The human problem in philosophy and understanding of its essence in different philosophical directions

Many sciences deal with the life and inner world of people, but only philosophy determines the destination, place and essence in the world. We can say that the problem of man in philosophy is one of its main questions. Since ancient times, there have been many definitions of belonging to the human race. Even in ancient times, they talked jokingly about a "biped creature without feathers", while Aristotle spoke very aptly and capaciously - a person is a zoon politikon, that is, a reasonable animal that can not live without social intercourse. In the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola, in his "Speech on the Essence of Man," stated that there is no place for people in the world and clear boundaries-they can rise above their angels in their greatness, and fall below demons in their vices. Finally, the French existentialist philosopher Sartre called man "an existence that precedes essence," meaning that people are born as a biological being, and then they become rational.

Man in philosophy appears as a phenomenon with specific characteristics. Man is a kind of "project", he creates himself. Therefore, he is capable not only of creativity, but also of "self-creativity", that is, change of self, as well as self-knowledge. However, human life and activity are determined and limited by time, that, like the sword of Damocles, hangs over it. Man creates not only himself, but also the "second nature," culture, as Heidegger put it, "doubling his being." In addition, he, according to the same philosopher, is "a being that thinks about what Genesis is." And, finally, a person imposes his measurements on the whole surrounding world. Protagoras also stated that man is the measure of all things in the universe, and the philosophers from Parmenides to Hegel tried to identify being and thinking.

The human problem in philosophy was also posed in terms of the relationship between the microcosm - that is, the inner world of man, and the macrocosm - of the surrounding world. In ancient Indian, ancient Chinese and ancient Greek philosophy, man was understood as part of the Cosmos, a single timeless "order," of nature. However, even the ancient pre-Socratics, such as Diogenes from Apollonia, Heraclitus and Anaximenus, adhered to a different view, the so-called "parallelelism" of the micro- and macrocosmos, treating man as a reflection or symbol of the macrocosm. From this postulate began to develop a naturalistic anthropology, dissolving a person in space (a man consists only of elements and elements).

The problem of man in philosophy and attempts to solve it also led to the fact that space and nature began to be understood anthropomorphically, as a living and spiritualized organism. This idea is expressed in the oldest cosmogonic mythologems of the "world-wide laundrette" (Purusha in the Indian Vedas, Imir in the Scandinavian "Edda", Pan Gu in Chinese philosophy, Adam Kadmon in the Jewish Kabbalah). From the body of this man arose nature, which also possesses a "cosmic soul" (Heraclitus, Anaximander, Plato, Stoics agreed), and this nature is often identified with an immanent deity. Cognition of the world from this point of view often acts as self-knowledge. The Neoplatonists dissolved the Cosmos in the soul and mind.

Thus, the presence in a person of a body and soul (or, more accurately, of a body, soul and spirit) gave birth to yet another contradiction, which characterizes the problem of man in philosophy. According to one view, the soul and the body are two different kinds of the same entity (the followers of Aristotle), and according to the other, these are two different realities (followers of Plato). In the doctrine of the transmigration of souls (characteristic of Indian, Chinese, partly Egyptian and Greek philosophy), the boundaries between living beings are very mobile, but it is only for a person to strive for "liberation" from the yoke of the wheel of existence.

The problem of man in the history of philosophy was considered many-valued. The ancient Indian Vedanta calls the atman essence by the essence of man, in its internal content identical with the divine principle - the brahmana. For Aristotle, man is a being with a reasonable soul and ability to social life. Christian philosophy put a person on a special place - being "the image and likeness of God," he is at the same time bifurcated due to the fall. In the Renaissance, they pathetically proclaimed the autonomy of man. The European rationalism of modern times made Descartes' expression that thinking is a sign of existence. Thinkers of the XVIII century - Lametrie, Franklin - identified human consciousness with a mechanism or with "an animal creating the means of production." German classical philosophy understood man as a living entity (in particular, Hegel said that man is a step in the development of the Absolute Idea), and Marxism tries to unite the natural and the social in man with the help of dialectical materialism. However, the philosophy of the twentieth century is dominated by personalism, which emphasizes not on the "essence" of man, but on his uniqueness, uniqueness and individuality.