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21PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES
CONCEPTS OF SPIRIT AND SPIRITUALITY IN REFLECTIONS OF DIFFERENT PHILOSOPHERS
Kolomak A.
North Caucasus Federal University of Stavropol, Associate Professor, PhD in Philosophical Sciences, Humanitarian Institute
Abstract
This article considers the concepts "spirit" and "spirituality" in the light of their exposition by famous European and Russian philosophers. Modern social philosophy consoders spirituality as in personal and transpersonal view. Spirituality is the highest way of living and the main goal of human life -is the gain of spirituality.
Keywords: spirit, spirituality, man, existence, life.
Modern social philosophy considers spirituality both from a personal and a transpersonal perspective. In the first case, spirituality is presented as a human, personal characteristic, and in the second as a cultural, social phenomenon that expresses different types of spiritual orientation of society and individual social groups. According to M. Kagan, human spirituality is a " manifestation of the quality of personality", and according to other philosophers, it is "the growth of a person in each of the people" or "the valuable content of consciousness".
The word "spirit " causes many disputes and is interpreted differently in modern national philosophy. For example, how the concept "spirit" is given in the philosophical encyclopedic dictionary. Under the word "spirit" in ancient philosophy the Latin word "spiritus" and the Greek "pneuma", which means "moving air, breath", "breath" (as a carrier of life) were used. Other meanings are also given: the soul as an entity that can temporarily or permanently leave the body; the life itself. Goethe said: «Life is love, and the life of life is spirit» as well as the essence of God: "God is spirit" and other concepts [1].
The spirit is the meaning of all our lives. In a metaphorical sense, one can speak of an objective spirit and even of an absolute spirit. The first, identified with culture, is the sum of contributions made by different personalities or subjective souls. The absolute spirit includes both culture and its producers, and all the relationships that exist between them. The name "absolute spirit" is also given to the Supreme being, who is able to embody the whole objectified culture of our individual soul, but who respects his subordinate individualities. The spirit appears in three forms of existence: as the spirit of the individual, that is, the personal spirit, as the General spirit (objective spirit) and as the objectified spirit, which means the totality of the completed creations of the spirit.
Christians were the first to discover the space of faith. A man appears before us not in two dimensions as body and soul, but already in three ones: body - soul - spirit. The spirit means belonging to the divine through faith, the openness of man to the divine word and wisdom.
According to Philo of Alexandria, the human soul, taken by itself, would have been insignificant, if God had not breathed into it the "pneuma", his Spirit. In the
First Epistle to the Corinthians we read: "And my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not rest on the wisdom of men but on the power of God... And God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so, the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of this world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things freely given to us by God".[2]
Intellectual process and abstraction are meaningless if there is no memory and imagination, and in man, these properties are connected with a sense of awareness of his personality. The memory of each person, my memory, is a repository of experience and knowledge unique to me, forcing me to be myself in front of others.
The spirit is the memory, the center of data about the world, acquired by each of the people, namely the originality of the accumulated personal experience gives people the features of individuality. For centuries spirituality has meant the conversion of man to the Supreme, the transcendent beginning of the world. Spirituality can be seen as a personal characteristic, which is realized in a personal effort, experiencing all the cycles of personal destiny. However, it draws strength not so much from itself as from the spirit, which is the carrier of universal values. The spirit as a symbol of the integrity of socio-cultural life, the ordering of the world is original.
The famous Danish philosopher S. Kierkegaard wrote that man "is a synthesis of soul and body - a synthesis that is based on the spirit and supported by it" [3]. The spirit is like a conscious flow of psychic experiences of a person. The body for a person is like an accumulator of his energy, which manifests itself in emotional motives, and emotional motives turn into subjective experiences and form the same spirit, which is a synthesis of soul and body.
According to S. Kierkegaard, the spirit or existence is a continuous stream of conscious emotions, which by its nature has energy, and knowledge is structured. The relationship of faith and knowledge is the relationship between energy and structure within the human Ego. Energy, according to the philosopher, is
transcendent, and structure is immanent. Its transcendence lies in eternity, agility, illogical and of his personality, and the structure - it is transitory, static, logical and impersonal.
However, in the history of philosophy the scholars did not always adhere to this opinion. Moreover, this is how Greek philosophy devalued faith and beliefs by considering them from a cognitive point of view. Faith belonged to things sensual, changeable, and therefore was a form of opinion. The ideal of Greek philosophy was knowledge. Ancient Greek philosophers pointed to knowledge as an exceptional virtue, realizing the essence of man.
Philosophers-existentialists, like K. Jaspers, M. Heidegger, J.-P. Sartre, set themselves the problem to comprehend the absolute transcendent in the human "Ego". Thus Jaspers clearly shows the relationship of faith and knowledge - energy and structural, to which he gives quite certain characteristics: faith, as something pointless, is referred to the form of existence and knowledge is its content. In the conception of society "communication" K. Jaspers adheres to the idea of V. Diltey about the interaction of spiritual forms. He marks two types of existential interaction: internal (intimate), which corresponds to the essence of existential communication, and external, ie, alienated, not affecting mutual emotions.
G. Leibniz in his philosophical works considers the features of the spirit, which are fundamentally different from the soul, since the decisive feature is the ability of self-knowledge, i.e. self-immersion of the subject in his inner cognitive activity. "Thinking of some color and realize that you are thinking about it are two very different things, just as the color itself is distinct from me thinking of it." [4]
G. Leibniz called such reflective self-deepening as apperception, and awareness - perception. In his opinion, the image of a clean board is completely irrelevant to the human soul and consciousness. In the cognitive actions of the soul, sensory experience is absolutely necessary, but only for the realization of the potential possibilities that are inherent in it.
According to Hegel, the human soul is a new way of being; it is a true and wonderful manifestation of the spirit in nature. The light, illuminating the world of things, inflames in an "inner" way. Spirituality is the highest way of life; more worthy of the idea, since the Spirit is superior than nature. Hegel distinguishes three stages of the spiritual path: the stage of" subjective spirit", the stage of' objective spirit "and the stage of "absolute spirit".
At the first stage, the spirit is "subjective", it has the form of a single soul, closed in its states. The soul has no idea of its spiritual nature. It will have to recognize their spirituality and rationality. The mature outcome of subjective spirit is reasonable will and freedom.
At the second stage, when the spirit is" objective", the soul, having freed itself internally, turns to the external conditions of its existence in the world and ties with them the process of struggle for freedom. The soul seeks tensely the spirituality of "otherness" in other people and in environmental conditions of his life, and
the spirit, having entered at this level, can say to itself: "I am a single, spiritual substance, organic Generality, the will - virtuous and strong, dominating the world and all my internal and external content" [5]. Only the spirit of the people, matured in the state, can create fine art, endure absolute religion and reveal the true philosophy.
On the third, higher stage, absolute knowledge is revealed to a man: knowledge of the Truth itself, the absolute Idea itself, the divine semantic substance. Man sees God and sees himself in God or God in himself.
The main task of human life, according to the Russian philosopher N. Berdyaev, there must be a conquest of spirituality. "Spiritual experience is a disconnecting experience which immerses into the superpersonal spiritual world, revealing the connection of the microcosm with the macrocosm. Spiritual experience is always a breakthrough in closed spiritual and physical monad, withdrawal from himself by means of immersion in the depths of the self, the overcoming of separateness" [6].
The spirit is not only freedom, but also the sense, and the world's sense is spiritual. Moreover, it is necessary to overcome the traditional Christian ascetic-neglectful attitude to the body, in which they see the antagonistic beginning to the spirit. After all, the spirit inspires the body, giving shape to the soul and leading them to the unity. The human face is the most amazing in the world life, for it shows another spiritual world. The philosopher concludes that the form of the human body, the face of man are spiritual and that the spirit constitutes the personality, its integrity as a single spiritual and physical being.
N. Berdyaev distinguishes several types of spirituality: Christian (Catholic, Orthodox, etc.), non-Christian (Muslim) and universal foundations of spirituality (Hindu, mystical, prophetic, etc.). It is possible and a new spirituality - divine-human. Creativity, freedom and love will manifest themselves more strongly in it.
According to the remarkable Russian philosopher L. Karsavin, the unity of personality lies in its spirituality. "Personality is not a spirit or a body, but a spiritually-corporeal being. It is not - "partially spiritual but partially physical", because the spirit can not be a part. An individual is fully spiritual and fully physical. The same individual, who is the spirit, is the body. Personality is above the distinction between the spirit and body ...."[7]. The spirit is a synonym not only of the unity, but also of freedom. As a spiritual, an individual is not an entity and necessity, but is really freedom. The philosopher notes that the personality is a spiritually-uniform and bodily-multiple integrity which is possible only because and then, when it possesses both the tran-quility and movement at the same time. According to the philosopher, the painful separation of individual by a number of elusive transitions is connected with its"normal" condition.
In his book "Philosophy of history" he makes a difference between the concepts of "change and development". He defines the change as a purely spatial movement of the system's elements, interpreted as a mechanical aggregate of its parts and the development as a purely qualitative change in time of an absolutely integral subject of development, which can not be reduced to any elements, and in the development of
which an actualization of some potentially contained substance is taken place. "We are talking about the development of mental life, the development of the body, etc. and at the same time we always think or perceive some closed whole in itself (as we speak about its development). It is, like a whole, does not made up of atoms. It is changed and becomes qualitatively different continuously, it is becoming ab intra, from itself, but not by joining something from outside. It is impossible to imagine developing itself, consisting of parts or component parts since the division denies continuity. And in the same way in the developing it is impossible to oppose continuously changing system to the invariable disconnected elements" [8].
The humanity of a personality is determined by its connection with transcendence and this connection is the guarantor of its humanity. A person who is away from transcendental roots distorts his image. Humanity is the image of God in man. According to N. Berdyaev, the transcendent is the necessary background of our existence, the atmosphere of spirituality, the element in which we exist. There is no personality unless there is transcendence. A personality, realizing itself, is transcending. The indicator of our connection with the transcendent, our acceleration in it, is horror and anguish. The horror is not experienced before the empirical danger, but before the mystery of existence and non-existence, before the transcendent abyss, before the uncertainty. The transcendental is the basis, the ground, the "noumenal world", "the spiritual kingdom". All these definitions are an attempt to express the inexpressible, to reveal the deep basis of a personality. Transcendence, according to N. Berdyaev, does not mean that a man obeys any whole and refers to the higher, the other as his master. This is freedom, and it always presupposes freedom, that is, the release of a man from captivity from himself. Escape from freedom, from risk and fear that his life is not subject to any rules, is a betrayal of his divine-human image, to which, according to Berdyaev, a man must constantly return. The greatest danger that lies in the way of a man is the danger of automatism, and all mechanical and automatic is impersonal and not free.
In conclusion, it is necessary to note that spirituality is based on three absolute values - truth, beauty and
goodness. The main way to achieve them is sincerity. There is a deep gap between the man inner world and the outer life. A man can be forced to think and act as he himself, relying only on himself. His inner conviction, personal integrity begin to lose stability; the spirituality is substituted with" surrogates", there is a discord of the personality with itself, and the ability to compromise with conscience, deception is appeared.
One of the outwardly most innocuous carriers of deception is the meaning, or rather, its social and cultural-symbolic embodiment and the results of spiritual life come true in meanings as spiritual clots of human experience.
The meaning of the human spirit creations is not limited to a single moment, expressed by a word, thought and realized activity: it continues to exist in history linking the past with the present and determine the future. Meaning is the "light" of the human, cultural and historical presence of truth, beauty and goodness, but it can equally mask and conceal these values with the same success. Values are the most full of meaning and thus the meaning in them goes into another quality -the spiritual or moral value.
REFERENCES:
1. Philosophical encyclopedic dictionary. -INFA-M, 1999. P.146
2. Bible.First Epistle to the Corinthians. Ch 2: 4,5,10,11,12. - M.:DAR,2005
3. S. Kierkegaard. Fear and tremor: ethical essays/under the editorship of .Ivanova.- M.: Respublika, 1993. P. 178.
4. G. Leibniz. Philosophical works. Vol.2 - M.: Mysl,1982. P.235
5. Hegel. Works in 10 volumes. Vol. 3. - M.: 2006, P.40
6. N. Berdyaev. Philosophy of free spirit. - M.: Respublika, 2004. P. 30
7. L. Karsavin. About the personality. Religious-philosophical works. Vol. 1. - M.: Renessans,2002. P. 20
8. L. Karsavin. Philosophy of history. - M.; SPb., 2003. P. 20
