Who needs psychotherapy? E. Zolotukhina-Abolina. Course of lectures on ethics Agafia Vsevolodovna, Grand Duchess

Introduction

MAN AS A MORAL BEING

Dear readers!

This book is dedicated to examining person like mereal being.

To reveal such a complex and ambiguous phenomenon as Homo moralis, it is necessary to dwell at least briefly on the generic characteristics of a person, which allow him not only to be known as, but also to actually be a subject of moral behavior. In addition, it is necessary to find out what morality is, give it a definition, and only then can we proceed to the most important and interesting thing - the analysis of those ethical concepts that are designed to express all the richness and inconsistency of everyday moral life.

Of course, moral issues are not limited to the topics that form the basis of my lecture course. It is inexhaustible, just as human experience is inexhaustible. However, I tried to choose for you those moral stories that are relevant at any time and run through the entire human history. Themes of good and evil, freedom and responsibility, duty and conscience, the meaning of life are as important and relevant today as they were a thousand years ago. I hope, my readers, that they will not leave you indifferent.

So, let us turn to the specifics of a person, which determines his ability to be moral. On the first

Look, man is one of the varieties of numerous animal species living on Earth. According to the ancient Greek thinker Aristotle, “matter has an appetite for form,” and in nature we see many animals and birds, fish and insects that are not similar to each other, endowed with different appearances, colors and dispositions. All of them are concrete sensory, empirical, carnal creatures, connected into an integral unity by environmental laws. Man also consists of flesh and bones, also wants to eat, strives to reproduce and submits in his development to the dictates of the genetic code. In some ways he is very similar to his “smaller brothers” - he suffers the same way and dies the same way. And yet, man is something fundamentally different, for biological laws are only the foundation on which the edifice of human existence is built, only a prerequisite for the development of the world of culture, which gives man the opportunity to have self-awareness, freedom and morality.

The presence of these special characteristics of a person has always sharply distinguished him from his animal environment, making him qualitatively different, a strange alien, as if a guest from another dimension.

Culture is a way of survival and development, in which a person passively adapts to kind, but, on the contrary, he adapts nature to himself. Biologically, a person is weaker than other living beings - he does not have powerful claws and fangs, he has a long childhood, when a child needs the help of others, and finally, a person is a “naked monkey”, not covered with fur from winds and frosts. But culture - objective-practical activity, work - allowed man to become the most powerful creature on the planet, because he created tools and tools - the continuation and strengthening of his potential. With their help, he sowed fields, built houses and created machines - laid the foundation for the whole world of modern civilization. At the same time, man no longer acted according to only a narrow genetically specified biological program.

gram. He broke out of the limits of purely natural laws into the “suprabiological” and was able to create not only according to the “standards of his species,” but according to the standards of any species, universally, including “according to the laws of beauty” (K. Marx). Culture is the emergence of fundamentally new relationships between “individuals”, who are now no longer just “members of the pack”, but people. Members of a monkey troop communicate exclusively about their natural needs, their natural interest does not extend further, and the subject of human communication becomes joint activity, which is only indirectly linked to the satisfaction of physical needs. Human communication itself emerges, subject to tradition and moral laws. A person is born as moral being. Not blind biological impulses, but morality now becomes the force that organizes actions, passions and thoughts.

Morality or morality (which in our conversation will be the same thing) is a set of norms, values, ideals, attitudes that regulate human behavior and are the most important components of culture. The peculiarity of morality is that for its successful action it must be deeply internalized by man com, must “enter his soul”, become part of his inner world. A person is moral only when moral behavior becomes organic to him, and he does not need an overseer who checks and urges. Since any human actions and relationships (except purely technical ones) have a moral aspect, in any area of ​​life we ​​are faced with morality as the “inner voice” of a person, which helps him behave morally in a variety of situations.

Moral regulation is evaluative-imperative character, this means that morality always evaluates and commands. She tells you to act according to good and prohibits following evil, encourages good, fair behavior and bright, benevolent thoughts, and condemns atrocities and evil, dark passions.

At the center of morality is the relationship between what should be and what is th. Morality always shows us the essentially necessary order of things, the ideal state of affairs, what we must strive for. Animals do not know ideals, they follow a given stereotype, but man is an open, unclosed being, and he is always striving for culturally recognized models and ideals, constantly relating himself to them, often realizing his actual imperfection. “I’m not what I need to be, but I will become like that!” - only a representative of the genus Homo sapiens can say this.

Morality turns out to be possible because a person living in a culture and communicating with his own kind has self-awareness. He separates himself from the world, has a sense of “I,” and experiences himself as a whole, distinct from everything else. Only such a sovereign subject is capable of relating to his actions, feelings and thoughts in a certain way, evaluating them, and taking responsibility for what he has done. Self-awareness gives people an understanding of their mortality, finitude, and this also contributes to moral reflection, because conscious death is that boundary in the future, before crossing which one must have time to take the path of good. Death has a binding meaning - it obliges us to constant moral effort for the sake of other people, for the sake of improving our own soul and for the sake of the triumph of higher principles in the world.

A person's morality is closely related to his ability to free choice. It is expressed primarily in people’s ability to distance themselves from selfish material and physiological needs in order to subordinate their actions to moral rules and principles. People are given the ability not only to “experience” an experience, but also to have a moral attitude towards their experience, for example, to suppress their fear and encourage courage. Free choice is a choice freed from the inevitable influence of external and internal circumstances; it is an act of personal decision, an expression of the individuality of the subject. Cro-

Moreover, freedom of choice is an important aspect of moral behavior itself. Of course, a truly moral person has established moral habits and moral intuition can work - something that acts as if automatically. But non-rational forms of morality are not always suitable. In difficult situations, when equivalent values ​​collide (duty and love, friendship and truthfulness, etc.), we are forced to think, reflect, weigh the pros and cons. It is here that our ability to freely choose and express our moral will is realized.

Man as a moral being lives, of course, in the real world, full of contradictions and imperfections. He submits to the type of morality and the relationships that are accepted among his people, in his community or state. And morals in the history of mankind are often extremely cruel: not only the Huns and barbarians, but also modern “enlightened peoples” are often aggressive and guided by severe intolerance towards everything that is not in their own honor. However, within almost any specific historical moral system there are seeds, sparks of “high morality.”

“High morality” is a set of universal human such attitudes towards a selfless, fair and benevolent attitude towards any human being. Even if it is despised or hated from the point of view of the “here” and “today’s” set of morals. “High morality” is the heart of all true morality; it is the best that humanity has developed in its moral history. Therefore in real life we are always faced with the interaction of at least three components that determine human behavior: this is, firstly, the action of simple biological and material needs that push the individual along a grossly egoistic path, secondly, this is a set of specific historical traditions and moral institutions, one way or another otherwise orienting individuals towards the priority of group interests, and thirdly, these are commands of high

morality, speaking on behalf of humanity as a whole and often on behalf of God. The complex dynamics of these three components determines the appearance of moral behavior and the inner world of specific people. The practical morality of each of us depends on what exactly prevails.

Speaking about a person as a moral being, we must not forget that moral guidelines do not hang in the air, they are closely intertwined with human psychology and are realized in behavior through psychological mechanisms. People do not just fulfill moral laws or not fulfill them, they hope and believe, strive and doubt, rejoice and get angry, find or do not find the strength to move towards a moral ideal. That is why here I am talking not just about the “categories of ethics” that have crystallized in theory, but about how the most important moral themes are involved in people’s lives.

Moral being Man goes through his life path, lives his destiny, constantly coming into contact with good and evil, freedom and responsibility, honesty and justice, he takes care of his dignity, seeks love, and raises children. Let us turn to this wealth of our life, full of passions and

Lecture 1THE WAYS OF GOOD AND EVIL

E.V. Zolotukhina-Abolina “Everyday life and other worlds of experience” M., 2003. About the sense of meaning We will talk about the meaning of life. Once upon a time, in my young post-student years, the question of the meaning of life seemed to me extremely sophisticated, elitist-philosophical and completely incomprehensible. "The meaning of life"? Something so vague and pompous, some strange addition to ordinary human existence, which takes place in worries and troubles; in efforts to achieve one or another quite clear goal. Life is rich and exciting, there are so many interesting things in it that you need to understand and experience: you need to become a good teacher, find your love, see the world... Thinking about the additional and general “meaning” that seems to hover over life was something for me like a medieval dispute about how many angels can survive on the point of a needle... But, since the expression “the meaning of life” sounded beautiful, then at my first lectures, I, looking sternly at the audience, said: “Every person, if he is a thinking being, at some point he thinks about the meaning of life...” The audience in the hall pulled their heads into their shoulders, because everyone instantly wondered in their minds whether they had thought about the meaning of their life... And it turned out that they had not. But you don’t want to look like an unthinking creature. That is why someone, completely in the spirit of the times, said from the place that the meaning of life is in work... Over time, going through the stages of my own life path one after another, reading books devoted to meaning, I began to understand that the topic of the meaning of life does not apply to the category of elite entertainment, to the realm of the exquisite “bead game”. The meaning of life is the most vital thing in the world, although it is very, very difficult to express it in words, because its content does not fully fit into rational forms, partly merging with life itself, its small and large concerns. It coincides with the desire to live, with the mood and general emotional tone. The meaning of life is not a register of even the highest and most worthy tasks (although it may include these high tasks), it is a state of consciousness that allows a person to cope with difficulties, overcome obstacles and fully enjoy his own existence. This meaning of the term “meaning of life” can best be learned from personal experience, because theoretical knowledge does not allow us to comprehend it in its entirety. In addition, I realized that even a thinking person does not necessarily think about the meaning of his existence. Philosophical rigorism, which requires tireless reflection from everyone, is inappropriate here. As a rule, a person comes to the question of meaning not from a good life: the vast majority of thoughts about the meaning of life are provoked by at least a short-term loss of meaning. People in whose fate meaning has never been lost, who have never let go of its life-giving thread, do anything except think about meaning: build houses, give birth and raise children, fight, write poetry. Meaning, with all its positive experiences, may have been given to them by culture or passed on by family, or they themselves found it along the ornate paths of individual development, but in any case it is there, available. And then there is no need to look for it or deliberately analyze your own emotional and semantic sphere, just as there is no need to closely examine a healthy, well-functioning organism. The search for meaning arises as necessary, and this happens even among philosophers, who, it would seem, should think about such questions due to their professional activities. A person searches for meaning when the world encourages him to do so, and this happens quite often, and especially when a series of sociocultural crises causes a series of existential crises. But what do we mean when we talk about the meaning of life? We are talking about a system of significant guidelines that turn into motives for our activities and behavior, as well as the preservation and reproduction of our life itself. The meaning of life can be subjective or intersubjective, but never objective in the sense of objectivity as independence from the inner world. As many authors writing about meaning note, the phenomenon of meaning is close to the phenomenon of purpose, but does not coincide with it. The goal is the image of the desired future, and the meaning is the significance of something for us: in in this case the significance of life itself, one’s own “I”, communication, the surrounding world. In a certain respect, the goal is derived from the meaning: I want from the future not just anything, but something that means a lot to me, that has an important meaning. However, the meaning, in turn, can be actualized and awakened by the set goal. The meaning of life, as I understand it, always places us in a system of relationships with the surrounding reality, it is always associated with “transcending” (W. Frankl) and answers the questions “why?”, “for what?” The purpose of this article is to show the meaning of life as a special feeling,Howstateinner world, whichcan'tbereduced towith hismeaningful, rationally expressiblecomposite,to oneonly a consciousnew search for a system of goals. We can say that we will talk about the non-rational nature of meaningful experiences in life. The intentional nature of meaning manifests itself primarily in unique experiences and only then is reflected, receiving a clear image and conceptual expression. So, the meaning of life is not only a set of significant contents, but first of all the nature of our actual attitude towards these contents, when significance expresses itself in the positive emotions present here and now. Without an emotional contribution from the subject himself, without his lively response, all significant value programs will remain only schematic. Values ​​and value programs are only more or less successful declarations until they become “personal meaning”, revived and animated by individual subjectivity. Indeed, for some people altruism can give meaning to life, while others will treat it critically or indifferently. In order to animate your life with dedication, you must first find a cause that can ignite your imagination and evoke a positive response. If it were easy to find such a thing, the problem of the meaning of life would simply not exist. The same applies to self-actualization. Its paths are either not found at all, or are found spontaneously, and a rationally thought-out program rarely participates in this. The value program itself is weak without our fascination with it, without passion and imagination, without the ardent interest that is born from the mysterious depths of the personality. The meaning of life flares up at the intersection of value-motivational programs and personal experience, and it burns with an even and unquenchable flame until neither the first nor the second component changes. The fact that the meaning of life is not only “the thought of life” is said by many researchers of meaning. In his interesting fundamental work “The Psychology of Meaning,” which contains a detailed overview of points of view on meaning,” D.A. Leontiev writes: “Among the ideas of different authors about the internal structure and dynamics of meanings, it is difficult to single out general provisions, with the exception of the idea of ​​situational variability of meaning and its dependence on the current state of the subject (K. Levin, L. Nystedt, E. Peterfreundt) and emphasizing that meaning is not always conceptually represented, is not always conscious and cannot always be clearly expressed by available means (S. Freud, A. Adler, V. Frankl). In this case, it is the non-rational existence of meaning that is emphasized, its ambiguous connection with logical and verbal forms in general. What do we feel when we experience the presence of meaning in life? Let us try to answer this question by describing the totality of meaning-creating experiences, presenting a short phenomenology of the emotional forms in which value guidelines are embodied. 1. The presence of meaning in life is expressed in the experience interest to the world, to people and to yourself. Each of us knows the feeling of interest well from our own experience, although it is quite difficult to describe it. Meaningful and interesting - practically the same thing. When a person says: the meaning of my life is to raise children (to poison the life of an enemy, destroy Carthage, discover new laws of the Universe, save more stray cats, etc.), this means that he is closely and persistently interested in children, an enemy, Carthage, science, cats, and tries to influence their existence in one way or another. To have meaning in life means to strive to embody one’s intentions in some specific actions, experiences, and mental actions. The meaning of life can be associated with interest in a variety of things; ideally, it includes a whole set of aspirations, a kind of integral integrity in which the personal values ​​that awaken our attention are interconnected. However, sometimes, due to circumstances, interest is concentrated on one particular area of ​​life and it becomes meaning-forming. Thus, a person who, due to his state of health, is deprived of interest in the sensory-physical side of being, can find full meaning in theoretical knowledge, which remains accessible to him, or in the affirmation of a certain ideology (examples of this scientist Stephen Hawking and writer Nikolai Ostrovsky). The nature of meaning-forming interest remains unclear. Why does something become interesting to us? Exactly for us and exactly this? What is the mechanism for the emergence of meaning-creating interest? How to understand what is interesting if we're talking about not about theory, but about everyday reality? Apparently, meaningful interest arises when something that is significant to us is present in our life, but its presence is not enough and cannot cause satiety. This insufficiency of the goods we value, their constant lack, awakens interest and meaning, directs a ray of attention to the “precious-eternally-missing”. The lack of true knowledge, active self-affirmation, love, and also anything else lights a semantic fire in the soul, makes this or that phenomenon infinitely interesting, and with it, the rest of life becomes more or less interesting. 2. The second emotional-sensory moment inherent in the presence of meaning in life is feeling of the future. The realization of meaning-interest is practically impossible outside of time; it requires the experience of temporal openness. A sense of perspective in a vivid form is inherent in childhood. Although a person does not know how long he will live, in childhood he clearly experiences a virtually existing “long and wonderful life.” Therefore, in childhood, if we exclude the consideration of mental pathologies, people, as a rule, do not lose their sense of meaning. They may suffer, grieve, experience hardships, but the spectrum of as yet unrealized alluring possibilities remains, and it gives a sense of hope and meaning that beckons to itself from the future. However, the experience of temporal perspective as the most important component of the meaning of life is possible at any age. And at ninety years old a person can make plans and perceive life as a long and exciting journey. 3. The third point that characterizes the sense of meaning in life is a spontaneous feeling of joy and emotional uplift. Actually, joy as such is generally a phenomenon associated with meaning, with the awareness of involvement in something meaningful, with productive activity (E. Fromm). The meaning of life and joy are inseparable. If, while grasping the meaning of a specific unfavorable situation for us, we may be upset, upset or angry, then, feeling that our life has meaning, we invariably feel joy and uplift. This happens even when the content is quite terrible (to take revenge on an enemy, to drive away someone you envy from the world) or unattractive, unenviable (to take care of yourself on your own, to survive at any cost). We should not forget that meaning and the joy of meaning are by no means always morally positive. People who are cruel, evil, and unjust also have a meaning in life, and this meaning often becomes the assertion of their own power, the implementation of violence against others, the realization of their own sadistic desires. Therefore, joy, associated with meaning, in this case does not at all resemble peaceful goodwill. This is evil joy, this is a menacing affirmation of one’s own plans and aspirations. By and large, such a meaning and such joy are “inauthentic”, because they are far from harmonious, humane relations with the world. However, there is a lot in the world that is inauthentic, and at the same time quite real, so we cannot discount the fact that many people are guided by destructive meanings and rejoice, experiencing the meaningfulness of their lives. 4. The fourth component and form of manifestation of meaningful experience is the feeling of being part of the whole, an important and significant component of a complex system of relationships - family, love, state, ethnic, cultural, cosmic, etc. As we have already noted, meaning is associated with transcendence - going beyond your own local “I”. The feeling of being beyond the boundaries of the “ego”, connected by myriads of threads with other subjects and with the world as a gigantic animated formation, coincides with a feeling of deep meaningfulness of one’s own life. Even the most inveterate egocentrics and individualists have a certain “reference group” within which they see their place, the values ​​of which they share. This group can only exist in a person’s memory, in his imagination, in cultural texts, but he must certainly be present so that we do not fall into a state of meaninglessness and irresistible absurdity. Even the semi-fantasy ideal of the hermetic magician, who has achieved complete independence from everything finite and earthly, includes the idea of ​​a place in the group: we are magicians, unlike others - mere mortals. Absolute loneliness would be an absolute death of meaning, since absolute inner loneliness can have neither values ​​nor guidelines. Subjectively, being embedded in a system of relationships can be perceived as a feeling of “coziness of the world,” its suitability for us and its human dimensions. The human dimension of the world means the direct experience of “one’s place in the sun” as decent and significant, respected and approved. Own certainty in an understandable coordinate system evokes deep positive emotions. The existence of the meaning of life precisely in the form of feeling, direct experience is very important, since the very nature of the highest values ​​does not give them the opportunity to constantly appear in the rational,
conceptual, clearly reflected form. Where we verbally express our highest meanings, try to verbally designate fundamental life goals, we are faced with the extreme blurring of what shines to us from the “world of value ideas.” Each highest value turns out to be like the sun, which shines with myriads of rays, pours out an infinite number of concrete images, self-moving and changeable, and gives birth to multidimensional worlds. What do you mean when you say “I want to be happy”? Or “I want to live an interesting life”? IN
Each such phrase includes many already realized and not yet realized possibilities, such that at the moment, perhaps, it is even impossible to imagine. When I say “I want to be happy,” I mean, willingly or unwillingly, situations about which I have no idea yet, which have not yet matured and appeared in their
completed form. What events are coming? What circumstances or actions will make you feel happy? What values ​​might come to the fore for me? We change every day, and remarkable reflection is needed to track the rational measure of the realization of each semantic intention. But a sense of meaning as an indicator shows us whether we are on the right path to the embodiment of our values, to their creative realization in the course of life. What factors are capable of maintaining our sense of meaning? In this case, we will talk about the need for support in situations when a person does not experience crushing blows of fate, does not experience those severe semantic crises. We will rather talk about “small losses of meaning” that happen to almost everyone, regardless of their external success in life. In common parlance, “small losses of meaning” are called bad mood, blues, and sometimes boredom or groundless melancholy. Often such a bad mood goes away on its own, but sometimes it drags on, painting the world in the gray colors of meaninglessness, turning everyday life into a routine, into a series of monotonous days that pass, leaving a feeling of emptiness in the soul. If we described the sense of meaning through the characteristics of interest, a sense of the future, spontaneous joy and finding one’s own cell in the social and cosmic “honeycomb”, then the appearance of “small loss of meaning” is characterized by all these factors with a minus sign. Longing and boredom are associated with a lack of interest in anything, when a person acts only out of duty and habit, without experiencing
no positive emotions from life, burdened by the need for worthless efforts. This is a bleak time when the future is seen as a bummer, as an endless repetition of an uninteresting “today.” Finally, melancholy is often associated with a feeling of loneliness, with a psychological loss from the system of relationships with Others and the loss of a sense of involvement in the world as a whole. In this article, I will limit myself to only pointing out the factors themselves that contribute to the restoration of a sense of meaning, which most often arise spontaneously or are found by the person himself in the course of his personal search. Intentional searches often have an effect: already in ancient times, a severely bored person was offered a change of scenery, to have fun, to travel, to make acquaintances - that is, to broaden his horizons and gain new perspectives. So, the very arrival of new people, new circumstances and new events into our destiny does a very important thing: it awakens interest in life, as if pulling out meaning by a thread. Against the background of monotony and repetition, new meetings, new landscapes, new relationships flash like torches, which attract attention, involving a person in communication with the world. There is not only the discovery of new circumstances and characters, but also self-discovery. Sometimes the role of a cure for loss of meaning is played by various deprivation factors: the loss of familiar benefits. It has been noted many times that in difficult situations - during wars and natural disasters - the number of depressions is reduced, since the meaning in this case automatically becomes survival itself. This, apparently, explains the passion of some people for extreme sports, for mountaineering, for constant self-examination, which returns a sense of meaning that is lost in a calm environment. However, I would like to point out softer moments that fit into everyday life, helping us overcome “small meaningless losses.” The first of them is love. “Easy to say! - the reader can answer me. “Where can I get it?” Don't know. I warned you that I am far from making practical recommendations, especially in matters that are decided not by us, but by some mysterious authorities - God, fate. But I want to emphasize: we are talking about the love that you feel, and not the love that someone feels for you. That is, it’s good, of course, when love turns out to be mutual, this is the most beautiful and prosperous option, but it is not someone else’s love that awakens meaning in us, but only our own. This is such a thing, meaning. As is known, it is not introduced from the outside. Therefore, someone else’s love, addressed to you and not finding a response in your soul, may not delight, but on the contrary, burden, make life even more meaningless, because there is nothing worse than fighting off someone else’s unnecessary passion. Of course, sometimes someone else’s love can awaken us from our emotional and semantic slumber. It acts initially through the restructuring of our sense of our own place in the world. “Nobody needs me” and “I am loved” are two different positions in existence. If I can create meaning in life for another person, or rather, be this meaning, then my place in the sphere of communication is respected and worthy. From this feeling interest, spontaneous joy, and the fullness of meaning can be born. But then, most likely, we will respond to the lover’s feeling, and the semantic relationship will become mutual. The birth of our own love (falling in love) with another person awakens in us a keen interest in reality, gradually forms goals, attracts pleasant prospects, causes spontaneous joy and gives each of us the opportunity to feel like a full-fledged person in a community of our own kind. The appearance of a Beloved in our life rebuilds the entire structure of relations with the world, for he becomes for us an emotional and semantic center, the most important point of interest. The intention of love is at the same time the intention of interest, because here we encounter someone else’s subjectivity, which is very valuable to us. The soul of a loved one is a mystery; for the lover there is an infinite depth in it, which cannot be reduced either to a set of external behavioral manifestations, or to reactions during sexual intimacy, or even to the words that the beloved utters to us in response. That is why love communication is deeply meaningful, it is a time-long attempt to solve a riddle that cannot be solved by definition. In connection with your loved one, the rest of your life takes on meaning. We find ourselves captured by the desire to work, create, achieve benefits in order to please our loved one, create conditions for his development, in order to win him over. mutual love and maintain this reciprocity. For your loved one, you need to maintain your own external and internal attractiveness. The simplest and most routine moments of everyday life and self-care also become meaningful. There is something to try for! Love cannot live without hope, and hope is a look into the future. Even someone who is unrequitedly in love always secretly hopes for a miracle: that somewhere, somewhere, they will return their love. And happy love certainly makes plans, looks at the future through the magic crystal of joy. Of course, real love is a complex relationship, it includes ups and downs, meetings and partings, but the struggle of wills, resentment, and reconciliation, no matter how difficult they are, still fill life with meaning, and the presence of this meaning does not need to be proven - everyone who has ever loved knows this for themselves. The second factor in regaining and maintaining meaning is being curious. Moreover, curiosity in its various forms. If a person, immersed in a temporary loss of meaning, wakes up and turns to something with curiosity, cognitive interest, things go well, the meaning returns. Curiosity can be inquisitiveness. Looking sadly at the TV, you can suddenly become interested in the hierarchy in a troop of macaques, UFO problems or ethnic conflicts in African countries. You may accidentally come across an interesting book at a friend’s house or hear something that caught your attention on a radio program. In any case, some knowledge becomes an attractor that attracts attention, makes you run to the library, explore the possibilities of the Internet, look for acquaintances that allow you to dive deeper into the comprehension of the subject that has become the semantic core. Unfortunately, curiosity is a type of curiosity that does not very often visit people who have left school and student age, although its meaning-creating power is enormous. Much more often, knowledge of a completely different kind brings us out of the temporary loss of meaning, that which is born in communication - this is knowledge about other people and the events that happen to them: news, gossip, rumors... If we turn to the work of M. Heidegger “Being and time,” then we will see that with all his desire to talk about curiosity exclusively as a way of being of understanding and interpretation, he still cannot restrain himself from its derogatory assessment. For him, curiosity and chatter are associated with the inauthenticity of human existence. “Curiosity is everywhere and nowhere,” he writes. - This mode of being in the world reveals a new way of being of everyday here-being, in which way of being here-being constantly deprives itself of its roots. Chat also leads to curiosity; it tells you what to read, what to see. This being everywhere and nowhere, inherent in curiosity, is entrusted to chatter.” Heidegger's position is dictated by the fact that the main relationship for him is the relationship of man to being, an inexpressible experience that takes us beyond the framework of the objective world, expressed in the language of discrete forms. The human turns out to be “too human” for him, too small, vain and flat. However, people themselves, immersed in everyday life and sharing all its leading characteristics, draw their meanings precisely from that “superficial” communication that Heidegger considers inauthentic. What can you do, even mystics cannot live by revelations alone, especially since revelation is not a permanent state. And there’s nothing to say about the normal average person. Curiosity and chatter are the most important moments of ordinary, non-esoteric life, and moreover, these are the moments that bring a sense of meaning to our existence. Perhaps Heidegger would not have liked these meanings, but this is his personal question: what, why and how animates the life of a particular person, in many cases remains a mystery to other people. As they say, to whom is the priest, to whom is the priest, and to whom is the priest’s daughter. The most banal chatter, neighborly gossip fulfills an important mission in relation to our personality: in chatter “about this and that,” firstly, we are presented with the most vivid and poignant events in the lives of other people, capable of reviving our interest - and what could be more interesting than other people, especially if they are significant to you? When a person becomes completely uninterested in other people and their affairs, this means; that psychological pathology has gone far and it is worth seeking professional help. Secondly, chatter always presupposes the possibility of extending into the future: we chatted today, we’ll chat tomorrow, there will certainly be something to talk about! News and gossip cannot be interesting in the face of the end of the world. They are “meaning carriers” only if they have the temporal perspective of returning to today and reinterpreting everything anew. Chatting is always an experience of interpretation, reinterpretation, and therefore the attribution of variable meanings. Finally, if they start chatting with you, then this is evidence of your importance, your high status in communication. People usually don’t want to chat with an unpleasant, disgusting person, they avoid him, they shy away from him. Therefore, the very fact of chatting is a kind of psychological stroking. A sense of meaning is born spontaneously in chatter: people are significant to you, you are significant to people, and from here follows an emotional and semantic upsurge. Another important way to awaken a temporarily dormant sense of meaning is to turn to art. In particular, to fiction, theater, cinema, that is, those forms that involve storyline. “Small losses of meaning” are associated with events in our personal destiny; it is a mental anabiosis that arose from our own disappointments, fatigue, and the monotony of days. Introducing oneself to someone else's fate, to the course of someone else's life, created by the imagination of talented authors, turns out to be able to temporarily fill emotional and semantic voids, just as some medications simply replenish hormones and enzymes missing in the body. In the full sense of the word, we begin to “live someone else’s life,” experience other people’s feelings, be filled with other people’s meanings, which at this time are perceived as our own. Art is always an opportunity to live someone else’s destiny, perhaps completely different from our own. The more talented the author of a work, the more he gives us “pills of meaning” that eliminate the emotional and semantic deficit and help the inner world recover for its own meaning of creative work. Different literary and artistic works achieve this effect in different ways. The genre of the detective story, science fiction novel, and fantasy, beloved by many, awakens our sense of meaning with the intensity of intrigue, the unusualness of what is happening, and attracts interest with the alternation of trials and victories that the main characters win - the very ones with whom we, willingly or unwillingly, identify ourselves. In action-packed works, the substantive moment dominates, the factor of surprise, it teases the mind, evoking the corresponding feelings: interest, curiosity, desire to understand the logic of the adventure. A different effect is created by works like the novels “In Search of Lost Time” by Marcel Proust or “My Diamond Crown” by Valentin Kataev. Here the sense of meaning is born precisely as a feeling, due to the detailed reproduction of vivid emotional impressions, visual images, “tasty” details that you experience directly - almost as a fact of your own life. However, a sense of meaning can be awakened not only by such positive experiences as love, neutral ones such as curiosity and chatter, and artistic and fantasy ones such as participation in works of art. Hatred carries a huge meaning-forming charge. It's probably not best way revive the meaning, but in reality it acts very often. In hatred, the world is torn apart, torn, mutilated, hostile. However, this hostility directly calls for aggression, active goal setting and harsh self-expression. If a person who is in a state of temporary loss of meaning is greatly offended, his possessions are taken away from him, and he is humiliated, then one of the most striking reactions will be the restoration of meaning through a fight with the offender. In real life, we see that the modern generation of young people, whose childhood was spent in destroyed Chechnya, warring Karabakh or Abkhazia, truly lives with hatred for their foreign ethnic offenders and cherishes the dream of eliminating their enemies, regardless of any principles of humanity . National enmity, ideological hatred, religious strife - all types of ideologies that create the “image of the enemy” give thousands and thousands of people a primitive, cruel, but very real sense of meaning. Here there is both a bright interest and a clear goal, here a project for a long victorious struggle is being built, the triumph of the coming revenge is bubbling, cohesion and unity with “our own” is felt. Unfortunately, the paths to creating meaning through simple and raw feelings often turn out to be shorter, more effective, and more successful than the long and painstaking work of love, service, and humanity. Concluding our article, let us briefly turn to such a subject as a person’s desire to get out of a state of temporary loss of meaning. If the psyche is normal, then a person who is currently subject to a depressive mood, as a rule, wants to get rid of it. We can say that the sense of meaning almost never completely disappears from our lives if we maintain a clear mind and the ability to be critical. With sad senselessness and lack of desires, we at least want to desire again, we understand that “something wrong is happening to us” and we are looking for help for ourselves. The desire to “regain a sense of meaning” can also be meaning. It seems to me that an important factor in such a return could be special techniques for working with the ability of attention. Attention is a ray of our consciousness aimed at a specific fragment of reality, because we still cannot cover “the whole world.” However, it matters a lot what exactly the eye falls on; what becomes the object of attention. This object can be the dark sides of reality, which will lead us to deepening depression, or it can be the bright features of the world, capable of directly conveying a sense of meaning by the very fact of their existence, their brightness and joy. Proper focus of attention, a sensory-semantic impetus, and... a person comes out of a heavy darkness to live, create, and prosper. In conclusion, I want to describe a metaphor that always comes to mind when thinking about the sense of meaning. Imagine a children's pop-up book with a gray, unattractive cover and no pictures. The book is closed, it looks like a dull flat stone, there is no light, no play, no fantasy in it, only the gloomy gloomy binding looks at you. And then the book opens, and inside it cardboard figures suddenly straighten out, depicting a fairy-tale life, wondrous landscapes shine, brightly dressed people are having fun, flowers are blazing. The figures are voluminous, they even move, and you enter the fairy tale on equal terms and wander in delight through the streets of cozy cities, and a wonderful secret awaits you around every corner. So is the sense of meaning. It reveals to us the fabulousness and attractiveness of the world, highlights its versatility, beckons with mysterious distances - hope, love, victory. And this always happens, even if just a minute ago we saw nothing but a gray cover. Literature: 1. Leontyev D.A. Psychology of meaning. M., 1999. P. 78. 2. Heidegger M. Being and time. M., 1993. P. 37.

(b. 01/23/1953) - special. on General Problems of Philosophy, Doctor of Philosophy. sciences, prof. Genus. in Rostov-on-Don. Graduated from Philosophy. Faculty of Growth. state University (1975). Cand. diss. - "Philosophy as theoretical self-consciousness." Dr. diss. - “Rational and value (problems of regulation of consciousness)” (1988). Currently vr. is prof. Department of History of Philosophy Philosopher Faculty of the Russian State University for the Humanities. Valid member The Academy humanizes. Sciences (1997). Basic scientific topic research - gnoseol. and axiol. problems of consciousness, existential. human aspects existence, philosophy problems of esotericism. In his works he pursues the idea of ​​the unity of rational and non-rational aspects of man. being and knowledge, emphasizes the priority of everyday life and awareness in relation to all altered states of consciousness, and defends humanistic values.

Op.: The concept of philosophical reflection // FN. 1979. No. 5;Philosophy and personality. Rostov-on-D., 1983 ;On the functions of culture // FN. 1984. No. 2;Philosophy as theoretical self-awareness // Yearbook of Philosophy. Society of the USSR. 1984;On the specifics of higher spiritual values ​​// Ibid. 1987. No. 4;Rational and value-based(problems regulating consciousness). Rostov-on-D., 1988 ;Socialism:deformation problems.[In al.]. Rostov-on-D., 1989 ;Man in the animated cosmos of esotericism // Man as a cosmic phenomenon. Izhevsk, 1993 ;Philosophy of education.[In al.]. Rostov-on-D., 1994 ;Philosophy of everyday life(existential problems). Rostov-on-D., 1994 ;Man in the Universe // Philosophy. Rostov-on-D., 1995 ;The world of everyday life // Ibid.;Soviet philosophy // Ibid.;Country Philosophy(book for schoolchildren and students). Rostov-on-D., 1995 ;Postmodernism - the collapse of consciousness? // ONS. 1997. No. 4.

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