Chapter 4. The theory of Vico civilization. The idea of circulation
Vico put forward a cyclical theory of the development of society. According to his concept, the cycles of development, according to which Providence leads mankind step by step from barbarism to civilization, history passed from ancient times to the decline of Rome and again from the “new barbarism” of the dark ages to the Age of Enlightenment.
The idea of the continuous development of the human race (the progressive movement of nations) is an integral part of Vico's philosophy. But this notion lacks in him that abstraction that prompted Perrault or Fontenelle to look at all previous history with more or less clearly expressed arrogance. Viko understands the eternal charm of the childhood of human society and does not seek to discard the sensual-practical common people's attitude to the world for the sake of the success of a radiant mind. He excellently depicts how the heroic age - the era of personal dependence, domination and slavery, fantastic law and harsh aristocracy, the age of weak reason and vivid imagination, mythology and epic - gives way to democratic orders, rational prose, dominant in republics (the symbol of which is not a spear , but a wallet and scales). Vico understands the progressiveness of this transition. The picture of the brutal oppression of the people by the landowning aristocracy, sketched out in several chapters of the New Science, surpasses the boldest arguments of the Enlightenment era. Vico's hatred for the remnants of the Middle Ages is truly organic, not at all bookish. But at the same time, Vico doubts that the victory of bourgeois civilization over the era of poetic barbarism is absolute progress. Its progressiveness is historically relative.
Together with the fantasy of the heroic era from public life a certain element of the nationality disappears, which even "a gracious right, evaluated by the equal usefulness of reasons for all," cannot return. The formal independence of the individual is often inferior to the natural freedom protected by custom. Is not sensory consciousness, based on bright and public images, more democratic, closer to the bodily-practical life of most people than the secret wisdom of philosophers, prosaic and cold? What could be more indifferent to the sufferings and joys of mankind than reasoning de more geometrico? Peoples are "poets by nature."
Vico is still unaware of the contradictions of the developed bourgeois system. He judges only on the basis of those cycles that earlier and simpler social organisms experienced. However, within these limits, his reasoning is irreproachable. The fog of heroic times is lifting, democracy is winning, and with it come humanity and self-awareness. But this victory is short-lived. The freedom of the people in the republics, whose symbols are the scales and the purse, becomes a convenient screen for the enrichment of the few. Private interests win over the public principle, and freedom turns into slavery.
"After the Mighty in the people's republics began to direct the Public Council in the personal interests of their Might, after the Free Peoples, for their own benefit, allowed themselves to be seduced by the Mighty and subjected their public freedom to their lust for power, then parties arose, rebellions began and civil wars, and in the mutual extermination of nations a form of Monarchy arose. " In Vico J. Foundations of a new science of the common nature of nations. M. - Kyiv, 1994. S. 116. Blessed is slavery, for it preserves particles of justice! The nobles ruled their vassals or clients on based on barbarian customs, unwritten and secret laws. The plebeian mass fought for written laws, rational jurisprudence. And what? The tyranny of laws is unusually beneficial for powerful peoples and hostile to natural law. The casuistry of heroic times, which retained the literal meaning of legislative formulas, does not disappear, it only changes, passing into the formalism of jurists - casuistry in the proper sense of the word, known only to educated nations. Thus civilization leads to a new barbarism, barbarism of reason, reflection. "As in times of barbarism of feelings, the barbarity of reflection respects words, and not the spirit of laws and regulations , but it is much worse than the first, since the barbarism of the senses believed that the just - this is what supported him, that is, the sounds of words; The barbarism of reflection knows that what is just is what supports it, that is, what institutions and laws have in mind, but seeks to circumvent this with the superstition of words. "Ibid., p. 124.
The justice of social institutions remains in the realm of abstract ideals; in practice, ideal norms are realized only through the most
ugly perversions. The spirit of the new world is hypocrisy. And in themselves the abstract formulas of law are so narrow that justice finds its defense only in mercy. Vico's system contains a characteristic inconsistency. showing how human nature the heroic nature of the noble peoples overcomes the oppressed peoples, Vico brings this process closer to the general development of consciousness from formless and vague fantasy to the rational thinking of democratic times. According to this scheme, the highest
the form of justice should be courts based on the strictest observance of rational norms. Let the world perish, but justice be done! However, in reality, Vico considers the more democratic and humane legal proceedings to be those that deal with the norm of the law more or less freely.
In his disgust with the tyranny of the laws, Vico is close to the ideas of the Renaissance, as they appear before us in Shakespeare's comedy Measure for Measure. Not the domination of infallible laws, but on the contrary: deviation from the norms of rational jurisprudence (more precisely, bourgeois law) is the basis of human, merciful justice. This justice is not content with form, but "considers the truth of facts and graciously inclines the meaning of laws wherever equal conditions require it."
If two people are equal before the law, but are not actually equal in their real position, then in order to maintain justice, it is necessary to follow the truth of the facts, violating the formal correctness of the law. So, the narrow horizon of bourgeois law, in the well-known expression of Marx, was no secret to Vico, but he believed that the only possible guarantee of justice would be the admission of some remnant of irrational times.
Feeling must save reason from nonsense, monarchy from the cruelty of republics based on wealth. And Vico dreams of a higher type of courts - courts that are completely disordered. "The truth of facts reigns in them; under the dictates of conscience, wherever there is a need, gracious laws come to their aid in everything that the equal usefulness of causes requires. They are fanned with natural shame, the fruit of education, and therefore serve as a guarantee in them conscientiousness is the daughter of culture, according to the sincerity of the People's Republics, and still more - the nobility of the Monarchies, where the Monarchs in such courts solemnly place themselves above the laws and consider themselves subordinate only to conscience and God. Much later these arguments were repeated by Balzac in the Nucingen Banker's House. Yes, in fact, the Hegelian philosophy of law is based on such containment of the contradictions of the bourgeois system through monarchical institutions.
Vico distinguishes between the monarchy following the popular republics and the original monarchy of divine times (Roman kings or Greek basileus). The first meets in a certain sense the interests of the plebeians, since it subjugates the powerful, relying on the hatred towards them on the part of the common people. The author of the "New Science" paints a picture of the establishment of the monarchy on the model of the Italian states of the Renaissance or imperial Rome. His monarchism is sometimes a mere historical observation, sometimes an idealistic utopia in the spirit of the theoreticians of enlightened absolutism, or rather in the spirit of Hegel. At the same time, everywhere Vico makes it clear that democracy is the highest result of culture, and only because of the vicissitudes of things it is short-lived and needs to preserve its progressive grain through some kind of reversal - to the monarchy.
The development of humanity takes place along with the fall of the all-destroying social energy, which the barbarians are so rich in (it was revealed not only in the lordly valor of the noble, but also in the competition with them of the subordinate classes). "Heroism is now impossible by the very nature of citizenship." In the republics, heroes are single, like Cato of Utica (and even that only because of his aristocratic spirit). In a monarchy, heroes are those who faithfully serve their rulers. "Therefore, one must come to the conclusion that oppressed peoples yearn for a hero in our sense, philosophers study, poets imagine, but civil nature does not know this kind of good deeds."
In other words, the progressive movement of nations is full of the deepest contradictions. Does it guarantee real people's freedom? Does not the social energy of peoples degenerate along with the development of social wealth, the separation of the state from society, the establishment of formal law, studied by a special class of lawyers, along with the victory of egoistic reason over the unconscious social feeling of primitive peoples?
Yes, at the highest stage of civilization, peoples again fall into a state of barbarism, at first completely different from the barbarism of the era of Homer or Dante. “Since the Peoples, like cattle, are accustomed to thinking only about the personal benefit of each individually, since they have fallen into the last degree of refinement, or, rather, arrogance, in which they, like beasts, are enraged because of one hair, are indignant and go wild when they live in the highest concern for bodily fullness, like inhuman animals with full spiritual
loneliness and the absence of other desires, when even just two cannot come together, since each of them pursues his own personal pleasure or whim - then the peoples, due to all this, due to stubborn party struggle and hopeless civil wars, begin to turn cities into forests, and forests into human lairs. Here, over the long ages of barbarism, the vile stratagems of insidious minds are covered with rust, which, by barbarism of reflection, made people such inhuman beasts as they themselves could not become under the influence of the first barbarity of feelings: after all, this barbarity revealed a magnanimous savagery, from which one could protect oneself either by struggle, or caution, and the barbarism of reflection with base cruelty, under the cover of flattery and hugs, encroaches on the life and property of their neighbors and friends.
Therefore, peoples from such rational anger, used as the last remedy by Providence, become so dumb and stupid that they no longer feel conveniences, refinement, pleasures and luxury, but only “the necessary usefulness of life.” There. S. 165.
These pages are one of the most brilliant depictions of the decline of human morals in a society based on buying and selling. This spiritual kingdom of animals, according to Hegel, is described by Vico in all its moral and psychological features, described with bold fullness and frankness, with a genuine gift of historical foresight. The realm of rational anger, savagery under the shadow of culture, the element of stupidity that suppresses all signs of thought, complete immersion in idiocy and inhumanity.
Vico's doctrine of the cycle reflects some of the real aspects of the progressive movement of nations. Many of the predictions of the New Science have been confirmed on the widest scale - the later critics of bourgeois civilization in the 19th century repeat the words of the great Italian about the new barbarism. But, like any prophet, Vico argues vaguely, with a touch of mysticism. His real pictures of reality are shrouded in a fantastic haze, weakened by the unconscious impression of the social circulation of small cultures. “The idea of the cycle becomes one-sided, and the ancient prejudice absorbs the barely born scientific truth”, Lifshitz M. Decree. op. P. 19. - considers M. Lifshitz.
Conclusion
Giambatista Vico is an Italian philosopher and historian who anticipated the methods of historical, cultural and ethnological research. In the course of his research, Vico expanded the scope of the tasks set in the work of the Foundation of a new science of the general nature of nations (Principi di una scienza nuova dintorno alla comune natura delle nazione .., or simply Scienza nuova), which went through several editions (in particular, in 1725, 1730 and posthumously in 1744) and many corrections, tried not only to describe the history of natural law, but also to find an ideal scheme for general history.
Vico's interest in the study of origins and causes was combined with his most significant innovation - an attempt to formulate the laws of historical development. He believed in the existence of laws of history that could be recognized and systematically expounded. Vico's "spiral" theory (in Soviet philosophical literature it was customary to call it the "theory of historical circulation") was one of the first attempts to create universal model the rise and fall of civilizations. It was neither linear nor cyclical and combined both of these concepts. Vico's conviction that there are certain laws that govern history, just as certain laws govern any other science, marked the beginning of a new way of looking at history. He first applied the positivist approach to history in the first half of the 18th century, but it was not until the middle of the following century that this approach finally became an integral part of historical analysis. The positivist approach - both in history and in physics - is based on the notion that all knowledge is based on an understanding of natural phenomena and that the properties and relationships of these phenomena, whether historical events or molecular structures, can be fully comprehended and verified. . And yet Vico, for example, in "Foundations of a new science of the general nature of things" recognized such realities as the Flood.
For Viko, history is by no means a simple set of facts marked materially in time. It is later that history will appear before the gaze of the one who is looking for historical essentiality, a continuous flow, the matter of reality, not subject to comprehension and reflection, not subjected in an attempt to mythical sympathy to some kind of adequacy in the unity of faith, experience, ideas. It is then that history will become embodied, embodied in all its forms, except for the future tense, chronology, the settled matter of being, "the keys to whose happiness", the "heavenly" ideal master key of which has long been known to everyone and is understood as something obvious in itself in historical knowledge.
But for Vico, history is not a simple fitting of facts to the existing chronology, as long as the historian sees the pulsation of historical authenticity in the fact. Especially not this. Vico challenges the meaningless chronology, which at the very beginning is "attacked" for its insanity and helplessness in itself. His History is precisely a set of Ideas, universally valid, true propositions that remain so "always". Which late European historiography also intently tried to find and formulate before their direct material and chronological embodiment in history, i.e. platonically, be it the historiosophical delights of the Russian Slavophiles N. Danilevsky and Khomyakov; cultural and historical morphemes of Spengler; the notorious axial time of K. Jaspers and other constructions, often called "historiosophical".
Ideas, Vico's Axioms are expressed in history, and they are expressed in it (which is chronology, as a dry residue of this expression), but not they, but precisely the connection, "how" these ideas are embodied in history and why exactly this way and not otherwise , here is the subject of Vico's close attention. Self-scientific interest in the given, and not in the ideal fullness. His "Science ..." is science, and Aristotle is here at the "headboard". Viko's preliminary list of Ideas, "Elements" is clearly inconsistent, redundant and thought out not in itself, but in relation to the convenience of the material, anticipated and put "in front of itself" in advance.
Of course, Vico is not building what we call "history" in our modern sense. They are thinking about "science", moreover, global historical science. Any "science" must begin with the setting of the subject (history) and the method of research. However, it is precisely such a “scientific-global” plan of comprehension that turns out to be capable of gaining such depth of historical generalization and such accuracy of historical tools that it makes the actually available material stand even “harder” in its place.
List of sources and literature
1. Vico J. Foundations of a new science of the general nature of nations. M. - Kyiv, 1994. S. 116.
2. Vico J. Collected works in 3 volumes. M., 1986.
3. Kuryatnikov V.N. On two approaches to covering history: spiritual and secular //http://samara.orthodoxy.ru/Christian/Kuryatn.html
4. Lifshitz M. Jambatista Vico // Vico J. Foundations of a new science of the common nature of nations. M. - Kyiv, 1994. S. 3 - 19.
Notes
Giambattista Vico was born in Naples on June 23, 1668 in the family of a modest librarian. “The growing poverty of the family caused him a lot of worries, he was eager to get leisure in order to continue his studies ...
Giambattista Vico - Italian philosopher and historian
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Giambattista Vico - Italian philosopher and historian
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-essay-
Cyclic concepts of social development
(J. Vico, O. Spengler, A. Toynbee)
Yaroslavl, 2002
Abstract plan
Introduction.
Chapter 1. Giambattista Vico.
Chapter 2. Oswald Spengler.
Chapter 3. Arnold Toynbee.
Conclusion.
Literature.
Introduction
One of the central questions in the philosophy of history and social philosophy is the question of the existence of objective regularities in social development. In the dispute between subjectivism and objectivism, the theory is growing that human society goes through certain stages in its development, that this stage is the main objective regularity in the history of human society. In many ways, the theory of cycles merges with the civilizational approach to the study of the history of human society, but the civilizational approach seems to be a narrower direction within the framework of the cyclical theory. Within the framework of this essay, the development of the cyclic concept of social development will be considered on the example of the views of J. Vico, O. Spengler and A. Toynbee.
Within objectivism itself, cyclical theory is opposed by the notion of the linear development of human history. In this sense, one can see a certain cycle in the history of the cyclic concept: the ideas of the ancient world that history repeats itself on a new turn replaced the Christian expectation of the end of the world as the end point of the human path, in the Enlightenment, the foundations of civilizational theory arose, which Marxism later began to resist another attempt to predict the final.
In modern domestic science, the problem of civilizations and the historical cycle in the years after the collapse of the USSR is being discussed very lively. This methodology seems to many to be one of the best opportunities to overcome the crisis of the social sciences and push back the "end of history" predicted by Fukuyama. In this regard, understanding the legacy of the past, from which modern ideas sprout and new apologists for the theory of civilizations draw inspiration, is undoubtedly relevant.
Chapter 1. Giambattista Vico
Giambattista Vico, with his work “The Foundations of a New Science of the General Nature of Nations”, according to N. S. Mudragey, was the founder of the very philosophy of history. The concept of a three-stage cycle of development of human society is his hallmark, but under it the Italian thinker also developed a solid theoretical base of an epistemological nature. Vico's ideas in his contemporary era were not understood, because at that time philosophers were more interested in the problems of the laws of nature and the limits of the human mind, and social patterns have not yet attracted due interest. Vico's ideas were rediscovered in the 19th century, in the era of post classical philosophy and the formation of a civilizational approach in its modern form.
Vico drew attention to the fact that, studying the external world of nature, scientists leave aside their own world, the world of people, to which he gave the name "World of Citizenship". Based on the point of view that only the creator can fully know what he created, and natural world created by God, he concluded that a person should focus on the knowledge of the created by himself, the social sphere, social relations and their possible patterns.
In his "New Science", by which the author understood "a new critical art - to find the truth about the founders of nations in the depths of folk traditions", Vico set the goal of understanding the course of human history, the meaning of human existence on earth. Knowing the past, identifying its patterns, the philosopher believed, we can understand what awaits us in the future. Attracting for analysis, first of all, the history of Europe in the period of antiquity and the Middle Ages, Vico concluded that every human society goes through three stages in its development - the Age of the Gods, the Age of Heroes and the Age of People. Finishing its cycle, society moves to a new round of the spiral. Ultimately, there is no final frontier. Mankind lives and develops only to maintain its existence.
Moving to a new stage, the nation makes a qualitative leap, changing in culture, behavior stereotypes, etc. For example, in the Age of the Gods, morals are pious, religion comes first, in the Age of Heroes, people are ardent, warlike, passionate. The Age of People awakens rational feelings, civic duty. The driving force of such a process is the natural spiritual and physical development of a person. However, the laws of social life are not, like itself, a product of human creativity, but are established by Providence.
Vico builds his research on the analysis of human thoughts, ideas, expressed in languages, legends, myths and reflecting human affairs. His "new science" was to become the history of human ideas. However, ideas for him are not the subject of research. The study of ideas is a way of knowing the World of Citizenship.
The history of mankind must be comprehended by two sciences, called by Vico philosophy and philology. “Philosophy considers Reason, from which the Knowledge of Truth flows; Philology observes Self-reliance human will from which comes the Consciousness of the Certain. Such a division is based on two forms of knowledge identified by Vico: knowledge given by the intellect, and consciousness generated by a person's volitional effort. In the widest philosophical sense here the question of the relationship between the general and the whole is touched upon, which constantly pops up in Vico's reasoning. Knowledge and philosophy using this method study the general, consciousness and philology study the particular. Vico does not give preference to any of the forms of knowledge, since this would lead to an extreme that does not exist in historical reality. The history of mankind is the most diverse manifestation of human activity and at the same time reflects the general order established by Providence.
Accordingly, history and man are also inseparable for Vico. In this sense, believing that without history there is no man and there is no history without man, Vico anticipates modern views on the problem of space and matter, according to which the existence of objects and the space containing them are interdependent. IN this case It's about social space. Trying to reflect history in its entirety and the interdependence of its elements, Vico denies external goals, the instrument for achieving which could be human deeds.
The natural development of man, recognized by the philosopher as the driving force of the historical process, allows you to get away from the one-sided definition of human society, when only one side of it is emphasized and a holistic view is lost. For Vico, history should not be a consideration of man and society only from the economic, political, religious or any other side, all forms of human activity should be studied.
The question of the relationship between the general and the particular also emerges in the question of the mechanisms for the development of society. While asserting the principle of free will in the activities of people, the philosopher, nevertheless, calls Providence the founder of the order of this development. Here again the problem of the correlation of individuality, specific actions of individuals guided by their own goals and objectives, and the general course of history, in which patterns are undoubtedly visible, is reflected.
Vico introduces the concept of Providence, guiding and guiding people in their affairs, in order to explain the common features that manifest themselves in the development of various peoples, the general result that is created completely different people, whose activity never leads history to chaos, which later, in principle, was repeated by Toynbee in explaining the most general and fundamental foundations of our world, which cannot be fully known by a person living in this order, and therefore attributed to divine power.
In Vico, however, the “divine” problem is solved quite “humanely”: Providence controls people, using the common sense of nations for this. In modern language, Vico addresses the issue of collective consciousness, group identity and imaginary communities, which is very actively discussed in today's science. The identification of the general, group, social in the individual consciousness of a person is precisely one of the main tasks of the modern humanities. In addition, Vico says, Providence uses divine and human authority when people do things without realizing, but believing in the word, and the secret wisdom of philosophers who reveal to ordinary members of society the hidden truth, the laws of history. Thus, the mechanisms of action of Providence, a supernatural force, are not themselves supernatural.
Recognizing the external source of the course of history, Vico thereby justifies the existing reality. In any case, it should be the natural result of development, since it is not blind chance or blind fate that establishes its order, but conscious force. Accordingly, having comprehended the result of its activity in the past, humanity is able to see its future: “... it was there that it should have been before, so it should and now and so it will continue to flow the history of nations, as it is considered by real Science, since this order was established by Divine Providence ... » [Cit. according to: 8. S. 107]. On the basis of this statement, Vico can be safely ranked among the objective idealists, who later became the majority of "civilizationists".
Considering in more detail the concept of Vico's eternal ideal history, it should be noted that it compares favorably with the speculative constructions of classical philosophy in that the author tried to build it according to the principle scientific work(although philosophy stands apart in a number of forms of cognition of reality). In epistemology, Vico relied on the mathematical ideal of knowledge, extolling geometry above all as a science that actually studies what it creates, i.e. arbitrarily chosen points, lines, planes. The philosopher makes excessively high demands on the concept of truth, considering its task to be the knowledge of the “eternal and unchanging order of things”, in social terms - the so-called. "ideal history", which leads him to create an objectivist model of social development.
The combination of theoretical thinking and empiricism, the need to study the relationship general laws and many specific facts of history are constantly emphasized by Vico: “... both philosophers who did not support their considerations with the authority of philologists and philologists who did not try to justify their authority with the reason of philosophers stopped halfway: if they did, they would be more useful for the State and warn us of the discovery of our Science" [Cit. according to: 6. S. 56].
In this statement, the realm of the certain correlates with human activity. Reliable knowledge, on the criteria of which Vico thought a lot, laying the foundations of his work, is directed by a goal and is guided by a certain way of action. As a result, the data of “philology” (i.e., narrative historical science and source studies) move to the level of truth, get the opportunity to be theoretically analyzed and generalized, and philosophical truths acquire practical confirmation. In the unity of philology and philosophy, a “new science” is born, with which Vico “explains the Eternal Ideal History, flowing in accordance with the Idea of Providence; and in the whole work it is proved that by this Providence the Natural Law of Nations was established; according to such an Eternal History, all the separate Histories of Nations flow in time in their origin, progress, state, decline and end” [Cit. according to: 6. S. 188].
The “new science” is built on the model of geometry, however, according to Vico, it far exceeds its model in reliability: “... in our constructions there is as much more reality as the laws of human activity are more real than points, lines, surfaces and figures” [Cited . according to: 6. C. 58]. It is clear that in modern social science, which is strongly influenced by postmodernism, such confidence in the realism of the laws of human existence and the possibility of their comprehension will cause skepticism, however, remembering the principles of historicism, the founder of which was Vico himself, it should be understood that in the 18th century. such views were certainly ahead of their time. In any case, without assuming the discovery of any real facts of individual and social life, the process of cognition is unlikely to be fruitful.
Although Vico is an adherent of the rationalistic criterion of truth, opposing it to external feelings, this does not prevent him from defending the possibility of historical knowledge, denied by the rationalists. Moreover, Vico in a sense rehabilitates mythological thinking, pointing out that it reflects the real situation in one way or another, and therefore myths can be a source of our knowledge about the past. In this combination of rationalism and intuition, laying the foundations for future historicism, Vico's creative individuality is manifested. It is impossible to discard folk traditions, since they are true in essence, but inadequate in form. Ancient people felt the truth, although they could not formulate it in the appropriate language. Having clearly imagined the nature of primitive consciousness, one can obtain adequate knowledge of the pre-literate past. In addition, Vico realized that even distorted information captured in myths is part of the life of the people of the era being studied, from which, in principle, one can pave the way to the theory of discourse developed in modern science: “We must ... adhere to a path completely opposite to that followed by priests and philosophers ... and instead of mystical meanings, restore in Myths their innate historical values» [Cit. according to: 6. S. 86].
Myths, according to Vico, give us grounds for the periodization of human history. Every society goes through the Age of the Gods and the Age of the Heroes, according to what the myths it creates mainly tell about. The very creation of myths is already an indicator of a certain development of society, the transition of a person from an animal state to a certain civilization, mental activity, self-control, carried out on the basis of the norms of behavior recorded in myths.
In the first two epochs, a person is not yet independent in the full sense, the historical scene, i.e. public consciousness, occupy the gods and their heirs heroes. Man is present in fantastic stories invisibly, anonymously. The human ideas of that time were created in accordance with the intellectual possibilities that existed then and the specific way of understanding reality, which Vico talks about a lot, calling it "poetic". A person cannot yet realize himself and therefore projects his own social being onto the “divine” sphere. Hence the philosopher faces the task of grasping the human in the superhuman.
Despite Vico's outward Catholic orthodoxy, his view of religion is rather pragmatic. Religion, he believes, arises in the era of the Gods as necessary condition social life. People come up with various names for the heavenly forces, although we are talking about the same thing - a means of curbing the initial animal aggressiveness. Without doubting the existence of Divine power, Vico gives a very mundane, from the point of view of classical Christianity, interpretation for its manifestations in everyday life. He connects the worship of a deity not with the development of higher human spiritual forces, but with the power of feelings and imagination over the intellect, in many respects equating his own faith with other religious cults.
Without bothering with careful calculations and based on the data of only one society, Vico determines the length of the Age of the Gods at nine hundred years, and the Age of Heroes at two hundred. The end of the "heroic" era is marked by the end of the ancient aristocracies and the transition to "people's freedom", the republic. The evolution of the political system, as well as the very life of society, ends with the monarchy, the most perfect form, after the decline of which social life is destroyed, and wild customs reign again, in order to go through the eternal cycle of history once again on a new turn.
The general philosophical postulate of the unity of world history becomes for Vico the principle of historical research, giving it rigor, orderliness and purposefulness. Vico consistently adheres to the principle of the integrity of the methodology. Of course, in the current conditions of the development of scientific thought and the state of the source base, this inevitably leads to exaggerations and assumptions, but it should be remembered that the main thing for the philosopher was still not the reconstruction of the historical picture, but the discovery of the regular repetition of the historical process.
Chapter 2. Oswald Spengler
Unlike J. Vico's desire for mathematical accuracy in the humanities, which earned positive reviews in the USSR and attempts to find signs of dialectical materialism in his philosophy, O. Spengler, with his appeal to the irrational, was subjected to severe criticism. His essay "The Decline of Europe", published in the wake of the shock of Western Europeans from the horrors of the First World War, became one of the most significant and controversial works in the field of philosophy of history, social philosophy, sociology and philosophy of culture.
According to the spirit of the work, the discussions that unfolded around it were also polemical in nature and expressed paradoxical assessments. Repeated attempts have been made to find out whether the resonance of labor is an opportunistic matter, or whether the author, who proclaimed the imminent end of European civilization, offers new methods of historical knowledge. Spengler himself considered himself the unique creator of a truly scientific scheme of the historical process. This uniqueness is questionable. The question of whether there is a logic of history, and attempts to reflect this logic through cultural and historical communities, have been made before. However, for example, Vico, discussed above, naturally did not have such a rich evidence arsenal. historical facts, which was accumulated by world science by the beginning of the twentieth century. The Italian philosopher, rather, indicated the landmarks to which it is worth moving, comprehending the laws of history. The question of the boundaries of civilizations and the criteria for their selection were in his infancy.
The German thinker, relying on the rather rich factual material of archeology, ethnography, linguistics and other humanities, spoke out sharply against the provisions that were widespread in European science of the 19th century: Eurocentrism, panlogism, and the idea of a linear course of history. Spengler countered this scheme with the doctrine of a plurality of cultures, the relationship between which should not be considered on the basis of the “more or less progressive” principle. Each culture is a natural and living organism that goes through a certain cycle of development, culminating in a logical finale.
Cultures equivalent to each other in terms of the level of maturity reached, Spengler counted eight: Egyptian, Indian, Babylonian, Arab-Byzantine, Chinese, Greco-Roman, Western European, Maya. Their existence, he believed, proves that a single world process does not exist. Cultures are closed formations that contact, but do not affect each other's basis. Such fragmentation of the perception of the historical process led the philosopher to pay special attention to the individuality of cultural communities, their sovereignty and exclusivity, using the method of morphological analysis.
Spengler's method of historical knowledge received a great response in cultural studies. In the movement of history, its logic, Spengler saw the change and development of extremely generalized cultural types. According to Spengler, culture (in the sense of property, not community) is what creates and unites an era, gives it unity, and, first of all, he focuses on the analysis of the style of this unity, objectified in the forms of economic, political, spiritual, religious life. The idea of a "pra-symbol" in the views of the German philosopher should be the key to understanding the morphology of any culture. The prime symbol of any culture, Spengler, in the chapter “On the Meaning of Number,” calls the number.
The historical material of Spengler, unlike Vico, was largely adjusted to a subjectively formed concept, which can be seen even from the list of cultures he singled out. The list shows that the philosopher did not see the possibility of the existence in the same territory and within the framework of one language of essentially different cultural types. However, Spengler's merit at least in overcoming the unidirectional Eurocentric view of the historical process is unconditional. The proclamation of the decline of Europe did much to moderate European "civilized" snobbery.
In order to find out the conditions in which Europe is experiencing its decline and its impending end, Spengler considers it necessary to investigate the essence of culture itself as an objectively existing object, in what relation it is to the observed history, in what forms it manifests itself. Such objects of observation and interpretation for Spengler are symbols of culture: languages, ideas, deeds, works of art, etc.
With regard to European culture, Spengler argues that it has gone through all the stages of its development and naturally, like any living organism, has approached death. By the 20th century, it entered the phase of civilization, i.e. a stable existence that cannot offer anything original, heuristic, artistically or metaphysically productive. The First World War is, according to Spengler, a clear indicator of such a decline.
In the development of culture, Spengler distinguishes several stages: mytho-symbolic early culture, metaphysical-religious high culture, and late ossified culture, turning into civilization. The term "civilization" in Spengler loses its former lofty sound, paving the way for the postmodern conventionality of linguistic designations. The whole cycle lasts, according to Spengler, about a thousand years. Civilization means the depletion of active forces, like any creative objectification of the subject in space, and is the beginning of the death of culture.
Culture, unlike civilization, is essentially religious. Civilization, on the other hand, is the will to rational activity, to arrange the space around oneself. Such rationality leads to the elimination of nationalism and national differences that impede the productive reproduction of a mass product both in the material and spiritual spheres, which we really observe after the Second World War in the face of world globalization.
Philosophy and art exist in culture; at the stage of civilization, only engineering is required. Culture is organic, while civilization is mechanical. Culture is qualitative, aristocratic, imbued with social inequality. Civilization is quantitative, striving for equality and democracy. Again, Spengler's prediction for Western Europe is coming true, although the straightforward dichotomy of logic is somewhat alarming in terms of its correspondence to the actual diversity of the historical process.
All historical cultures go through these stages. To prove this, Spengler uses the homology method. Civilization has the same characteristics in each case. It is an indicator of degeneration cultural world and his ideas, the return of culture to ethnic chaos.
In his methodology, Spengler draws analogies of culture not only with the body, but also with the human soul. He divides culture into possible, corresponding to the ideas of a person and real, corresponding to his actions. In this case, history appears as the objectification of a possible culture through the acts and institutions of society. The practical tools of culture, the number and the word, are the person's worldview that has received an image.
As Spengler says, the extent of the external is expressed by a mathematical absolute number, and the direction in time is expressed by a chronological, relative number. Nature, objectified, is calculable, and history as a process, as the unfolding of culture in space and time, cannot be described using mathematical methods, which completely denies Vico's methodological views. Spengler gives numerous examples of how the meaning of numbers is used in different cultures to express the vision of the world, figuratively speaking, the soul of a given culture. Culture and history, proceeding from this, are formed only when its subjects realize the meanings of numbering, naming, forming images of the external world, i.e. these subjects, individuals or groups, are for Spengler the main premise of the objective morphology of history.
Spengler's increased emphasis on the irrational, instinctive, inevitable death of European culture and a breakthrough into a new spiritual space, due to the circumstances that developed soon after the publication of the work, to some extent contributed to the philosophical design of National Socialism. The deprivation of democracy as a symbol of the decline of its progressive halo influenced the subsequent establishment of a totalitarian regime in the homeland of the philosopher. But the philosopher himself considered dictatorship, despotism only a sign of decline, referring both socialism and imperialism to phenomena of the same order.
However, the impending death of European culture is not a reason for mourning. This is a natural process. In this case, you should not rely on the help of other cultures. Each culture is isolated and goes its way from birth to death sequentially (in this sense, the concept of L. N. Gumilyov, which provides for the mechanisms of ethnic regeneration and the possibility of disrupting the natural development of culture, is much more diverse). History, according to Spengler, breaks up into a series of closed, independent, cyclical cultures.
Spengler was often accused of being destructive. However, the meaning of his teaching is that a correct understanding of one's own capabilities is necessary in order to evoke a life-creating pathos. The only method of cognition of historical phenomena is "physiognomic", i.e. empathy, intuition, perception through the study of external manifestations, symbols. According to P. S. Gurevich, Spengler's accusation of biologization is also incorrect: speaking of the organic development of cultures, he used only an analogy. Spengler understands cultures as individual formations, which is impossible in the animal kingdom. The main thing for him is to comprehend the inner life of culture, and not external signs of similarity.
In contrast to living and animated matter, Spengler calls the morphology of inanimate, mechanical and physical forms of nature systematics, which reveals and streamlines the laws of nature and causal relationships. In the chapter “The Problem of World History”, Spengler dwells on the question of the compatibility of two forms of cosmic necessity: causality as the fate of culture and as physicochemical, cause-and-effect causality. These two forms, the philosopher believes, are irreducible to one another and determine the existence of Nature and History as two ways of representing the world. History is a sum of images, pictures and symbols - irrational, subjective, possible. If we consider History as what has become, it becomes Nature, a set of objective laws and systems. Such a systematization, Spengler believed, covers the whole world.
In epistemological terms, Spengler, following the principle of historicism, focuses on the historical conditionality of scientific concepts and their relativity resulting from this. Absolutizing the spiritual tradition, Spengler considers science capable only of a subjective reflection of reality, seeks to highlight the moving element of worldviews due to a specific historical situation, to clarify the significance of natural scientific discoveries for the formation of a modern worldview picture.
In line with his concept, Spengler treated science as one of the forms of culture, considering its task to symbolize the surrounding space, its semantic organization, and emphasized the magical and superstitious side of science. Spengler predicted many phenomena in modern science, which, in his opinion, also testified to the decline of European culture, namely: the rational merging of sciences, their desire for methodological unity, the oversaturation of the scientific language with symbols. In contrast to many, he considered European science and culture as a whole to be essentially the antipode of ancient science, striving for corporality, while European culture “embodied” the world, which stemmed from the ancient Germans and Celts.
When asked about the meaning of history, Spengler agreed with Vico: the development of mankind and the circulation of cultures do not have any external goal. It is only an objective given, a process that takes place regardless of whether people ascribe a goal to it or not. Attempts to formulate the purpose and idea of history only obscure the richness of the forms of the historical process. Unacceptable for progressives, he extended the position to all aspects of public life.
Spengler still looked for opportunities in European culture that had not yet been realized, he wanted to reveal it. creative potential. The denial of Eurocentrism in his concept did not testify to the inferiority human culture generally. The purpose of his criticism was to make people understand the equivalence and originality of all the great cultures that existed on Earth. The philosopher completely denied evolutionary development, but considered the contribution of individual cultures to the general historical process through the created symbols possible.
Spengler develops the idea of the desire of culture to subdue the hostility of the world. The image of space is very significant for him. Characteristic life as such - belonging to a certain field of activity. This feature, in the absence of a pra-symbol, is the reason for the long preservation of the same life forms among entire peoples (what is also called "homeostasis").
Such an existence is outside the framework of culture, creativity, development, therefore, outside of history. Culture can be found only in the development and change in the forms of human existence, therefore history is unique and transient. In the world of human community, therefore, static can coexist as a constant reproduction of any forms of life, as a way of life, and the movement of the Heraclitus river, which cannot be stopped in order to describe objectively. Outside of culture, peoples, as a special form of organization of living matter, fall out of historical time in a special way.
Civilization for Spengler is the opposite of a living culture, a soulless intellect, stands in the context of the concept of "mass society" and "mass culture". To activate the still remaining forces of Western Europe, it is necessary, he believes, to objectively assess their capabilities. A subjective assessment, including Eurocentrism, will mean the triumph of formlessness and amorphousness in this culture. True self-awareness will give the Europeans the necessary self-restraint.
Spengler also paid special attention to the development of European technical thought. Adhering to his morphological method, he also denied the pragmatic essence behind technology, but saw in it, first of all, the symbolic mechanization of all aspects of the life of a European person. Spengler was one of the first to raise the question of the universal impact of technology on nature and society. However, he did not allow the thought of a possible end of human history, both physical and "Fukuyamov's".
Global alarmism was not Spengler's style. The philosopher saw the misfortune of the human species at this stage of development in the impossibility of adapting to the the world changes. He was convinced of the inexhaustibility of human possibilities to supply material for the emergence of new cultures. Modern life, of course, poses global threats to humanity, but the amazing phenomenon of stabilizing the population of the human species over an insignificant period of time of half a century by historical standards gives reason to believe that some hidden mechanisms that are not yet subject to man and not fully realized by him can indeed ensure life Spenglerian cultures, suprabiological superorganisms.
The logical continuation and completion of the idea of the decline of Europe was Spengler's later work "Man and Technology", the main content of which was the concept of the will to power in its civilizational and intellectual form. Developing the ideas laid down by Schopenhauer, Spengler says that the will to a pure number, the pra-symbol of any culture, moves the spirit to discover the secret, in fact, to the knowledge of oneself, one's inner structure. A.P. Dubnov calls this conclusion the pinnacle of Spengler's philosophy and his greatest insight into the mathematized essence of modern technotronic civilization.
Chapter 3 Arnold Toynbee
Arnold Joseph Toynbee, one of the largest representatives of the cultural-historical school of the 20th century, historian and diplomat, in his work “The Study of History”, he outlined his own understanding of the world-historical process, a civilizational concept based primarily on the use of geography. Toynbee's work is very indicative of the development of objectivist historical science, which recognizes the existence of real patterns in the historical process, and believes that "in the muddy chaos of events, we discover order and order."
Despite the huge amount of evidence (The Study of History was published in 12 volumes), Toynbee was subjected to the same reproaches as Spengler: exaggeration, fitting facts to the concept, the use of unverified, inaccurate data, excessive generalization and the resulting fragility of objectivist constructions. . The subject of his studies, civilizations (unlike Spengler, here the term is used without a negative meaning) seem to be devoid of empirical clarity and objective content. The proximity of Toynbee's concept to Spengler's work was noticeable to many of his critics, which seriously reduced the originality of the work of the English thinker.
Spengler in The Decline of Europe did not go beyond philosophical generalizations, while Toynbee declared himself primarily as a historian who, on the basis of facts, reveals the patterns of the world historical process. But his interest in history was still philosophical. Toynbee was interested not only - and, judging by numerous inaccuracies, not even so much - in what is within the competence of a professional historian, but also in something more secretive, essential: the relationship of history as a universal whole with the internal dynamics of the human soul. This gives E. B. Rashkovsky reason to attribute Toynbee’s concept primarily to the philosophy of history, the essence of which he saw in the study of the paradox: Being is objective and immutable, but it is not given to a person apart from the efforts of his own consciousness.
Subjective moments were often combined with objectivism in Toynbee's work. This refers mainly to his vision of the method of historical science. He said that "the selection, systematization and comparison of facts is a technique that belongs to the subjective creativity of the historian." Those. here we meet Spengler's idea of the subjectivity of science. Such subjectivism and general idealism, which permeates Toynbee's philosophy of history, gives it a rather speculative character, for which he was reproached both in the USSR and in the West.
The English philosopher, following the philosophy of life, focusing attention on the features of the living world, believes that it is impossible to transfer the methods of the sciences about the inanimate world to historical knowledge: “It is known that treating people or animals as inanimate objects can have catastrophic consequences. Why should it not be assumed that such a course of action is no less mistaken in the world of ideas? . His cognition is, rather, comprehension, “a deep impulse to embrace and understand the integrity of Life,” which gives grounds to see intuitive knowledge in Toynbee’s method.
Toynbee considers “society” to be the unit of the historical process. "Societies" are divided into two categories: primitive (not developing) and civilizations. At the beginning of work on "Comprehension of History" Toynbee singled out 21 civilizations in 16 regions of the planet that existed before and still exist. He allowed the successive existence of several civilizations on the same territory. By the time he completed his work on "Comprehension of History", Toynbee created the following classification of civilizations: Flourished: 1) independent: a) isolated: Mesoamerican, Andean; b) independent non-isolated: Sumerian-Akkadian, Egyptian, Aegean, Indian, Chinese; c) filial, the first group: Syrian, Hellenic, Indian; d) filial, the second group: Orthodox Christian, Western, Islamic; 2) satellite civilizations: Mississippian, “southwestern”, northern Andean, southern Andean, Elamite, Hittite, Urartian, Iranian, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Italian, Southeast Asian, Tibetan. In special sections, Toynbee distinguishes “abortive” civilizations - Irish, Scandinavians, Central Asian Nestorians, - “detained” - Eskimos, Ottomans, nomads of Eurasia, Spartans and Polynesians, - and “undeveloped” - the first Syrian, Nestorian Christian, Monophysite Christian, Far Western Christian and “space of the medieval city-state”.
Toynbee has been criticized for being vague in his subject matter. This core concept of his work was defined by the author himself very vaguely: in epistemological terms, as an “intelligible unit” of historical analysis, as “a certain phase in the development of culture”, existing for a long time. Toynbee did not give clear criteria distinguishing civilization from other human groups. For all "civilization" it has always been the main problem. Toynbee himself believed that the term loses its abstractness, becomes clear when a comparison is made of cultural phenomena belonging to different civilizations, i.e. must be proven by contradiction.
Toynbee considers the religious component to be the main core of every civilization. Toynbee himself is quite religious and abundantly supplies his work with quotations from the Bible. Unlike Spengler, he saw the goal of historical development: history is aimed at comprehending God through the self-disclosure of man. History is the work of the Creator, realized through the existence of man and humanity. Comprehending history, mankind comprehends itself and in itself the divine Law. Comprehending history, the researcher becomes involved in the process of creation.
The being of society for Toynbee is a manifestation of Life as an element of being. Life is continuous, although civilizations are discrete, its local manifestations, but the constancy of their existence as a phenomenon, the constant regeneration of cultures, ensures the unity of the life process of the Universe. Toynbee insisted on combining the humanities to create a unified science of human action. To understand the nature of Life, Toynbee believes, it is necessary to learn to identify the boundaries of its relative discreteness, in which "the concept of continuity matters only as a symbolic speculative image", against which the specific diversity of the historical process manifests itself.
However, a serious blow to the very heart of Toynbee's concept was dealt by P. Sorokin, who took up the question of whether Toynbee's civilizations are systems, since. only systems, according to Sorokin, are able to arise and die, i.e. have a common development model. Systems, on the other hand, are a harmonic whole, where the parts and the whole are mutually dependent. In the civilizations described by Toynbee, Sorokin did not see such a systemic dependence, depreciating the laws of historical development derived by Toynbee.
Toynbee is one of the few historians of the 20th century who demonstrated in his work the encyclopedic knowledge necessary to create such a large-scale concept of the world historical process, first of all, knowledge of the most diverse sections of history (both chronologically and geographically). Such knowledge allowed him to widely apply the method of analogies, comparing some cultures with others and looking for common features in their development. But, having divided the historical process into local civilizations, as V. I. Ukolova believes, Toynbee disunites the object of knowledge and makes impossible the goal declared by itself - comprehending the secrets of world history. The well-known historian L. Febvre saw the weakness of Toynbee's comparative method in that his comparisons are based on a priori derived laws.
The classification of civilizations by region appears rather arbitrary in Toynbee's presentation. The Byzantine and Ottoman empires are included in one civilization only because they were located on the same territory. Israel, Achaemenid Iran and the Arab Caliphate are included in one, “Syrian”, civilization, Sumer and Babylon are divided into maternal and child. The term about the civilizational unity of modern Russia and the Orthodox peoples of Eastern Europe, put forward by the Russian Slavophiles of the 19th century, is again proclaimed, although modern data allow not only to refute this thesis, but also indicate a stable confrontation in relations between Russia and Eastern Europeans and that the role of the religious factor , the significance of which Toynbee especially emphasizes for the “Eastern European Orthodox civilization”, is in reality negligible in these respects. Thus, an attempt to classify civilizations suggests that the author of the concept was largely guided by his own arbitrariness and followed the lead of common historical myths.
Toynbee notes that separate societies-civilizations simultaneously exist in constant contact with each other, which is especially important for the 20th century: there was a claim to consider oneself one's society as a closed universe.
Toynbee believes that the main mechanism for the development of societies is the so-called. mimesis (imitation). Primitive societies are characterized by imitation of old people and ancestors, which is why these societies are incapable of development, movement into the future. In contrast, civilizations imitate creative individuals, which creates the dynamics of their development. Accordingly, the main task of the historian is to find the factor of dynamism. Toynbee attaches decisive importance in this matter to the influence of the geographical environment.
Toynbee's original solution is the concept of Challenge-Response, according to which society moves to the stage of civilization only by overcoming the difficulties and challenges that the environment throws at it. He believes that only external difficulties can inspire society to an unprecedented effort until then. At the heart of this process lies the interaction of God and man, who again and again answers the divine question.
Toynbee is not a racist and rejects the influence of biological heredity on the emergence of civilization, as well as the division of peoples into more and less civilized. According to Toynbee, the differences between peoples are determined primarily by the non-simultaneity of the process of the emergence of civilizations, and not by the general intellectual and cultural lag of any ethnic community.
Toynbee divides challenges into three categories. The first of these are natural difficulties, which are unfavorable for human life. For example, the swamps in the Nile Delta, according to Toynbee, became a necessary challenge for the ancient Egyptians, the jungles of Central America - a challenge to the Mayan civilization, the sea became a challenge for the Greeks and Scandinavians, and the taiga and frosts - a challenge for the Russians. Excessively high difficulties take too much energy from people, so society no longer has the strength to create a civilization. At the same time, the author creates a target for criticism: natural difficulties exist on the entire surface of the Earth, but man does not give an answer to this challenge everywhere. In addition, many civilizations arose in regions quite comfortable for human habitation, where people from the earliest antiquity were not extremely concerned about the problem of survival. In addition, the author demonstrates some ignorance in knowledge of geography.
Toynbee calls the second category of challenge external intrusions, in other words, the factor of geographic migrations. This provision also contains vulnerabilities. External invasions have taken place all over the world throughout history, and the indigenous peoples have not always given an adequate response, even if they were not inferior in strength to the attackers. The third challenge, according to Toynbee, is the decay of previous civilizations, with which contemporaries must fight. For example, the collapse of the Hellenic-Roman civilization, according to Toynbee, gave rise to Byzantine and Western European civilizations. However, here it is worth noting that a dying civilization is not necessarily followed by a new one, but usually long centuries of decline lie between them.
Toynbee himself notes in relation to the so-called. historical time, that the continuity, continuity in the development of societies that consistently exist on the same territory, are much less pronounced than the continuity between the phases of the development of one society, although some, primarily cultural, connection between different societies still exists. In the development of civilizations, Toynbee distinguishes several stages: genesis, growth, breakdown and decay.
The subjectivism of Toynbee's method serves in his concept as a theoretical justification for voluntarism: a decisive role in the formation and development of civilizations, in his opinion, is played by creative individuals, followed by the main mass of the population, indifferent in its essence. However, these same creative personalities, according to Toynbee, also play a major role in the processes of fracture and collapse of civilization. Toynbee sees the primary danger for civilization in the same mechanism of mimesis, imitation of creative personalities, more precisely, in excessive enthusiasm for it: “the risk of catastrophe is inherent in mimesis as a means and source of mechanization of human nature.
Obviously, this constant risk increases when the society is in the process of dynamic growth and decreases when the society is in a stable state. The disadvantage of mimesis is that it offers a mechanical response borrowed from a foreign society, that is, an action worked out through mimesis does not imply one's own internal initiative. Toynbee considers the best remedy against the dangers of fracture to be the consolidation of properties learned through imitation in the form of a habit or custom. However, in the process of dynamic development, the custom is destroyed, and the mechanisms of mimesis become apparent.
Passing their way, civilizations create historical time. History exists only where this time, conditioned by action, exists. Through the change of states of human society, the content of history is manifested. The one who knows history makes the connection between the past and the present, the continuity of Life. Toynbee assigns exceptional importance in this process to memory. In this regard, he develops the concept of an intelligible field of historical knowledge. Toynbee affirms the cognizability of the hidden, deep mechanisms of history through their manifestations in the existence of various societies. By delving into the facts, one should cognize the essential in history, which is based on the divine law.
Despite the fact that all previous civilizations experienced a breakdown, Toynbee does not consider this outcome predetermined: “a living civilization, such as the Western one, cannot be a priori sentenced to repeat the path of civilizations that have already collapsed. "Delayed societies" in harmony with the surrounding landscape, Toynbee considers not the end product of the history of civilization, but just one of the options for the development of events after the fracture. Toynbee refers to the collapse of civilization as one of the types of challenge to which the creative minority must respond in such a way that, after a certain period, a split and disintegrated society is reborn. Unlike Spengler, Toynbee considers the progress of mankind possible, seeing it in spiritual perfection, in particular, in religion.
Conclusion
Assessing the contribution of representatives of the cyclic concept of social development to the development of philosophical science, one cannot help but notice the resonance that these ideas caused in the scientific world, awakening to life a stormy and fruitful discussion on many fundamental issues of being, both natural and human. Although the mechanisms of human society are still far from being finally revealed, much has been learned in the course of this debate. It seems that the representatives of the cyclical concept did not succeed in proving their views convincingly, substantiated and rigorously enough. This fact should not, however, lead to a denial of any correctness of the cyclical approach. The complexities of its development reflect the complexity of the very object of its cognition, the social area, which is something different from both inanimate matter and the biological world.
Such complexity also causes difficulties in choosing a method for studying the social sphere, a clear allocation of the subject and object of research, and evidence criteria. In this regard, the contribution of J. Vico to the epistemology of the humanities, the theory scientific knowledge. First of all, Spengler should be credited with his emphasis on the study of the irrational component of human culture, which prevented the development of mechanism in the minds of the humanities. Toynbee's work seems to be a great step towards building a comprehensive picture of the world historical process. Despite a certain schematicity and fragility of the theoretical constructions of all the considered authors, their works have contributed huge contribution in human understanding of the world around and itself.
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Despite the fact that the idea of progress dominated the new European social thinking, in the XVIII century we meet with an interesting concept of socio-historical cycles, created by the Neapolitan thinker Giambattito Vico (1688-1744). He tried to prove that the concept of infinite progress does not prove its exceptional power when applied to real human history.
Cyclic theories social change appear earlier than theories of progressive changes, since a person in his life first of all encounters various forms of cyclic changes - seasonal changes in the landscapes surrounding primitive man, etc.
Cycles, when talking about objects studied by the social sciences, are recurring or recurring social processes in which a sequence of events is followed by a similar sequence at their completion. Let us turn to the analysis of Vico's concept. His main work is dedicated to her: "Foundations of a new science about the general nature of nations, thanks to which new foundations of the natural law of peoples are also revealed," or simply "New Science" (1725). In his introduction, Vico noted that "The new science elucidates ideas that are completely new in their own way." Vico meant that these foundations can be found not in books, but in "modifications of the human mind". Vico expressed surprise that philosophers who studied "the Science of the World of Nature, which was made by God and which therefore he alone can know", "neglected reflections on the World of Nations, that is, the World of Citizenship, which was made by people, and the Science of which therefore can be made available to people. “In order to find such a nature of human things,” Vico writes, “our Science advances through a rigorous Analysis of human thoughts related to the necessity or benefit of social life ... In this new main aspect, our Science turns out to be the History of Human Ideas ... ".
Vico considers the history of mankind and the history of the states and forms of its social organization as the history of a cyclical movement, according to which all nations make their run in time in their origin, forward movement, state, decline and end. The following remark by Vico is very important: “We even dare to assert that the one who thinks through the real Science tells himself this Eternal Ideal Story ..., creates it for himself; after all, the World of Nations was, of course, made by people ... and therefore the way of its emergence must be sought in the modifications of our own Human Consciousness.
In these words lies a very important idea for a correct understanding of the essence of the work performed by the social sciences. A historian who studies the history of mankind collects it according to facts (fragments of the past) and, creating integral pictures of the past, participates not only in the restoration of what was, but also in what is thought to be related to the ensemble of social relations and connections of past eras. He is an accomplice of history. At the same time, under the person of "the one who thinks through real Science, tells himself this Eternal Ideal History and creates it for himself" 63 . Vico is referring to humanity itself. The social and historical sciences are the instruments by which humanity studies its history and its essence. Most importantly, Vico considered the knowledge of human culture to be more true than the knowledge of physical nature, since people know more reliably what they themselves have created (and therefore science is possible).
Reading Vico's work allows us to draw the following conclusions about the main ideas of his theory.
- 1. People are able to understand human phenomena in ways that cannot be used to understand natural phenomena. A person can understand himself and everything that he has created, that is, the entire cultural reality, but he cannot use the basis of the inductive study of culture for the knowledge of nature. From this we can proceed to the conclusion that the study of society requires a special science.
- 2. The basis of such a science is comprehended in the historical study of the collision between human consciousness and nature, which take place in different parts, in different time and under different conditions. Each era has its own problems and its own answers to these problems (questions), which will change in accordance with the level of rationality achieved by culture. Each era has its own needs, capabilities and abilities, prejudices, and each era develops the institutions and values necessary for knowledge and control of the world.
- 3. All nations follow in their development from primitive to civilized. Cycling cultures will develop only those ideas, institutions and values that meet their needs at each stage they are in, guided by the internal logic of evolution. Cultures evolve in response to the demands and desires of a particular cycle time.
- 63 Vico J. Decree. op.
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During the existence of historical and economic science developed a large number of options for periodization of the economic history of mankind.
There are currently three main approaches to this problem:
The economic history of mankind is interpreted as an ascent from the lowest to the highest;
Ideas of the historical cycle;
Ideas of Civilizations.
The second group - the ideas of the historical cycle - has become predominantly known in the historical and economic literature in the last 60-70 years, although the first of them were created so far in early XVIII in. In particular, the Italian G. Vico, putting forward the idea of historical circles, argued that the advancement of all peoples goes in cycles.
The idea of the objective nature of the historical process permeates the teachings of the Italian philosopher D. V. He believed that the area of our knowledge is limited to our deeds. A person knows something to the extent that he does it. This dependence gives culture an objective and visible mode of existence. History is the science of human activity. It is accessible to knowledge regardless of divine revelation. The regularity of the historical process, in Vico's understanding, is similar to the individual development of a person.
Viko's main work is of interest to culturologists primarily because it sets out the principle of periodization of the cultural-historical process. Before Vico, the periodization of history was built on the basis of the dogma of the Bible. The problem of typology of cultures was also considered from this point of view.
The Italian philosopher, the founder of the philosophy, history and psychology of peoples, D.V. introduced the comparative method into history and believed that all nations develop in cycles consisting of three eras:
The age of the gods is characterized by the absence of a state, the symbolic fixation of people's ideas about themselves, their society and the world in theogonic myths, in which religious structures dominated the management of sociocultural processes.
Age of Heroes - marked by the dominance of the aristocratic state and the symbolization of socio-cultural ideas in the forms of the heroic epic.
The age of people is a democratic republic or a monarchy and a historical form of comprehension of socio-cultural processes.
The age of the gods is characterized by morals tinged with piety and religion; Age of heroes - mores are angry and scrupulous; The age of people is helpful, guided by a sense of civic duty. Accordingly, in the Age of the Gods, law is based on the notion that God rules everything; in the Age of Heroes, on a force unrestrained by either morality or religion; in the Human Age, law is based on the attitudes of the human mind.
After the completion of the third stage, the gradual disintegration of this society begins. This theory of epochs (stages) is set forth in the work "Foundations of a New Science on the General Nature of the Nation", a Russian translation of which was published in Leningrad in 1940.
Vico's ideas had a great influence on subsequent ideas about history and culture. They were one of the first attempts to see order and sequence in apparent chaos. historical events. Vico considered the laws of the development of society discovered by him to be providential. Their knowledge and comprehension of the meaning of history in general became, as it were, penetration into the plans of God. The idea of the possibility of such penetration is the leading thought for the worldview of the New Age.
From the context of Vico's reasoning, it follows that the typology of historical epochs is at the same time a typology of cultures, due to which it is possible to single out the culture of the Age of Gods, the culture of the Age of Heroes and the culture of the Age of People. These three types, according to Vico's ideas, differ from each other primarily qualitatively.
Their differences are manifested not only in the way people work the earth, metal and stone, but also in the way they think, feel, experience. In fact, Viko comes to the idea that each culture has its own mentality, an idea that was comprehensively disclosed only by culturologists of the second half of the 20th century, who substantiated the presence of a “soul” in each culture (O. Spengler) and proved the existence of a “culture style” (S. Averintsev, L. Botkin), who characterizes it as a specific integrity, where there is an internal echo of ideas and moods between all its elements.
No less interesting is another idea of Viko - the idea of the "circulation" of cultures, which was subsequently widely used by many culturologists from N.Ya. Danilevsky to P.A. Sorokin. Vico was a supporter of the theory social progress, but unlike Perrault or Fontenelle, who “looked at all previous history with the contempt of self-satisfied writers,” he was not his blind apologist. Vico well understood the inconsistency of social development and had very doubts that the historical process is like a straight line going from the lowest point to the highest.
According to Viko, a more complex pattern operates in history, which is confirmed by numerous facts. Human society as a whole is moving from the darkest times, when rude morals dominated, to enlightened times, where relations between people are built on reasonable grounds, but this process is not unambiguous. When a society (and, accordingly, its culture) reaches the highest point in its development, there is a return to the initial stage, and the cycle repeats again.
Such cycles in the history of culture, according to Viko, can be countless. Progress consists in the fact that a new cycle begins from another point located higher on the line of progress. It should be said that the idea of the cycle, the endless repetition of cycles of development is found in the works of authors who lived and worked long before Vico. In particular, it is present in the poems of Heraclitus, who wrote: "Our world is like a wheel that fate strives up and down." It is also found in the Bible, in the book of Ecclesiastes. Similar reasoning can be found in the works of thinkers of the East. Therefore, it is impossible to attribute to Viko the glory of the discoverer of this truth, but his merit lies in the fact that he grasps some real aspects of the progressive movement of European culture, which over the centuries of its existence has repeatedly risen to the heights of refinement and spirituality and just as repeatedly plunged into the darkness of ignorance and savagery. In fact, Vico anticipated later critics of European civilization in his insights, largely repeating Vico's arguments about the “new barbarism”, which inevitably replaces the flourishing of culture. For Vico, the death of any culture is predetermined, as is its subsequent rise. Vico knows no other dilemma, although human history is full of examples of a more complex process of development than a simple repetition of cycles. In this, as many researchers of the Italian thinker's work note, the one-sidedness of his approach is manifested, and it is for this that he can be criticized.
Viko expresses a very heuristic idea about the integrity of culture. From his point of view, every culture is characterized by a commonality of religious, moral, legal, aesthetic attitudes that dominate the public mind. According to him, they are most directly related to the types of political and economic organization of society, which change during the transition from one cultural era to another. The "order of ideas," as Vico notes, follows the "order of things." It follows from this that culture is something unified; when studying it, an analysis of those ideas that are dominant in a particular culture at a particular stage of its development gives a completely acceptable result. It should be said that this idea was picked up by Hegel, who developed and supplemented it in his philosophy of history.
For culturologists, Viko's arguments about myth as a cultural phenomenon are of great interest. In fact, he was the first to make myth the object of scientific analysis and showed that myth is the product of a special type of cognition that differs from scientistic.
From his point of view, myths are not fiction, they are a presentation of human history in its first stages, especially in the Age of the gods. Vico proceeds from the fact that man has a common nature with animals and therefore initially he perceives the world only through feelings. The first people, from his point of view, had an undeveloped mind and therefore could not cognize the world in the proper sense of the word. Not being able to comprehend things in their essence, they fantasized, attributing feelings and passions to insensible things, created in their imagination creatures that did not exist in reality. Thus, fantasy, imagination were the first forms of cognition of a person who had just embarked on the path of improving his mind. The product of this mental activity is myths. Myths, Viko believes, are not the result of empty fun or entertainment. They are historical monuments, in which the real events experienced by our distant ancestors are captured in a peculiar form. They reflect the character of the people, their worldview and attitude. It follows that the study of history, which is the history of ideas, must begin with myths, which are the true basis of any culture.
No less important for theoretical culturology is Vico's idea of the unity of man, history and culture. For the author of the New Science, there is no history and culture without man, just as there is no man outside of history and culture. Vico understands history not as an action external to man, but as a process in which man creates his own being, his life and, consequently, himself. Such a solution to the problem favorably distinguishes Vico from the thinkers of subsequent eras, in particular Hegel, who understands history as the result of the subordination of the individual to the world spirit, which determines its goal and gives meaning to the cultural-historical process. Later, Viko's idea was picked up and developed by our domestic culturologists (M.B. Turovsky, N.S. Zlobin), who showed that culture is nothing but a personal aspect of history.
History, according to Vico, has no other purpose than the preservation of the human race. This is also the purpose of culture.
Finally, one cannot ignore Vico's idea of the connection between the forms of the human spirit and time. From his point of view, the forms of the human spirit are the product of history and at the same time its mover. This applies not only to science, but also to art, the role of which in the development of the human race can hardly be overestimated. Vico believes that the place of art and its significance are belittled in the same way as the significance of fantasy, feeling and passion in cognition is belittled. According to him, their role in comprehending the essence of things is no less significant than the role of the mind, which is immoderately praised by narrow-minded thinkers.
Vico raises his voice in defense of imagination, will, memory, believing that it is they who, first of all, create the history and culture of the human race. Moreover, he believes that it is feelings and imagination that are the force that laid the foundations of culture.
Below is the first paragraph of the creative work “Comparative analysis of the theories of culture by D. Vico and I.G. Herder". Part about on a separate page. The work is not yet circulating on the Internet, the uniqueness of the text is 84%.
G. Vico's Theory of Culture
Main labor
Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is one of the founders of the theory of culture. He is the author of many works, but the work "Foundations of a New Science of the General Nature of Nations", which was published in 1725, brought him worldwide popularity, in which he undertook the first theoretical study of the problems of culture.
The Foundations of a New Science is a rather extensive work, combining bold, innovative ideas that were not appreciated until three hundred years later, and medieval superstitions, such as the passage about witches eating innocent babies to increase their witchcraft power.
The book is difficult to understand, as it is saturated with archaic vocabulary, a large number of philosophical digressions that have little to do with the main theme.
Despite this, the "Foundations of a New Science" laid the foundations for the theory of culture, they set out the original principle of periodization of the cultural-historical process.
Before Vico, the periodization of history had a linear event character - the creation of the world and the first man, the flood, pandemonium, the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, the birth of Christ, and so on.
Vico identified three historical eras in the history of Europe: the Age of the Gods, the Age of Heroes and the Age of Men. Each stage corresponds to its own special type of customs, type of government, type of law, type of court, type of language.
Three centuries in the history of societies
Vico identified three historical eras in the history of Europe:
- Age of the gods
- age of heroes
- Age of people.
Each stage corresponds to its own special type of customs, type of government, type of law, type of court, type of language.
Age of the gods
The age of the gods is a golden age, at this time there is no confrontation between the authorities and the people. Technique is not developed, mythological thinking dominates, everyone speaks a single universal language.
People deify nature, fantasy and imagination dominate in the minds of people, which leads to a poetic, creative perception of the world. Law is divine. From that era, we inherited myths - the history of the first peoples.
Age of Heroes
The era of heroes - the silver age begins with the transition to a settled way of life. Separate families stand out, the unlimited power of the father in the patriarchal family replaces the theocratic rule of the era of the gods.
The fathers of the families gradually turned into biblical patriarchs, into Roman patricians, ordinary family members into plebeians. This is a period of domination of the aristocracy, religious confrontations, technological progress.
Law is based on a force unrestrained by morality or religion. During this period, cultural differentiation occurs, due to the collapse of a single language, which complicated intercultural contacts. Weak and strong cultures are distinguished.
The geographical factor plays a major role in this - spatial isolation, remoteness from trade routes, navigable rivers, a small population, a hostile environment - weakens some cultures and they are expected to be either subjugated or assimilated by a stronger culture.
Age of people
The age of people is the iron age, the period of maturity, consciousness of mankind. Instincts and unconscious actions in social relations give way to reason, duty and conscience.
Society is becoming more humane, democratic forms of government based on political and civil equality are spreading. Law is based on the principles of the human mind.
At this time, national limitations are overcome and humanity begins to exist as a single whole. There is a weakening of religious consciousness and, gradually, scientific thinking comes to the fore, and as a result, technology and technology, international trade are rapidly developing.
On the other hand, humanity is struck by a cultural crisis, the cause of which lies in the fact that many insufficiently cultured rulers cannot manage society in accordance with the highest values.
As a result, social conflicts are aggravated, the number of wars is increasing. Language becomes not a form of cultural identification, but a factor in the separation of people. As a result, the apogee of the development of culture simultaneously becomes the beginning of its end.
Vico suggests three ways out of this situation: the usurpation of power by one person who, relying on military force, takes care of the welfare of society (Octavian August among the Romans); the subjugation of a corrupted people by better peoples (as happened with Greece, and then with Rome); complete collapse of the state, civil wars and anarchy, the onset of the "second barbarism" (this is the path of the Eastern peoples).
These three stages of human development are characteristic not only of the history of mankind in general, but also of the history of any individual people.
So, according to Viko, contemporary European states live in the last era, Japan and Russia - in the era of heroes, a number of peoples of the south and north - in the era of the gods.
The typology of historical eras according to Vico is at the same time a typology of cultures. There are cultures of the Age of the Gods, the Age of Heroes and the Age of Men. These three types of cultures differ from each other, first of all, qualitatively.
Their differences are expressed not so much in technology - how people cultivate land, stone, metal, but in mentality - how they think, experience, feel.
Vico expresses the idea that each culture has its own mentality. This idea was developed by culturologists of the 20th century, who spoke about the presence of a “soul” in every culture (O. Spengler) and proved the existence of a “cultural style” (S. Averintsev, L. Batkin), which is its specific characteristic as an integrity, where there is an internal the core of ideas and moods of all its components.
Cyclic development
Another provision of Vico is the idea of the "circulation" of cultures. Vico was an adherent of the theory of social progress, but was not his blind apologist. He was aware of the contradictory nature of the development of society and did not believe that the historical process is like a straight line going from the lowest point to the highest.
Human society as a whole is progressing from the times of the dominance of rude mores to the times of enlightenment, where relations in society are built on the principles of reason, but this movement is by no means unambiguous.
At a certain stage, when a society (and, consequently, its culture) reaches the apogee of its development, a rollback is made to the initial stage, and the cycle resumes. Such cycles in the history of culture, according to Viko, can be countless.
Progressiveness lies in the fact that each new cycle starts from a different point, located at a higher point on the progress line. The idea of cyclicality is also characteristic of ancient thought, but Vico speaks of cyclical progress, spiraling cycles.
For him, the death of any culture is predetermined, as is its subsequent rise, the "new barbarism" inevitably comes to replace the flourishing of culture.
“Thus, it turns out that our Science describes the Eternal Ideal History, according to which the Histories of all Nations flow in time in their emergence, progress, state, decline and end.”
Language is the basic value of any culture
Vico was the first to point out language as the basis of human essence: "Man in the proper sense is nothing but mind, body and speech, and speech is placed in the middle between mind and body."
Thus, a triadic unity is formulated, in which language links the corporeal and the spiritual. Human development is summarized in the development of language. This is the first fundamentally important conclusion of Vico's philosophical anthropology, which is very significant in the general construction of the "new science".
Culture is a holistic system
Another contribution of Vico to the development of cultural studies is the approach to considering culture as a holistic entity. In his opinion, each culture has specific religious, moral, legal, aesthetic attitudes that prevail in the public mind.
These attitudes are directly related to the political and economic organization of society and are transformed with the change of cultural epochs. The "order of ideas," writes Vico, follows from the "order of things."
It follows from this that culture is a single integrity and its study can rely on the analysis of those ideas that are dominant in a particular culture at a certain stage of its development.
Myth as the basis of culture
Vico was the first to consider myth as an object of scientific analysis and discovered that myth is the product of a special type of cognition, different from scientific. In his opinion, a myth is not fiction, but a reflection of human history in its early stages. Vico starts from the position that man has a common nature with animals and therefore initially he perceives the world only through the senses.
The first people, from his point of view, had an undeveloped mind and therefore could not cognize the world in the proper sense of the word. Not having the ability to comprehend things in their essence, they extended feelings and passions to insensible objects, created creatures in their imagination that did not exist in reality.
That is, imagination and fantasy were the first forms of cognition of a person who had just embarked on the path of developing his mind. Myth is the result of the cognitive activity of ancient people. For this reason, myths are historical monuments, in which real events experienced by previous generations are reflected in a peculiar form.
They express the character, worldview and worldview of the people. Myth is the basis of any culture, so the study of history, which is the history of ideas, must begin with myths.
The principle of historicity
Another important idea for cultural studies is Vico's idea of the unity of man, history and culture. For him there is no history and culture without man, just as there is no man without history and culture.
History is not events external to man, but a process in which man creates his own being, his life and, consequently, himself. History and culture, according to Vico, have one goal - the preservation of the human race.
The connection of the forms of the human spirit with time is another valuable idea of Vico. In his opinion, the forms of the human spirit (religion, science, art) are a product of history and at the same time its mover.
From his point of view, the role of art, feelings, human passions in knowledge is no less important than the role of science and reason. Vico assigns a significant role to imagination, will, memory, believing that it is with their help, first of all, that the history and culture of the human race is created. And even more, in his opinion, it was feelings and imagination that laid the foundation of culture.