Social relationships, their place in human nature
If a person is constantly in a healthy and positive environment of combat horting, he subconsciously cultivates the qualities inherent in teachers, coaches and senior students of the organization. The principle of personal example is the basis of education and a tradition that is embedded in combat horting. "Who you associate with, you will gain from it," says ancient Slavic wisdom. Namely, the environment and the circle of like-minded people to a certain extent influence the upbringing of strong-willed qualities of the individual. For a more complete understanding of the need to be in harmony with the surrounding society, to have one's place in public life, it is necessary to reveal the essence of social relations in general, their place in the human essence of each person, and also to give specific examples from sports life and education in the traditions of combat horting, which has its own educational philosophy aimed at this goal. Having determined the place of spirituality in the structure of human essence, it is impossible to ignore the environment in which a person lives. We are talking about the sphere of human relations. Even Aristotle defined a person as a political being. That is, to the natural he added the political, in the ancient sense, that which lies in the sphere of state, or rather, city relations. The study of social relations is associated with the names of Vico, Herder, Hegel and others. In Marxism, this side of human essence has acquired a universal character and has pushed all the latter into the background. "The essence of man is not an abstract thing inherent in a separate individual. In reality, it is the sum total of all social relations," K. Marx and F. Engels argued in Soch. vol. 42, p. 265. The following example is given to prove the truth of this Marxian thesis: "An Indian boy brought to Paris as an infant will become a "one hundred percent" Parisian in adulthood." The son of a commoner, raised in a nobleman's family, assimilates all the conventions of the family noble life, the same can be said about the son of a nobleman who grew up in a peasant family" (Introduction to Philosophy. Part 11, Politvydav, 1990, p. 221). No objections to the fact itself arise. But when we ask the question: do an Indian, a Parisian, a nobleman have something in common in their essence that makes them primarily people, or does such a common thing not exist? The specific way of manifesting the human essence in all individuals will be different. But is at least one of them deprived by upbringing of reason, morality, faith, love, economic interest, etc., that is, the traits inherent in a person as such? If we assume the idea that a specific person is formed by the very specific social relations in which he is included, then not a universal human being, but a specifically noble, peasant, Indian essence, and therefore, by analogy, a Parisian one, should arise.
If so, then how does society differ from an anthill or a bee swarm? A queen bee is a queen, drones are noblemen, a worker bee is a peasant mass, this is how the author of the popular manual for children-beekeepers, Shabarshov, introduces the basics of beekeeping. The unity of function and essence is shown here in visual images. What the classics of Marxism actively opposed - "biologization" in the understanding of the essence of man, successfully driven out of the door of anthropology, stealthily flew in here through the window of "sociologization", inadvertently opened by the same Marx. This example shows only one thing: if you take one of the features of human essence and transform it into the monosubstantial basis of man, then you will definitely fall into some variant of "sociologization", that is, a one-sided cretinized explanation of human nature. Criticism of "sociologization" does not remove the problem of the social in human essence. Let us recall the main types of social relations, there are not very many of them. The classification reduced the entire fullness of social relations to the following groups: economic, political, moral, ideological, spiritual. The entire range of social relations arose, grew and developed to the extent of the formation of man himself. In the historical process, social relations are sometimes transformed beyond recognition. What can be found in common between the labor of a slave and the wage labor of a worker in modern capitalist society. One works somewhere near the shaduf, exhausted from unbearable work, and the other is highly qualified, well-fed, satisfied with his position, working on assembling a personal computer. The specific position of a person here is different. Different levels of satisfaction of needs, different levels of development of the person himself, different nature of labor, different levels of development of humanity. But the type of relationship here is the same. These are specifically human relationships of the production sphere, they arose as a new level of development of human existence together with the formation of civilization. The owner of production takes the labor in full and returns some of it either in the form of a piece of bread or in the form of a fairly decent salary. The second gives the labor in full, and receives what can be taken at a given stage of social development, but no less than the means that support life and working capacity under specific conditions of the level of development of technology, technology and the person himself. Having arisen at a certain stage of the development of society, a social relationship can undergo fantastic transformations, however, caused by the necessity of the functioning of the socio-cultural system, it does not disappear. Today's social relations carry within themselves in a condensed form their entire history. They contain the memory of centuries and millennia. But not all relationships change their form so dramatically. Sometimes, having arisen, they serve humanity for more than one century, or even a millennium. Let's take feudal relationships. On the territory of Kievan Rus, they began to form in the VIII-IX centuries. In their classical form, they existed until 1861 and, somewhat deformed, until 1917. Now a significant number of researchers, analyzing the seventy-year history of the development of socialism in our country, find essential features of feudalism in the Soviet collective farm system.
Whether transformed or original, relationships retain the memory of millennia. In addition to all other types of socially significant memory, there is the memory of the stereotype of relationships. It can be said that social relationships carry the memory of human creation. The second function of relationships in society is communicative, or rather relay. The formation of personality, all human qualities in the younger generation occurs through the inclusion of a person in a complex range of human relationships. Education, re-education (when such a process is for some reason underway), a change in views, worldview, etc. occurs under the influence of social relationships. The older generation, through relationships, passes on to the younger generation what it received from its ancestors. This is where supporters of the single substance of man stumble, because the process is passed off as the result.
Human life is a process of his activity in various spheres, not only in sports and self-education, as it is established and done in the martial art of horting. A person acts, a being that carries within himself the natural and the spiritual. Activity is possible only in the form of relations with nature and other people. Relations between people are a social form of the movement of matter. If so, then let's ask the question, what moves in a social form? If social relations are a social form of movement, and a person is a set of social relations, then it turns out that movement moves. So we have entered a logical circle. And we have no choice but to recognize social relations as the highest form of movement and qualify this movement as an external manifestation of human essence. Human essence is realized through relations, and is not itself a "set of relations". Social relations are the same form of being of man and human society as the mechanical form of movement of the existence of the solar system. It never occurs to anyone to reduce the essence of the solar system to mechanical movement. First, the Sun and planets are needed, and therefore mechanical movement will be a necessary condition for the existence of the solar system. If there is no thing that moves, then there is nothing to talk about. Therefore, social relations are not a determining, but a derivative side of human existence. Activity, relations, relationships - all these are manifestations of the essence of man. Social relations are a way of realization, a tool for the formation and development of human abilities, and not a human essence, at least a potential one. Man as a phenomenon does not have a single or defining substantive component. The first component of man - his physical being - is a mandatory condition, carrier and important stimulus for manifestations of activity. Physical being is a bridge between man and nature-cosmos. The second component is spirituality. This is a very complex, specifically human phenomenon, which combines consciousness-knowledge, morality, religiosity and other aspects of the human psyche. Social relations are a form of human being. It is important to pay attention to another essential characteristic of a social being, which connects it with all of existence. A person is defined not so much by the level of development of individual aspects as by their interconnections. The qualitative characteristic depends more on the method of interconnections, the features of the harmonization of elements, the nature of hierarchical structures, than on the level of development of the mind, education, religion, morality, etc. That is why we see wise, altruistically oriented, prudent, life-loving people in different historical eras, in different social strata, under different socio-political circumstances. These are holy people. Not all of them are canonized by churches, but they are the lights in the darkness of human relations. The complexity of the interconnections of the elements of the human essence has been fixed by both religion and science for a long time. In Christian doctrine, this complexity was reflected in the form of a contradiction between spirit and body. In Kant, this is a contradiction between faith and reason, in Marxism, this is a contradiction between the individual and the social. And then personalism, positivism, Freudianism, and all the latter, in one way or another, reveal and resolve the contradictions of human essence. In the twentieth century, existentialism most actively and fruitfully develops the problem of the contradictions of human essence. This problem is one of the eternal ones, and in every era it will have its own solution. It is important to note that, apart from the Bible, which gives a mythological version of two thousand years ago, few people in the analysis of the contradiction of human essence truly rely on the anthropogenetic origins of this contradiction. Even existentialism puts the existing human existence in the first place. According to the existential vision, a person appears in the world and only then begins to create himself, starting with his own "I", and even in a hostile environment. Consideration of the complex process of harmonization of contradictory elements of human essence is a separate problem, now it is only important to emphasize that in the analysis of such a complex phenomenon as a person, one cannot be limited to revealing the content of the components. The system of interdependence of the elements of the human essence is the main, defining qualitative characteristic of a person both in the general and in the individual plans. It all depends on what is at the "top of the pyramid" in a particular person, which determines his behavior: good or evil, altruism or egocentrism, logical or emotional, rational or irrational, etc. It is here that one cannot ignore social relations and the socio-political systems that organize them. In the development of the essential properties of a person, one cannot overestimate the role of social relations, the conditions, the atmosphere in which a person lives. A specific social system provides a space for development, calls into action a certain human characteristic, or it can also be qualified as: a side of the human essence. This side of a person becomes dominant and in a certain way subordinates everything else in a person. This is how a businessman, an intellectual, a master of production, a preacher and all other human types, both positive and negative, appear in the world.
The process of human development within the framework of world civilization is the successive creation of conditions for the disclosure of one or another side of the human essence. The Middle Ages, despite all its shortcomings, provides full scope for satisfying the religious need and improving spirituality in the then understanding of this side of the human essence. The Renaissance puts the natural in man, especially his physical perfection, in the first place. The Age of Enlightenment values knowledge the most and promotes the development of science. Today in Europe, there is a desire to implement the principles of democracy in all spheres of life. This, in turn, forms the demand for those qualities of man that were laid down in the primitive tribal society and were once developed by the ancient Greeks. But then for almost two millennia these qualities were not required of man, and in a way they faded, faded away. In such a small, by global dimensions, period of time as the history of European civilization, new essential properties of man did not arise. Everything that we have had in the history of human development for more than two and a half thousand years is not new. All the human qualities inherent in us appeared in primitive society, and finally this process ended with the formation of classes and world religions. The whole variety of types and historical personalities over the five millennia of our civilization is a manifestation of what was laid down in man by anthroposociogenesis and maintained by biological and sociocultural genetic codes. The diversity of people of different historical periods and different regions is a new composition, a new structure, new hierarchical accents, formed from already existing qualities.
One can foresee objections to what has been said and accusations of metaphysical deadening of the human essence. However, the situation is completely different. Changes in man are ongoing, man is developing relentlessly, but now, as five thousand years ago, these changes are quantitative. Serious qualitative changes are not taking place. Nevertheless, quantitative changes in the future will lead to a qualitative leap. It is then that humanity, endowed with a new quality, will move to the rank of God-manhood, as the Russian philosopher Fedorov spoke about. Perhaps this will be communism, perhaps it will be the realization of the myth of Paradise, or the "upper world" of Skovoroda, or something else.
Now we can only note one thing: this new stage of development will be possible only when the human essence changes. Future generations will differ from us in the same way that we differ from Neanderthals. Perhaps this difference will be greater or lesser, but it will be significant.
Of course, this is a hypothesis about a distant and even very distant prospect. Now it is important to understand the essence of what is. The maximum use of knowledge about man for the benefit of man is one of the main tasks of humanities in general and philosophy in particular.
Concluding a brief consideration of human essence, we note: the study of the essence of man is the first step of humanistic philosophizing. For the development of the humanistic worldview of the Slavic peoples, for the transformation of humanism into an influential worldview position, it was enough to use the already acquired knowledge of humanities. A broad philosophical development of the educational system is needed, the study of philosophical issues with the active use of the philosophical tradition. Such an essential means is the educational system of the personality - the art of combat horting, which has stable philosophical views on the upbringing of such qualities necessary for human life as moral and strong-willed. Having a certain level of such qualities, a person is able to harmoniously feel himself in a community and even in a competitive environment. And the practical skills of combat horting will only strengthen his confident position.
Changes in the socio-political life of the state require a radical restructuring of the education process in general, and of children in particular, starting from an early age. That is why it is recommended to start training in combat horting from 5-6-7 years old, because this is a suitable age for starting the education of all human qualities without exception. The transition of our state to new international standards of education requires a change in the education system and the introduction of new inventions and ways of implementing a targeted state education program. This is evidenced by the Constitution of Ukraine, the Laws of Ukraine “On Education”, “On Physical Culture and Sports”, the Targeted Comprehensive Program “Physical Education - Health of the Nation”, the Concept of Physical Education in the Education System of Ukraine.
"Horting Encyclopedia"
Eduard Yeromenko
© 2014