To spiritual values include social ideals, attitudes and assessments, norms and prohibitions, goals and projects, standards and standards, principles of action, expressed in the form of normative ideas about good, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, fair and unfair, lawful and unlawful, about the meaning of history and purpose of a person, etc. If object values act as objects of human needs and interests, then the values of consciousness perform a dual function: they are an independent sphere of values and a basis, a criterion for evaluating objective values.
The ideal form of being of values is realized either in the form of conscious ideas about perfection, about what is due and necessary, or in the form of unconscious inclinations, preferences, desires, aspirations. Ideas about perfection can be realized either in a concrete-sensual, visual form of a certain standard, standard, ideal (for example, in aesthetic activity), or embodied by means of language.
Spiritual values are heterogeneous in content, functions and the nature of the requirements for their implementation. Exists whole class instructions rigidly programming goals and methods of activity. These are standards, rules, canons, standards. More flexible, representing sufficient freedom in the implementation of values - norms, tastes, ideals, serving as an algorithm of culture. The norm is an idea of the optimality and expediency of activity, dictated by uniform and stable conditions. The rules include: a form of uniformity of actions (invariant); a ban on other behaviors; the optimal variant of an act in given social conditions (sample); assessment of the behavior of individuals (sometimes in the form of some sanctions), warning against possible deviations from the norm. Normative regulation permeates the entire system of human activity and relations. The condition for the implementation of social norms is a system of their reinforcement, which involves public approval or condemnation of an act, certain sanctions against a person who must fulfill the norm in his activities. Thus, along with the awareness of needs (which, as we have already noted, may be adequate or inadequate), there is an awareness of their connection with social norms. Although norms arise as a means of consolidating methods of activity tested by social practice, verified by life, they can lag behind it, be carriers of prohibitions and prescriptions that are already outdated and hinder the free self-realization of the individual, hinder social progress.
For example, communal land use, traditional for Russia, which was on early stages history of our country economically and socially justified, has lost its economic feasibility and is an obstacle to the development of agrarian relations at the present stage. Nevertheless, it remains in the minds of a certain part of our society (for example, the Cossacks) as some unshakable value.
Ideal- the idea of the highest standard of perfection, the spiritual expression of a person's need for streamlining, improvement, harmonization of relations between man and nature, man and man, personality and society. The ideal performs a regulatory function, it serves as a vector that allows you to determine the strategic goals, the implementation of which a person is ready to devote his life to. Is it possible to achieve the ideal in reality? Many thinkers answered this question in the negative: the ideal as an image of perfection and completeness has no analogue in empirically observable reality, it appears in consciousness as a symbol of the transcendental, otherworldly. Nevertheless, the ideal is a concentrated expression of spiritual values. The spiritual is the sphere of higher values associated with the meaning of life and the purpose of man.
Human spirituality includes three basic principles: cognitive, moral and aesthetic. They correspond to three types of spiritual creators: the sage (knowing, knowing), the righteous (saint) and the artist. The core of these principles is morality. If knowledge gives us the truth and points the way, then the moral principle presupposes the ability and need of a person to go beyond the limits of his egoistic “I” and actively assert goodness.
feature spiritual values is that they have a non-utilitarian and non-instrumental character: they do not serve for anything else, on the contrary, everything else is subordinate, acquires meaning only in the context of higher values, in connection with their approval. A feature of higher values is also the fact that they constitute the core of culture. certain people, fundamental relations and needs of people: universal (peace, life of mankind), communication values (friendship, love, trust, family), social values (ideas of social justice, freedom, human rights, etc.), lifestyle values, self-assertion of personality. Higher values are realized in an infinite number of situations of choice.
Thus, the concept of values is inseparable from the spiritual world of the individual. If reason, rationality, knowledge are the most important components of consciousness, without which the purposeful activity of a person is impossible, then spirituality, being formed on this basis, refers to those values that are associated with the meaning of human life, one way or another deciding the question of choosing one's life path goals and meaning of their activities and the means to achieve them.
Spiritual values are a kind of spiritual capital of mankind, accumulated over millennia, which not only does not depreciate, but, as a rule, increases. Acting as criteria for the spiritual development of a person, spiritual values express the meaning of his existence and life.
The concept of "spiritual values" covers social ideals, attitudes and assessments, as well as norms and prohibitions, goals and projects, standards and standards, principles of action, expressed in the form of normative ideas about good, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, fair and unfair, lawful and illegal, about the meaning of history and the destiny of man. As can be seen, they are heterogeneous in content, as well as in functions and the nature of the requirements for their implementation. Standards, rules, canons, standards are included in the class of prescriptions that rigidly program goals and methods of activity. The norms, tastes and ideals that serve as the algorithm of culture are more flexible, representing sufficient freedom in the realization of values. Spiritual values motivate people's behavior and provide a stable relationship between people in society.
Classification of spiritual values
1. Health values - show what place health and everything related to it occupies in the value hierarchy, what prohibitions are more or less strong in relation to health.
2. Personal life - describe the set of values responsible for sexuality, love and other manifestations of intersexual interaction.
3. Family - show the attitude towards the family, parents and children.
4. Professional activity- describe the attitudes and requirements for work and finances for this particular individual.
5. Intellectual sphere - they show what place thinking and intellectual development occupy in a person's life.
6. Death and spiritual development - values responsible for the attitude towards death, spiritual development, religion and church.
7. Society - values that are responsible for the attitude of a person to the state, society, political system etc.
8. Hobbies - values that describe what an individual's hobbies, hobbies and leisure activities should be.
Max Scheler The main areas of his research are descriptive psychology, in particular the psychology of feeling, and the sociology of knowledge, in which he distinguished a number of types of religious, metaphysical, scientific thinking (depending on their attitude towards God, the world, values, reality) and tried to put them in connection with certain forms of social, practical state and economic life. The contemplative and cognizing person, according to Scheler, is opposed by objective, objective worlds not created by man, each of which has its own essence accessible to contemplation and its own laws (essential laws); the latter stand above the empirical laws of the existence and manifestation of the corresponding objective worlds, in which these entities become data due to perception. In this sense, Scheler considers philosophy to be the highest science of essence, the broadest in scope. At the end of his spiritual evolution, Scheler left the soil of the Catholic religion of revelation and developed a pantheistic-personalist metaphysics, within which he wanted to include all sciences, including anthropology. Nevertheless, he did not completely depart from his phenomenological-ontological point of view, but the problems of philosophical anthropology, the founder of which he was, and the problem of theogony, now moved to the center of his philosophy.
Scheler's theory of value
At the center of Scheler's thought is his theory of value. According to Scheler, the value of being an object preceded perception. The axiological reality of values preceded knowledge. Values and their corresponding disvalues exist in objectively ordered ranks:
the values of the saint against the non-values of the vicious;
the values of the mind (truth, beauty, justice) against the non-values of lies, ugliness, injustice;
the values of life and honor versus the non-values of dishonor;
pleasure values versus non-pleasure values;
the values of the useful versus the non-values of the useless.
culture- the totality of all types of transformative activity of man and society, as well as the results of this activity, embodied in material and spiritual
values. Values are understood as material and ideal objects that can satisfy any needs of a person, class, society, serve their interests and goals. The world of values is diverse - these are natural, ethical, aesthetic and other systems. Value systems are historical and tend to be hierarchical. One of the highest levels of such a hierarchy is occupied by universal human values. Emphasizing the difference between material and spiritual values, many researchers distinguish between material and spiritual culture.
Under material culture is understood as the totality of material goods, means and forms of their production, ways of mastering them.
spiritual culture are defined as the totality of all knowledge, forms of thinking, areas of ideology (philosophy, ethics, law, politics, etc.) and methods of activity to create spiritual values. The social nature of culture is due to the fact that culture is an integral part of the life of society and is inseparable from man as a social being. There can be no society without culture, just as culture without society. Therefore, from a philosophical point of view, the ordinary understanding of culture that we often encounter is incorrect: "This is an uncultured person, he does not know what culture is." By saying this, they usually mean that the person about whom in question, poorly educated or insufficiently educated. However, from the point of view of philosophy, a person is always cultured, because he is a social being, and society without culture does not exist. Any society always creates an appropriate culture, i.e. a set of material and spiritual values and methods of their production. At the same time, the degree of cultural development depends on the specific historical stage the development of society, the conditions in which humanity develops, the opportunities that it has.
Culture is the cement of the building public life, because it is transmitted from one person to another in the process of socialization and contacts with other cultures, it forms in people a sense of belonging to a certain group. Members of one cultural group experience mutual understanding, trust and sympathy with each other to a greater extent than
"outsiders". Their shared feelings are reflected in slang and jargon, favorite foods, fashion, and other aspects of culture. But culture not only strengthens solidarity between people. It can cause conflicts within and between groups. This can be illustrated by the example of language, the main element of culture. On the one hand, the possibility of communication contributes to the rallying of members of a social group, and on the other hand, a common language excludes those who do not speak this language or speak a little differently.
high culture - fine art, classical music and literature were created and perceived by the elite. Folk culture, which included fairy tales, folklore, songs, etc., belonged predominantly to the poor. The products of each of these cultures were intended for certain social groups, and this tradition was rarely broken. With the advent of the mass media (radio, television, mass print media, the Internet), the distinction between high and low folk culture, arose Mass culture, which is not associated with religious or class subcultures. A culture becomes "mass" when its product is standardized and distributed to the general public.
In all societies there are subgroups with different cultural values and traditions. The system of norms and values that distinguish a group from the majority of society is called a subculture; it is shaped by factors such as social class, ethnic background, age, religion, place of residence, etc. The values of the subculture influence the formation of the personality of the members of the subgroup.
Cultural regulation human activity through the value system. Unlike norms that must be followed, values imply the choice of one or another object, state, need, goal, which determine the status of a person in society. Values help society and a person to separate good and bad, ideal, truth and error, beauty and ugliness, fair and unfair, permissible and forbidden, essential and insignificant, etc.
7.6. Spiritual values of a person
The scope of such concepts as interest, need, aspiration, duty, ideal, orientation and motivation is narrower than the concept of "value". Interest or need is usually understood as socially conditioned drives associated with the socio-economic situation of various social strata, groups or separate individuals; in this case, the remaining values (ideals) are only an abstract reflection of interests.
Between value and everyday orientations, a gap can arise - a discrepancy between duty and desire, due and practically realizable, an ideally recognized state and real life conditions. A person can master the discrepancy between the recognition of the high significance of a value and its unattainability in different ways. He can see the cause in external circumstances, the actions of rivals or enemies, or in his lack of activity and efficiency. A classic example of a dramatic discrepancy between a value and an action oriented towards its achievement is provided by W. Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. Almost to the very end of the play Danish prince delays the action (and if it does, then it is situational, according to mood) - and not only in order to once again ascertain the crime committed by the king, but also because it deeply doubts the need to act. In contrast to him, the hero of the novel F.M. Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" Rodion Raskolnikov not only convinced himself that the life of a "harmful old woman" has no value, but actually kills her, and this entails deep repentance.
An important means of closing the gap between value and behavior is the will, which removes hesitation and uncertainty and makes a person act. The will can manifest itself both as an internal impulse and as an external strong motivation in the form of an order.
Classification of values. Any classification of values by type and level is conditional due to the fact that social and cultural values are introduced into it. In addition, it is difficult to attribute one or another value that has its own ambiguity (for example,
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measures, family), to a certain class. Nevertheless, the following conditionally ordered classification of values can be given:
O vital - life, health, physicality, safety, well-being, physical condition of a person (satiety, peace, vigor), strength, endurance, quality of life, natural environment (environmental values), practicality, consumption, comfort, level of consumption, etc.;
about social - social position, status, diligence, wealth, work, profession, family, patriotism, tolerance, discipline, enterprise, risk-taking, social equality, gender equality, ability to achieve, personal independence, active participation in society, focus on the past or future, local (soil) or super-local (state, international) orientation;
about political - freedom of speech, civil liberties, statehood, legality, order, constitution, civilian world;
about moral - good, good, love, friendship, duty, honor, honesty, disinterestedness, decency, fidelity, mutual assistance, justice, respect for elders, love for children;
about religious - God, divine law, faith, salvation, grace, ritual, Holy Scripture and Tradition, church;
O aesthetic- beauty (or, on the contrary, aesthetics of the ugly), ideal, style, harmony, adherence to tradition or novelty, eclecticism, cultural identity or imitation of prestigious borrowed fashion.
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Existence cultural property characterizes the human way of being and the level of separation of man from nature. Value can be defined as the social significance of ideas and their conditionality to human needs and interests. For a mature personality, values function as life goals and motives for its activities. Realizing them, a person makes his contribution to the universal culture.
Values as part of the worldview are due to the existence public demands. Thanks to these requirements, a person could be guided in his life by the image of the proper, necessary correlation of things. Thanks to this, values formed a special world of spiritual existence, which raised a person above reality.
Value is a social phenomenon, therefore, the criterion of truth or falsity cannot be unambiguously applied to it.
Value systems are formed and changed in the course of the development of history human society. Therefore, the criteria for a value choice are always relative, they are conditioned by the current moment, historical circumstances, they translate the problems of truth into a moral plane.
Values have many classifications. According to traditionally established ideas about the spheres of public life, values are divided into “material and spiritual values, production-consumer (utilitarian), socio-political, cognitive, moral, aesthetic, religious values.”1 We are interested in spiritual values, which are the center of a person’s spiritual life and society.
There are spiritual values that we find at different stages of human development, in different social formations. Such basic, universal values include the values of good (good), freedom, truth, creativity, beauty, and faith.
As for Buddhism, the problem of spiritual values occupies the main place in its philosophy, since the essence and purpose of being, according to Buddhism, is the process of spiritual search, improvement of the individual and society as a whole.
Spiritual values from the point of view of philosophy include wisdom, the concepts of true life, understanding the goals of society, understanding happiness, mercy, tolerance, self-awareness. At the present stage of development of Buddhist philosophy, its schools place new accents in the concepts of spiritual values. The most important spiritual values are mutual understanding between nations, readiness to compromise in order to achieve universal goals, that is, the main spiritual value is love in the broadest sense of the word, love for the whole world, for all mankind without dividing it into nations and nationalities.
These values organically follow from the basic values of Buddhist philosophy. Spiritual values motivate people's behavior and provide a stable relationship between people in society. Therefore, when we talk about spiritual values, we cannot avoid the question of the social nature of values.
In Buddhism, spiritual values directly govern the whole life of a person, subdue all his activities. Spiritual values in the philosophy of Buddhism are conditionally divided into two groups: values related to the external world, and values related to the inner world. Values outside world are closely connected with social consciousness, the concepts of ethics, morality, creativity, art, with an understanding of the goals of the development of science and technology. The values of the inner world include the development of self-awareness, personal development, spiritual education, etc.
Buddhist spiritual values serve to solve the problems of real, material life by influencing inner world person.
The world of values is the world of practical activity. The relation of a person to the phenomena of life and their evaluation are carried out in practical activity, when an individual determines what significance an object has for him, what is its value.
Therefore, naturally, the spiritual values of Buddhist philosophy were of practical importance in the formation traditional culture China: they have contributed to the development aesthetic foundations Chinese literature, art, in particular landscape painting and poetry. Chinese artists pay the main attention to the inner content, the spiritual mood of what they depict, in contrast to European ones, who primarily strive for external similarity.
In the process of creativity, the artist feels inner freedom and reflects his emotions in the picture, thus, the spiritual values of Buddhism have a great influence on the development of the art of Chinese calligraphy and Qigong, wushu, medicine, etc.
Although almost all philosophical systems, one way or another, touch upon the issue of spiritual values in human life, it is Buddhism that deals with them directly, since the main problems that the Buddhist teaching is called upon to solve are the problems of spiritual, internal perfection of a person.
Spiritual values. The concept covers social ideals, attitudes and assessments, as well as norms and prohibitions, goals and projects, standards and standards, principles of action, expressed in the form of normative ideas about good, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, fair and unfair, lawful and unlawful, about the meaning of history and the purpose of man, etc.
The concepts of "spiritual values" and "spiritual world of the individual" are inextricably linked. If reason, rationality, knowledge are the most important components of consciousness, without which the purposeful activity of a person is impossible, then spirituality, being formed on this basis, refers to the values associated with the meaning of human life, one way or another deciding the question of choosing one's life path, the meaning of one's activity. its goals and means to achieve them.
