Man and machine scientific forecast. What awaits us in the 21st century? Futurological forecast by Ray Kurzweil. Modern understanding of the term "technology"

Path. - May 1933.- No. 38. - P. 3-38.

The pages are set according to the first edition of the magazine. The page number precedes the text on it.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the question of technology has become a question of the fate of man and the fate of culture. In an age of little faith, in an age of weakening not only of the old religious faith, but also of the humanistic faith of the 19th century, the only strong faith of modern civilized man remains faith in technology, in its power and its endless development. Technology is a person’s last love, and he is ready to change his image under the influence of the object of his love. And everything that happens in the world feeds this new faith of man. The man longed for a miracle for his faith, and it seemed to him that miracles had stopped. And technology produces real miracles. The problem of technology is very alarming for the Christian consciousness, and it has not yet been comprehended by Christians. Christians have two attitudes toward technology, and both are insufficient. Most consider technology to be religiously neutral and indifferent. Technology is the work of engineers. It gives improvements in life, which are also used by Christians //4//

Not. Technology multiplies the blessings of life. But this special area, which does not in any way affect the consciousness and conscience of a Christian, does not pose any spiritual problem. The Christian minority experiences technology apocalyptically, is horrified by its growing power over human life, and is ready to see in it the triumph of the spirit of Antichrist, the beast emerging from the abyss. Abuse of the apocalypse is especially characteristic of Russian Orthodox Christians. Everything that is not pleasant, everything that destroys the familiar, is easily declared the triumph of the Antichrist and the approaching end of the world. This is a lazy solution to the problem. It is based on the affect of fear. However, the first solution in terms of neutrality is also lazy, it simply does not see the problem.

Technology can be understood in a broader and a narrower sense. GREAT! means both industry and art. GREAT! means to fabricate, to create with art. We are talking not only about the technology of economic, industrial, military, technology related to movement and the comfort of life, but also about the technology of thinking, poetry, painting, dance, law, even about the technology of spiritual life, the mystical path. So, for example, yoga is a kind of spiritual technique. Technology everywhere teaches you to achieve the greatest results with the least expenditure of effort. And this is especially the technique of our technical, economic age. But in it, the achievements of quantity replace the achievements of quality characteristic of the technician-master of old cultures. Spengler, in his new short book “Der Mensch und die Technik,” defines technology as a struggle, not a tool. But, undoubtedly, technology is always a means, an instrument, and not an end. There can be no technology //5//

The human goals of life can only be technical means, but the goals of life always lie in another area, in the area of ​​the spirit. The means of life very often replace the goals of life; they can take up so much space in human life that the goals of life completely and even completely disappear from a person’s consciousness. And in our technological era this happens on a grand scale. Of course, technology for a scientist making scientific discoveries, for an engineer making inventions, can become the main content and purpose of life. In this case, technology, as knowledge and invention, receives a spiritual meaning and relates to the life of the spirit. But replacing the goals of life with technical means can mean belittling and extinguishing the spirit, and this is how it happens. A technical tool is by its nature heterogeneous both to those who use it and to what they are used for, heterogeneous to man, spirit and meaning. Connected with this is the fatal role of the dominance of technology in human life. One of the definitions of man as homo faber - a being who makes tools, which is so common in the histories of civilizations, already indicates the substitution of the goals of life with the means of life. Man is undoubtedly an engineer, but he invented the art of engineering for purposes beyond himself. Here the same thing is repeated as with Marx’s materialist understanding of history. Undoubtedly, economics is a necessary condition of life; without an economic basis, the mental and spiritual life of a person is impossible, and no ideology is possible. But the purpose and meaning of human life does not lie at all in this necessary basis of life. That which is most powerful in its urgency and necessity is //6// not ultimately the most valuable. What is highest in the hierarchy of values ​​is not at all the most powerful. One could say that the most powerful in our world is rough matter, but it is also the least valuable, while God seems to be the least powerful in our sinful world, He was crucified by the world, but He is the supreme value*. Technology has such power in our world not at all because it is the supreme value.

We are faced with the main paradox: without technology, culture is impossible, the very emergence of culture is connected with it, and the final victory of technology in culture, the entry into the technical era, leads culture to death. There are always two elements in culture - a technical element and a natural-organic element. And the final victory of the technical element over the natural-organic element means the degeneration of culture into something else, no longer similar to culture. Romanticism is a reaction of the natural-organic element of culture against its technical element. Because romanticism rebels against classical consciousness, it rebels against the dominance of technical form over nature. The return to nature is an eternal motive in the history of culture; it senses the fear of the death of culture from the power of technology, the death of integral human nature. The desire for integrity, for organicity, is also a characteristic feature of romanticism. The thirst for a return to nature is a memory of a lost paradise, a thirst for a return to it. And a person’s access to heaven is always blocked. Fran

*) N. Hartmann speaks well in his “Ethik” about the fact that the highest values ​​are the least important.

The Tsuz Thomists like to make a distinction between agir (GREEK!) and faire (GREEK!)**. This is an old scholastic distinction. Agir means free exercise of human powers, faire means creation of products, fabrication. In the first case, the center of gravity lies in the person, in the creator, in the second case - in the product. The technical era requires a person to fabricate products, and in the greatest quantities with the least expenditure of effort. Man becomes an instrument for the production of products. The thing is placed above the person.

It is possible to establish three stages in the history of mankind - natural-organic, cultural in the proper sense and technical-machine. This corresponds to the different attitude of the spirit to nature - the immersion of the spirit in nature; the separation of spirit from nature and the formation of a special sphere of spirituality; active mastery of the spirit of nature, domination over it. These stages, of course, cannot be understood solely as a chronological sequence; they are, first of all, different types. And the man of culture still lived in the natural world, which was not created by man, which seemed to be created by God. He was connected with the earth, with plants and animals. Telluric mysticism, the mysticism of the earth, played a huge role. It is known how important plant and animal religious cults were. The transformed elements of these cults also entered Christianity. According to Christian beliefs, man came from the earth and must return to the earth. The culture during its flowering period was still around //8//

His wife was a nature person and loved gardens and animals. Flowers, shady parks and lawns, rivers and lakes, purebred dogs and horses, birds are part of the culture. People of culture, no matter how far they had gone from natural life, still looked at the sky, at the stars, at the running clouds. Contemplation of the beauties of nature is even primarily a product of culture. They liked to understand culture, the state, and everyday life organically, by analogy with living organisms. The prosperity of cultures and states seemed to be a plant-animal process. The culture was full of symbols, it reflected the web in earthly forms, and gave signs of the world in this world. Technology is alien to symbolism, it is realistic, it does not reflect anything, it creates a new reality, in which everything is present here. It separates man from nature and from other worlds.

Fundamental to our topic is the distinction between organism and organization. The organism is born from natural cosmic life, and it itself gives birth. A sign of birth is a sign of an organism. The organization is not born and gives birth at all. It is created by human activity, it is created, although creativity is not the highest form of creativity. An organism is not an aggregate, it is not made up of parts, it is integral and is born integral, in it the whole precedes the parts and is present in each part *. The body grows and develops. Mechanism. created by the organizational process, is made up of parts, it cannot grow and develop, in it the whole is not present in the parts and but precedes the parts. The body has

(*) See Driesch, "La philosophie de l"organisme".

The forest-likeness is immanent in it, it is put into it by the Creator or nature, it is determined by the dominance of the whole over the parts. An organization has an expediency of a completely different kind; it is invested into it by the organizer from the outside. A mechanism is constructed with a specific purpose in mind, but it is not born with an inherent purpose. The clock operates very expediently, but this expediency does not lie in it, but in the person who created and wound it. An organized mechanism depends on the organizer for its expediency. But there is an inertia in it, which can act on the organizer and even enslave him to himself. In history there were organized bodies, similar to the life of organisms. Thus, the patriarchal system, natural economy were presented as organic and even eternal in this organicity. The organic system was usually presented as created not by man, but by nature itself, or by the Creator of the world. For a long time there was a belief in the existence of an eternal objective order of nature, with which human life must be consistent and subordinated. The natural was given a kind of normative character. That which was in accordance with nature seemed both good and fair. For the ancient Greek and for medieval man there was an unchanging cosmos, a hierarchical system, an eternal ordo. This order existed for both Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Earth and sky formed an unchanging hierarchical system. The very understanding of the unchanging order of nature was associated with an objective theological principle. And technology in its form, which has triumphed since the end of the 18th century, destroys this belief in the eternal order //10// of nature, and destroys it in a much deeper sense than evolutionism does. Evolutionism recognizes changes, but these changes occur at the same stage of natural reality. Evolutionism arose mainly from the biological sciences, and therefore development itself was understood as an organic process. But we do not live in the age of biological sciences, we live in the age of physical sciences, in the age of Einstein, and not in the age of Darwin. The physical sciences are not as conducive to the organic understanding of natural life as the biological sciences. Biology itself was mechanistic in the second half of the 19th century, but it favored organic understanding in other fields, eg sociology. Naturalism, as it developed in the second half of the last century, recognized development in nature, but this development took place in the eternal order of nature. Therefore, he especially valued the principle of the regularity of natural processes, which is much less valued by modern science. The new natural reality that modern technology confronts man is not at all a product of evolution, but a product of the ingenuity and creative activity of man himself, not an organic process, but an organizational process. The meaning of the entire technical era is connected with this. The dominance of technology and machinery is, first of all, a transition from organic life to organized life, from vegetation to constructiveness. From the point of view of organic life, technology means disembodiment, a rupture in the organic bodies of history, a rupture of flesh and spirit. Technology reveals a new stage of reality, and this reality is the creation of man, the result //11// of the breakthrough of the spirit into nature and the introduction of reason into elemental processes. Technology destroys old bodies and creates new bodies, completely different from organic bodies, creates organized bodies.

And the tragedy is that the creation rebels against its creator and no longer obeys him. The mystery of the Fall is the rebellion of the creature against the Creator. It is repeated throughout the history of mankind. The Promethean spirit of man is not able to master the technology he created, to cope with uninhibited, unprecedented energies. We see this in all rationalization processes in the technical era, when man is replaced by a machine. Technology replaces the organic-irrational with the organized-rational. But it gives rise to new irrational consequences in social life. Thus, the rationalization of industry gives rise to unemployment, the greatest disaster of our time. Human labor is being replaced by a machine; this is a positive conquest that should abolish slavery and human poverty. But the machine does not at all obey what man demands of it; it dictates its own laws. The man said to the machine: I need you to make my life easier, to increase my strength, but the machine answered the man: I don’t need you, I will do everything without you, you can disappear. Taylor's system is an extreme form of labor rationalization, but it turns man into an improved machine. The machine wants a person to take on its image and likeness. But man is the image and likeness of God and cannot become the image and likeness of a machine without ceasing to exist. Here we are faced with the limits of the transition from organic-irrational to organized-rational //12//

To Nalny. An organization associated with technology presupposes an organizing subject, that is, an organism, and it itself cannot be turned into a machine. But the organization tends to turn the organizer himself from an organism into a machine. The very spirit that created technology and the machine cannot be technicalized and mechanized without a trace; the irrational principle will always remain in it. But technology wants to take possession of the spirit and rationalize it, turn it into an automaton, enslave it. And this is a titanic struggle between man and the nature he technizes. At first, man depended on nature, and this dependence was plant-animal. But here begins a new dependence of man on nature, on a new nature, technical-machine dependence. This is the whole pain of the problem. The human body, his psycho-physical organism, was formed in another world and was adapted to the old nature. It was a plant-animal adaptation. But man has not yet adapted to the new reality that is revealed through technology and the machine; he does not know whether he will be able to breathe in the new electric and radioactive atmosphere, in the new cold, metallic reality, devoid of animal warmth. We still don’t know how destructive the atmosphere that is created by our own technical discoveries and inventions is for humans. Some doctors say that this atmosphere is dangerous and destructive. And human ingenuity in instruments of destruction greatly exceeds ingenuity in medical and healing technology. It turned out to be easier to invent asphyxiating gases that could destroy millions of lives than a method for treating cancer //13// or tuberculosis. The human body turns out to be defenseless against man's own inventions. Discoveries related to organic life are much more difficult than discoveries related to the inorganic world, where we enter into a world of wonders. II.

The dominance of technology and the machine opens up a new level of reality, not yet provided for by the classification of sciences, a reality that is not at all identical with the mechanical and physico-chemical reality. This new reality is visible only from history, from civilization, and not from nature. This new reality develops in the cosmic process later than all stages, after complex social development, at the heights of civilization, although mechanical-physical-chemical forces operate in it. Art also created a new reality that did not exist in nature. We can say that the heroes and images of artistic creation represent a special kind of reality. Don Quixote, Hamlet, Faust, Leonardo's Mona Lisa or Beethoven's symphony are new realities not given in nature. They have their own existence, their own destiny. They affect people's lives, giving rise to very complex consequences. People of culture live among these realities. But the reality revealed in art is symbolic in nature; it reflects the ideological world. Technology creates reality, devoid of any symbolism; in it, reality is given here, directly. This also affects art, because technology does not //14//

Art itself is reborn. This is evidenced by cinema, which is displacing more and more old theater. The power of cinema is enormous. But it became possible thanks to technical discoveries, mainly amazing discoveries in the field of light and sound, which would have impressed the people of previous eras as real miracles. Cinema takes over spaces that theater was completely powerless to master - oceans, deserts, mountains, just as it takes over time. Through talking cinema and T.S.F. the actor and singer are addressing not a small audience of old theaters, in which a small number of people met in a certain place, but to the huge masses of all humanity, all parts of the world, all countries and peoples. This is the most powerful weapon for the unification of humanity, although it can be used for the most evil and vulgar purposes. Cinematography demonstrates the power of realization inherent in modern technology. Here a new reality is revealed. But this reality, associated with technology, radically changing the relationship to space and time, is the creation of the spirit, the human mind, the will, which brings its own expediency. This is a superphysical reality, not spiritual or psychic, but rather superphysical. There is a sphere of the superphysical, as well as a sphere of the superpsychic.

Technology has cosmogonic significance, through it a new cosmos is created. Lafitte in his recently published book “Reflexions sur la science des machines” says that along with inorganic and organic bodies there are also organized bodies - the kingdom of machines, a special kingdom. This is a new category of being. A machine is indeed neither an inorganic nor an organic body. The appearance of these new bodies is associated with the difference between the organic and the organized. It would be completely wrong to attribute a machine to the inorganic world on the grounds that for its organization they use elements of inorganic bodies taken from mechanical-physical-chemical reality. Inorganic machines do not exist in nature; they exist only in the social world. These organized bodies do not appear before man, as inorganic bodies do, but after man and through man. Man managed to bring to life, to realize a new reality. This is an indicator of the terrible power of a person. This indicates his creative and royal calling in the world. But also an indicator of his weakness, his propensity for slavery. The machine has enormous not only sociological, but also cosmological significance, and it poses with extraordinary acuteness the problem of the fate of man in society and space. This is the problem of the relationship of man to nature, the individual to society, spirit to matter, irrational to rational. It is amazing that a philosophy of technology and machinery has not yet been created, although many books have been written on this topic. To create such a philosophy, much has already been prepared, but the most important thing has not been done, the machine and technology have not been recognized as a spiritual problem, as the fate of man. The machine is viewed only from the outside, only in a social projection. But from within it is the theme of the philosophy of human existence (Existensphilosophie). Can a person exist only in the old cosmos, physical and organic, which seemed to be an eternal order, or can he //16//

Can it exist in a new, different, still unknown space? Christianity, with which the fate of man is connected, is placed before a new world, and it has not yet comprehended its new position. The construction of a philosophy of technology also depends on this, for the question must be resolved in spiritual experience before it is resolved in philosophical knowledge. This always happens, even if philosophical knowledge does not notice it.

What does the technical era and the emergence of a new cosmos mean in the destiny of man? Is this the materialization and death of the spirit and spirituality, or may it have a different meaning? The rupture of the spirit with the old organic life, the mechanization of life gives the impression of the end of spirituality in the world. Materialism has never been so strong. The fusion of the spirit with historical bodies, which is destroyed by technology, seemed to be an eternal order, and for many the spirit disappears after its separation from the flesh. And the technical era really brings death with it to many things. Soviet technical construction makes a particularly terrible impression. But its originality is not at all in the technology itself - in this respect there is nothing special there, anyway, America has gone much further, and it is difficult to catch up with it. What is original in Soviet communist Russia is the spiritual phenomenon that is found in relation to technical construction. There really is something unprecedented here, a phenomenon of a new spiritual type. And this is what makes a terrible impression with its eschatology, the reverse of Christian eschatology. Technology and economics themselves can be

(*) Experience in the philosophy of technology is presented in the book “Philosophie der Technik” by Friedrich Dessauer.

Trawling, but the relationship of the spirit to technology and economics inevitably becomes a spiritual issue. Sometimes it seems that we live in an era of the final predominance of technology over wisdom in the ancient, noble sense of the word. The technization of the spirit, the technization of the mind can easily seem like the death of the spirit and mind. Christian eschatology connects the transformation of the world and earth with the action of the Duua of God. The eschatology of technology awaits the final mastery of the world and the earth, the final domination over them with the help of technical tools. Therefore, the answer to the question about the meaning of the technical era from a Christian and spiritual point of view may seem very clear and simple. But in reality the problem is much more complex. Technology is as dual in its meaning as everything in this world. Technology tears man away from the earth, it strikes a blow to all the mysticism of the earth, the mysticism of the maternal principle, which played such a role in the life of human societies. Actualism and titanism of technology are directly opposed to any passive, animal-vegetative stay in the mother's womb, in the womb of Mother Earth, Magna Mater, it destroys the comfort and warmth of organic life, clinging to the earth. The meaning of the technical era, first of all, is that it ends the telluric period in the history of mankind, when man was determined by the earth not only in the physical, but also in the metaphysical sense of the word. This is the religious meaning of technology. Technology gives a person a sense of the planetary nature of the earth, a completely different sense of the earth than that which was characteristic of man in previous eras. A person feels completely different when he feels the depth, holiness, mysticism of the earth beneath him, and when he feels the earth as a planet flying in endless space, among endless worlds, when he himself is able to separate from earth, fly through the air, be transported to the stratosphere. This change in consciousness theoretically occurred already at the beginning of modern times, when the Copernican system replaced the Ptolemaic system, when the earth ceased to be the center of the cosmos, when the infinity of worlds was revealed. Pascal was horrified by this still theoretical change; he was frightened by the silence of endless spaces and worlds. Space, space of antiquity and the Middle Ages, space of St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante disappeared. Then the person found compensation and a fulcrum, transferring the center of gravity inside the person, into the self, into the subject. The idealistic philosophy of modern times is this compensation for the loss of the cosmos in which man occupied his hierarchical place, in which he felt surrounded by higher powers. But technology has a terrible power of realization, and it gives an acute “feeling of the destruction of the ancient cosmos with the earth in the center. This changes, revolutionizes the entire life of modern man. And the result is contradictory and ambivalent in relation to man. Man was frightened when the infinity of spaces and worlds was revealed , he felt lost and humiliated, not the center of the universe, but an insignificant, infinitesimal speck of dust. The power of technology continues the work of revealing the infinity of spaces and worlds into which the earth is thrown, but it also gives man a sense of his own power, the possibility of mastering the infinite world, in it is the titanism of man. Man for the first time finally becomes //19// the king and master of the earth, and perhaps the world. The attitude towards space and time radically changes. Previously, man clung to mother earth so as not to be crushed by space and time Now he begins to master space and time, he is not afraid to separate from the earth, he wants to fly as far into space as possible. This, of course, is a sign of a person’s maturity; he no longer seems to need the care and protection of his mother. This makes the struggle more severe - the flip side of technology making life more convenient. There are always these two sides to technology: on the one hand, it brings with it convenience, the comfort of life and has a softening effect, on the other hand, it requires greater severity and fearlessness.

The old cultures mastered only a small space and small masses. This was the most perfect culture of the past: in ancient Greece, in Italy during the Renaissance, in France in the 17th century, in Germany at the beginning of the 19th century. This is the aristocratic principle of culture, the principle of selection of qualities. But the old culture is powerless in the face of huge quantities; it does not have the appropriate methods. Technology takes over vast spaces and enormous masses. Everything becomes global, everything extends to the entire human mass in the era of the dominance of technology. This is its sociological meaning. The principle of technology is democratic. The technical era is an era of democracy and socialization, in it everything becomes collective, in it groups are organized that in old cultures lived a plant, organic life. This plant life that has received religious sanction //20//

Tsiyu, made the organization of the masses unnecessary in the modern sense of the word. Order, and even a very stable order, could be maintained without organization in the modern sense of the word; it was maintained organically. Technology gives a person a feeling of terrible power, and it is a product of the will to power and expansion. This will to expansion, which gave birth to European capitalism, inevitably calls into historical life the masses of the people. Then the old organic order collapses and a new form of organization is inevitable, which is provided by technology. Undoubtedly, this new form of mass organization of life, this technicalization of life destroys the beauty of the old culture, the old way of life. The mass technical organization of life destroys all individualization, all originality and originality; everything becomes impersonal mass, devoid of image. Production in this era is massive and anonymous. Not only is the external, plastic side of life devoid of individuality, but also the internal, emotional life is devoid of individuality. And the romantic reaction against technology is understandable. The rebellion of Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy is understandable, a revolt for both aesthetic and moral reasons. But such a denial of technology is powerless and cannot be consistently carried out. There is only a defense of more primitive and backward forms of technology, and not its complete denial. Everyone came to terms with the steam engine and the railways, but there was a time when they provoked protest and were rejected. You can deny traveling on airplanes, but you probably use railways and cars, you don’t like the subway, but you willingly travel by trams, you don’t want to put up with talking cinema, but you love cinema //21// Count Silent. We are very inclined to idealize previous cultural eras that did not know machines, and this is so understandable in our ugly and suffocating life. But we forget that the old, non-technical life was associated with the terrible exploitation of people and animals, with slavery and enslavement, and that the machine can be a tool for liberation from this exploitation and slavery. This duality of the past is beautifully depicted in Pushkin’s poem “The Village.” Pushkin describes the extraordinary charm of the Russian village and landowner life in it, but suddenly remembers that it is based on the enslavement of people and on a terrible lie. In the problem of an idealizing attitude towards the past, we encounter the paradox of time. The past that we like so much and which attracts us so much never happened. This past has passed through our creative imagination, through purification, it stands before us freed from the evil and ugliness that was in it. We love only the past, attached to eternity. But the past never existed in the past; the past is only an integral part of our present. In the past itself there was another present, and there was evil and ugliness in it. This means that you can only love the eternal. Therefore, there is no return to the past, and one cannot be desired. We may only want a return to the eternal past, but this eternal is highlighted by us in a transformative creative act, freed from its darkness. It is impossible to imagine a return to subsistence farming and the patriarchal system, to the exclusive predominance of agriculture and crafts in economic life, as Ruskin wanted. This opportunity is not given to man; he must continue to live //22// his destiny. New human masses, thrust into the arena of history, require new forms of organization, new tools. But what we now call the “technical era” also does not last forever. The era of the unheard-of power of technology over the human soul will end, but it will end not with the denial of technology, but with its subordination to the spirit. A person cannot remain chained to the earth and depend on it for everything, but he cannot completely tear himself away from it and go into space. Some kind of connection with the land will remain, and agriculture will remain, without which a person cannot exist. It is not given to a person to break into paradise, into the Garden of Eden until the end and transformation of the world, the entire cosmos, but the memory of paradise and the longing for paradise will always remain, there will always be a hint of paradise in natural life, in gardens and flowers, in art. Man's internal connection with the soul of nature is the other side of his relationship to nature. Its final displacement by technical actualism disfigures not only nature, but also man. The future of humanity cannot be thought holistically; it will be complex. There will be reactions against technology and machines, returns to primordial nature, but technology and machines will never be destroyed while man makes his earthly journey. III.

What is the main danger that a machine poses for humans, a danger that has already been fully revealed? I do not think that this is a danger mainly for the spirit and spiritual life. Machinery and technology inflict terrible damage on mental life //23//

Lovek, and above all emotional life, human feelings. The mental and emotional element is fading away in modern civilization. So we can say that the old culture was dangerous for the human body, it left it neglected, often pampered and relaxed it. Machine, technical civilization is dangerous, first of all, for the soul. The heart can hardly bear the touch of cold metal; it cannot live" in a metallic environment. Our era is characterized by processes of destruction of the heart as the core of the soul. In the greatest French writers of our era, for example, Proust and Gide, one can no longer find the heart as an integral organ spiritual life of man. Everything has decomposed into the intellectual element and sensory sensations. Keyserling is absolutely right when he speaks of the destruction of the emotional order in modern technical civilization and wants to restore this order.* Technology deals terrible blows to humanism, the humanistic worldview, the humanistic ideal of man and culture "The machine is by its nature anti-humanistic. The technical understanding of science is completely opposite to the humanistic understanding of science and comes into conflict with the humanistic understanding of the fullness of humanity. This is the same question about the attitude towards the soul. Technology is less dangerous for the spirit, although this may be surprising at first glance In fact, we can say that we live in an era of technology and spirit, not in an era of soulfulness. The religious meaning of modern technology lies precisely in the fact that it puts everything under the sign of a spiritual question, and therefore can lead to spiritualization. It requires a strain of spirituality.

(*) See his "Meditations Sud-Americaines" //24//

Technology ceases to be neutral, it is no longer neutral, it is not indifferent to the spirit and issues of the spirit. And in the end, nothing can be neutral; something could seem neutral only until a certain time and only at a superficial glance. The technique has a deadly effect on the soul, but at the same time it causes a strong reaction of the spirit. If the soul, left to its own devices, turns out to be weak and defenseless against the growing power of technology, then the spirit may turn out to be quite strong. Technology makes a person a cosmiurge. Compared to the tools that modern technology puts into the hands of man, his previous tools seem like toys. This is especially evident in war technology. The destructive power of the previous weapons of war was very limited, everything was very localized. With old cannons, rifles and sabers it was impossible to exterminate a large mass of humanity, destroy large cities, or endanger the very existence of culture. Meanwhile, new technology provides this opportunity. And in everything, technology puts terrible power in the hands of man, which can become destructive. Soon peaceful scientists will be able to produce shocks not only of a historical, but also of a cosmic nature. A small group of people, possessing the secret of technical inventions, will be able to tyrannically hold all of humanity in their power. This is quite imaginable. Renan foresaw this possibility. But when a person is given the power with which he can control the world and can destroy a significant part of humanity and culture, then everything becomes dependent on the spiritual and moral state of the person, on what he will use this power for, what kind of spirit he is. //25//

The question of technology inevitably becomes a spiritual question, and ultimately a religious question. The fate of humanity depends on this. The miracles of technology, always dual in nature, require an unprecedented intensity of spirituality, immeasurably greater than previous cultural eras. Human spirituality can no longer be organic and plant-based. And we are faced with the demand for a new heroism, both internal and external. The heroism of man, associated in the past with war, ends; it was almost gone in the last war. But technology requires new heroism from a person, and we constantly read and hear about its manifestations. Such is the heroism of scientists who are forced to leave their offices and laboratories. Flying into the stratosphere or sinking to the bottom of the ocean requires, of course, real heroism. All daring airplane flights and the fight against air storms require heroism. Manifestations of human heroism begin to be associated with cosmic spheres. But technology requires strength of spirit, first of all, so that a person is not enslaved and destroyed by it. In a certain sense, we can say that we are talking about life and death. Sometimes it seems like such a terrible utopia. The time will come when there will be perfect machines with which man could control the world, but man will no longer exist. The machines themselves will operate to perfection and achieve maximum results. The last people themselves will turn into machines, but then they too will disappear due to the uselessness and impossibility of organic breathing and blood circulation for them. Factories will produce goods with great speed and perfection. Cars and airplanes will fly. Through T.S.F. throughout //26// the world music and singing will be heard, the speeches of former people will be reproduced. Nature will be conquered by technology. The new reality created by technology will remain in cosmic life. But there will be no man, there will be no organic life. I sometimes have this terrible nightmare. Whether a person will avoid this fate depends on the exertion of fortitude. The exclusive power of technization and mechanization leads precisely to this limit, to non-existence in technical perfection. It is impossible to allow the autonomy of technology, to give it complete freedom of action; it must be subordinated to the spirit and spiritual values ​​of life, like everything else. But the human spirit will cope with a grandiose task only if it is not isolated and does not rely only on itself, if it is united with God. Only then will the image and likeness of God be preserved in man, i.e. the person will be preserved. This reveals the difference between Christian eschatology and technical eschatology. IV.

The power of technology in human life entails a very large change in the type of religiosity. And we must say frankly that it is for the better. In the technical, machine era, the hereditary, habitual, everyday, socially conditioned type of religiosity is weakening and becoming more and more difficult. The religious subject is changing, he feels less connected with traditional forms, with plant-organic life. Religious life in the technical-machine era requires a more intense spirituality, //27//

Christianity becomes more internal and spiritual, freer from social suggestions. This is an inevitable process. It is very difficult in the modern world to maintain a form of religion determined by hereditary, national, family, and social group influences. Religious life becomes more personal, more painstaking, that is, it is determined spiritually. This, of course, does not mean religious individualism at all, for the very conciliarity and churchliness of religious consciousness is not of a sociological nature. But in another respect the power of technology can have fatal consequences for spiritual and religious life. Technology masters time and radically changes the attitude towards time. And a person is truly capable of mastering time. But technical actualism subjects man and his inner life to the ever-accelerating movement of time. In this frantic speed of modern civilization, in this flight of time, not a single moment remains an end in itself and not a single moment can be stopped as if it were leaving time. There is no way out in an instant (Augenblick) in the sense that Kierkegaard uses the word. Each moment must be replaced as quickly as possible by the next moment, and all moments remain in the flow of time and therefore disappear. Inside each moment, it is as if there is nothing except aspiration towards the next moment; it is empty in itself. But such mastery of time through speed and speed turns out to be enslavement to the flow of time. And this means that technical actualism, in its relation to time, destroys eternity and makes it more and more difficult for a person to relate to eternity. Man has no time for eternity. //28// He is required to move to the next time as quickly as possible. This does not mean at all that we should see only the eternal in the past. which is destroyed by the future. The past does not belong to eternity any more than the future, and both belong to time. As in the past, and in the future, and at all times, exit into eternity, into a valuable, fulfilling moment is possible. Time is subject to the speed machine, but by this it is not overcome or conquered. And man faces the problem: will the possibility of moments of contemplation, contemplation of eternity, God, truth, beauty, remain for him? Man undoubtedly has an active calling in the world, and there is truth in actualism. But man is also a being capable of contemplation, and in contemplation there is an element that defines his “I”. In contemplation itself, that is, in man’s relationship to God, there is creativity. The formulation of this problem convinces us even more that all the diseases of modern civilization are generated by the discrepancy between the mental organization of man, inherited from other times, and the new, technical, mechanical reality, from which he cannot escape anywhere. The human soul cannot withstand the speed that modern civilization requires of it. This requirement tends to turn man into a machine. This process is very painful. Modern man tries to strengthen himself through sports and thereby fights anthropological regression. And one cannot deny the positive significance of sport, which returns to the ancient, Greek attitude towards the body. But sport itself can turn into a means of destroying a person, can create ugliness in the place of //29// one hundred harmonizations, if it is not subordinated to a holistic, harmonious idea of ​​a person. Technical civilization is essentially impersonalistic; it does not know and does not want to know personalities. It requires human activity, but does not want the person to be a person. “And it is unusually difficult for a person to stay in this civilization. A person is in every way the opposite of a machine. First of all, it is unity in diversity and integrity. It sets itself as its goal, it does not agree to be turned into a part, into a means and a tool. But a technical civilization, but a technical and mechanized society wants man to be a part of them, their means and instrument, they do everything so that man ceases to be a unity and wholeness, that is, they want man to cease to be a person. And a terrible struggle lies ahead between personality and technology civilization, technicalized society, the struggle between man and machine. Technology is always merciless towards everything living and existing. And pity for living and existing things should limit the power of technology in life.

Machinism, triumphant in capitalist civilization, first of all distorts the hierarchy of values, and the restoration of the hierarchy of values ​​is a limitation of the power of machinism. This problem cannot be solved by returning to the old mental structure and to the old natural-organic reality *. And at the same time, the character of modern technical civilization and what it does to man is unbearable for Christian consciousness, and not only Christian, but human consciousness

(*) Cina Lombroso's interesting book "La rancon du machinisme" is imbued with too much faith in the possibility of a return to domestic types of civilization.

Niya, consciousness of human dignity. We are faced with the question of saving the image of man. Man is called to continue creating peace, and his work is, as it were, the eighth day of creation; he is called to be the king and lord of the earth. But the work he does and to which he is called enslaves him and distorts his image. A new person appears, with a new mental structure, with a new image. The old man, the man of the past, mistook himself for an eternal man. There was something eternal in him, but he was not an eternal person. The past is not eternal. A new man must appear in the world. And the difficult question is not the question in what relation he stands to the old man, but about the question in what relation he stands to the eternal man, to the eternal in man. The image and likeness of God in man is eternal, which makes him a person. This cannot be understood statically. The image and likeness of God in man, as a natural being, is revealed and affirmed in dynamics. This is the tireless struggle against the old, old man in the name of the new man. But machinism would like to replace in man the image and likeness of God with the image and likeness of a machine. This is not the creation of a new man, this is the extermination of man, the disappearance of man, his replacement by another being, with a different, no longer human existence. This is the whole pain of the problem. The machine is created by man, and it can give him a proud consciousness of his dignity and strength. But this pride of a person, unnoticed by him, turns into humiliation of a person. A truly new creature may appear, but no longer human. And not at all because man belongs to the old world, and the new world //31// must certainly not change only man, but replace him with another creature. Man changed throughout his historical destiny, he was old and new. But in all times, old and new, man touched eternity, and this made him human. The new man, who will finally break with eternity, will finally attach himself to the new world, which he must master and subjugate, will cease to be a man, although he will not immediately notice it. Human dehumanization occurs. The question is posed: to be or not to be a person, not an old person who must be overcome, but simply a person. Since the emergence of human self-awareness, revealed in the Bible and in ancient Greece, never before has this problem been posed with such acuteness and depth. European humanism believed in the eternal foundations of human nature. He received this belief from the Greco-Roman world. Christianity believes that man is a creation of God and bears His image and likeness, that man has been redeemed by the Son of God. Both faiths strengthened European man, who considered himself a universal man. Now this faith has been shaken. The world is not only de-Christianized, but also dehumanized. This is the whole acuteness of the question that the monstrous power of technology confronts us with.

A remarkable attempt to resolve the issue facing us belongs to the brilliant Christian thinker N. Fedorov, the author of “Philosophy of the Common Cause.” For him, as for Marx and Engels, philosophy should not theoretically cognize the world, but remake it, should be projective. Man is called upon to actively master the elemental forces of nature, //32//

Bringing death to him, and to regulate, streamline not only social, but also cosmic life. N. Fedorov was an Orthodox Christian, and the justification for his “common cause,” the cause of victory over death and the return of life to all the dead, was Christian. But he also believed in science and technology, had extraordinary faith. He does not idolize science and technology, for he believed in God and Christ, but science and technology for him are man’s greatest tools in victory over the spontaneous, irrational, deadly forces of nature. He believed in the miracles of technology and called for their accomplishment. The example of N. Fedorov is interesting for us because he combined faith in the power of technology with a spirit directly opposite to that which dominates the technical era. He hated the machinism of modern civilization, hated capitalism, created by prodigal sons who had forgotten their fathers. He has a formal similarity with Marx and communism, but with complete opposition in spirit *. N. Fedorov is one of the few in the history of Christian thought, almost the only one, who overcame the passive understanding of the apocalypse. The Apocalypse is a revelation about the historical destinies of man and the world and about the end, the final outcome. But this revelation cannot be understood deterministically and fatalistically. The end, the Last Judgment and the eternal destruction of many are not at all predetermined by divine or natural necessity, and are not at all fatal. Man is free and called to activity, the end depends on him. Apocalyptic

(*) See Setnitsky’s interesting book “On the Final Ideal”. Setnitsky's book is Fedorov's direction in the Soviet period. In it, the traditionally religious elements of N. Fedorov’s worldview weakened.

Sky prophecies are conditional. If Christian humanity does not unite for the common cause of mastering the elemental deadly forces, for victory over death and for the restoration of universal life, for the regulation of world life, if it does not create a kingdom of Christianly inspired labor, if it does not overcome the dualism of theoretical and practical reason, mental and physical labor , will not implement Christian truth, Christian brotherhood and love in all the fullness of life, will not conquer death with the power of Christian love and the power of science and technology, then there will be the kingdom of the Antichrist, the end of the world, the Last Judgment and everything that is described in the apocalypse. But all this may not happen if the “common cause” begins. N. Fedorov's eschatology differs both from ordinary Christian eschatology and from the eschatology of modern technology, the religion of machinism. Russian communism especially reminds us of the little appreciated N. Fedorov. He posed in all its acuteness the religious question of human activity and technology. The power of technology and machinery is associated with capitalism; it was born in the depths of the capitalist system, and the machine was the most powerful instrument for the development of capitalism. Communism entirely accepts this hyper-machine and technicism from capitalist civilization and creates a real religion of the machine, which it worships as a totem. Undoubtedly, if technology created capitalism, then it can also help overcome capitalism and create a different, more just social system. It can become a powerful tool in solving a social issue. But in this case, everything will depend on which spirit will win, what kind of spirit the person will be. Materialistic commu //34// nism subordinates the problem of man as an integral mental-physical being to the problem of society. It is not man who should organize society, but society should organize man. But in reality, the truth is the opposite: man belongs to primacy, man must organize society and the world, and this organization will depend on what kind of person he is, what kind of spirit he is. And man is taken here not only as an individual being, but also as a social being with a social vocation. Only then does a person have an active and creative calling. Very often in our era, people wounded by machinism say that the machine cripples a person, that the machine is to blame for everything. Such an attitude humiliates a person and does not correspond to his dignity. It is not the machine that is responsible, which is the creation of man himself, the machine is not to blame for anything, and it is unworthy to transfer responsibility from the man himself to the machine. It is not the machine, but the man who is guilty of the horror of the power of machinism; it is not the machine that has deprived man of his soul, but man himself that has deprived him of his soul. The problem must be transferred from outside to inside. The spiritual limitation of the power of technology and machines over human life is a matter of the spirit, the work of man himself, and depends on the tension of his spirituality. A machine can be a great tool in the hands of man, in his victory over the power of elemental nature, but for this man must be a spiritual being, free spirit. There is a process of dehumanization in the world, dehumanization in everything. But man himself is to blame for this dehumanization, not the machine. Machinism is only a projection of this dehumanization. We, for example, see this dehumanization of science in modern physics, amazing in its // 35 // coverings. Physics studies invisible light rays and inaudible sound, and this leads beyond the world of light and sound familiar to man. Einstein also leads beyond the spatial world familiar to man. New discoveries in physics have a positive meaning and are not guilty of anything, they testify to the power of human consciousness. Dehumanization is a state of the human spirit, it is the attitude of the spirit to man and the world. Everything leads us to the religious and philosophical problem of man.

A person can be absorbed by an increasingly unfolding cosmic infinity. Christianity freed man from the power of cosmic infinity, into which he was immersed in the ancient world, from the power of spirits and demons of nature. It put him on his feet, strengthened him, made him dependent on God, and not on nature. But at the heights of science, which only became achievable with the independence of man from nature, at the heights of civilization and technology, man himself discovers the secrets of cosmic life, previously hidden from him, and discovers the action of cosmic energies that previously seemed to be dormant in the depths of natural life. This testifies to the power of man, but it also puts him in a new, dangerous position in relation to cosmic life. A person’s demonstrated ability to organize disorganizes him internally. A new problem is being posed for the Christian consciousness. The Christian response to the new position of man in the world presupposes a change in Christian consciousness in understanding the vocation of man in the world. The problem of Christian anthropology is put at the center //36//

Gii. Patriotic and scholastic anthropology or humanistic anthropology cannot satisfy us. From the cognitive side, the problem of philosophical anthropology becomes central. Man and machine, man and organism, man and space - all problems of philosophical and religious anthropology. In his historical fate, a person goes through different stages, and this fate is always tragic. In the beginning, man was a slave of nature, and he began a heroic struggle for his preservation, independence and liberation. He created culture, states, national unities, classes. But he became a slave of the state, nationality, classes. Now he is entering a new period. He wants to master irrational social forces. It creates an organized society and developed technology, makes man an instrument for organizing life and the final mastery of nature. But he becomes a slave of organized society and technology, a slave of the machine into which society has been transformed and man himself is imperceptibly transformed. But in new and new forms the problem of human liberation, mastery of the spirit of nature and society is posed. This problem can be solved only by consciousness, which will place man above nature and society, will place the human soul above all natural and social forces that must submit to him. That which freed a person must be accepted, and that which enslaved him must be rejected. But this truth about man, about his dignity and his calling is inherent in Christianity, although, perhaps, it was not revealed enough in its history and was often distorted. The path to the final liberation of man and the final fulfillment of his calling is the path to the kingdom of God, which is not only the kingdom of heaven, but also the kingdom of the transformed earth, the transformed cosmos.

Preface to the publication in the journal "Questions of Philosophy". No pages listed.

N. A. Berdyaev is undoubtedly one of the most original Russian philosophers of the 20th century. But both in the style of his thought and in his problematics, the features of extra-academic philosophizing, characteristic of many Russian thinkers, are easily discernible: indifference to the methodology of philosophical discourse, a reckless, almost ecstatic desire to solve the “ultimate questions” uncritically accepted from theology, “sticking together” “metaphysics with natural philosophy, thinking in the categories of “spiritualistic materialism,” the moralistic attribution of “originally inherent” qualities to objects and belief in the teaching purpose of philosophy.

Like many Russian philosophers, Berdyaev did not create a philosophical system; everything he wrote is united not by a system, but by a common religious-philosopher-| Chinese worldview with more or less elaboration of individual parts and aspects. In this worldview, elements determined by dogmatic theology, esoteric mysticism, journalism, gnostic speculation, moralistic pathos and “prophetic insights” of the mysteries of the future are easily distinguishable. However, with all the diversity and contradictions of the original motives, Berdyaev was not an eclectic. Among the thinkers closest to him and who influenced him, he names Origen, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, Jacob Boehme, Kant, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Marx, Kierke-gore, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Jaspers. “The very combination of these incompatible names excludes the idea of ​​eclectic synthesis,” notes G. P. Fedotov. “They cannot be reconciled, but they can be poured, melted in personal experience, into a completely new original worldview” 2.

This is certainly true: it was the worldview that Berdyaev developed from the mission he voluntarily assumed of “philosophical defense of the truth of a new religious consciousness” that was the force energy field that fed the elements of his philosophizing. Berdyaev is often called a “thinker,” thereby distancing him from the tradition of academic philosophy. Indeed, in Berdyaev’s texts we will not find any strict definitions, no consistent discursive development, no evidence, no precise conclusions. His thinking is intuitive, aphoristic, marked by the sharpness and clarity of individual formulations of vivid images and at the same time repetitions threatening tautology. It is always a spontaneous flow, capriciously changing its course and breaking into parallel branches. Berdyaev spoke a lot about the principles of anarchy and formlessness, rooted in the Russian cultural tradition. However, in his writings this anarchy, due to primary literary or moralistic reactions and contempt for complete perfection, manifested itself perhaps more clearly than in any of his contemporaries. And, judging by Berdyaev’s confession, this did not sadden him at all: “I was of little interest in the product of my creativity, its perfection. I was interested in expressing myself and shouting to the world what my inner voice revealed to me as truth” (“Self-Knowledge”, p. 97).

Whatever Berdyaev wrote about, he always remained a publicist: he always argued with someone, denounced someone, refuted someone, suggested the correct answers to someone. At the same time, he inevitably fell into the monologue tone of a prophesying teacher; the cooling of passion seemed to him a deadening routine. Undoubtedly, such a combination of journalism and philosophy was predetermined by the fact that Berdyaev recognized himself as an apologist for the truth, which he chivalrously defended in the face of all kinds of “temptations.” And this apologetic pathos remains with him even where he wants to destroy something, where he gives free rein to his unpious “problematics” or accusatory criticism of any orthodoxy. Hence the ideological nature of his contradictions; hence his thinking “in books”: the idea and plan of a book usually preceded his philosophical study of the subject; finally, this is where Argazenz comes from, the present tense of his philosophical explications: Berdyaev philosophizes here and now, without moving towards clarifying the boundaries of neighboring semantic spaces, without asking the question about the essence of these boundaries - any of his questions casts a gentle shadow of an answer.

Of course, Berdyaev’s problems, his sense of life, and his style of thought entirely belong to the culture of modernism (I use the word “modernism” in the context of today’s discussions about postmodernism) and remain incomprehensible outside of modernism. First of all, we are talking about the fundamental idea for Berdyaev about a two-layer reality, divided into the real world and the inauthentic world, about the manifestation of true reality in acts of creative novelty, about the identity of the “genuine” and the subjective and about the opposition to them of the frozen “world of objects”, and finally, about his projective-utopian eschatology, embodied in the theurgic effort of man; this also includes, of course, his ontology of freedom and his philosophy of history - appendages of a theologically oriented anthropology.

Berdyaev himself called his philosophy existential, or philosophy of spirit, emphasizing that his philosophy is primarily an anthropological philosophy; posing the problem of man meant for him posing the problem of freedom, creativity, personality, spirit, history.

According to its main tendency, Berdyaev’s philosophy is dualistic: it is the dualism of spirit and nature, freedom and necessity, subject and objectification, personality and the general, the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Caesar. The starting point of his worldview is the primacy of freedom over being: freedom precedes being and God. In the doctrine of groundless and beginningless freedom, Berdyaev follows Jacob Boehme, but radicalizes his doctrine of freedom. From the Abyss of primary freedom, according to Berdyaev, God is revealed, and from it the personality of man is also revealed. Non-existence freely agreed to being, and therefore God is omnipotent only over being, but powerless before Nothing, before freedom. Freedom precedes good and evil; it is the condition of the possibility of good and evil. Man is a child of God and a child of freedom - Nothing, non-existence, “meon”. True humanity is the godlike, the divine in man. However, the divine in man, Berdyaev insists, is not “supernatural” and is not a special act of grace, but is the spiritual principle in him as a special reality. The humanity of man is God-manhood: by realizing in himself the image of God, man realizes in himself the image of man, and by realizing in himself the image of man, he realizes in himself the image of God. The assumption of uncreated freedom explains the origin of evil and the sacrificial descent of God into the abyss of freedom, its enlightenment from within through voluntary suffering. Hence the explanation of the possibility of creativity and novelty in the world. Creativity, according to Berdyaev, is always a transition from non-existence to being, that is, creativity from freedom. It is the opposite of the determinism of evolution; the world is not finished, not completed, it continues to be created.

In culture, a person’s creative act is objectified: freedom falls into the captivity of necessity and takes the form of dead objects, alienated from the life of the spirit. The formation of the world of objects is the source of all human misfortunes. The limit of objectification is the power of technology over man. In general, according to Berdyaev, the results of creativity are not realistic, but symbolic. Realistic creativity would be the transformation of the world, the end of this world, the emergence of a new heaven and a new earth. The creative act is an eschatological act, it is directed towards the end of the world.

According to Berdyaev, world history is also eschatological. The meaning of the story involves the end of the story. And on the contrary, recognition of endless progress in history is recognition of the meaninglessness of history. The meaning of history means overcoming decay and the evil infinity of time, that is, the creative discovery of a radically different, new zone, the “last,” eschatological world, opposing the world of objectification, alienation, impersonality, and enmity.

The philosophy of freedom and the philosophy of creativity are the focus of Berdyaev’s entire philosophy. From this center its metaphysics, philosophy of religion and culture, its historiosophy, epistemology, and ethics proceed and return to it.

The basis of Berdyaev's ethics is personalism. Berdyaev distinguishes three ethics: the ethics of law, the ethics of redemption, and the ethics of creativity. Every genuine moral act is a personal act, bearing creative novelty. And in this sense, ethics, just like the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of culture, and the philosophy of history, finally, like all of Berdyaev’s philosophical anthropology, rests on eschatology - on the problem of ultimate meaning, the problem of immortality, hell and heaven. And here Berdyaev makes his decisive judgment: hell is in the subjective, not objective, and it remains in time, in infinite time, does not go into eternity. The ontology of eternal hell is impossible. Hell was created by the “good” for the “evil”, and therefore they turn out to be evil. The Kingdom of God according to that side of our local “good” and “ala”, and thinking about it can always only be apophatic.

Even from this brief retelling of the main provisions of Berdyaev’s philosophical worldview, it becomes clear that the problem of “man and machine” for this worldview is not only not accidental, but, on the contrary, is necessarily woven into one chain with other anthropological themes of his books and articles - “Man and God”, “Man and Space”, “Man and Society”, “Man and Power”, “Human Personality and Superpersonal Values” - designed to reveal the most important points of the philosophy of personalistically oriented neo-humanism.

Berdyaev’s first attempt to formulate the problem of the relationship between man and technology dates back to 1915: it was his article “Spirit and Machine” (Newspaper “Birzhevye Vedomosti” dated October 12). This article, directed against the neo-Slavophile illusions awakened by the First World War about the superiority of the “power of the Russian national spirit” over the “spiritless power of German technicism,” is interesting because in it Berdyaev considers technology as a principle liberating the “human spirit”: “Secularization, like the machine , kills not spirit, but matter. Machinization is the tearing away and separation of material heaviness from the spirit, the lightening of the spirit... With the entry of the machine into human life, it is not the spirit, but the flesh that is killed... Fear and fear of the machine is materialism and weakness of the spirit... Russian consciousness must renounce Slavophile and populist utopianism and move courageously to complex development and to the machine.”

In the early 20s, Berdyaev again returned to the theme of “man and machine,” this time considering it from a historiosophical aspect. This approach is quite understandable - in those years everyone spoke about the decisive, turning role of technology: the ideologists of technocratic utopias, and their opponents (remember E. Zamyatin’s “We”), and futurists, and proletkultists, and artists of the revolutionary avant-garde, and young Fedorians ( here, first of all, it is necessary to mention V. N. Muravyov, a participant in Berdyaev’s “Free Academy of Spiritual Culture”, author of the book “Mastery of Time”), and, finally, O. Spengler, sensational at that time: precisely in the chapter “Machine” (where the machine appears as the final symbol of the “Faustian soul” and the entire Western European civilization) ends the second volume of his “Decline of Europe”. Berdyaev also talks about the turning point of technology in the destiny of man. “The Entry of the Machine” (this is the title of a chapter in Berdyaev’s book “The Meaning of History”, Berlin, 1923) is “the greatest revolution that history has ever known - the crisis of the human race”; the essence of the crisis is that the machine “not only apparently conquers the natural elements of man, but it also conquers man himself; she not only liberates him in some way, but also enslaves him in a new way” (p. 181). The appearance of the machine is assessed by Berdyaev as the end of traditional humanism and its values: “This new terrible force is decomposing the natural forms of man. It subjects a person to a process of dismemberment, separation, due to which a person, as it were, ceases to be the natural being that he was before” (p. 182).

In the published article “Man and Machine” - this article was especially appreciated by Berdyaev: it was reprinted in six of his collections published in foreign languages ​​- his views on the problem of the crisis of man and humanity caused by the “rapid development of technology and the onslaught of scientistic-technocratic ideology , are presented with the greatest consistency. Of course, here, too, the thoughtful reader is left with considerable scope for question marks in the margins. Counter questions are also legitimate here: does technology serve only as a symbol of alienation and power, or is it a new environment that realizes human capabilities? What prevents us from speaking about the beauty of technical products, about the aesthetics of technical design, about the expansion and continuation of the human body in technology (remember “Organoprojection” by P. A. Florensky) 7 And do we have the right to think about the hopelessness of humanitarization of “technical” thinking? And, finally, if technology changes the nature and organization of work, does this mean that man has always obediently followed the forms imposed on him? Alas, Berdyaev says nothing about the connections between technology and various social structures. For him, technology is only an object for man, determining him from the outside. But is a person capable of “spiritually limiting the power of technology,” that is, according to Berdyaev, turning technology into a subject, while remaining on the basis of subject-object dualism?

Berdyaev has an unusually wide horizon, allowing him to cover many aspects of the problem at once, but at the same time he has an extremely narrow sector of clarification, specific philosophical elaboration of the problem itself. And ^yu concept: it is not so much the thought of thought in relation to any objects or objects, but the objects themselves, the relationships between them and the correct attitude towards them. As a result, the object, the image of the object, and the thought about them turn out to be almost identical, stuck together and therefore stuck between brilliant guesses and triviality. Hence, from the insufficient reflection of different levels of conceptualization of the problem, there is a tendency towards a mythopoetic, natural-philosophical, “alchemical” method of description; hence the inevitable “literary” style of philosophizing, bordering on unconscious “literaryism”. Here, journalistic excitement or poetic dream pushes aside the philosophical effort itself as a kind of burdensome hindrance imposed by inescapable objectification. At the end of his life, Berdyaev again returned to the theme of “man and machine.” To a large extent this was a repetition of what had been said; The seventy-four-year-old philosopher remained true to his previous assessment of the role of technology, as well as to his belief in the victory of the human spirit. Berdyaev, insisting that machine and technology have a cosmogonic significance, establishes “four periods in man’s relationship to the cosmos”: 1) man’s immersion in cosmic life, dependence on the objective world, the lack of differentiation of the human personality, man has not yet mastered nature, his magical and mythological relationship (primitive cattle breeding and agriculture, slavery); 2) liberation from the power of cosmic forces, from spirits and demons of nature, struggle through asceticism, not technology (elementary forms of economy, serfdom); 3) mechanization of nature, scientific and technical mastery of nature, the development of industry in the form of capitalism, the liberation of labor and its enslavement, its enslavement through the exploitation of instruments of production and the need to sell labor for wages; 4) the decomposition of the cosmic order in the discovery of the infinitely large and the infinitely small, the formation of a new organization, in contrast to organicity, by technology and machinism, the terrible increase in the power of man over nature and the slavery of man to his own discoveries 3. But after a short digression, Berdyaev makes a characteristic of his style of thinking is a corrective addition: “It is also possible to think of the fifth period in relation to man and nature. In this fifth period there will be an even greater mastery by man of the forces of nature, the real liberation of labor and the worker, the subordination of technology to the spirit. But this presupposes a spiritual movement in the world, which is a matter of freedom. , with thoughts about possible ways to get over it. No, freedom for Berdyaev meant that we were already floating, floundering, and it was not too late - despite all the couplings! - to change our and our common destiny.

E. V. BARABANOV

3 See: Berdyaev N. The Kingdom of the Spirit and the Kingdom of Caesar. Paris, 1951, p. 38.

4 Ibid., p. 39.

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev was born in Kyiv on March 6 (18), 1874 into a noble family. He was educated in the Kiev Cadet Corps; in 1894 he entered first the natural and then the law faculty of Kyiv University. In the same year, Berdyaev became close to a student group close to Marxism, and later joined the Social Democratic Party. After his arrest in 1898, he was expelled from the university and exiled to Vologda for three years. Here, in exile, Berdyaev’s break with the revolutionary movement, his path from “critical Marxism” to “ethical idealism” is defined. Signs of this turn were his book “Subjectivism and Individualism in Social Philosophy. Critical study of II. K. Mikhailovsky" (St. Petersburg, 1901) and the article "The Ethical Problem in the Light of the Philosophy of Idealism" in the acclaimed collection "Problems of Idealism" (M., 1902). In 1905, Berdyaev, together with S.N. Bulgakov, published the socio-philosophical and literary magazine “Questions of Zhiani” in St. Petersburg, and two years later took an active part in the founding of the St. Petersburg “Religious and Philosophical Society.” From 1908 to 1922 Berdyaev lived in Moscow. Here he participates in the Religious and Philosophical Society named after Vl. Solovyov, in the creation of the religious and philosophical publishing house “Put”; here - at the beginning of the tenth years - he first formulated the foundations of his original philosophy of freedom and philosophy of creativity, embodied in his books “The Philosophy of Freedom” (M., 1911) and “The Meaning of Creativity” (M., 1916).

Berdyaev experienced the war of 1914 and the Russian revolution not only as the greatest historical shock, but also as events of his own destiny. “The revolution, according to Berdyaev, exposed the roots of Russian life and helped to find out the truth about Russia. Later he wrote: “I realized the complete inevitability of Russia’s passage through the experience of Bolshevism. This is the moment of the inner fate of the Russian people, its existential dialectics. There is no return to what was before the Bolshevik revolution, all restoration attempts are powerless and harmful, even if it was the restoration of the principles of the February revolution. Only movement forward is possible."

However, the awareness of the inevitability of revolution did not mean for Berdyaev reconciliation with what accompanied it. Hence the contradictory opinions of Berdyaev about the “origins and meaning of Russian communism” and attacks on him from different sides: some accused him of “Bolshevisanism”, of “sympathy for the Reds”, others of anti-communism.

In 1919, Berdyaev was elected professor at Moscow University, and in the fall of the same year he founded the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture

losophy of history, philosophy of religion, about Dostoevsky.

In 1922, Berdyaev was expelled from Russia along with a large group of Russian writers and scientists. From 1922 to 1924 he lived in Berlin, where he gave courses of lectures on the history of Russian thought and ethics; There, in Berlin, he created the Religious and Philosophical Academy, which was moved to Paris in 1925. In Paris, from 1925 to 1940, Berdyaev edited the journal of religious and philosophical thought, “The Path,” which he founded.

The years of Berdyaev's life in France were a time of intense philosophical creativity. During this period, he wrote the most significant philosophical books: “Philosophy of the Free Spirit” (2 vols. 1927-1928; this book was awarded the French Academy Prize), “On the Purpose of Man. Experience of paradoxical ethics" (1931), "I and the world of objects. Experience of the philosophy of loneliness and communication" (1934), "Spirit and reality. Fundamentals of theanthropic spirituality" (1937), "On slavery and human freedom. Experience of personalistic philosophy" (1939). All these books were translated into many European languages ​​(and after the war into Japanese) and brought Berdyaev worldwide fame.

Both during the war and after its end, Berdyaev remained faithful to his openly proclaimed patriotic position. He persistently convinced everyone of the “post-war transformation of Russia,” although he was painfully worried about the growth of Stalinist-Zhdanov terror. The story with A. Akhmatova and M. Zoshchenko made a particularly difficult impression on him.

Until the end of his life, Berdyaev continued his philosophical work. The last books he wrote were “The Experience of Eschatological Metaphysics”, “Existential Dialectics of the Divine and Human”, “The Kingdom of the Spirit and the Kingdom of Caesar”, “Truth and Revelation”, another edition of his tragic philosophy of freedom. They were published after his death.

This year I organized and published my predictions. The forecast for the future of humanity is presented in the form of a tight schedule, and events will begin to develop in 2019. The scientist believes that soon artificial intelligence will radically change our world and people’s lives will be extended. Historically, advanced technology has been accompanied by horror stories. According to Kurzweil, machine Superintelligence is not dangerous - today there is no reason to consider it a serious threat to civilization. AI will not be used as a weapon by any aggressor or provocateur, for the reason that it will be distributed everywhere. People of the future will be able to regulate it.

Ray Kurzweil is the CTO of Google, inventor of speech recognition systems and tablet scanning, winner of prestigious awards and 19 doctoral degrees. He has dozens of patents and is the author of the concept of Technological Singularity

Having been involved in artificial intelligence research since the 70s, Raymond Kurzweil has received recognition as one of the leading experts in this field. His technological predictions almost certainly come true: the advent of self-driving cars, wireless communications, the loss of a chess grandmaster to a computer, etc. He has been honored by three presidents, and Bill Gates calls Kurzweil "the best predictor of future technology." After many years of entrepreneurial activity, in December 2012, Raymond Kurzweil was hired by Google at the personal invitation of Larry Page.

The future of tomorrow with Google

Google solves current problems of humanity, explores tomorrow's technologies and thinks about promising ones. To work on futuristic and ambitious projects, the corporation launched a number of divisions and secret laboratories: Google X, Google 2.0, Google Y, which oversee other innovative projects. For example, the development of an autopilot for cars using 100% artificial intelligence. By dynamically changing, Googlers are ready to revolutionize everything - from robotic toys to the construction of “cities of the future”, making it more convenient, more compact, more efficient, etc. Google is actively developing methods to combat aging. In search of breakthrough technologies, the IT giant has already invested billions of dollars in research to increase life expectancy.

Larry Page: “My vision for the future extends far beyond search. What we are now focused on is long-term investment. It will still take a lot of patience to get the first results.”

The very idea of ​​holographic bodies, virtualized minds and digitized immortality does not look fantastic except for adherents of transhumanism. Many people don’t believe in AI at all, or consider it some kind of failed project. John McCarthy, who is called the father of artificial intelligence, is the author of the term “artificial intelligence” and the creator of the declarative programming language Lisp:

Once AI actually starts working, everyone stops calling it artificial intelligence.

An interesting remark about biological science was made by theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, an outstanding scientist and Nobel laureate:

What is striking about biology is the lack of explanation for the necessity of death. When we try to create a perpetual motion machine, we will discover the impossibility of this according to the known laws of physics, or the fallacy of the laws themselves. But in all biological science there is no indication of the inevitability of death. This suggests that there is no inevitability and it is only a matter of time before science gets closer to discovering the true causes of human mortality. Then this terrible disease will be cured

The director of technical development of the “good corporation” is convinced that we are on the threshold of the beginning of a new era. Perhaps he is so optimistic, relying on the expected breakthrough in neural networks with the transition to memristor memory, which should radically change computer architecture (and increase writing speed by a hundred thousand times). When self-learning algorithms and artificial neural networks become comparable in functionality and performance to biological prototypes, this will find application in bionics. In turn, the development of neurobionics is predicted to become the basis for the creation of artificial intelligence.

In our age of active growth of new discoveries and technologies, the question of the spiritual life of man, his connection with God and further spiritual development is increasingly being raised. This is due to the waste of spiritual energy on finding new technical innovations and learning to use these same technologies. Here's a question worth asking:

“Does a person become dependent on his discoveries and how does this affect his spiritual life and future in general?”

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev tried to answer this question in his article “Man and Machine”.

Considering the problem of man and machine, N. Berdyaev shifts the focus of his attention to man, the process of changing his consciousness under the influence of technical progress. He notes that a change in consciousness occurred when the views of Copernicus became dominant, when the infinity of worlds was revealed.

“Pascal was horrified by this still theoretical change; he was frightened by the silence of endless spaces and worlds.”

Then the person found compensation and a fulcrum, transferring the center of gravity inside the person, into the self, into the subject. He stopped connecting himself with the world, lost touch with the forces around him and concentrated only on his needs and desires.

“The machine has enormous not only sociological, but also cosmological significance, and it poses with extraordinary acuteness the problem of the fate of man in society and space. This is the problem of the relationship of man to nature, the individual to society, spirit to matter, irrational to rational.”

Cosmos implies a certain shell where higher powers are located, the loss of connection with which will entail the further destruction of this special shell and the destruction of the spiritual and emotional in the person himself.

Berdyaev notes that a person, as an element independent from the world, is capable of destroying his soul, losing the main thing - spirituality and kindness of heart.

“But the human spirit will cope with a tremendous task only if it is not isolated and does not rely only on itself, if it is united with God. Only then will the image and likeness of God be preserved in man, i.e. man will be preserved."

“Our era is characterized by processes of destruction of the heart, as the core of the soul.”

Although the spiritual and spiritual aspects of a person are considered inseparable, every living creature has a soul, but the power of the spirit may not exist. Therefore, in the struggle for his independence in this world, a person risks losing his spiritual aspect and, succumbing to his own pride, being conquered by his own discoveries.

“Technology gives a person a feeling of terrible power, and it is a product of the will to power and expansion.”

“But when a person is given the power with which he can control the world, and can destroy a significant part of humanity and culture, then everything becomes dependent on the spiritual and moral state of the person, on what he will use this power for, what kind of spirit he is.”

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev repeatedly touches on this problem, the loss of spirituality, but he is more concerned about the spiritual issue. Because the spiritual aspect can be renewed, even if it did not exist at all, but spirituality, if lost, cannot be restored.

“What is the main danger that a machine poses for a person, a danger that has already been fully revealed? I do not think that this is a danger mainly for the spirit and spiritual life. Machines and technology inflict terrible damage on a person’s mental life and, above all, on emotional life and human feelings. The mental and emotional element is fading away in modern civilization.”

“In fact, we can say that we live in an era of technology and spirit, not in an era of soulfulness.”

“The idealistic philosophy of modern times is this compensation for the loss of the cosmos in which man occupied his hierarchical place, in which he felt surrounded by higher powers.”

With the loss of space, a person is doomed to lose connection with the world, the loss of his qualities that define humanity - soulfulness, fortitude, and the emotional aspect. This will entail a new philosophy of time, where the primacy of the incorporeal, insensitive, subjective, evaluative and non-spatial in any phenomena and processes over the material, which is characterized by objectivity, corporeality, sensory sensation without evaluation.

« Technology has cosmogonic significance; through it a new cosmos is created.”

Mass replication of technology, mass technical organization of life destroys all originality and individuality of man. At the same time, new idols appear, created by man, which man himself begins to worship. An example is new mobile phone models that appear every couple of months. Which drive people crazy in the race to dominate them. But people created this technique themselves, and it turns out that they themselves brought themselves into this addiction. Just like drug addicts who can give themselves a new dose, ordinary people drive themselves into dependence on technology because they are simply afraid to be alone with themselves and their thoughts, afraid to look deep into themselves. Because many people have nothing there anymore. But also the reason for this race for “arms” can be attributed to the herd characteristic of man, which has existed at all times. Again, it’s scary to stay on the sidelines.

Not following technological progress in our time is partly stupid; we have not lived in the Stone Age for a long time, and it is impossible to imagine a return to the old natural economy, the patriarchal system. This opportunity is not given to man.

According to N. Berdyaev, technological progress affects not only a person, but also everything that surrounds him, and what a person creates in the future, for example, art.

“...the reality revealed in art is symbolic in nature, it reflects the ideological world. Technology creates reality, devoid of any symbolism; in it, reality is given directly.”

And here the question arises: “What idea can a person devoid of spirituality bring into the world?”

After all, spirituality is not only a connection with God, it is, first of all, a connection with the world and how a person reflects this world through himself.

Our generation faces the main paradox: without technical progress, further development of human culture, art, and his moral element is impossible, because life is development in everything. Without technology, the emergence of human culture would not have been possible. But the excessive introduction of technical innovations into human life slows down this progress in culture; a person loses the incentive for further development. Culture ceases to develop and may completely perish in the final entry into the technical era.

“The spiritual limitation of the power of technology and machines over human life is a matter of the spirit, the matter of man himself, and depends on the tension of his spirituality. A machine can be a great tool in the hands of man, in his victory over the power of elemental nature, but for this man must be a spiritual being, a free spirit.”

It is only in our hands to create our own bright future. Stop being consumerist towards the world around us. Start again to appreciate the connection with spiritual forces and the spirituality of each person.

But despite the undeniability of the problems raised and the author’s arguments for them, I do not agree with everything.

« Soviet technical construction makes a particularly terrible impression. But its originality is not at all in the technology itself - in this respect there is nothing special there; anyway, America has gone much further, and it is difficult to catch up with it. What is original in Soviet communist Russia is the spiritual phenomenon that is revealed in relation to technical construction.”

I would like to note as a builder that it was in Soviet times that at least construction was at its best. Houses built in those days still stand to this day, and people choosing between an old brick five-story Soviet house and a new building choose a Soviet house. This is due to the fact that, unlike today’s construction schedule, in those years construction standards were followed. They built relying on their analytical thinking, and not on modern computer programs. And it’s very easy to say that there is nothing special in Soviet construction if you are not a builder. Comparing your homeland, while living in France, with its main rival at that time, and not in its favor - why so much lack of love for your homeland? As for America, the author did not take into account that American architecture can be more diverse - but they build houses there where the climatic regions are much softer and more favorable than the sharp and severe temperature changes in Russia.

Among those expelled was a famous histologist Alexander Alexandrovich Maksimov(1874–1928). A native of St. Petersburg, he is the author of the theory of the origin of blood from a single lymphocyte-like cell (unitary theory of hematopoiesis). It was he who first introduced the concept of “stem cell” into scientific circulation.

Vladimir Kuzmich Zvorykin, famous inventor. Since 1919, Vladimir Kuzmich, having moved to the USA, worked in various radio engineering companies. Of his many inventions, the creation of the iconoscope, the first transmitting television tube, the prototype of the modern kinescope, brought him worldwide fame, for which he is considered the “father of television.”

It is impossible to talk about all the emigrants of the first wave who left their mark on the history of medicine, just as it is impossible to assess the damage caused to the culture and science of Russia by the forced emigration of scientists. There was once a popular joke in the United States that Zworykin was a Russian gift to America. This was probably the best way out of the worst situation.

It was strange to read this paragraph, full of aggression towards the country where the author was born, although he himself wrote how important spirituality and sincerity are to a person. It doesn't look spiritual. And it is not clear how a person who does not have technical knowledge in construction dares to evaluate the quality of construction activities as a whole.

As for the very topic of the article about the dark future of humanity enslaved by machines - I don’t believe in it. I believe that an inanimate object will never be able to think independently, much less enslave anyone. To do this, you need to understand what you are going to enslave, and for this, again, you need to be able to think and reason.

“Technical civilization is essentially impersonalistic; it does not know and does not want to know personalities. It requires human activity, but does not want the person to be a person. And it is extremely difficult for an individual to stay in this civilization.”

As you know, all scientific discoveries are made by people. And not a herd, but at least a group of people led by one of the smartest and most capable. A unique person, disposed not only to science, but also to leadership, knows what he wants and achieves it, as for me, a real personality.

Mark Zuckerberg- Creator of the world-famous Internet network Facebook.

Steve Jobs- the founder of the Apple company, and if he did not assemble the equipment he produced, then he skillfully led a team of engineers.

In other words, without these very individuals there would be no technical progress, which means that as long as there are such people, as long as a person is curious and interested in the world around him, humanity controls technology. But this does not mean that a person should not develop spirituality in himself, on the contrary. Without it, a person does not develop, and without a person there is no technical development.

Man and machine was last modified: October 12th, 2016 by Polina Dedyukhova

Article by Berdyaev N.A. “Man and Machine” is undoubtedly relevant to this day, presenting its acuteness of the problems of technology in the light of modernity.

The work amazes with its novelty and unconditional involvement in modern society, where the technical aspect is gaining momentum in its influence and total mastery of the consciousness of individuals. Here Berdyaev’s personal understanding of problems directly related to technology and modernity is revealed. It seems that the work is dedicated to our days, although it was written at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The appearance of the machine is assessed by Berdyaev as a manifestation of traditional humanism and its values, where man is subordinate to technology. The means turns into a goal, thereby rebuilding not only the social structure of society, but also consciousness, acquiring its new quality. The philosopher’s ideas are imbued with concern about the future of humanity, and, it must be said, they are currently perceived as completely acceptable, because technology since the beginning of the twentieth century. really gained dominance over man (take, for example, the phenomenon of computer addiction).

In his article, Berdyaev especially appreciated the view on the problem of the crisis of man and society caused by the rapid development of technology and the onslaught of scientistic-technocratic ideology presented with unconditional consistency, although the topic, of course, is quite controversial, because society cannot help but develop, and development, in turn, inevitably leads to civilizational “pros and cons.”

It was the study of N.A.’s article. Berdyaev’s “Man and Machine” is the subject of this work.

In his work “Man and Machine,” Berdyaev tries to compare eschatological and technical issues, considering technology as “a principle that liberates the human spirit.” His vision extends its gaze into the future, where man, through spiritual dominance, will once again rise above his creation, subjugating it for the benefit of humanity.

Berdyaev identifies three stages in human culture: natural-organic, cultural, technically machine, where he briefly describes each of them on the basis of history, and also gives a comparative description of the “organism” and “mechanism” as opposing subject and object, their mutual the impact and tragedy of the confrontation.

The article traces the idea of ​​comparing “organic” and “technical”. He makes this comparison almost from the very first lines, where he compares the previous organization of society and the new one, equipped with technology. The former individual was closer to nature, and therefore, according to Berdyaev, closer to spirituality. There was a direct connection between man and nature. The advent of machines greatly facilitated people's work; they gained greater freedom and minimized the cost of physical labor. But this same circumstance radically influenced not only their life, the organization of work, but also their thinking and attitude.

We cannot underestimate the capabilities of technology and its unconditional influence on the organization of our reality. Life with machines has become much easier; they have made our work easier in many ways. But Berdyaev focuses the problem precisely on the power of technology. “Technology ceases to be neutral...” And in this sense, it represents a dangerous dependence for humans. Berdyaev says that technology kills, consumes the soul, it is merciless to man, our consciousness becomes chained to the technical and rational. Technology is not interested in the soul, it is the sphere of mechanisms, the reality of machines. Without a doubt, it brings comfort to our lives, but it also influences our being, occupying a dominant position in our way of thinking, which affects our soul.

Globalism cannot help but shape a new reality, where man becomes a god for himself and for the cosmos. The emptiness of the spirit is compensated by the power of invention, where a new universe of human achievement lives.

Berdyaev talks about another problem - the danger of subordinating the sphere of science and its discoveries, which is interconnected with technology by a certain, small group of people interested in their projects for the implementation of scientific discoveries, which is also not at all utopian, but, on the contrary, can be very real.

In this regard, Berdyaev talks about supporters and opponents of “improving life” thanks to technology. They view technology as something neutral and indifferent, declaring it the work of engineers, while others “experience technology apocalyptically, experiencing horror at its growing power over human life, seeing in it the identity of the spirit of Antichrist. This attitude towards technology comes from the simple principle that “everything that is not pleasant, everything that destroys the familiar, is declared evil.” But Berdyaev, as a philosopher, opposes the expansion of technology in modern society. You can talk as much as you like on this topic, but, undoubtedly, technology allows you to achieve the greatest results at the lowest cost; this is a fact with which one cannot but agree.

Berdyaev probably wanted to reconcile the two realities “technical” and “organic”. Of course, because Technology is a creation of man; it cannot be the cause of spiritual problems of humanity. The person is to blame for them himself. But technology can radically influence the consciousness of the masses, and due to man’s vulnerability to global problems, he has what he has. It is his will to change reality. And if God died, as Nietzsche, Sartre and many others argued, all responsibility lies with man, another thing is that this burden is beyond his strength.

Berdyaev offers a way out of this problem, anticipating future metamorphoses; he believes that the spirit will subjugate the machine kingdom for the benefit of humanity, but man will have to turn to introspection to rediscover his spirituality. Only this can save him and free him from the dependence of machines.

We can conclude that technology will again be subordinated to man. This reveals nostalgia for a lost paradise, which corresponds to Berdyaev’s Christian vision. The dream of finding what was lost will inevitably end in the victory of the spirit in human history. The goal of progress, according to Berdyaev, is precisely this.

The tragedy is that man has become so dependent on the machines that he has created that he prefers comfort rather than intimacy in a social environment where he feels quite alone. Machines are gradually replacing the individual, and this shows the irreversible process of civilization. Only spiritual potential can return a person to freedom again. “The path to the final liberation of man and the final fulfillment of his calling is the path to the Kingdom of God, which is not only the Kingdom of Heaven, but the kingdom of the transformed earth, the transformed cosmos.”

N. A. Berdyaev is undoubtedly one of the most original Russian philosophers of the 20th century. But both in the style of his thought and in his problematics, the features of extra-academic philosophizing, characteristic of many Russian thinkers, are easily discernible: indifference to the methodology of philosophical discourse, a reckless, almost ecstatic desire to solve the “ultimate questions” uncritically accepted from theology, the “sticking together” of metaphysics with natural philosophy, thinking in the categories of “spiritualistic materialism”, the moralistic attribution of “originally inherent” qualities to objects and belief in the teaching purpose of philosophy.

Like many Russian philosophers, Berdyaev did not create a philosophical system; everything he wrote is united not by a system, but by a general religious and philosophical worldview with more or less elaboration of individual parts and aspects.

Whatever Berdyaev wrote about, he always remained a publicist: he always argued with someone, denounced someone, refuted someone, suggested the correct answers to someone. At the same time, he inevitably fell into the monologue tone of a prophesying teacher; the cooling of passion seemed to him a deadening routine.

Of course, Berdyaev’s problematics, life perception, and style of thought entirely belong to the culture of modernism and remain incomprehensible outside of modernism. Berdyaev himself called his philosophy existential, or philosophy of spirit, emphasizing that his philosophy is primarily an anthropological philosophy; posing the problem of man meant for him posing the problem of freedom, creativity, personality, spirit, history.

His article “Man and Machine” is devoted to the problem of sociology and metaphysics of technology. The appearance of this article was mainly due to the almost complete absence of philosophical developments on this topic, the fact that a philosophy of technology had not yet been created. To create such a philosophy, it was necessary, first of all, to realize that this is a spiritual problem “from the inside, it is the theme of the philosophy of human existence.”

ON THE. Berdyaev emphasizes that the question of technology has become a question of the fate of man and the fate of culture. “In an age of little faith, in an age of weakening not only of the old religious faith, but also of the humanistic faith of the 19th century, the only strong faith of modern civilized man remains faith in technology, in its endless development. Technology is a person’s last love, and he is ready to change his image under the influence of the object of love.”

After reading the article by N.A. Berdyaev, really the first thoughts about how modern and relevant it is to this day.

At the beginning of the article, Berdyaev notes that we are talking not only about technology that makes it possible to improve living conditions, but also about the technology of thinking, painting, dancing, etc. But further, throughout the entire article, it is technology in its original meaning, as a technical tool, as means of life. And it is precisely the “replacement of the goals of life with the means of life” that Berdyaev so regrets, saying that such a substitution humiliates a person, makes him soulless.

Berdyaev believes that humanity faces a fundamental paradox: “without technology, culture is impossible, the very emergence of culture is connected with it, and the final victory of technology in culture, the entry into the technical era, leads to culture’s death.” It is impossible to completely agree with this, since in other cases technology makes it possible to convey this very culture to the masses (radio devices, televisions, MP3 players), thereby serving as a kind of conductor or intermediary. With the help of technology, music is created, filmed films are played, the atmosphere in the theater is created, newspapers, magazines are published, etc.

Previously, everyone was afraid of predatory animals. Today they are observed in zoos. People were afraid of hunger; they were forced to do hard and thankless work. Today these tasks are performed by robots and computers. A person has more and more free time to think. And when a person thinks, he asks himself questions. By asking questions, he tries to find answers, thereby developing spiritually and increasing his level of knowledge.

But sooner or later, “the creation rebels against its creator and no longer obeys him. We see this in all processes of rationalization in the technical era, when man is replaced by a machine, technology will replace the organic-irrational with the organized-rational. But it gives rise to new irrational consequences in social life. Thus the rationalization of industry gives rise to unemployment, the greatest disaster of our time.”

Human labor is being replaced by a machine, which is a positive gain that should eliminate slavery and human poverty. But the machine does not obey what man demands of it; it dictates its own laws. “The man said to the machine: I need you to make my life easier, to increase my strength, but the machine answered the man: I don’t need you, I will do everything without you, you can disappear.”

Another aspect of modernity from the article, because today unemployment with its consequences is on a par with poverty and social instability as the most pressing problems on a global and national scale.

Taylor's system is an extreme form of labor rationalization, but it turns man into an improved machine. The machine wants a person to take on its image and likeness. “But man is the image and likeness of God and cannot become the image and likeness of a machine without ceasing to exist. The very spirit that created technology and the machine cannot be technicalized and mechanized without a trace; the irrational principle will always remain in it.” But technology, according to N. Berdyaev, wants to master the spirit and rationalize it, turn it into an automaton, enslave it. And this is “the titanic struggle between man and the nature he technizes.”

This “titanic struggle” between man and technology can be traced throughout the article: “technology tears man away from the earth,” “technology is a product of the will to power and expansion,” “technology deals terrible blows to humanism, the humanistic worldview, the humanistic ideal of man and culture,” and etc. The author seems to every time accuse a person of his dependence on technology and, with the help of this article, tries to convey the essence of what is happening, but there is a gradual technicalization of all humanity. And although technization in itself is an inevitable phenomenon, a person forgets his culture, spirituality, goals, becoming more and more carried away by the means of life.

Carried away by discussions about the harmful effects of technology on humans, the author delves into philosophical reflections on time and its meaning for humans: “Man has no time for eternity. They demand from him an early transition to the next time. This does not mean at all that we should see in the past only the eternal, which is destroyed by the future. The past no more belongs to eternity than the future, and both belong to time...” And in general, the article, dedicated to the idea of ​​the struggle between man and technology, is full of many philosophical terms, as if once again emphasizing that the question of technology became an issue at the beginning of the 20th century. an inseparable question about the fate of man and the fate of culture.

Based on the above, we can conclude that Berdyaev is saying that a person can be absorbed by an increasingly unfolding cosmic infinity. Christianity freed man from the power of cosmic infinity, into which he was immersed in the ancient world, from the power of spirits and demons of nature. It put him on his feet, strengthened him, made him dependent on God, and not on nature. But at the heights of science, which only became achievable with the independence of man from nature, at the heights of civilization and technology, man himself discovers the secrets of cosmic life, previously hidden from him, and discovers the action of cosmic energies that previously seemed to be dormant in the depths of natural life. This testifies to the power of man, but it also puts him in a new, dangerous position in relation to cosmic life.

A person’s demonstrated ability to organize disorganizes him internally. A new problem is being posed for the Christian consciousness. Technology has destroyed the old order of things, which began in the 18th century. In its place came a new understanding of reality in all spheres of human activity. Science and technology have made a revolutionary leap in vector history, revealing the titanism of man as the master of the Universe. But technology cannot solve the simple, pressing issues of an individual. She cannot help him with this. And yet, turning his gaze to the sky, a person feels his duality: he realizes his greatness and feels his weakness before the vast Universe. Realizing the scale, a person understands how little he has done and how much he still wants to accomplish. Technology is for a person compensation for what is currently unattainable. The tragedy is that man has become so dependent on the machines that he has created that he prefers comfort rather than intimacy in a social environment where he feels quite alone. Only spiritual potential can return a person to freedom again.

A squeak of literature

1. Berdyaev N. Man and machine. (The problem of sociology and metaphysics of technology) // “The Path”. – May 1933. – No. 38. - With. 3-38.

2. Gorokhov V.G., Rozin V.M. Introduction to the philosophy of technology. – M.: 1998.

3. Negodaev I.A. Philosophy of technology: Proc. allowance: [For technical universities] / I. A. Negodaev. – Rostov n/d.: DSTU, 1997.

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Analysis of the text by N.A. Berdyaev "Man and Machine"

In his work “Man and Machine,” Berdyaev tries to compare eschatological and technical issues, considering technology as “a principle that liberates the human spirit.” His vision extends its gaze into the future, where man, through spiritual dominance, will once again rise above his creation, subjugating it for the benefit of humanity.

Berdyaev identifies three stages in human culture: natural-organic, cultural, technically machine, where he briefly describes each of them on the basis of history, and also gives a comparative description of the “organism” and “mechanism” as opposing subjects and objects and their mutual the impact and tragedy of the confrontation.

In his work he makes the following arguments.

His article “Man and Machine” traces the idea of ​​​​comparing “organic” and “technical”. He makes this comparison almost from the very first lines, where he compares the previous organization of society and the new one, equipped with technology. The former individual was closer to nature, and therefore, according to Berdyaev, closer to spirituality. There was a direct connection between man and nature. The advent of machines greatly facilitated people's work; they gained greater freedom and minimized the cost of physical labor. But this same circumstance radically influenced not only their life, the organization of work, but also their thinking and attitude.

We cannot underestimate the capabilities of technology and its unconditional influence on the organization of our reality. Life with machines has become much easier; they have made our work easier in many ways. But Berdyaev focuses the problem precisely on the power of technology. “Technology ceases to be neutral...” And in this sense, it represents a dangerous dependence for humans. Berdyaev says that technology kills, consumes the soul, it is merciless to man, our consciousness becomes chained to the technical and rational. Technology is not interested in the soul, it is the sphere of mechanisms, the reality of machines. Without a doubt, it brings comfort to our lives, but it also influences our being, occupying a dominant position in our way of thinking, which affects our soul.

Globalism cannot help but shape a new reality, where man becomes a god for himself and for the cosmos. The emptiness of the spirit is compensated by the power of invention, where a new universe of human achievement lives.

Berdyaev talks about another problem - the danger of subordinating the sphere of science and its discoveries, which is interconnected with technology by a certain, small group of people interested in their projects for the implementation of scientific discoveries, which is also not at all utopian, but, on the contrary, can be very real.

In this regard, Berdyaev talks about supporters and opponents of “improving life” thanks to technology. They view technology as something neutral and indifferent, declaring it the work of engineers, while others “experience technology apocalyptically, experiencing horror at its growing power over human life, seeing in it the identity of the spirit of Antichrist. This attitude towards technology comes from the simple principle that “everything that is not liked, everything that destroys the familiar, is declared evil.” But Berdyaev, as a philosopher, opposes the expansion of technology in modern society. You can talk as much as you like on this topic, but, undoubtedly, technology allows you to achieve the greatest results at the lowest cost; this is a fact with which one cannot but agree.

Berdyaev uses the following types of arguments:

Arguments for logical possibility.

For this text, the following keywords can be identified: globalization, man, machine, technology, science.

In connection with the text read, the following questions arise.

A person is free and called to activity; his reality, like his destiny, depends only on him?

Is man a spiritual being, in his pursuit of comfort, of surplus product, has he forgotten who he is, what are the foundations of his existence?

Does technology solve spiritual problems?

But is it the reason?

In my opinion, Berdyaev probably wanted to reconcile the two realities “technical” and “organic”. Of course, because Technology is a creation of man; it cannot be the cause of spiritual problems of humanity. The person is to blame for them himself. But technology can radically influence the consciousness of the masses, and due to man’s vulnerability to global problems, he has what he has. It is his will to change reality. If God died, as Nietzsche, Sartre and many others argued, all responsibility lies with man; it’s another matter that this burden is beyond his strength.

Berdyaev offers a way out of this problem, anticipating future metamorphoses; he believes that the spirit will subjugate the machine kingdom for the benefit of humanity, but man will have to turn to introspection to regain his spirituality. Only this can save him and free him from the dependence of machines.

We can conclude that technology will again be subordinated to man. This reveals nostalgia for a lost paradise, which corresponds to Berdyaev’s Christian vision. The dream of finding what was lost... will inevitably end in the victory of the spirit in human history. The goal of progress, according to Berdyaev, is precisely this.

The tragedy is that man has become so dependent on the machines that he has created that he prefers comfort rather than intimacy in a social environment where he feels quite alone. Machines are gradually replacing the individual, and this shows the irreversible process of civilization. Only spiritual potential can return a person to freedom again. “The path to the final liberation of man and the final fulfillment of his calling is the path to the Kingdom of God, which is not only the Kingdom of Heaven, but the kingdom of the transformed earth, the transformed cosmos.”

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