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

Way. - May 1933.- No. 38. - S. 3-38.

The pages are affixed to the first edition of the journal. 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 lack of faith, in an age of weakening not only the old religious faith, but also 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. Technique is the last love of man, and he is ready to change his image under the influence of the object of his love. And everything that happens to the world feeds this new faith of man. The man longed for a miracle for faith, and it seemed to him that the miracles had ceased. This is where technology does wonders. The problem of technology is very disturbing for the Christian consciousness, and it has not yet been comprehended by Christians. Two attitudes exist among Christians towards technology, and both are insufficient. Most consider the technique to be religiously neutral and indifferent. Technology is the work of engineers. It gives improvements to life, which are also used by Christians//4//

Not. Technology multiplies the blessings of life. But this special area, which does not affect in any way the consciousness and conscience of a Christian, does not pose any spiritual problem. The Christian minority, on the other hand, experiences technology apocalypti- cally, 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. The abuse of the apocalypse is especially characteristic of the Russian Orthodox. Everything that is not liked, everything that destroys the habitual, is easily declared the triumph of the Antichrist and the approaching end of the world. This is a lazy solution to the question. It is based on the effect of fear. However, the first solution in the sense of neutrality is also lazy, it simply does not see the problem.

Technology can be understood in a broader and narrower sense. GRCH! means both industry and art. GRCH! means to fabricate, to create with art. We are talking not only about the technology of economic, industrial, military, technology associated with movement and the comfort of life, but also about the technology of thinking, versification, painting, dance, law, even about the technology of spiritual life, the mystical path. For example, yoga is a kind of spiritual technique. Technique everywhere teaches to achieve the greatest result with the least expenditure of effort. And such is especially the technique of our technical, economic age. But in it the achievement of quantity replaces the achievement of quality, characteristic of the master-technique of the old cultures. Spengler, in his new little book Der Mensch und die Technik, defines technique as a struggle, not a tool. But, undoubtedly, technology is always a means, a tool, and not an end. There can't be techies//5//

The only goals of life can 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 finally and even completely disappear from the consciousness of a person. And in our technological age, this is happening on a grand scale. Of course, for a scientist making scientific discoveries, for an engineer making inventions, technology can become the main content and purpose of life. In this case, technology, like knowledge and invention, acquires a spiritual meaning and relates to the life of the spirit. But the substitution of the goals of life by technical means can mean the belittling and quenching of the spirit, and this is how it happens. A technical tool by its nature is heterogeneous both to the one who uses it and to what it is 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 tool-making being, which is so common in the histories of civilizations, already testifies to the substitution of the goals of life by the means of life. The man is undeniably an engineer, but he invented the art of engineering for purposes beyond himself. Here the same thing is repeated as with the materialistic understanding of Marx's history. Undoubtedly, the economy is a necessary condition for life, without an economic basis, the mental and spiritual life of a person is impossible, 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 //6// is by no means the most valuable. What is highest in the hierarchy of values ​​is not the strongest at all. It could be said that the strongest in our world is gross matter, but it is also the least valuable, the least powerful in our sinful world is God, He was crucified by the world, but He is the supreme value *. Technique has such power in our world not at all because it is the supreme value.

We are confronted with a fundamental paradox: culture is impossible without technology, the very emergence of culture is connected with it, and the final victory of technology in culture, the entry into a technical era, leads culture to destruction. 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 rebirth of culture into something else, not like culture any more. Romanticism is the reaction of the natural-organic element of culture against its technical element. As romanticism revolts against the classical consciousness, it revolts against the predominance of technical form over nature. The return to nature is an eternal motive in the history of culture, in which one feels the fear of the death of culture from the power of technology, the death of an integral human nature. The desire for integrity, for organicity is also a characteristic feature of romanticism. The thirst for a return to nature is the remembrance of the lost paradise, the thirst for a return to it. And always a person's access to paradise is barred. Fran

*) The fact that the highest values ​​are the least valuable is well said by N. Hartmann in his "Ethik".

The Tsuz Thomists like to make a distinction between agir (GRCH!) and faire (GRCH!)**. This is an old scholastic distinction. Agir means the free exercise of human powers, faire means the 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 man to fabricate products, and, moreover, in the greatest quantity 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 a different attitude of the spirit to nature - the immersion of the spirit in nature; separation of the 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 primarily different types. And the man of culture still lived in the natural world, which was not created by man, who seemed to be created by God. He was associated with the earth, with plants and animals. Telluric mysticism, the mysticism of the earth, played a huge role. It is well known how important plant and animal religious cults were. The transformed elements of these cults entered Christianity. According to Christian beliefs, man came out of the earth and must return to the earth. The culture during its flowering period was still around //8//

Wife by nature, 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. The contemplation of the beauties of nature is even primarily a product of culture. They liked to understand culture, the state, 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 displayed the web in earthly forms, the signs of the second world in this world were given. Technique, on the other hand, is alien to symbolism, it is realistic, it does not display anything, it creates a new reality, everything is present here in it. It tears a person away from nature and from other worlds.

Basic to our theme is the distinction between organism and organization. The organism is born from the natural cosmic life, and it itself gives birth. The sign of birth is the sign of the organism. The organization is not born at all and gives birth. It is created by human activity, it is created, although creativity is not the highest form of creativity. The organism is not an aggregate, it is not made up of parts, it is born whole and whole, 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, but precedes the parts. The body has

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

Forest-likeness, immanently inherent in it, it is invested in it by the Creator or nature, it is determined by the dominance of the whole over the parts. Organization has an expediency of a completely different kind, it is invested in it by the organizer from the outside. A mechanism is built with its subordination to a specific purpose, but it is not born with an inherent purpose. The clock functions very expediently, but this expediency is not in them, but in the person who created and started them. The organized mechanism in its expediency depends on the organizer. But there is an awn of inertia in it, which can act on the organizer and even enslave him to himself. There have been organized bodies in history, similar to the life of organisms. Thus, the patriarchal system, the subsistence economy, seemed organic and even eternal in this organicity. The organic structure was usually presented not as created 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 coordinated and subordinated. The natural was given, as it were, a normative character. Consistent with nature seemed to be both good and just. For the ancient Greek and for the 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 constituted an unchanging hierarchical system. The very understanding of the unchanging order of nature was connected with an objective theological principle. And now technology in its form, which has triumphed since the end of the 18th century, destroys this faith 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 level 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 an organic understanding of the life of nature as the biological sciences. Biology itself was mechanistic in the second half of the 19th century, but it favored organic understanding in other fields, for example, in sociology. Naturalism, as it took shape 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 the processes of nature, 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 is 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 the transition from organic life to organized life, from vegetation to constructiveness. From the point of view of organic life, technology means disincarnation, a rupture in the organic bodies of history, a rupture of flesh and spirit. Technique reveals a new level 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. Technique destroys old bodies and creates new bodies, not at all like organic bodies, creates organized bodies.

And the tragedy is that the creation rebels against its creator, no longer obeys him. The secret of the fall is in the rebellion of the creature against the Creator. It repeats itself throughout the history of mankind. The Promethean spirit of man is unable to master the technique he has created, to cope with uninhibited, unprecedented energies. We see this in all processes of rationalization in the technical era, when a person is replaced by a machine. Technology replaces the organic-irrational with the organized-rational. But it generates new irrational consequences in social life. Thus the rationalization of industry breeds unemployment, the greatest scourge of our time. The labor of man is being replaced by machines; this is a positive conquest, which should have abolished the slavery and poverty of man. 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, but 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//

Nalny. The organization associated with technology presupposes an organizing subject, i.e. an organism, and it cannot itself be turned into a machine. But the organization has a tendency to turn the organizer himself from an organism into a machine. The spirit itself, which created technique and machine, cannot be technicalized and mechanized without a trace; an irrational principle will always remain in it. But technology wants to master the spirit and rationalize it, turn it into an automaton, enslave it. And this is a titanic struggle between man and nature technized by him. 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 crux of the problem. The human organism, its psycho-physical organism, took shape in another world and was adapted to the old nature. It was a plant-animal adaptation. But man has not yet adapted himself to the new reality that is revealed through technology and machinery; he does not know whether he will be able to breathe in the new electrical and radioactive atmosphere, in the new cold, metallic reality, devoid of animal warmth. We do not yet know at all how destructive for a person is the atmosphere that is created by his own technical discoveries and inventions. Some doctors say that this atmosphere is dangerous and destructive. And man's ingenuity in tools of destruction greatly exceeds ingenuity in medical, healing technology. It turned out to be easier to invent suffocating gases that could destroy millions of lives than a method of treating cancer //13// or tuberculosis. The human body is defenseless against its own inventions of man. The discoveries connected with organic life are much more difficult than the discoveries connected with the inorganic world, where we enter into a world of miracles. II.

The dominance of technology and machinery opens up a new stage of reality, not yet foreseen by the classification of sciences, a reality that is by no means identical with mechanical and physical-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 a complex social development, at the heights of civilization, although mechanical, physical and chemical forces act in it. Art also created a new reality that did not exist in nature. It can be said that the heroes and images of artistic creativity 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 act on people's lives, giving rise to very complex consequences. People of culture live among these realities. But the reality revealed in art has a symbolic character, it reflects the world of ideas. Technique, on the other hand, creates reality, devoid of any symbolism; in it, reality is given here, directly. This also affects art, because technique is not //14//

It revives the art itself. This is evidenced by the cinema, which is replacing the more and more old theatre. The power of cinematography is enormous. But it was made possible by technical discoveries, mainly by amazing discoveries in the field of light and sound, which should have impressed the people of former eras with real miracles. Cinematography takes possession of spaces that the theater was completely powerless to take possession of - oceans, deserts, mountains, just as it also takes possession of time. Through talking cinema and T.S.F. the actor and the singer do not address the small audiences of the old theaters, in which a small number of people united in a certain place, but to the vast masses of all mankind, all parts of the world, all countries and peoples. This is the most powerful instrument for the unification of mankind, although it can be used for the most evil and vulgar purposes. Cinematography testifies to the power of realization inherent in modern technology. Here a new reality opens up. But this reality, connected with technology, radically changing the attitude to space and time, is the creation of the spirit, the mind of man, the will, which introduces its expediency. This reality is superphysical, not spiritual or psychic, but precisely superphysical. There is a sphere of the superphysical, just as there is a sphere of the superpsychic.

Technique has a cosmogonic meaning, 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 realm of machines, a special realm. This is a new category of being. The machine is indeed neither an inorganic nor an organic body. The appearance of these new bodies is connected with the difference between the organic and the organized. It would be completely erroneous to attribute the machine to the inorganic world on the grounds that its organization uses elements of inorganic bodies taken from mechano-physico-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 man. This indicates his creative and royal calling in the world. But also an indicator of his weakness, his propensity for slavery. The machine is of great 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 relation of man to nature, the individual to society, the spirit to matter, the irrational to the rational. It is striking that no philosophy of technology and machine has yet been created, although many books have been written on this subject. 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 realized as a spiritual problem, as the fate of man. The machine is considered only from the outside, only in the 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//

Is it possible to exist in a new, different, still unknown cosmos? 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 the philosophy of technology also depends on this, for the question must first be resolved in spiritual experience than it is resolved in philosophical knowledge. This always happens, even if philosophical knowledge does not notice this *.

What does the technical era and the emergence of a new cosmos mean in the fate of man, is it the materialization and death of the spirit and spirituality, or can it have another meaning? The break 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 a lot. Soviet technical construction makes a particularly terrible impression. But its originality is not at all in the technique itself - in this respect there is nothing special, all the same, America has gone much further, and it is difficult to catch up with it. What is original in Soviet communist Russia is that spiritual phenomenon that is revealed in relation to technical construction. There really is something unprecedented here, a phenomenon of a new spiritual type. And it is this that makes a terrible impression with its eschatology, the opposite of Christian eschatology. Technique and economics themselves can be it

(*) The experience of the philosophy of technology is presented by the book "Philosophie der Technik" by Friedrich Dessauer.

Trawling, but the attitude 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 be presented as the death of the spirit and the 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 mastery 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 complicated. Technique is as dual in its meaning as everything in this world. Technology tears a person away from the earth, it strikes at every 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 is 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. Technique gives a person a sense of the planetary nature of the earth, a completely different feeling of the earth than that which was characteristic of man in previous eras. A person feels completely different when he feels the depth //18// of the depths, holiness, mysticism of the earth under him, and when he feels the earth as a planet flying into endless space, among endless worlds, when he himself has the power to separate from land, fly through the air, travel to the stratosphere. This change of consciousness theoretically took place already at the beginning of the new time, when the Copernican system replaced the Ptolemy 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 infinite spaces and worlds. Cosmos, the cosmos of antiquity and the Middle Ages, the cosmos of St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante disappeared. Then the person found compensation and a point of support, transferring the center of gravity into 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 himself surrounded by higher powers. But technology has a terrible power of realization, and it gives a sharp "feeling of the destruction of the ancient cosmos with the earth in the center. This changes, revolutionizes the whole life of modern man. And the result is contradictory and ambivalent in relation to man. The 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, infinitely small 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 a person 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 of the world. The attitude to space and time changes radically. Formerly, 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 t fly as far as possible into space. This, of course, is a sign of man's maturity, he does not seem to need the cares and protection of his mother. It makes the fight more severe - the flip side of making life more comfortable with technology. There are always these two sides in technology: on the one hand, it brings with it the convenience, comfort of life and has a softening effect, on the other hand, it requires greater severity and fearlessness.

The old cultures took possession of only a small space and small masses. Such 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 the selection of qualities. But the old culture is powerless in the face of huge numbers, it does not have the appropriate methods. Technique takes possession of vast spaces and vast masses. Everything becomes global, everything spreads to the entire human mass in the era of the domination of technology. This is its sociological meaning. The principle of technology is democratic. The technical epoch is an epoch of democracy and socialization, in it everything becomes collective, in it collectives are organized, which in the old cultures lived a vegetative, organic life. This plant life, which received a religious sanction //20//

Qiyu, made the organization of the masses in the modern sense of the word unnecessary. Order, and even a very stable order, could be kept without organization in the modern sense of the word, it was kept organically. Technique gives a person a feeling of terrible power, and it is the product of the will to power and expansion. This will to expansion, which gave birth to European capitalism, inevitably brings the masses of the people back to historical life. Then the old organic order collapses and a new form of organization is inevitable, which is given by technology. Undoubtedly, this new form of mass organization of life, this technization 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 the external, plastic side of life is devoid of individuality, but also the inner, emotional life is devoid of individuality. And the romantic reaction against technology is understandable. Understandable is the uprising of Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy, an uprising both for aesthetic and moral reasons. But such a negation of technology is powerless and cannot be carried out consistently. There is only a defense of more primitive and backward forms of technology, and not its complete denial. Everyone was reconciled to the steam engine, to the railroads, but there was a time when they provoked protest and were denied. You can deny traveling by airplanes, but you probably use railways and cars, you do not like the subway, but you are willing to travel by trams, you do not want to put up with talking cinema, but you love cinema //21// the count is 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 an instrument of 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 countryside and the life of the landlords in it, but suddenly recalls that it is based on the enslavement of people and on a terrible lie. In the problem of an idealizing relationship to the past, we encounter the paradox of time. The past that we like so much and that attracts us so much never happened. This past has passed through our creative imagination, through purification; it is before us freed from the evil and ugliness that was in it. We love only the past attached to eternity. But the past has never been in the past, the past is only an integral part of our present. In the very past there was another present, and in it there was evil and ugliness. This means that only the eternal can be loved. Therefore, there is no return to the past, and it cannot be desired. We can only want a return to the eternal past, but this eternal is singled out by us in a transforming creative act, freed from its darkness. It is impossible to conceive of a return to a subsistence economy and a patriarchal system, to the exclusive predominance of agriculture and handicrafts in economic life, as Ruskin wanted. This opportunity is not given to man, he must continue to live //22// his fate. The new masses of people brought into the arena of history require new forms of organization, new tools. But what we now call the "technical age" is also not eternal. The era of the unheard-of power of technology over the human soul will end, but it will end not with the negation of technology, but with subordination to its spirit. A person cannot remain chained to the earth and dependent on it in everything, but he cannot completely tear himself away from it and go into space. Some connection with the land will remain, and agriculture will remain, without which a person cannot exist. Breaking into paradise, into the Garden of Eden is not given to a person to the end and the transformation of the world, the entire cosmos, but there will always be a memory of paradise and longing for paradise, there will always be a hint of paradise in natural life, in gardens and flowers, in art. The inner connection of man 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 mankind cannot be thought holistically, it will be complex. There will be reactions against technology and machinery, returns to primordial nature, but technology and machinery will never be destroyed as long as man makes his earthly journey. III.

What is the main danger that the machine carries with it for man, a danger that has already been fully revealed? I don't think it was a danger primarily to the spirit and spiritual life. Machinery and technology inflict terrible defeats on the spiritual life of Che //23//

Lovek, and above all, emotional life, human feelings. The mental-emotional element is fading away in modern civilization. So it can be said that the old culture was dangerous for the human body, it left it neglected, often pampered and relaxed it. Machine, technical civilization is dangerous primarily 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 the 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 everything has decomposed into an intellectual element and into 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 inherently 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. It is still the same question about the attitude towards the soul. Technology is less dangerous for the spirit, although this may surprise at first glance .In fact, It must be said 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 the tension of spirituality.

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

Technique ceases to be neutral, it has long been no longer neutral, not indifferent to the spirit and questions of the spirit. And nothing, after all, can be neutral; something could seem neutral only up to a certain time and only at a superficial glance. 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 itself, turned out to be weak and defenseless against the growing power of technology, then the spirit can turn out to be strong enough. Technique makes a man a cosmiurge. Compared with the tools that modern technology puts into the hands of man, his former tools seem like toys. This is especially evident in the technology of war. The destructive power of the old weapons of war was very limited, everything was very localized. Old cannons, guns and sabers could not exterminate a large mass of humanity, destroy large cities, endanger the very existence of culture. Meanwhile, new technology makes this possible. And in everything, technology puts into the hands of man a terrible force that can become destructive. Soon, peaceful scientists will be able to produce upheavals not only of a historical, but also of a cosmic nature. A small group of people who possess the secret of technical inventions will be able to tyrannically control all of humanity. This is quite imaginable. This possibility was foreseen by Renan. But when a person is given a 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 a 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, in the end a religious question. The fate of mankind depends on this. The wonders of technology, always dual in nature, require an unprecedented tension of spirituality, immeasurably greater than previous cultural epochs. Human spirituality can no longer be organic-vegetative. And we are facing the demand for a new heroism, both internal and external. The heroism of man, associated in the past with the war, is coming to an end, he was almost gone in the last war. But technology requires a new heroism from a person, and we constantly read and hear about its manifestations. Such is the heroism of scientists who are forced out of their offices and laboratories. Flying into the stratosphere or sinking to the bottom of the ocean requires, of course, real heroism. Heroism is demanded by all the bold flights of airplanes, the fight against air storms. Manifestations of human heroism are beginning to be associated with cosmic spheres. But fortitude requires technology, first of all, so that a person is not enslaved and destroyed by it. In a sense, we can say that it is a matter of life and death. Sometimes such a terrible utopia appears. The time will come when there will be perfect machines with which man could control the world, but there will be no more man. The machines themselves will operate in perfection and achieve maximum results. The last people themselves will turn into machines, but then they will also disappear because they are no longer needed and cannot have organic respiration and blood circulation. Factories will produce goods with great speed and perfection. Cars and airplanes will fly. Through T.S.F. throughout //26// the world will be filled with music and singing, and 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. This terrible nightmare sometimes dreams. It depends on the tension of the strength of the spirit whether a person will avoid this fate. 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 everyone else. But the human spirit will cope with the 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 saved. This reveals the difference between Christian eschatology and technical eschatology. IV.

The power of technology in human life entails a very great change in the type of religiosity. And I have to say straight out that it's for the best. In the technical, machine era, the hereditary, habitual, everyday, socially conditioned type of religiosity weakens and becomes 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 is becoming more internal and spiritual, more free 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, social group influences. Religious life becomes more personal, more endured, that is, it is determined spiritually. This, of course, does not at all mean religious individualism, for the catholicity and ecclesiastical nature of religious consciousness itself does not have a sociological nature. But in another respect the power of technology can have fatal consequences for the spiritual and religious life. Technology takes over time and radically changes the relationship to time. And man is really capable of mastering time. But technical actualism subordinates 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 it is impossible to stop at a single moment, as at a time emerging from time. There is no way out in an instant (Augenblick) in the sense that Kierkegaard uses the word. Each moment must be replaced as soon as possible by the next moment, and all moments remain in the flow of time and therefore disappear. Inside each moment, as if there is nothing but striving for the next moment, it is empty in itself. But such mastery of time through quickness and speed turns out to be enslavement by 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 man to relate to eternity. Man has no time for eternity. //28// He is required to move to the next tense as soon 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 belongs no more to eternity than the future, and both belong to time. As in the past, and in the future, and at all times, an exit to eternity, to a self-valuable, filled moment is possible. Time obeys the speed machine, but it is not overcome and defeated by this. And man is faced with the problem of whether he will retain the possibility of moments of contemplation, contemplation of eternity, God, truth, beauty. Man undoubtedly has an active vocation 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 determines his "I". In contemplation itself, that is, in man's relation 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 is trying to strengthen himself with sports and this is fighting anthropological regression. And one cannot deny the positive meaning of sport, which returns to the ancient, Greek attitude to the body. But sport itself can turn into a means of destroying a person, can create ugliness instead of //29// one hundred harmonization, if it is not subordinated to the integral, harmonious idea of ​​a person. Technical civilization is essentially impersonalistic, it does not know and does not want to know personality. It requires the activity of a person, but does not want a person to be a person. "And it is unusually difficult for a person to stay in this civilization. A person is in everything opposite to a machine. First of all, it is unity in diversity and integrity. It assumes its goal from itself, it does not agree to be turned into a part, into a means and tool. But a technical civilization, but a technicalized 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 integrity, i.e. they want man to cease to be a personality. civilization, technized society, the struggle between man and machine.Technology is always ruthless to everything living and existing.And pity for the living and existing should limit the power of technology in life.

Machinism, which triumphs in capitalist civilization, first of all perverts 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 a return to the old psychic structure and to the old natural-organic reality*. And at the same time, the nature of modern technical civilization and what it does to man is unbearable for the Christian consciousness, and not only for the Christian, but for the human consciousness.

(*) An interesting book by Cina Lombroso "La rancon du machinisme" is imbued with too much faith in the possibility of a return to pre-machine 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 the creation of the world, 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 that 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. An old man, a man of the past, took himself for an eternal man. He had the eternal, but he was not an eternal man. The past is not eternal. A new man must appear in the world. And the difficult question is not what is his relation to the old man, but what is his relation to the eternal man, to the eternal in man. Eternal is the image and likeness of God in man, which makes him a person. This cannot be understood statically. The image and likeness of God in man, as in a natural being, is revealed and affirmed in dynamics. This is the relentless struggle against the old, decrepit 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, it is the extermination of man, the disappearance of man, his replacement by another being, with a different, non-human existence. This is the crux of the problem. The machine was created by man, and it can give him a proud consciousness of his dignity and strength. But this pride of man, imperceptibly for him, turns into the humiliation of man. A truly new being may appear, but no longer human. And not at all because a person belongs to the old world, and the new world //31// must certainly not only change a person, but replace him with another being. Man has changed throughout his historical destiny, he has been old and new. But at all times, old and new, man has touched eternity, and this has made him a man. But 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 this. Human beings are dehumanized. The question is raised: to be or not to be a man, not an old man who must overcome, but simply a man. Since the emergence of human self-consciousness, revealed in the Bible and in ancient Greece, this problem has never been posed with such acuteness and depth. European humanism believed in the eternal foundations of human nature. This faith he received from the Greco-Roman world. Christianity believes that man is a creation of God and bears in himself His image and likeness, that man is 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-Christianizing, but also dehumanizing. This is the whole acuteness of the question confronting us with the monstrous power of technology.

A remarkable attempt to resolve the issue before us belongs to the brilliant Christian thinker N. Fedorov, the author of The 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 to actively master the elemental forces of nature, //32//

Bringing him death, and 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, he believed extraordinarily. He does not deify science and technology, for he believed in God and Christ, but science and technology for him are the greatest tools of man in victory over the elemental, irrational, deadly forces of nature. He believed in the wonders 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 prevails in the technical era. He hated the machinism of modern civilization, he hated capitalism created by prodigal sons who had forgotten their fathers. It has a formal resemblance to Marx and communism, but with a complete opposite spirit *. N. Fedorov is one of the few in the history of Christian thought, almost the only one who has overcome the passive understanding of the apocalypse. The Apocalypse is a revelation about the historical destinies of man and the world and about the end, about the final outcome. But this revelation cannot be understood deterministically and fatalistically. The end, the Last Judgment and the eternal death of many are not at all predetermined by divine or natural necessity, they 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 trend in the Soviet period. The traditionally religious elements of N. Fedorov's worldview have weakened in it.

Sky prophecies are conditional. If Christian humanity does not unite for the common cause of mastering the elemental deadly forces, for the victory over death and for the restoration of universal life, for the regulation of world life, if it does not create the kingdom of Christian spiritual labor, if it does not overcome the dualism of theoretical and practical reason, mental and physical labor , will not realize Christian truth, Christian brotherhood and love in 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 Antichrist, the end of the world, the Last Judgment and everything that is described in the Apocalypse. But all this may not be if the "common cause" begins. The eschatology of N. Fedorov 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 raised in all acuteness the religious question of human activity and technology. The power of technology and machine is connected with capitalism, it was born in the depths of the capitalist system, and the machine was the most powerful tool for the development of capitalism. Communism entirely accepts this super-machine and technism from capitalist civilization and creates a real religion of the machine, which is worshiped as a totem. Undoubtedly, if technology created capitalism, then it can also contribute to the overcoming of capitalism and the creation of a different, more just social order. It can become a powerful tool in solving a social problem. But in this case, everything will depend on which spirit wins, which spirit the person will be. Materialistic communion //34// nism subordinates the problem of man as an integral soul-bodily being to the problem of society. Not a person should organize society, but society should organize a person. But in reality, the opposite is true: man has primacy, man must organize society and the world, and this organization will depend on what kind of person, 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 vocation. 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, does not correspond to his dignity. It is not the machine that is responsible at all, 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. Not a machine, but a man is guilty of the terrible power of machinism, it was not a machine that decapitated a person, but the person himself became desensitized. The problem must be transferred from outside to inside. The spiritual limitation of "the power of technology and machines over human life is the work of the spirit, the work of man himself, depends on the tension of his spirituality. The machine can be a great tool in the hands of man, in his victory over the power of elemental nature, but for this a person must be a spiritual being, free spirit. The world is undergoing a process of dehumanization, dehumanization in everything. But this dehumanization is the fault of the man himself, and 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// covers. Physics studies invisible light rays and inaudible sound, and thereby takes light and sound beyond the limits of the world of light and sound familiar to man. Similarly, Einstein deduces the spatial world familiar to man. New discoveries in physics have a positive significance 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. This brings us to the religious and philosophical problem of man.

Man can be absorbed by the ever more unfolding cosmic infinity. Christianity freed man from the power of cosmic infinity, in which he was immersed in the ancient world, from the power of the spirits and demons of nature. It set 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 man's independence 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 used 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. The ability to organize manifested by a person disorganizes him internally. A new problem is posed for the Christian consciousness. The Christian response to the new position of man in the world presupposes a change in the Christian consciousness in understanding the calling of man in the world. The problem of Christian anthropolos is put in the center //36//

Gee. We cannot be satisfied with patriotic and scholastic anthropology, or with humanistic anthropology. On the cognitive side, the problem of philosophical anthropology becomes central. Man and machine, man and organism, man and space - all the problems of philosophical and religious anthropology. In his historical destiny, 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 protection, independence and liberation. He created culture, states, national units, classes. But he became a slave of the state, nationality, classes. Now he is entering a new period. He wants to master the irrational social forces. It creates an organized society and developed technology, makes man an instrument for organizing life and for the final mastery of nature. But he becomes a slave to organized society and technology, a slave to the machine into which society has been turned and man himself imperceptibly turns. But in newer and newer forms the problem of man's liberation, mastery of the spirit of nature and society is posed. This problem can only be solved by a consciousness that will put man above nature and society, put the human soul above all natural and social forces that must submit to it. That which liberated man must be accepted, and rejected that which enslaved him. But this truth about man, about his dignity and his vocation is embedded in Christianity, although, perhaps, it was not revealed enough in its history and was often distorted. The path of the final liberation of man and the ultimate fulfillment //37// 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 transfigured earth, the transfigured cosmos.

Preface to the publication in the journal "Problems of Philosophy". Pages not 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, reckless, almost "metaphysics with natural philosophy, thinking in the categories of" spiritualistic materialism ", moralistic attribution to objects of "inherent" qualities in them and faith in the teaching purpose of philosophy.

Like many Russian philosophers, Berdyaev did not create a philosophical system; everything written by him is united not by a system, but by a common religious-philosopher-| skim worldview with more or: less elaboration of individual parts and aspects. In this worldview, elements are easily distinguishable, due to dogmatic theology, esoteric mysticism, journalism, gnostic conjectures, moralistic pathos and "prophetic insights" of the mysteries of the future. However, with all the diversity and contradictions of the initial motives, Berdyaev was not an eclecticist. 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, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Jaspers. “The very combination of these incompatible names excludes the idea of ​​an 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 precisely the worldview that Berdyaev developed from the mission of “philosophical defense of the truth of the new religious consciousness” that he voluntarily assumed, and 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 find neither strict definitions, nor consistent discursive development, nor evidence, nor exact 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 stream, willfully changing its course and breaking into parallel branches. Berdyaev talked a lot about the beginnings of anarchy and formlessness, rooted in the Russian cultural tradition. However, in his writings this anarchism, due to primary literary or moralistic reactions and contempt for finished perfection, manifested itself perhaps more clearly than in any of his contemporaries. And, judging by the confession of Berdyaev, this did not sadden him at all: “I was little interested in the product of my work, its perfection. I was interested in expressing myself and shouting to the world what the inner voice reveals 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 strayed into the monologue tone of a prophetic teacher; cooling of passion seemed to him a deadly routine. Undoubtedly, such a conjugation of journalism and philosophy was predetermined by the fact that Berdyaev realized himself as an apologist for the truth, which he chivalrously defended in the face of all sorts of "temptations." And this apologetic pathos remains with him even where he wants to destroy something, where he gives free rein to his pious “problematics” or accusatory criticism of any orthodoxy. Hence the ideological nature of its contradictions; hence his thinking in "books": the idea, the plan of a book usually preceded his philosophical study of the subject; finally, this is also where Rgazenz, the present tense of his philosophical explications, comes from: Berdyaev philosophizes here and now, without moving towards clarifying the boundaries of neighboring semantic spaces, without questioning the essence of these boundaries - any of his questions casts a sparing shadow of an answer.

Undoubtedly, both the problematics, and the sense of life, and the style of thought of Berdyaev 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 Berdyaev’s fundamental idea of ​​a two-layer reality, divided into the real world and the fake 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 of the frozen “world of objects” to them, and finally, about his projective-utopian eschatology embodied in the theurgic effort of man; this 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 the philosophy of the spirit, emphasizing at the same time 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 trend, Berdyaev's philosophy is dualistic: it is a 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 Jakob Boehme, but radicalizes his doctrine of unguided. From the Abyss of primary freedom, according to Berdyaev, God is revealed, and from it the personality of man is also revealed. Non-being freely agreed to being, and therefore God is omnipotent only over being, but is 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 god-like, the divine in man. However, the divine in man, insists Berdyaev, is not "supernatural" and is not a special act of grace, but is a spiritual beginning in him as a special reality. Man's humanity is also God-manhood: by realizing the image of God in himself, man realizes the human image in himself, and by realizing the human image in himself, he realizes the image of God in himself. The admission of uncreated freedom explains the origin of evil and the sacrificial descent of God into the abyss of freedom, its enlightenment from within by 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 into 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, the creative act of a person is objectified: freedom is captured by necessity, 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 transfiguration 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.

Eschatological, according to Berdyaev, is world history. The meaning of history presupposes the end of history. And vice versa - the recognition of the infinite progress in history is the recognition of the meaninglessness of history. The meaning of history means overcoming decay and the evil infinity of time, i.e., the creative discovery of a radically different, new zone, the “last”, eschatological world, opposed to the world of objectification, alienation, impersonality, enmity.

The philosophy of freedom and the philosophy of creativity are the focus of Berdyaev's entire philosophy. Its metaphysics, philosophy of religion and culture, its historiosophy, epistemology, and ethics come from this center and return to it.

The basis of Berdyaev's ethics is personalism. Berdyaev distinguishes three utiks: 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, as well as the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of culture "and the philosophy of history, finally, like the entire philosophical anthropology of Berdyaev, rests against eschatology - the problem of ultimate meaning, the problem of immortality, hell and paradise. And here Berdyaev makes his decisive judgment: hell is in the subjective, not the objective, and it remains in time, in infinite time, does not pass into eternity. The ontology of an 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 the other side of our local “good” and “ala”, and thinking about it can always be only 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 Cosmos”, “Man and Society”, “Man and Power”, “Human Personality and Suprapersonal 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" (Birzhevye Vedomosti newspaper, October 12). This article, directed against the neo-Slavophile illusions awakened by the First World War about the superiority of the “strength of the Russian national spirit” over the “spiritual power of German technism”, is interesting because in it Berdyaev considers technology as a liberating “spirit of man” principle: “Secularization, like a machine , kills not the spirit, but the matter. Mechanization is the tearing off and separation of material heaviness from the spirit, the lightening of the spirit... With the entry of the machine into human life, not the spirit, but the flesh is mortified... Fear and fear of the machine is materialism and weakness of the spirit... The Russian consciousness must renounce the Slavophile and populist utopianism and courageously move on to complex development and to the machine.

In the early 1920s, Berdyaev again returned to the theme of "man and machine", this time considering it in a historiosophical aspect. This approach is quite understandable - everyone spoke about the decisive, turning role of technology in those years: both the ideologists of technocratic utopias, and their opponents (remember E. Zamyatin’s “We”), and the futurists, and the proletarians, and the artists of the revolutionary avant-garde, and the 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 Mastering Time), and, finally, O. Spengler, sensational at that time: precisely the head of the Machine (where the machine acts as the final symbol of the "Faustian soul" and the entire Western European civilization) ends the second volume of his "The Decline of Europe". Berdyaev also talks about the turning point of technology in the fate 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 lies in the fact that the machine “not only apparently conquers the natural elements for man, but it also conquers man himself; it 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, division, by virtue of which a person, as it were, ceases to be a natural being, as he was before” (p. 182).

In the published article "Man and Machine" - Berdyaev especially appreciated this article: 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 in the technology of the human body (remember P. A. Florensky’s Organ Projection) 7 And are we entitled to think about the hopelessness of humanitarization of “technical” thinking? technology changes the nature and organization of labor, does this mean that a person has always dutifully followed the fo rmam? Alas, Berdyaev says nothing about the connections of technology with various social structures. For him, technology is only an object for a person, which determines him from the outside. But is man capable of "spiritually limiting the power of technology", i.e., according to Berdyaev, of turning technology into a subject, while remaining on the basis of subject-object dualism?

Berdyaev has an unusually wide horizon, which allows him to cover many aspects of the problem at once, but at the same time he has an extremely narrow sector of clarification, of the 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 relationship between them and the correct attitude towards them. As a result, both the object, and the image of the object, and the thought about them turn out to be almost identical, stuck together and therefore stuck between brilliant conjectures 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" way of description; hence the inevitably “literary” style of philosophizing bordering on unconscious “literaryism”. Here, publicistic excitement or poetic dream pushes aside philosophical effort proper 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 former assessment of the role of technology, as well as his belief in the victory of the human spirit. Berdyaev, insisting that the machine and technology have a cosmogonic significance, establishes "four periods in relation to man to the cosmos": 1) man's immersion in cosmic life, dependence on the magical and mythological attitude (primitive pastoralism and agriculture, slavery); 2) liberation from the power of cosmic forces, from the spirits and demons of nature, the struggle through asceticism, and not technology (elementary forms of economy, serfdom); 3) the mechanization of nature, the scientific and technical mastery of nature, the development of industry in the form of capitalism, the emancipation of labor and its enslavement, its enslavement by the exploitation of the instruments of production, and the necessity of selling labor for wages; 4) the decomposition of the cosmic order in the discovery of infinitely large and infinitely small, the formation of a new organization, in contrast to organicity, by technology and machinism, a terrible increase in man's power over nature and the slavery of man to his own discoveries 3. But after a short digression, Berdyaev makes a characteristic of corrective addition to his style of thinking: “It is also possible to think of the fifth period in relation to man to nature. In this fifth period, there will be an even greater mastery of the forces of nature by man, a real emancipation 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. ”Of course, in this testament of his, Berdyaev, speaking of freedom, did not at all mean “freedom of choice”, when a person is presented standing before life or history, as if facing a river No, freedom for Berdyaev meant that we were already swimming, floundering, and it was not too late - against all odds! - to change our own 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 brought up 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 on II. K. Mikhailovsky ”(St. Petersburg, 1901) and the article “The Ethical Problem in the Light of the Philosophy of Idealism” in the sensational collection “Problems of Idealism” (Moscow, 1902). In 1905, Berdyaev, together with S. N. Bulgakov, published the socio-philosophical and literary journal “Questions of Zhiani” in St. Petersburg, two years later he 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 "The Way"; here, at the beginning of the 1910s, he for the first time formulated the foundations of his original philosophy of freedom and the philosophy of creativity, captured 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 absolute inevitability of Russia going through the experience of Bolshevism. This is a moment of the inner fate of the Russian people, its existential dialectics. 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 forward movement is possible.

However, the realization of the inevitability of the revolution did not mean for Berdyaev reconciliation with what accompanied it. Hence - the inconsistency of Berdyaev's judgments about the "origins and meaning of Russian communism" and attacks on him from different sides: some accused him of "Bolshevism", of "sympathy for the Reds", others of anti-communism.

In 1919, Berdyaev was elected a professor at Moscow University, in the autumn 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 lectured on the history of Russian thought and ethics; in the same place, in Berlin, he created the Religious-Philosophical Academy, transferred in 1925 to Paris. In Paris, from 1925 to 1940, Berdyaev edited the journal of religious and philosophical thought, The Way, founded by him.

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 Appointment of Man. The experience of paradoxical ethics” (1931), “I and the world of objects. An Experience in the Philosophy of Solitude and Communication” (1934), “Spirit and Reality. Fundamentals of God-human spirituality” (1937), “On the slavery and freedom of man. An Experience in 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 it, Berdyaev remained true to his openly proclaimed patriotic position. He persistently convinced everyone of the "post-war transformation of Russia", although he was painfully experiencing the growth of the Stalinist-Zhdanovist terror. The story of A. Akhmatova and M. Zoshchenko made a particularly heavy impression on him.

Until the end of his life, Berdyaev continued his philosophical work. The last books written by him - "The Experience of Eschatological Metaphysics", "Existential Dialectics of the Divine and the Human", "The Kingdom of the Spirit and the Kingdom of Caesar", "Truth and Revelation" - is another edition of his tragic philosophy of freedom. They were published after his death.

This year he streamlined and published his predictions. The forecast for the future of humanity is presented in the form of a tight schedule, and events will begin to develop from 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 get as a weapon to any aggressor or provocateur, for the reason that it will be ubiquitous. The people of the future will be able to regulate it.

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

Engaged in the study of artificial intelligence since the 70s, Raymond Kurzweil is recognized as one of the leading experts in this field. His technological predictions almost certainly come true: self-driving cars, wireless communication, a chess grandmaster losing to a computer, and so on. He has been awarded three presidents, and Bill Gates calls Kurzweil "the best of all who predict the development of future technologies." 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 the actual problems of mankind, explores the technologies of tomorrow 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 with 100% use of artificial intelligence. Dynamically changing, Googlers are ready to revolutionize everything in a row - 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 investments. 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 the adherents of transhumanism. Many do not believe in AI at all, or consider it a 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:

As soon as AI actually starts to work, then immediately everyone stops calling it artificial intelligence.

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

What is striking about biology is the lack of explanation for the necessity of death. When trying 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 inevitability does not exist and it is only a matter of time before science approaches the discovery of the true causes of human mortality. Then this terrible disease will be cured

The director of technical development of the “corporation of goodness” 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 the architecture of the computer (and increase the write 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 a person, his connection with God and further spiritual development is increasingly being raised. This is due to the wasting of spiritual forces on finding new technical innovations and learning to use these same technologies. It's worth asking a question here:

“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 technological progress. He notes that the change of consciousness occurred when the views of Copernicus became dominant, when the infinity of the worlds was revealed.

Pascal was horrified by this still theoretical change, he was frightened by the silence of infinite spaces and worlds.

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

“The machine is of great 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, the spirit to matter, the irrational to the rational.

Cosmos implies a certain shell where the 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 spiritual in the person himself.

Berdyaev notes that a person, as an element independent of 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 grand 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 survive."

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

Despite the fact that the spiritual and spiritual aspects of a person are considered inseparable, every living being has a soul, and there may not be a spirit. Therefore, in the struggle for his independence in this world, a person runs the risk of losing his spiritual aspect and succumbing to his own pride, being subdued by his own discoveries.

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

“But when a person is given a 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 a person, on what he will use this power for, what kind of spirit he is.”

Nikolai Alexandrovich 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 renewable, even if it did not exist at all, but sincerity, if lost, cannot be restored.

“What is the main danger that a machine brings with it to a person, a danger that has already been fully revealed? I don't think it was a danger primarily to the spirit and spiritual life. Machinery and technology inflict terrible defeats on the spiritual life of a person and, above all, emotional life, human feelings. The mental-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 the new time is this compensation for the loss of the cosmos, in which man occupied his hierarchical place, in which he felt himself surrounded by higher powers.”

With the loss of the cosmos, a person is doomed to lose connection with the world, the loss of his defining properties of humanity - sincerity, strength of mind, and emotional aspect. This will entail a new philosophy of time, where the primacy of the incorporeal, insensible, subjective, evaluative and non-spatial in any phenomena and processes over the material, which is characterized by objectivity, corporality, sensual sensation without evaluation.

« Technique has a cosmogonic meaning, through it a new cosmos is created.

The mass reproduction of technology, the mass technical organization of life destroys all originality and originality, the individuality of man. At the same time, new idols appear, created by man, whom man himself begins to worship. An example is the new models of mobile phones that appear every couple of months. Which drive people crazy in the race to dominate them. But people created this technique themselves, it turns out, they introduced themselves into this addiction. Like drug addicts who themselves can inject themselves with a new dose, so ordinary people make themselves addicted to technology, because they are simply afraid to be alone with themselves and their thoughts, it’s scary to look deep into themselves. Because a lot of people don't have it anymore. But also the herd peculiarity of a person, which has been at all times, can also be attributed to the reason for this race for “arms”. Again, it's scary to be left behind.

It is kind of stupid not to follow technical progress in our time, we are not living in the Stone Age for a long time, and it is impossible to think of a return to the old subsistence 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.

“…reality revealed in art is symbolic, it reflects the world of ideas. Technique, on the other hand, creates a reality devoid of any symbolism; in it, reality is given directly here.

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

After all, spirituality is not only a connection with God, it is primarily 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 its 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 a person's life slows down this progress in culture, a person loses the incentive for further development. Culture ceases to develop, and in the final entry into the technical era, it may completely perish.

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

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

But despite the indisputability of the issues raised and the author's arguments to them, I do not agree with everything with him.

« Soviet technical construction makes a particularly terrible impression. But its originality is not at all in the technique itself - in this respect there is nothing special, all the same, 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.

As a builder, I would like to note that in Soviet times, 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, in contrast to today's construction schedule, in those years, building codes were complied with. They built relying on their analytical thinking, and not on modern computer programs. And to say that there is nothing special in Soviet construction is very simple if you are not a builder. Compare your homeland, while living in France, with its main rival at that time, and even not in its favor - why so much dislike for the motherland? 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 milder and more favorable than the sharp and severe temperature changes in Russia.

Among those expelled was a well-known 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 (the unitary theory of hematopoiesis). It was he who first introduced the concept of "stem cell" into scientific circulation.

Vladimir Kuzmich Zworykin famous inventor. Since 1919, Vladimir Kuzmich, having moved to the USA, worked in various radio engineering firms. Of his many inventions, world fame brought the creation of the iconoscope - the first transmitting television tube, the prototype of the modern kinescope, for which he is considered the "father of television."

It is impossible to tell 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 USA that Zworykin was a Russian gift to America. It 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 come out spiritually. And it is not clear how a person who does not have technical knowledge in construction dares to evaluate the quality of construction activities in general.

As for the very topic of the article about the gloomy future of mankind, enslaved by machines - I do not believe in it. I believe that an inanimate object will never be able to think on its own, let alone 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 personality. It requires the activity of a person, but does not want a person to be a person. And it is unusually difficult for a person 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, he knows what he wants and achieves it, as for me, this is a real person.

Mark Zuckerberg- the creator of the world famous network on the Internet Facebook.

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

In other words, without these very personalities, 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, man does not develop, and without man 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 undeniably 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 the problems directly related to technology and modernity is revealed. One gets the impression that the work is dedicated to our days, although it was written at the beginning of the 20th century.

The appearance of the machine is estimated by Berdyaev as a manifestation of traditional humanism and its values, where a person acts in subordination 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 mankind, and, I must say, they are currently perceived as quite acceptable, because. technique since the beginning of the 20th century. really gained dominance over a person (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 the scientist-technocratic ideology presented with unconditional consistency, although the topic, of course, is quite controversial, because. society cannot but develop, and development, in turn, inevitably leads to civilizational “pluses and minuses”.

It is the study of the article by N.A. Berdyaev "Man and Machine" is devoted to this work.

In his work "Man and Machine" Berdyaev tries to compare eschatological and technical problems, considering technology as "the beginning that frees the spirit of man." His vision extends its gaze into the future, where man, through the spiritual dominant, will again rise above his creation, subordinating it for the benefit of humanity.

Berdyaev distinguishes three stages in human culture: natural-organic, cultural, technical 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 subject and object opposing each other, their mutual influence and tragedy of confrontation.

The article traces the idea of ​​comparing "organic" and "technical". He cites this comparison almost from the 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 the work of people, they gained greater freedom and minimized the cost of physical labor. But the same circumstance radically influenced not only their way of life, the organization of work, but also their thinking and attitude.

One should not underestimate the possibilities of technology and its unconditional influence on the organization of our reality. Life with machines has become much easier, they have greatly facilitated our work. But Berdyaev sharpens the problem precisely on the power of technization. “Technology ceases to be neutral…” And in this sense, it is a dangerous addiction for a person. Berdyaev says that technology kills, absorbs the soul, it is ruthless to man, our consciousness becomes chained to the technical and rational. Technique 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 affects our being, occupying a dominant position in our way of thinking, which affects our soul.

Globalism cannot but form a new reality, where a person becomes a god for himself and for the cosmos. The emptiness of the spirit is compensated by the power of ingenuity, where a new universe of human achievements 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 of implementing scientific discoveries, which is also not at all utopian, but, on the contrary, can be very real.

In this regard, Berdyaev speaks of supporters and opponents of the "improvement of life" through technology. They consider technology as something neutral and indifferent, declaring it the work of engineers, while others “experience technology apocalyptically, horrified by its growing power over human life, seeing in it the identity of the spirit of Antichrist. Such an 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 precisely the expansion of technology in modern society. You can talk about this topic as much as you like, but, undoubtedly, technology allows you to achieve the greatest result 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 the spiritual problems of mankind. The person is responsible for them. But technology can radically affect the consciousness of the masses, and in view of the insecurity of a person from the global nature of problems, he has what he has. It is in his will to change reality. And if God is dead, as Nietzsche, Sartre and many others claimed, the whole responsibility lies with the person, it is another matter that this burden is beyond his strength.

Berdyaev offers a way out of this problem, foreseeing future metamorphoses; he believes that the spirit will subjugate the realm of machines for the benefit of mankind, but man will have to turn into introspection in order to regain his spirituality. Only this can save him and free him from the addiction of machines.

It can be concluded that technology will again be subordinated to man. This traces the nostalgia for the lost paradise, which corresponds to the Christian vision of Berdyaev. The dream of regaining what was lost will inevitably end in the victory of the spirit in human history. The purpose of progress, according to Berdyaev, is precisely this.

The tragedy is that man has become so dependent on the machines that he himself has created that he prefers more comfort than rapprochement in a social environment where he feels quite alone. Machines are gradually replacing the individual, and this is seen as an 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 non-academic philosophizing, characteristic of many Russian thinkers, are easily discernible: indifference to the methodology of philosophical discourse, a reckless, almost ecstatic striving to solve the “last questions” uncritically perceived from theology, the “sticking together” of metaphysics with natural philosophy, thinking in the categories of "spiritualistic materialism", moralistic attribution to objects of "inherent" qualities in them, and belief in the teaching purpose of philosophy.

Like many Russian philosophers, Berdyaev did not create a philosophical system; everything written by him is united not by a system, but by a common 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 strayed into the monologue tone of a prophetic teacher; cooling of passion seemed to him a deadly routine.

Of course, both the problematics, and the sense of life, and the style of thought of Berdyaev entirely belong to the culture of modernism and remain incomprehensible outside of modernism. Berdyaev himself called his philosophy existential, or the philosophy of the spirit, emphasizing at the same time 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 the philosophy of technology has 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 a 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 lack of faith, in an age of weakening not only the old religious faith, but also the humanistic faith of the 19th century, the only strong faith of modern civilized man remains faith in technology, in its endless development. Technique is the last love of man, 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 article, it is technology in its original meaning that is opposed to man, as a technical tool, as means of life. And it is precisely about “substituting 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 is facing 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, entry into the technical era leads culture to death." It is impossible to fully agree with this, since in other cases technology makes it possible to convey this same culture to the masses (radio devices, televisions, MP3 players), thus being a kind of conductor or intermediary. With the help of technology, music is created, filmed films are reproduced, an atmosphere is created in the theater, newspapers, magazines, etc. are published.

Before, 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, “creation rebels against its creator, no longer obeys him. We see this in all processes of rationalization in the technical era, when a person is replaced by a machine, technology will replace the organic-irrational with the organized-rational. But it generates new irrational consequences in social life. Thus the rationalization of industry breeds unemployment, the greatest scourge of our time.”

The labor of man is being replaced by machines, which is a positive conquest which would have to abolish the slavery and poverty of man. 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, 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 acute problems of 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 spirit itself, which created technique and 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 "a titanic struggle of man and nature technized by him."

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

Carried away by reasoning about the detrimental effect of technology on a person, the author delves into philosophical reflections on time and its significance for a person: “A person has no time for eternity. He is required to move on to the next time as soon 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 ... ". And in general, the article devoted 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 at the beginning of the 20th century. an inseparable question about the fate of man and the fate of culture.

On the basis of the foregoing, we can conclude that Berdyaev says that a person can be absorbed by the more and more revealing cosmic infinity. Christianity freed man from the power of cosmic infinity, in which he was immersed in the ancient world, from the power of the spirits and demons of nature. It set 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 man's independence 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 used 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.

The ability to organize manifested by a person disorganizes him internally. A new problem is posed for the Christian consciousness. Technique has destroyed the old order of things, which began in the eighteenth 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, vital questions of the individual. She can't 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 immense Universe. Realizing the scale, a person understands how little he has done yet and how much he still wants to do. Technique is for a person a 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 more comfort than rapprochement in a social environment where he feels quite alone. Only spiritual potential can return a person to freedom again.

List of Literature

1. Berdyaev N. Man and machine. (The problem of sociology and metaphysics of technology) // "Way". - 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 tech. universities] / I. A. Negodaev. - Rostov n / D .: DSTU, 1997

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Text analysis by N.A. Berdyaev "Man and Machine"

In his work "Man and Machine" Berdyaev tries to compare eschatological and technical problems, considering technology as "the beginning that frees the spirit of man." His vision extends its gaze into the future, where man, through the spiritual dominant, will again rise above his creation, subordinating it for the benefit of humanity.

Berdyaev distinguishes three stages in human culture: natural-organic, cultural, technical 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 subject and object opposing each other and their mutual influence and tragedy of confrontation.

In his work, he makes the following arguments.

His article "Man and Machine" traces the idea of ​​juxtaposing "organic" and "technical". He cites this comparison almost from the 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 the work of people, they gained greater freedom and minimized the cost of physical labor. But the same circumstance radically influenced not only their way of life, the organization of work, but also their thinking and attitude.

One should not underestimate the possibilities of technology and its unconditional influence on the organization of our reality. Life with machines has become much easier, they have greatly facilitated our work. But Berdyaev sharpens the problem precisely on the power of technization. “Technology ceases to be neutral…” And in this sense, it is a dangerous addiction for a person. Berdyaev says that technology kills, absorbs the soul, it is ruthless to man, our consciousness becomes chained to the technical and rational. Technique 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 affects our being, occupying a dominant position in our way of thinking, which affects our soul.

Globalism cannot but form a new reality, where a person becomes a god for himself and for the cosmos. The emptiness of the spirit is compensated by the power of ingenuity, where a new universe of human achievements 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 of implementing scientific discoveries, which is also not at all utopian, but, on the contrary, can be very real.

In this regard, Berdyaev speaks of supporters and opponents of the "improvement of life" through technology. They consider technology as something neutral and indifferent, declaring it the work of engineers, while others “experience technology apocalyptically, horrified by its growing power over human life, seeing in it the identity of the spirit of Antichrist. Such an 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 precisely the expansion of technology in modern society. You can talk about this topic as much as you like, but, undoubtedly, technology allows you to achieve the greatest result 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 distinguished: globalization, man, machine, technology, science.

The following questions arise in connection with the text.

Is a person free and called to activity, does his reality, like his fate, depend only on him?

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

Does technology solve spiritual problems?

But is it the cause?

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 the spiritual problems of mankind. The person is responsible for them. But technology can radically affect the consciousness of the masses, and in view of the insecurity of a person from the global nature of problems, he has what he has. It is in his will to change reality. If God is dead, as Nietzsche, Sartre and many others argued, the entire responsibility lies with the person, another thing is that this burden is beyond his strength.

Berdyaev offers a way out of this problem, foreseeing future metamorphoses; he believes that the spirit will subjugate the realm of machines for the benefit of mankind, but man will have to turn into introspection in order to regain his spiritual beginning. Only this can save him and free him from the addiction of machines.

It can be concluded that technology will again be subordinated to man. This traces the nostalgia for the lost paradise, which corresponds to the Christian vision of Berdyaev. The dream of finding the lost ... will inevitably end in the victory of the spirit in human history. The purpose of progress, according to Berdyaev, is precisely this.

The tragedy is that man has become so dependent on the machines that he himself has created that he prefers more comfort than rapprochement in a social environment where he feels quite alone. Machines are gradually replacing the individual, and this is seen as an 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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