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FRANK Semyon Ludvigovich(01/16/28/1877, Moscow, – 12/10/1950, near London), Russian religious philosopher. In 1894 he entered the Faculty of Law of Moscow University. In 1899 he was expelled for promoting Marxism. He completed his education in Gelderberg and Munich. Evolved from Marxism to “Christian realism.” Since 1912 – private associate professor at St. Petersburg University. In 1915 he defended his master's thesis (“Subject of Knowledge”). Since 1917 - head. department and dean of the historical and philological faculty of Saratov University. In 1918 he published the book “The Soul of Man,” which he presented as a dissertation for a doctorate, but due to the difficult conditions of Russian life, the defense did not take place. In 1921 he took the chair of philosophy at Moscow University. In 1922 he was expelled from Soviet Russia. At first I worked in Germany. From 1930 to 1937 he lectured at the University of Berlin; in 1937 he moved to France, and in 1945 he moved to England.

The main works of S. L. Frank: “Essay on the methodology of social sciences” (1922); "Introduction to Philosophy in concise presentation"(1923); "The Meaning of Life" (1926); “Spiritual foundations of society. Introduction to Social Philosophy" (1930); “Unfathomable. Ontological introduction to the philosophy of religion" (1939); "The light in the darkness. Experience of Christian ethics and social philosophy" (1949); “Reality and man. Metaphysics of human existence" (1956).

According to the most authoritative historian of Russian philosophy, V.V. Zenkovsky, “in terms of the strength of his philosophical vision, Frank can without hesitation be called the most outstanding Russian philosopher,” who created a harmonious, thoughtful system based on the “metaphysics of unity.”

Social philosophy occupies an important place in Frank's system. In the work “Spiritual Foundations of Society. Introduction to Social Philosophy" Frank explores the question of the essence and meaning of social existence. Social being is understood by him not as material being, empirical reality, and not as mental, ideal being, but as a sphere ideal-real. This “social ideal-realism” finds expression in categories of spiritual existence. The main thesis of Frank's social philosophy is that the spiritual existence of society is being a cathedral: society is not a collection of individuals, not an organism - it is conciliarity, i.e. organically internal unity. The foundation of this unity is made up of three highest spiritual values: “the beginning of service, the beginning of solidarity, the beginning of freedom.”

According to Frank, driving force social life cannot be either ideas or material needs, but only man himself in the entire integrity of his physical-spiritual being. The highest goal of public life is the embodiment of the fullness of Divine truth in collective human life. The most adequate expression of such a life is Love in all its manifestations: from love for one’s neighbor to love for God. Thus, Frank’s social philosophy organically merges with Christian ethics (cf. the title of one of his main works - “The Experience of Christian Ethics and Social Philosophy”). This anthology publishes the “Introduction” from Frank’s book “Spiritual Foundations of Society.” According to the Russian philosopher B.P. Vysheslavtsev, “the value of this book is determined primarily by the fact that it sums up the results of social science over the past 50 years.” In the “Introduction,” Frank formulates the main question of social philosophy as a question about the essence and meaning of social existence, and also examines the relationship between social philosophy, sociology, philosophy of law and philosophy of history.

Human society is the highest stage of development of living systems, the main elements of which are people, the forms of their joint activity, primarily labor, products of labor, various shapes property and the age-old struggle for it, politics and the state, a set of various institutions, a refined sphere of spirit. Society can also be defined as a self-organized system of behavior and relationships between people with each other and with nature: after all, society is initially inscribed in the context of relationships not with the entire Cosmos, but directly with the territory on which this or that particular society is located.

When we talk about human society as a whole, we mean a union that includes all people. Without this, society would be only a certain number of individual, disparate individuals living separately in a given territory, and not connected by the threads of common interests, goals, actions, labor activity, traditions, economics, culture, etc. Humans are created to live in society.

The concept of society covers not only all living people, but also all past and future generations, i.e. all of humanity in its history and perspective. The unification of people into an integral system occurs and is reproduced regardless of the will of its members. No one is enrolled in human society by application: the natural fact of birth inevitably includes a person in social life.

Society at any stage of its development is a multifaceted entity, a complex interweaving of many different connections and relationships between people. The life of a society is not limited to the lives of its constituent people. Society creates material and spiritual values that cannot be created by individual people: technology, institutions, language, science, philosophy, art, morality, law, politics, etc. The complex and contradictory tangle of human relationships, actions and their results is what makes up society as a whole. Human society is an internally dismembered complete system, which arose historically and is continuously developing, going through successive stages of qualitative transformations. The general laws of this system determine the character of any element included in the system and guide its development. Consequently, each element of this system can be understood not in its individuality, but only in the connection that leads to the whole. Society is a single social organism, internal organization which is a set of certain, diverse connections characteristic of a given system, which are ultimately based on human labor. The structure of human society is formed by: production and the production, economic, and social relations that develop on its basis, including class, national, and family relations; political relations and, finally, the spiritual sphere of social life - science, philosophy, art, morality, religion, etc.

There is no society in general, just as there is no person in general, but there are specific forms of social organization of people. Despite all the differences between specific societies, any society has features that distinguish it from a herd of animals and, in general, from everything that is not a society.

Society has a clear internal division of its constituent components and their close interconnection. Economics, politics, science, law, morality, art, family, religion do not exist without connection with each other. Without a social whole, without people inextricably linked with each other by the entire system of social relations, there is no economy, no politics, no morality, etc. All these are facets of a single whole, living according to the same laws. Political organizations, economic relations (production, distribution, consumption), legal norms, family and marriage relations, family ties, national and other relations unite people and contrast them with each other in various combinations human integral collective.

People constantly carry out the process of social production of their lives: the production of material goods, the production of people as social beings, the production of the appropriate type of relationships between people, the very form of communication and the production of ideas. In society, economic, economic, state, family relations, as well as a whole series of ideological phenomena, are intertwined in the most intricate way. All this interacts, changes, shimmers with all sorts of colors and generally forms the flow of social life. The life basis of this flow is labor. People constantly weave and tie the bizarre, multi-colored threads of personal and universal destiny through their everyday actions - labor.

It is society that represents the main condition for the more or less normal existence and development of people, for a lonely person, left to himself, is powerless against the elements of nature, against predatory animals and “inhuman people.” Society, while protecting a person’s personal freedoms, at the same time limits this freedom with certain norms, customs, rights and responsibilities. But these restrictions follow from the essence of the matter, i.e. from the interests of members of society.

In conclusion, we emphasize once again that society is an integral system of human life. By society we mean a union of people united to achieve results that are inaccessible to the strength of each individual. Society is a whole in which individuals participate, in which they are included, but which is not formed by them at all. arithmetic sum or mechanical mass. When we talk about society, we mean the union of people, thereby fundamentally distinguishing human society from various kinds of animal communities that they form instinctively, driven by biological needs. Society, according to D. Diderot, gives man power over other animals. Thanks to society, man is not content with his native elements, but extends his power to the sea. The same union provides him with cures for illnesses, help in old age, and gives consolation in sorrows and sorrows. He, so to speak, gives him the strength to fight fate. Destroy sociability, and you destroy the unity of the human race, on which the preservation of life and all its happiness depend.

The idea of civil society. Civil society is a unity of various individuals that lives in a system of rule of law, where the principle of protecting human rights operates. In a truly civil society, each person is an end in himself and the highest value. However, a person without relationships with other people cannot satisfy his needs and achieve his goals in their entirety. All this constitutes a necessary condition for the realization of good for everyone. After all, the life of every person is connected with a social community, which means that the whole is the relationship between people, the soil on which the freedom of all citizens is nurtured and their natural talents are developed. In the community of people, everything irrational, natural and random is manifested - the accidents of birth and happiness, here waves of all passions arise and flow, controlled only by the radiance of reason penetrating them.

According to G. Hegel, civil society is the unification of members as independent subjects of a community based on their needs and through the legal structure as a means of ensuring the security of persons and property and through the order of life for their special and common interests.

The fundamental principle of civil society is to ensure the life, well-being and dignity of the individual as a full citizen of a given society. Individual goals and interests, thus conditioned in their implementation by the interests of the whole, determine a system of comprehensive dependence, so that the means to fulfillment and the good of each person and their legal existence are intertwined with the means of existence, the good and the right of all people. They are based on this and only in this connection are valid and secured. This system of society is civil society.

When civil society became somewhat developed, people gave up (to a certain extent) their natural freedom and submitted to the authority of the civil state. This gave them a sure and valuable advantage, which they could only hope for with the advent of the civil principle. It was for his sake that they provided the state with the power of all members of society, which makes it possible to ensure the execution of laws. This sure and valuable advantage for which men have united consists in mutual protection from possible harm from other people, as well as in resisting their violence, with the help of a still greater force capable of punishing crimes committed.

About the social structure of society. It has long been noted that in society there are social classes that differ in their status, interests and aspirations. In attempts to understand their origins, a wide variety of views have been expressed. Some saw their source either in the spiritual qualities, psychological characteristics of people, or in their religious views, worldview (after all, as L. Feuerbach aptly put it, people think differently in huts than in palaces); others - in the level of well-being (which was considered regardless of a person’s place in the system of material production). According to G. Hegel, classes rest primarily on the inequality of wealth, income, education, and most importantly - on the nature of labor: these are peasants engaged in agriculture; workers working in factories and plants, on construction sites, etc.; employees who make up the bureaucratic class; people of mental labor - scientists, artists and artists in general, clergy (i.e. those who belong to Russian tradition to the intelligentsia, which we called for some reason “the stratum.” There is something derogatory in this name. Rather, the intelligentsia is a social class of people engaged in mental work.) In foreign and domestic socio-philosophical modern literature The expression “middle class” came into use.

Social structure is a historically established, orderly, relatively stable system of connections and relationships between various elements of society as a whole: individuals and social communities of people (clan, tribe, nationality, nation, family), classes, social groups.

S. Frank*

The moment of “due”, the beginning that normalizes social relations and ideally defines them, exists in two forms: in the form of law and in the form of morality. How to explain this strange fact that human behavior, human will and relationships between people are subject to not one, but two different laws, which in their content are significantly divergent from each other, which leads to countless tragic conflicts in human life? Numerous social reformers have constantly rebelled and are rebelling against an incomprehensible and, as it seems to them, absurd and disastrous duality and are trying to cover all social life without exception with one law - usually a moral law (a typical example here is the moral teaching of Leo Tolstoy); however, their attempts are always frustrated by some fatal necessity; and, thinking through and especially trying to implement them to the end, we involuntarily come to the conviction that these attempts, despite all their naturalness and rational justification, somehow contradict the fundamental, irreducible properties of human nature. Cold and cruel world law, with its inherent legalization of egoism and brutal coercion, sharply contradicts the principles of freedom and love that form the basis moral life; and yet every attempt to completely abolish the law and consistently subordinate life to the moral principle leads to results even worse than the legal state - to the unbridling of the darkest and basest forces of human existence, thanks to which life threatens to turn into pure hell. How to explain this strange duality that permeates the entire social life of man?

Law and Morality

Most of the prevailing theories that try to clearly rationally distinguish these two principles from each other, seeing the grounds and their differences in the differences in the objects and areas to which they are directed (for example, the usual teaching that law normalizes external behavior and relationships between people,

Frank S. Spiritual foundations of society. Introduction to social philosophy // It's him. Spiritual foundations of society. M., 1992. pp. 80-98.

morality determines the inner world of human motives - a teaching, versions of which we find in both Kant and Hegel), then in the different nature of the norms themselves (cf. well-known theory Petrazycki, according to which morality is a sphere of unilateral norms that define an obligation without anyone’s corresponding right, while right is a two-way relationship, where the obligation corresponds to the claim of another person), does not achieve its goal. We cannot enter into a detailed critical examination of them here. We limit ourselves to a general indication that the difference established by the prevailing theories either does not coincide at all with the genuine difference between law and morality, but intersects with it, or, at best, concerns some derived characteristics, without capturing the essence of the relationship. The difficulty and problematic nature of the relationship lies in the fact that both law and morality are legislation that fundamentally covers the entire human life and ultimately stems from a person’s conscience, from the consciousness of what is proper and therefore indistinguishable from each other either in their subject matter or in their origin ; on the one hand, morality concerns not only the inner life of a person and not only personal relationships between people, but, in principle, all relationships between people in general (there is political morality, and morality in commercial matters, etc.); and, on the other hand, law, first of all, as the beginning of the “ought” in general, also concerns not external behavior - the external action of a person as a purely physical phenomenon is not at all subordinate to the ideal beginning of what should be, but is directed towards the will of man and then - since we do not stop on derivative law, borrowing its force from authority state power, and we go back to primary law, which carries its own obligation in itself - it, just like morality, has as its source and carrier conscience, a free inner consciousness of truth - as was shown above.

Thinking through this problematic relationship, in which both principles somehow indistinguishably flow into each other, it is necessary to come to the conclusion that, since we think of both principles under the form of a “law” or “norm,” we cannot generally establish a distinct logical, qualitative difference between them; at best, the difference here will be only quantitative, in degree; Some norms will seem to us to be more moral than legal, others - on the contrary (such as, for example, on the one hand, the norm “thou shalt not kill” and, on the other, the norm “pay your debts”). But even such a purely relative difference in degree in specific norms and relations presupposes a clear logical difference in the very principles that serve as criteria here, and does not relieve us of the need to look for this difference. The latter, however, can only be found if we go beyond the “norm” or “law” as a form of law and morality.

It is very significant that this difference did not always exist in public life and was recognized by human consciousness. Anyway ancient life, in the first stages of social life, with the elementaryness and undifferentiation of spiritual life, this difference is fundamentally absent. IN Old Testament one “law”, having the character of a sacred law as the command of God, covered primarily the moral instructions of the Ten Commandments, and all civil and state relations, and the rules of ritual, and even the requirements of hygiene. In all primitive societies, a single customary law, which always has a sacred character, normalizes human relations, and in it the moral and legal consciousness of man is indistinguishably and completely expressed. The ancient world, however, knew the difference between “natural”, internally authoritative, divine in origin law and positive law, emanating from state power or from a conditional agreement between people (this

the distinction, first outlined by Heraclitus, was developed by the Sophists and artistically depicted in Sophocles’ Antigone), but the difference between law and morality in our sense of these concepts was unknown to him. In essence, the awareness of this difference with sufficient certainty and intensity arises only with Christianity and is the fruit of the Christian understanding of life. In the words “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's,” this distinction is sharply affirmed for the first time.

Thinking about this origin of the duality in question, we most immediately see its essence in the double relationship of the human spirit to the ideal, to the ought. The “ought,” on the one hand, is directly given to the human spirit, lives in it in all its absoluteness and speaks within it and, on the other hand, appears to the human spirit as a transcendental-objective principle, externally addressed to it and demanding obedience from it. But it is precisely this difference that cannot be adequately revealed in the form of a “law.” For the law, as a command, as a requirement addressed to a person, in itself has a certain transcendental and objective character. Understanding “law” in a broad general sense (in a broader sense than it is usually understood), one could say that every law, regardless of its content or even the specific nature of its significance, belongs to the field of law and does not provide an adequate expressions of the beginning of morality; at best, it is possible to distinguish here “natural” law, directly obvious to the human spirit and having absolute force for it, from positive law, but not law from morality. True, the moral principle participates in natural law (as, in essence, according to what was stated above, in any law), and here we have, according to the degree of proximity of a particular form or area of law to its source - the moral principle - the possibility of the above quantitative distinction (distinction by degree) of norms that more or less fully and directly express moral consciousness, but we do not have the most primary distinction between law and morality. A significant mistake in Kant’s ethics (which reproduces the main motive of ancient Stoic ethics) is precisely that it thinks of morality under the form of law (“categorical imperative”) and actually merges it with natural law.

We can understand the essence of the difference, as indicated, only by rising above the form of “law”.

Grace and Law

Social life, like human life, is in its essence, as we have seen, spiritual life. A person is not as he appears to us (and to himself) from the outside, against the background objective world, where he, through connection with his body, is a natural being, a small product and a piece of cosmic nature, and the way he internally exists for himself in his intuitive self-awareness, in living being for himself, there is a certain inner world that has immeasurable depths , from within in contact with absolute, superhuman reality and carrying it within itself. This absolute, divine reality in its practical action on human life is the moral principle in it - not as someone else’s will, not as the fulfillment of a command or law, but as the basis and essence of it own life. This is living essential morality as grace, by which one lives and is spiritually nourished. human life. Christianity in its teaching about grace that surpasses and overcomes the law, in its denunciation of the insufficiency of “Pharisee” morality - not only as the external fulfillment of the law (Kantian “legality”), but also as its internal fulfillment out of “respect” for the law itself (Kantian “ morality"), but without love for God and inner life in Him - in his assertion that the repentant harlot and the thief who turned to Christ

nik closer to God than the most virtuous executor of the law, for the first time revealed to us the true essential basis of moral life. Essential morality is the presence of God in us and our life in Him, morality not as a law, not as the fulfillment of only the transcendental will of God, but as concrete life, as a living substantial principle, immanently inherent in our existence. Outside of this grace-filled life, consciously or unconsciously hidden in the depths of our being, outside of this theanthropic foundation of our human being, there is no moral life at all, there is no beginning that, forming, uniting and improving human life, thereby creates social life.

A person, internally, by the substantial roots of his personality, established in God, externally, by his periphery, belongs to the “world”, to the sphere of objective-cosmic existence. Or, as Plotinus said: the head human soul is in heaven, her feet are on earth. This objective-cosmic being, by its very essence, is transcendental to God: God is not in it, but outside of it and acts in it only as the will that determines it from the outside. Since the human being is only in its final depths and only potentially “deified”, since man, despite his essential spiritual life, remains a natural being, a dualism is revealed in him between the empirically existing and the truly existing, between the external and internal principles, the action of moral life in the external, external sphere of human life can only be realized as consciousness of the “law” of what is due and its implementation. The law as a “must” is essential life, since it is transcendental and acts only as an exemplary idea, as a goal of striving, as the will of God opposed to man. To the extent of his essential God-manhood, man is the son of God, a participant in God’s life, God’s house: to the extent of its absence, he is only a servant and servant of God, an executor of His commands. Hence the sphere of derivative moral life as the subordination of empirical human life to the moral law.

This determines once and for all - until the expected complete transformation and deification of man and the world - the basic dualism of human nature, the joint action in it of the internal, essential moral life and the transcendental law. This relationship is not some arbitrary structure of life dependent on human thoughts and views, but a truly ontologically approved structure of human existence, which is externally generally unchangeable, unshakable, given once and for all, and which internally is only gradually overcome and softened - but within the limits of empirical life never surmountable without a trace - to the extent of a person’s internal spiritual growth.

Seeing this basic dualism between “grace” and “law” is essential for understanding the nature of social life . That duality that amazes moral spirit of a person when observing social life, is painfully felt by him as a kind of abnormality and imperfection and is the source of his constant aspirations for social reform, the duality between cold objectivity, indifference to the human person, abstract community, the externally objective nature of the state-legal and social structure of human existence, with on the one hand, and the intimacy, vitality, unique individuality of his personal life and personal relationships - on the other - this duality has its final root in the inner life of the person himself - in the insurmountable dualism of grace and law, immanent and transcendental moral life. After all, the same duality is already reflected in a person’s personal life, for example, in the relationship between parents and children, where mutual free love and inner intimacy are still surrounded by a shell of strict discipline, or in the most intimate relationships between people, as in friendship and marital love where is the living spiritual

connection, the substantial affinity of souls is expressed at the same time in the fulfillment of certain elementary rules life together, in a sense of duty, which comes into force where direct love is not a strong enough impulse.

The relationship between morality and law discussed above turns out to be only a derivative of this primary relationship between an essentially grace-filled life and life according to the law, and that is why the first relationship cannot be clearly explained to the end, remaining within the limits of its usual external form. “Law”, being always a transcendental relation, a relation in which the structure of the will is bifurcated into two authorities - the highest, commanding, and the lower, executing - in turn, to the extent of its proximity to the inner, grace-filled moral life, fusion with it and immediacy of its connection with it can be more or less “immanent” and “transcendental”, subjective-living or abstract-objective. And it is precisely this secondary and relative difference that is the difference between morality and law. The moral law is the law that the human “I” experiences as an internally understandable and freely recognized law, in contrast to the law that appears from the outside, as an objective force that spiritually compels a person. In the interval between one and the other stands the internally and externally binding force of “good morals,” customs, and public opinion.

The severity and formalism of the law (both moral and legal), the external discipline to which a person is subject, can be softened and reformed by legislation and public opinion only insofar as they no longer correspond to the substantial spiritual life of man and society that has outgrown them, and to this extent and must be subject to revision; otherwise, we have that utopian reformism (be it a political revolution proclaiming “freedom, equality, fraternity”, where they are not internally established in the morals and spiritual nature of man, or pseudo-humanitarian relaxations of public opinion in the field of moral life, which do not correspond to the spiritual maturity of man ), which not only brings harm instead of the expected benefit of life, but inevitably ends in a result directly opposite to its goal: the disturbed balance, determined by the ontological relationships of spiritual life, breaks out against the will of people and is re-established, often as a result of an artificial shock, at a lower level, than before; the overthrown monarchy is replaced by a harsher Caesarian despotism, the required “freedom of morals” is wrapped in violence against the individual; life becomes not freer, softer, more humane, but more connected, harsh and inhuman. The classic example we have experienced of this immanent impotence of rationalistic reformism and the immanent punishment for it is the Bolshevik revolution in its effect on both law and moral life: the demands for the rapid and external “humanization” of legal and moral relations, the mechanical implementation of ideal justice led to “brutality” ”, to a fall to a lower level and to the need from now on for measures of spiritual education adequate to this lower level. On the other hand, the same is the immanent punishment that befalls any deliberate “reaction,” any conservatism that tries to retain the given content of the law and externally defined social relations, when the essentially moral spiritual life of society has already outgrown the present form of the law.

From this ontologically defined duality of immanent-essential moral life and a transcendental attitude to good in the form of subordination to the moral law, the inevitability of two paths of service, two forms of fighting evil and overcoming it follows. Evil, chaos, the elemental unbridledness of man is internally overcome and truly destroyed only by organic

the cultivation of substantial forces of good, the growth of essential truth. This organic process cannot be replaced by any external measures, no attempts to mechanically suppress evil.

In this sense, the “Tolstoy” (widespread and deeply rooted in the Russian consciousness and beyond “Tolstoyism” as a doctrine and school) conviction in the powerlessness of state legal regulation and reform is quite correct and corresponds to the true ontological relationship revealed in the Christian consciousness. But since the whole world lies in evil, the very possibility of preserving and maintaining life in it, and therefore the possibility of essentially morally overcoming evil, requires another task from a person - the task of curbing evil and protecting life from it. This is the task of the law (not only state-legal, but also moral): the main contradiction of Tolstoyism lies here in the fact that it does not see the fundamental homogeneity of law and morality in the form of “law”.

This necessity of a double moral task, a double service of the positive transformation of life through the cultivation of substantial forces of good and purely negative opposition to evil through curbing it and protecting life from it - inevitably leads in practice to tragic conflicts in moral life: for the law with its external coercion, with its inherent to him, the beginning of the mechanical suppression of human freedom in itself contradicts the ideal of essential morality based on freedom and love, and is evidence of man’s sinful weakness. Following the path of the law is like a tribute paid to human sinfulness - and this applies not only to state law, operating through physical coercion or its threat, but also to moral law, operating through moral coercion.

The law is a form of struggle against the imperfection of the world and man, which itself reflects this imperfection. The paradoxical nature of moral life under the form of law, profoundly revealed by the Apostle Paul, lies in the fact that in recognizing and implementing the law as a means of combating sin, man himself recognizes himself as a slave of sin, instead of truly freeing himself from sin through a life of grace. The sinfulness of the police, the court and all kinds of state coercion, so acutely realized by Tolstoy, is only a derivative, reflected expression of this basic moral antinomy of human life, arising from the dualism between grace and law. This antinomy is insoluble by abstract rationalistic moralism. It is removed only in a specific moral consciousness, which understands the inevitability and moral justification of the law as a form of struggle against evil, adequate precisely to the sinful imperfection of the world - a tragic necessity for a person (to the extent of his spiritual lack of enlightenment, not penetrated by the light of essential good) in his obligatory struggle with It is evil to be an accomplice to the world’s sin and take it upon your soul. To imagine that the fight against sin itself should be absolutely sinless, not reflect the sinful imperfection of human nature, and on this basis to evade this fight means theoretically not understanding the ontological structure of spiritual being, and practically falling into the maximum sin of passivity in relation to evil .

The opposite distortion of moral consciousness (also very characteristic of the Russian spirit and expressed in all political fanaticism and moralism) consists in not seeing and denying the imperfection and therefore only the relative justification of the law, in the dream, through external measures of physical and moral coercion, to internally ennoble human life and implant in it the real good. In both cases, the basic dualism of moral life is equally distorted, due to which the essential moral life must be protected

and be replenished by the sphere of law, and the law itself must be nourished by the forces of substantial good and grow on the soil of internal grace-filled existence.

Social life, being in its essence a spiritual life, appears before us with the character of the externally objective existence of a certain “environment”, which, like the material world, surrounds us from the outside and acts on us with the brutal coercion of an external fact, and, moreover, in such a way that this coercion is recognized by us not simply as our dependence on the subjective mental forces of other people, but precisely as the action of an objective, transpsychic, superhuman reality.

The secret of the transpsychic objectivity of social existence lies in the fact that the unity of many, being in the category “we”, being at the same time serving the truth, appears before us with the obligatory nature of the law, “due”, and precisely because of this it is clothed in the form of an objective relationship that ideally subordinates us . The unity of “we”, combined with the moment of “must”, obligatory - which in itself is, as we have seen, the superhuman, divine principle of human life - acquires the character of an objectively superhuman will that rules over us. Hence the mysticism of the state that we indicated above, the rights of any long-term union and social relationship. The basis of this objectivity is the objectification of the moment of law in moral life - objectification not in the sense of the subjective process of the emergence in human consciousness of the “illusion” of objectivity, but in the sense of transferring the principle of what is transcendental in its very essence from the internal spiritual sphere to the external empirical sphere, i.e. the very real embodiment in the social unity of man of this transcendental spiritual principle. Hegel's definition of the state as an “earthly god” in this sense is quite correct, although his practical conclusions from this, based on the religiously false pantheistic identification of the divine with the human, are incorrect. The state (like any social unity and relationship in general) is the human - and therefore always only partial and inevitably distorted - embodiment of the divine principle of truth, behind which stands as its living substantial basis and the supreme authority above it Truth itself, as it is revealed in the grace-filled , the essentially moral spiritual life of humanity. In contrast to this absolute Truth, rooted in the depths of the human spirit and freely and internally nourishing it, the objectively superhuman reality of social unity is constituted by the beginning of “positive law”, i.e. moment of the due, since it appears before us from the outside, in the very surrounding empirical reality of collective human existence and, therefore, in its empirical refraction.

But here we also discover a very close connection between the relationship we are considering and the duality discussed above between “conciliarity” and “external society.” It is obvious that “conciliarity” is somehow connected with the internal, essentially moral life, just as the external community is connected with the beginning of the law. In this sense, conciliarity coincides with the “church” in the deepest and most general sense of this concept, and the public coincides with the “world” - in the sense of the sphere of being opposed to the church.

“Church” and “world”

Already above, when considering conciliarity, the closest connection was indicated between conciliarity as the primary unity of “we” and religiosity - the relationship of the human soul to God. It is no coincidence that always and everywhere - consciously or unconsciously, whether in agreement with the deliberate will of people or contrary to it - society is fundamentally sacred, sacred in nature, social unity in its

in living depths it is felt as a shrine, as an expression of the superhuman-divine principle of human life and, on the other hand, religious life is the primary socially unifying force, directly related to the super-individual unity of “we”. Ontologically, this connection is determined, as we already saw at the same time, by the fact that in both moments a certain opening of the human soul operates and is revealed, its internal relationship to what goes beyond the boundaries of closed consciousness, what stands above it or next to it. Religiously sensing the final ontological depths in which it is rooted, the human soul perceives an all-encompassing unity that transcends its own limitations, through which it is connected internally with everything that exists and, therefore, with other people in the primary inseparability of “we”. And, on the other hand, the awareness of “we”, the internal openness of the human soul in relation to the “neighbor”, “neighbor” in itself is already its openness in relation to the whole and the deepest mystical unity that defines it and is experienced as such.

Love for God and love for man, connection with God and connection with man - no matter how often they empirically diverge from each other and how possible one is without the consciousness of the other - are fundamentally the same feeling, the same ontological relationship . Ancient saying Christian sage Abba Dorotheus, that people, like points inside a circle, are closer to each other, the closer they are to the center of the circle - God, is not just a pious edification, but a completely accurate expression of the ontological relationship. Logically, it can be expressed in the position that the connection between the individual members of the whole and the connection of the members of the whole with the unity that underlies the whole and constitutes it are only correlative moments of a single ontological relationship.

But it also follows from this that those two principles constituting social life, which we considered in previous chapters as two separate and different principles - society as a multi-unity and society as spiritual life and the realization of truth - are also only two correlative and mutually interconnected moments one integral beginning that embraces them. That truth to the realization of which a person strives so that this desire forms, as we have seen, an essential feature of social life as a spiritual life in contrast to empirically natural being - this truth in its content is a complete, free and therefore blissful life; and such a life is nothing other than the realization of unity - a life in which nothing remains external to us and therefore hostile, constraining us and us, but everything is given to us from within, permeates us and internally participates in us, just as we do in German And, on the other hand, conciliarity, the internal unity of “we”, in turn, constitutive of social being, in its very essence is potentially all-embracing and is, therefore, unity - the internal connection and interpenetration of the human spirit with all things, life in unity in contrast fragmentation and alienation of parts of natural existence. But thereby, conciliarity is already the very expression of that inner fullness and freedom of life, which, being the last divine basis of being, in its action on the world and its implementation in it is the transformation and deification of the world, the embodiment in it of the Divine truth itself.

Social life in its very essence as a multi-unity, which is based on the primary unity of “we”, is already a kind of spiritualization of being, bringing it closer to its true ontological fundamental principle and thereby to its moral purpose, raising it to a higher level, closer to God .

The desire for truth, overcoming human, “all too human” nature in its empirical reality, is not only immanently inherent in every

social life, not only constitutes its very essence, but also, conversely, the very “social” character of human life, as such, i.e. how the plurality and living compatibility of human existence with the underlying conciliarity is evidence of the spiritual essence of man, the action in his empirical nature of the highest principle of “truth” that overcomes it.

Social positivism, which considers socio-historical life as a simple fragment and, moreover, a later and derivative part of empirical world existence, as we have seen, is precisely for this reason unable to discern the uniqueness of social existence, to see it as such. In contrast to this currently dominant view, punitive social thought With true blindness, the ancient consciousness well understood this spiritual supernatural being of social life. It is essential to recall that now-forgotten filiation of ideas, through which the very concept of “law of nature” (now having lost its innermost, deep meaning and identified with the blindly meaningless cohesion of natural things and forces), as well as the understanding of the “cosmos” in nature, i.e. a harmonious, internally ordered and coherent whole, arose through the transfer of categories of social existence to nature. Only through assimilating nature to social existence, through seeing the action in it of that very beginning of “law”, that force of order and law restraining chaos that creates social life, was man able to understand nature for the first time - and not just be horrified by it - and create a science of nature. “The sun cannot leave its appointed path, otherwise the Erinnyes, the servants of Truth, will overtake it” - this is how for the first time human thought, in the person of the ancient Greek sage Heraclitus, understood and discovered the pattern of nature. And in accordance with this, the ancient Stoics understood the cosmos as “the state of gods and people.” This ancient, first intuition of humanity, which saw a social principle at the basis of nature itself and comprehended universal existence itself as a kind of union and system of joint spiritual life, not only collapsed itself, supplanted by the opposite consciousness of the deepest heterogeneity between the blind and dead existence of nature and the essence of human life, - a consciousness that, in its overcoming of ancient cosmic pantheism, contained an element of genuine truth introduced by the Jewish-Christian revelation of the chosenness, aristocracy of human nature; but along with the fall of this ancient intuition in the worldview of modern times, even the consciousness of the spiritual supernatural being of human social life itself, which originally determined this fall, disappeared. If nature was first understood according to the human model, i.e. social, the world, now they want to understand man and society according to the model of nature - that nature, modern concept which, as a complex of blind forces, has its relative justification precisely only in its opposition to the supernatural, spiritual being of man and human society.

title ( font-family: "Verdana"; font-size: 110%; hyphenate: none; ) body ( font-size: 80%; font-family: "Calibri"; ) cite > p ( font-size: 90% ; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-align: justify; margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%; text-indent: 0px; ) poem ( font-size: 90%; text -align: left; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; text-indent: 0px; ) text-author ( font-size: 90%; text-align: right; font-size: 90%; text-indent: 3em; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; ) religion Semyon Ludvigovich Frank S. L. FRANK. SPIRITUAL FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIETY. Introduction to social philosophy.

The book “Spiritual Foundations of Society” falls into two sequential themes: the first analyzes the most popular social concepts of the 19th–20th centuries: historicism, biologism, psychologism. These idols of social science of the 19th century. created the illusion of the possibility of reducing social life to “natural” fundamental principles that could be described in the language of positive science. The simple but compelling arguments of S. L. Frank reveal the internal contradiction of these attitudes, which vainly strive to bring the highest from the lowest. At the same time, the author introduces, for him, a fundamental distinction between “conciliar” and “public”. Society is not a derivative association of separate individuals, but a primary integrity, in it (and only in it) a person is given as concreteness. By choosing WE or I as the initial principle, philosophers choose the “lie of abstract collectivism” or the “lie of abstract individualism.” Not inferior in the subtlety of analysis to the pillars of existentialism and dialogism, S. L. Frank proves that “I”, “you” and “we” are correlative and “equally primary”.

Religion, Orthodoxy, Holy Bible, Gospel, Christianity, ethics, philosophy, spirituality, society, sociology ru Vladimir Shneider http://www.ccel.org/contrib/ru/xml/index.html OOoFBTools-2.9 (ExportToFB21), FictionBook Editor Release 2.6, AlReader2 January 2013 Vladimir Shneider OOoFBTools-2013-1-24-7-40-18-1421 2.0

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S. L. FRANK. SPIRITUAL FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIETY. Introduction to social philosophy. Proofreading:

S. L. FRANK

SPIRITUAL FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIETY

Introduction to Social Philosophy

Society is a collective unity realized through external submission to a single guiding will, which is power and law. But underneath the external unification, the power of internal human unity, the power of “conciliarity,” operates. S. L. Frank considers the main life forms of conciliar unity to be marital and family unity (this is the main “educational force of conciliarity”), religious life, as well as “community of fate and life,” that is, the force that cements people into a living ethnos or community.

The philosopher identifies four aspects of conciliarity that distinguish it from others social phenomena. 1) Sobornost is the unity of “I” and “you”, growing out of the primary unity of “we” in this regard. 2) Conciliar unity is rooted in life content personality itself, which is basically love. 3) You can only love the individual, and therefore conciliarity exists where the personal principle can be discerned. 4) In conciliarity, the supra-temporal unity of human generations is realized, when the past and the future live in the present. It is not difficult to notice that what we have before us is not entirely Slavophil conciliarity. In the concept of S. L. Frank, the communal is reduced to a minimum and, for the most part, is classified as social. In the foreground is the ability of the individual, thanks to love, to enter the dimension of community, remaining himself.

From the article:

A. DOBROKHOTOV. FOR THE PUBLICATION OF FRAGMENTS OF S. L. FRANK’S BOOK “SPIRITUAL FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIETY”

PREFACE

The proposed book is an abbreviated sketch of the system of social philosophy on which I have been working intermittently for more than 10 years. According to the original plan, this system of social philosophy was supposed to form the third part of that “trilogy” in which I hoped to express my philosophical worldview and the first two parts of which are represented by my books “The Subject of Knowledge” and “The Soul of Man.” Partly external circumstances in connection with the all-Russian tragedy experienced, which overturned all the calculations and assumptions of every Russian person, partly the further deepening, over this long period, of one’s own philosophical convictions somewhat disrupted the harmony of this plan. Nevertheless, the proposed book, although being a completely independent whole, stands in close connection with my general philosophical worldview and is organically included in its composition. This book is the result of many years of study of social science, which began in early youth, and of general religious and philosophical achievements, and of that life experience, instructive in its tragedy, that all of us, Russian people, have had over the years. last decade. To what extent I managed to merge these three ingredients into a harmonious, internally unified whole is not for me to judge. I myself am well aware of the imperfection of the external form of the book, written in spite of long preparation, somewhat hastily and under unfavorable external conditions. I hope, however, that a religiously and socially interested reader, who is not afraid of an abstract and philosophical substantiation of ideas, will find in the book a system of thoughts that has both theoretical value and is useful for the practical task of spiritual and social renewal that now faces every thinking Russian person .

Berlin, March 1929

S. Frank

INTRODUCTION

ON THE TASKS OF SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY

1. THE PROBLEM OF SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY

What is social life itself? What is its general nature, which is hidden behind all the diversity of its specific manifestations in space and time, starting with the primitive family unit, with some horde of wild nomads, and ending with complex and vast modern states? What place does social life occupy in a person’s life, what is its true purpose and what, in fact, does a person strive for and what can he achieve by building the forms of his social existence? And finally, what place does human social life occupy in world, cosmic existence in general, what area of existence does it belong to, what is its true meaning, what is its attitude to the final, absolute principles and values that underlie life in general?

All these questions in themselves, i.e. how purely theoretical issues, interesting enough to attract intense attention and become the subject of philosophical inquisitiveness, at the same time they have far more than just “academic” or theoretical interest. The problem of the nature and meaning of social life is, obviously, a part, and, moreover, as is clear by itself, a very significant part of the problem of the nature and meaning of human life in general - the problem of human self-awareness. It is connected with the question of what a person is and what is his true purpose. This basic religious and philosophical question, which is, in essence, the final goal of all human thought, of all our mental quests in general, from some very significant aspect comes down to the question of the nature and meaning of social life. For concrete human life is always a joint, that is, social, life. And if human life in general is full of passions and intense struggle, so that, in the words of Goethe, “to be a man is to be a fighter,” then most of all this is revealed in social life. Millions of people throughout world history sacrifice their lives and all their property to the social struggle - whether it be the struggle between peoples or the struggle of parties and groups - with the greatest, all-encompassing passion, devoting themselves to the implementation of any social goals or ideals; they obviously give this realization some kind of absolute meaning that justifies such great sacrifices. But, in essence, it is obvious that every individual social goal acquires value and meaning only as a means of implementation or a form of expression of the general goal and, therefore, the general essence of social life as such. And if in reality, in practice human societies and parties live and act in the same way as individual people, under the rule of blind, unreflective passions, without realizing exactly why and why they strive to achieve this goal, then this does not change the essence of the matter; on the contrary, it is precisely in view of this blindness that the demand for a genuine understanding of social life, the development of genuine social self-awareness, acquires all the greater practical urgency.

Pyotr Ossovsky - about the artist’s work

Ossovsky Petr Pavlovich.

In 1953 he graduated from the Moscow Art Institute named after V.I. Surikov.

Peter Ossovsky is from that generation of artists who came to art in the mid-fifties. They were all different - P. Ossovsky, G. Korzhev, V. Stozharov, Viktor Ivanov, D. Zhilinsky, Gavrilov, the Tkachev brothers. Different in their creative style, in each of them with their own range of images. The talent, the freshness of the young people, who were looking for a long way, brought them together creative forces. Brought together by the desire to show beauty ordinary people, simple human affairs, to discern the face of time in everyday life. Now they are established artists, and time has shown: the young were able to accept those precepts of truth and skill that the experience of previous generations dictated. The tradition continued, a tradition confirmed by the entire development of our art - to feel the breath of time, to see in the passing day themes, images that would reveal modernity, to find means of depiction that would correspond to modernity. Great continuity of experience continued Soviet art. Continuity of outlook on life. Continuity of awareness in the life of oneself - an artist.

At that time, youth exhibitions were organized year after year. This was an honor for the young: young artists were entrusted with the independence of major performances. This required creative responsibility - it gave birth to a spirit of friendly “competition” among young people.

“I know from myself how much the annual youth exhibitions meant to us,” P. Ossovsky would later say. - For me and my comrades, the most serious school was preparing for them, discussing work, and exchanging opinions. I learned from such a master as Sergei Vasilyevich Gerasimov, and yet I will say: I learned from my comrades no less than from him. We confirmed our views on the tasks of art, on the means of solving these problems. Exhibitions taught young people their attitude to art and life. There was independence, there was a determination to express in your own way what you felt and what you experienced. Exhibitions gave perspective and a sense of team, a sense of community...››

Let the first experiments, the first canvases of those young people of those years, seem modest now. Let them be inferior in their creativity to more significant works, significant in the scale of all our art. But the beginning of their subsequent successes lies in canvases almost fifteen years ago, with which they then entered a great artistic life.

The name Ossovsky became famous at the Moscow youth exhibition in 1956. The painting “In the District Center” he showed was accepted by viewers and critics as one of the most interesting works of young Muscovite artists. In it they saw life, not embellished, not composed, taken in everyday life - the life of a small regional town. But as the artist showed it, there was a lot of soul and truly poetic. The picture is not flashy in color, nothing external in the manner stops attention, his speech is simple and natural - and the more reliable the impression, the more convincing the intonation of the story. It seems that the story is slowly being told about a small town somewhere in middle lane Russia. Here and at home from pre-revolutionary times, people walk slowly, not like in big cities. A guy is riding a bicycle, a car is being unloaded near a tea shop, a girl - a collective farmer - is sitting on a cart - they came from a suburban village; a boardwalk kiosk sells ice cream, a passer-by is reading a newspaper, there are posters on the fence: “The Fate of a Clown” is showing in the cinema, and a football match will take place at the “Pishchevik” stadium. Simple, humane details. The life of this town is woven from them, and they are very vividly retold - clearly and kindly. And, at the same time, you see: all these are signs of the day, small features of unimagined everyday life that make up modernity.

Painted in 1957, the painting “At the Elevator” already testifies to the search for the integrity of painting and

energetic compositional structure. The manner of pictorial narration seems to have been preserved the same, but at the same time, the picture is not “read”, as before, from detail to detail, like the lines of a story, but is perceived in the unity of everything depicted. Details and details do not hold the eye, they are interesting not in themselves, not each separately, as it was before, but precisely in their unity, creating a whole artistic image. The artist seems to move away from the subject of the image and sees the whole in its large features, in the unity of the landscape and human affairs. This is the figurative basis of the picture: the mighty structures of the elevator, huge barns, a spacious courtyard filled with cars, the busy busyness of people - everything makes you feel the completeness and scale of the business working day. It is characteristic that the compositional principle itself is different here: the point of view in the picture is raised, we are looking as if from above, from some elevation, and this makes it wider. Deeper into the space of the image, the gaze absorbs not just specific episodes, objects of nature, but the general and unified diversity of the working day at the elevator. This makes the most artistic image more capacious, the picture of life captured by the artist appears more significant. Accordingly, the very nature of painting has changed. The written out details were replaced by a broader manner, summarizing the details and particulars in color; everything was united, connected by a solid color system - a range of lilac-ocher tones of autumn, autumn earth, a soft, slightly cloudy September day.

Actually, the search for generalized images began with this painting and with other things close to it in time in the artist’s work. These searches were in line with the general aspirations of our painting of those years. The new thing that Ossovsky outlined in the painting “At the Elevator” - the desire for energetic integrity of the pictorial solution, emphasized by the sharpness of the composition - was fully manifested in a series of city landscapes painted in 1958-1959. Some of these things remained nothing more than a test of compositional and pictorial solutions, but they also speak of acute perception, a poetic sense of life. This is the scene “Market Day”, market rows in the same, perhaps regional town that has already been depicted by the artist. Midday sun, festive colors in bright lighting, deep shadows under the canopy of shopping arcades, emphasizing the power of light. And the cheerful bustle of the market itself - as it is rightly said here about a hot summer afternoon in the market square! The artist’s success in this and other canvases, for example, in a small sketch with a very immediate mood - a rainy winter day, a damp wind over the city outskirts - is, first of all, the success of P. Ossovsky, the painter. The artist does not at all strive to convey color naturalness in his early canvases; color in his paintings becomes the leading principle of figurative content. In fact, both the sunny colors of “Market Day” and the heavy, gloomy gray-rusty tones, which so faithfully convey the feeling of a dank day, when the snow is filled with dampness and the cloudy sky hangs low over the city, they form the range of feelings that is included in us emotional perception nature.

But all these sketches are nothing more than a “test of the pen.” By the way, this is the peculiarity of Ossovsky the artist, which manifested itself from the first steps of his creativity, that he invariably strives for the breadth of implementation of his plans, his quests, and that new thing that is deposited in his life impressions and outlined in the structure itself visual arts, he usually embodies in paintings. The search for increased sonority in painting and in-depth poetic image, which noticeably changed the character of P. Ossovsky’s artistic speech, appeared in their current form most of all in the paintings “On the Embankment”, “On the Ring Railway”, “Skating Rink” and “Midnight”.

In the same year, 1958, another painting “On the City Outskirts” was painted - about spring day, about cyclists and the openness of roads. (Later, the artist returned to this theme more than once.) With its mood, it stands out among other works of this time. It contains an open sonority of colors and sensations, an energetic perception of the world. The entire canvas expresses a feeling of freshness of strength, breadth of space...

City. The theme of the city, the urban outskirts, filled with the invigorating rhythm of our days, invariably occupies the artist. Here, on the outskirts of Moscow under construction, the steps big city pushes aside the disorder of old houses, crowds out cluttered vacant lots and subordinates the very face of the area to the handwriting of time, giving that feeling of modern, dynamic beauty that speaks so much to our feelings. This modern beauty of the city was included in the art of P. Ossovsky. Following the painting “Rink” with its lyrically subtle interpretation of the theme of the city, at the Fifth Exhibition of Young Artists of Moscow in 1959, he showed two of his new canvases - “Moscow Outskirts. Winter" and "Moscow outskirts. Warm day".

In both paintings there is a free coverage of space. An elevated point of view makes it possible to consistently deepen the gaze from the foreground to increasingly distant objects, figures, group scenes, silhouettes of houses that close the perspective. Widely seen, the outskirts of the city appear. The city lives its own life, the city works - in the distance there are smoke from factories and cranes, the city is resting. This is the artist's story. But this story is no longer the same as in the earlier things, developing from detail to detail, but a single figurative embrace of the whole - the whole, as it were, absorbs the particulars. The painting itself carries an emotional sound. The “winter” landscape is especially expressive - “Moscow outskirts. Winter". The painterly palette, sparse in color and somewhat harsh in its tonality, conveys the characteristic colorful atmosphere in which the outskirts of the city seem to be immersed. Here the old is next to the new, here the brick is brown with age and the ocher-gray walls of the barns, and behind them the buildings of the rebuilt buildings rise against the sky - they are in a foggy lilac haze, softened in tone by distance and winter diffused light. This soft diffused light connects the tones into a coherent color scheme, unifies the space of the picture and thereby gives it a picturesque, poetic integrity.

Both of these landscapes are notable among Ossovsky’s works for the fact that the energetic notes that are increasingly emerging in his painting are clearly outlined here. Within the framework of his favorite brownish-lilac, ocher palette, the contrasts of tonal relationships and, in places, heavy color saturation stand out expressively, and this gives the pictorial style a peculiar masculine sonority.

Ossovsky's paintings about Moscow established his fame as an artist of urban landscapes, modern perception keenly aware of the rhythm of city life. The art of many artists speaks about Moscow. But P. Ossovsky found his line of discovery, and very modern notes of poetic

story. For this, his canvases were widely loved, and the artist won the lasting sympathy and affection of the viewer.