The system “man - technical progress.” Fundamentals of the philosophy of technology Spiritual paradigm of technical development
A positive shift in humanities education is increased attention to technology as a social phenomenon, to this specific cultural phenomenon. The existing debates around the problems of the humanistic role of technology and its role in the environment require a philosophical understanding of the phenomenon of technology and its relationship to the development of civilization. In the context of the restructuring of engineering and technical education, philosophical thoroughness is needed in the normative assessment of both technocratic and technophobic extremes of understanding its social significance.
The emerging educational literature on the philosophy of technology cannot satisfy the requirements for philosophical training of both students, cadets of engineering and technical universities, and graduate students, applicants for technical specialties. These publications suffer from verbosity in the absence of deep philosophy; they are often divorced from the history of technology and do not develop a “taste” for philosophical understanding technology.
The proposed material summarizes some experience in covering the problems of philosophy of technology in courses taught by the author at various universities. I wanted to group the accumulated material in such a way as, on the one hand, to show the specificity of the philosophical analysis of technology, and on the other, to rely on the reality of the development of technology, which is still incompletely presented in publications on the history of technology.
In the few publications on the philosophy of technology so far, the emphasis is on illuminating the problems of the technical sciences, while the ontology of technology remains on the sidelines. Meanwhile, philosophers who are practically familiar with the development of technology write about the significant difference between the philosophy of technology and the philosophy of science (technical sciences). A number of significant differences between technology and science : the first is a collection of artifacts, and the second is a system of knowledge; with the help of the first we transform the world, create a “second nature”, and with the help of the second we cognize and explain the world; the first is created by engineers and practical workers, the second by scientists and theorists.
However, philosophy, in the process of understanding science and technology developing together, shows, especially during the period of the scientific and technological revolution, the convergence of philosophical images of both phenomena of human activity. The “meeting point” of the philosophy of science and the philosophy of technology is technical science.
The development of technical sciences in the 19th and 20th centuries brings these images so close that in modern philosophical analysis of technology the illusion of the identity of science (an ideal phenomenon) and technology (a material phenomenon) arises. A fundamental philosophical principle is “blurring” unity theory and practice, and instead of a philosophical analysis of technology as a phenomenon of social existence, we are presented with a synthesis of technical knowledge as a phenomenon of social consciousness.
Pointing to the trend of natural-philosophical synthesis of science, technology and art, which arose during the Renaissance and developed under the conditions of scientific and technological revolution, E. A. Shapovalov noted the nihilistic danger of identifying the philosophy of technology with the philosophy of engineering activity. He rightly noted: “The philosophy of technology is, in essence, the philosophy of technical activity... the philosophy of technology is philosophical reflection, first of all, about technology “in general”... As a new branch of philosophy, the latter grows mainly from the synthesis of three directions of philosophical knowledge: philosophy of culture, philosophical anthropology and social philosophy".
Consequently, the philosophy of technology in the modern understanding is a fragment of the general philosophy of the dialectical-materialist unity of social existence and social consciousness in the practical activities of people.
Ontological synthesis of technology
Two empirical facts give a materialist direction to the understanding of technology in the ideological aspect: the existence of a technical system is given in sensations; every technical unit is a phenomenon of social existence, for nature does not create any technical phenomena.
By synthesizing all the diversity of technology in its history (equal to the history of mankind), we can give the following definition of technology as a phenomenon of social existence: technique is a developing system of artificially created material means of human activity, designed to increase the practical efficiency of this activity.
This captures the essence of technology. The dialectical bifurcation of a single essence and the knowledge of its contradictory parts advance us to discern the substrate and substance in each technical system. Substrate technology is that natural material (transformed matter, forces, information of nature) that forms the content of the corresponding system, and substance - the purposeful purpose that people assign to this material so that it can fulfill the practical role assigned to it. The substance of technology is associated with the goal-setting activity of the people who create technology, and the substrate is their goal-fulfilling activity.
The operating technique represents the practical unity of substance and substrate. It is the practically operating technology that shows that the leading role in this unity is played by substance, that is, its human purpose. The substrate of technology reveals itself only when the technical system “fails” or when the environmental consequences of the mass use of technical systems of a certain kind are discovered.
The social way of being of technology is technical practice - that area of transformative sensory-material activity that is associated with the use of artificially created material means of achieving human goals. Technical practice is the being of “technology-for-us”, where the substance of the technical system functions in the foreground. The existence of “technology-for-itself” is as a way of functioning of human productive force, when the ideal (as the conscious beginning of human activity) is objectified technological process as a material result of human activity. The construction of a technological process is determined and conditioned both by the substrate of technology and by the material nature of the subject of labor.
Based on the distinction between substance and substrate of technical systems, two types are possible classification of technology : on a substantive basis it is permissible to distinguish production, social (political) and cultural technology with their varieties (for example, mining, manufacturing, construction, transport, communications, military, television, etc.), and on a substratum basis - nuclear, mechanical, chemical, biological, anthropological. A mixed classification is possible according to the areas of practical application of technology (industrial, agricultural, printing, household, etc.).
Since the existence of technology is derived from human and natural existence at the same time, the systemic synthesis of technology has as its objective basis the existence of technology in the social system. Concept "technical base of society “In connection with this circumstance, the unity of all technical systems operating in the practice of a given society is designated, which includes both those material systems that were created in the past society and those that are created to satisfy the technical needs of the current society. Potential artificial systems (archival, museum and exhibition samples of equipment) remain outside the technical base.
Epistemological analysis of technology
Since any technology is a creation of human labor, the act of its creation is preceded by knowledge as the production of special knowledge about the nature of the practical need of society for a new material means of human activity and corresponding knowledge about the possibilities of those natural bodies and phenomena that could become the substrate of this means. The historical experience of such knowledge and its development become the object of epistemological analysis of technology as a specific phenomenon of existence.
The epistemological approach to technology is associated primarily with the problem of its genesis. If all natural phenomena are products of the self-motion of matter in a global natural process, then technological artifacts are never products of self-motion: they are a product of human activity in nature. The practical activities of people, repeated billions of times in any field, reveal algorithms that prompt a person to the idea of modeling the interaction of natural components based on their structure and transferring human algorithmic functions to these material models. At first this was done on an isomorphic basis, when a technical device (tool) became an artificial “amplifier” of human organs (hands, eyes, legs, ears, etc.), and then the collective functions of human activity began to be modeled - already on a homomorphic basis.
Thus, first the ordinary and then the technical practice of the human race becomes the basis for goal-setting in technical invention. As for goal fulfillment, it required the study of objects and properties of nature, the relationships of natural bodies in order to find suitable components of the substrate of the future technical system.
The development of craft technical practice had its source in the technical creativity of people in two forms - extensive , when the available technical means were improved, rationalized, and intensive , when a new technical tool was invented, to which algorithmic human functions were transferred. When the homomorphic algorithm of manufacturing labor made it possible in Europe of the 17th-18th centuries to invent a system of machines headed by the steam engine as the universal engine of this system, then the knowledge of new technical practice and the ways of its development, due to capitalist needs, moved to a qualitatively new level of rationality of technical creativity.
The development of industrial technical practice required the inclusion of a new, unprecedented source of technical creativity - scientific knowledge . The creative energy of scientists is, as it were, “spurred” by the needs, firstly, of knowledge of the substrate of machine technology for various practical purposes, and secondly, by the new interests of the owners of industrial production. This led to the scientific revolution of the 17th century, which meant the birth of a whole range of natural sciences and the formation of a scientific status for a whole range of humanities and social sciences. The development of this revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries leads to the emergence of a spectrum of specialized technical sciences.
Thus, with the transformation of scientific rationality into the main source of technical creativity and the development of technical activity, a new quality of technical development of mankind has been formed since the turn of the 18th-19th centuries - scientific- technical progress as progress in the technical base of society based on scientific progress.
With the historical development of the technical practice of mankind during the technical revolutions of the 18th-19th centuries, the epistemological basis of technical progress changes radically. Intensive development scientific knowledge makes scientific activity the locomotive of technical practice and radically transforms the entire system of creating and improving technology. This was already noted in the first publications on the philosophy of technology in Germany and Russia. Technical creativity becomes scientific and technical creativity, and which began in the middle of the 20th century. The scientific and technological revolution gives birth to the unique figure of its main creator - the “scientist-engineer”.
In the 20th century The development of technical sciences not only enters an intensive phase of dividing these sciences into fundamental and applied, but also leads to the identification of a specific type of technological sciences, the subject of which is the functioning, structure and development of technological processes as ways of being machine and machineless technology.
Subject of technical development
The concept of “technical development” denotes a system of qualitative changes in technology and the subsequent process of updating the technical base of a particular society. Accordingly, the subject of technical development in general is people as creators of technology and as subjects of the development of technical practice.
Technology of any type and society acts as a component of material culture and, as such, can be an element of other types of culture. This circumstance is reflected in the general thesis “man is the creator of culture.” However, the specificity of technology as a phenomenon of social existence determines the special quality of the subject of technical development.
The historical approach to understanding technology allows us to specify the concept of the subject. We are talking about the mutual complementarity of the qualities of the subject of cognition and the subject of social action. The history of technology shows that at the historical stage of the direct inclusion of knowledge in the technical practice of society, the subject of technical development was personally united: the artisan himself invented, used and improved tools and other means of technical practice. As technology developed up to the manufacturing phase, the stages of generating technical ideas, designing and manufacturing technology were not separated either socially or professionally.
At the manufacturing and industrial-machine stages of industrial production, it begins to gradually stand out within the framework of the subject of technical development, first scientist figure , whose job is to generate technical ideas, and then engineer figure , whose main function is to organize the design, production and operation of technical systems in a variety of technological processes. The subject of technical development becomes cooperative on a public scale.
In the course of scientific and technological progress and the use of its achievements in the development of technical practice of the 19th and 20th centuries cooperative entity technical development is differentiated professionally: an applied scientist (or a scientist in the field of technical sciences) becomes a creator of technical ideas and projects; the engineer turns into a professional designer and constructor of technical systems; profession technique is now the organization of production of developed equipment and its optimal operation in the technical practice of society; skilled worker professionally completes this division of functions as the final subject of technical practice. This is how the type of “aggregate worker” foreseen by K. Marx appears in the field of technological development.
Further modification of the subject of technical development is associated with the development and deployment in the historical space of the XX-XXI centuries scientific and technological revolution. The creators of the main directions of this revolution integrate in their activities the functions of almost all elements of the cooperative subject of technical development. In technical practice, peculiar figures of “scientist-engineer” or “engineer-worker” or “technician-operator” or “engineer-organizer” (technological engineer) appear in technical practice.
Historical development of technology
The history of technology as its final reality has not only logical, but also important heuristic and prognostic significance. The first applies especially to the general history of technology, the second to the history of industrial technology, which should be paid special attention to when giving a lecture at a technical university.
The usual approach to the historical development of technology used to be to see in this process a change of evolutionary and revolutionary phases. At the same time, more attention was paid to technical revolutions and progressive branches of development. On a global scale, such successive technical revolutions are known today as the “Neolithic” (IX-VIII millennia BC), the “Bronze Age” and the “Iron Age” (1st millennium BC - 1st millennium AD). BC), technical revolution of the 18th-19th centuries, scientific and technological revolution (from the 50s of the 20th century to the 20s of the 21st century).
The systemic genetic approach to the development of technology in the civilizational process seems more meaningful. From this point of view, technical reality appears as a stepwise replacement of terminal equipment with systems of standard quality. I call terminal that technique that functionally continues and enhances the transformative activity of human organs; it is located, as it were, on the periphery of these organs and is associated with the limits of their capabilities. At the same time, instrumental-terminal equipment (hand tools, tools, devices, etc.) often literally serves as an “attachment” to the human working body, and machine-terminal equipment (unit, machine tool, bicycle, etc.) is under direct technological control of one or a group of people, replacing and enhancing their work functions. In both cases, we are dealing with simple or complicated technical systems of terminal properties. Conditioning technology ensures not only the performance of the working functions of a person (collective), but also determines his existence, life in a specific habitat. In this case, the systematic nature of machine technology becomes more complicated (a multifunctional transport vehicle for water, air, underwater purposes, a spaceship, a submarine, etc.) due to the need for a certain number of people to stay and practice in the abiotic, extreme environment. Super complex air conditioning systems, as a rule, are automated and can form complexes of a continual nature.
In connection with the systemic genetic approach to technology, it is necessary to mention two important points in the technical history of civilization.
Firstly, about the relationship between progress and regression in the development of technology. In the literature it is customary to talk mainly about technical progress. However, the time has come to philosophically evaluate and regressive branch historical development of technology. Indeed, how much do we know about the path of technology into oblivion, about the descending line of its qualitative changes? Meanwhile, this question has a certain heuristic significance. Physically obsolete equipment is removed from technical practice and subjected to natural destruction or recycling (or conversion). Morally obsolete equipment becomes a museum exhibit, a historical rarity, a toy or monument, or a teaching aid.
Secondly, in conditions of a socio-ecological crisis, we are forced to study the regressive line of technology development and because the disposal of old equipment or its components is becoming an acute environmental problem (for example, the disposal of waste from nuclear reactors or old cars, machine tools, etc.), and because knowledge of the reasons for the rapid obsolescence of technology is essential for optimizing technical progress in various fields of practice and for the systematic development of the technical base of society in the interests of saving working time and improving the environment.
The socio-ecological aspect of the development of technical practice of mankind is now acquiring independent significance.
Particularly interesting in philosophical and prognostic terms is the problem of the development of this practice during the deployment of the biotechnological stage of the scientific and technological revolution, the contours of which were noted by Leningrad philosophers back in the early 80s. In unity with the information-cybernetic direction of modern scientific and technological revolution, the future achievements of the new scientific and technological revolution will lead to an epoch-making turn in the historical development of the technical component of civilization, the world technosphere.
Axiological aspect of technology
It is associated with the cultural nature of technology and its social effectiveness.
The technique is special value , if we assume that there are values of life and values of culture, as was shown in the works of V.P. Tugarinov. In the function of the value of life, technology acts not only as a tool for the production of means of life, but also as a material means of saving life and human health in peaceful conditions (in medicine, during natural disasters), as a means of survival in a military situation. But since technology is always an artificial product of man, it becomes the value of life after it has become the value of culture.
Related to the philosophical theory of values is the question of criteria of cultural value technology. The genesis of the binary (unity of substrate and substance) nature of technology allows us to identify a number of interrelated criteria for the relative value of technical systems for various purposes. Their presence and interrelation are determined by the universal nature of human activity. If we accept that the key characteristic of human activity is its expediency, then we can determine social efficiency in general, as the degree of compliance of the results of human activity with its goals. In this sense, any technical system is the embodied expediency of practical human action. Therefore, the value of any technical unit is correlated with its social efficiency.
The first and main criterion for the value of a technical system is its functionality , i.e. the degree of compliance with the specific functional purpose. The basis of this criterion is the technical optimum, at which the maximum of substantial quality is ensured by the minimum* of the substrate principle. From this point of view, the technology is better that bases its versatility on the simplest substrate. The environmental friendliness of technical systems is indirectly related to this criterion.
The second criterion for the value of any technical unit is its genetic technology , i.e. a real opportunity to produce it using simple, easily accessible technology. Obviously, the best technology is the one that can be reproduced with a minimum of material and labor costs and quickly and reliably equip the relevant areas of technical practice in society.
Third criterion - durability technical system, because value is largely determined by how long it reliably serves a person without losing its purpose. This criterion is associated with the sustainability of technical progress and the possibility of expanding the area of technical practice, as well as the environmental value of equipment for various purposes.
The fourth criterion of technical value is aesthetics , for man creates his existence not only to the extent of practical needs, but also according to the laws of beauty. That is why the internal correspondence of the substance and substrate of a technical system should be expressed in external harmony. Beautiful technology is valuable not only for its design, but also meets man’s desire to create his world according to a universal standard.
The axiological aspect of technology seems to emphasize its human essence. History shows that technical systems lose their value when the integral nature of a person is “torn”, when a person’s existence is alienated from his generic essence. It is on such an anthropological basis that the natural substrate of technology is torn away from its humanistic substance. Then the technique of “civilized barbarism” is born, which drags behind it through history a trail of superficial accusations of the inhumanity of technology in general. Even the abstract term “technogenic civilization” is born as the fruit of the indiscriminate elevation of technology to the rank of “parent” of a certain human condition. The real purpose of technology is humanistic and in reality it only expresses and highlights the actual nature of the people of the society that created this technology.
Spiritual paradigm of technical development
The existence of technology is purely material, but its social substance is directly related to the spiritual foundations of human existence. This situation is due not only to the fact that the creation of technology begins with the work of the spirit, with spiritual creativity, but also by the fact that technical practice serves as a source of development of the spirit (consciousness, unconsciousness) in the space of free time.
The first impetus for the development of the human spirit is given by the process of formation technical design based on comprehension of the algorithm of a certain practical activity and the idea of giving a new degree of freedom to an active person. N.A. Berdyaev turned his attention in a unique way to this side of the spiritual paradigm of technical development.
Berdyaev's assessment of technology in the form of its machine typicality is not entirely correct, because it is of an abstract nature. He, for example, believed that it was during the Renaissance period (XVI-XVIII centuries) that human powers were set free for creativity. But for some reason he does not notice that the mechanization (machineization) of the technical practice of mankind in the 19th-20th centuries really released massive human forces for creative action. However, since this did not happen in the mass spiritual life of industrial society, he again places the blame for this impoverishment of spirit on the dominance of machine technology. The machine shields the blessed nature from man and subjugates the rhythm of the mechanical life of man himself. It is not the capitalist system of alienation of man that turns humanity into new slavery, but the machine, as the demonic “third element”, separates man from the organic world and thereby enslaves him. Here we see the technicist limits of Berdyaev’s abstract humanism and, in general, the existentialist origins of the demonization of technology, especially at the stage of its automation - after the death of N. A. Berdyaev, during the development; scientific and technological revolution.
An accomplished technical event, developing the practical activity of man, is communicated by a new one - logical impulse spiritual life of society. Firstly, the degree of effectiveness of existing technology is analyzed and the heuristic value and depth of knowledge about the substrate and substance of technology are assessed. Secondly, conclusions are drawn about the degree of truth of the fund of knowledge that is embodied in the technical system. After all, only true knowledge can be embodied in a purposefully operating technical unit. Thirdly, knowledge embodied in technology stimulates the development of scientific knowledge both in the sphere of nature, and in the sphere of society, and in the sphere of thinking. Development scientific thought creates a creative foundation for improving the technosphere on a planetary scale. Fourthly, the technization of public life and individual life of people creates virtual reality, which makes it possible to stimulate developed unconscious beginning in a person and mobilize new reserves for his intellectual and emotional improvement. At the same time, new problems arise in the development of spirituality and spiritual culture.
A particularly strong channel of communication between technology and the spiritual world of man is art . Indeed, since antiquity, “techne” has meant, first of all, skill, skillful mastery in human activity. Existentialism in European philosophy pays close attention to this.
In “The Question of Technology” M. Heidegger correctly noted that the existence of technology is not identical to its essence. This being has instrumental and anthropological definitions. Modern technology is a means to achieve goals that hide causality. However, in the interpretation of causality, the German philosopher remains at the level of Aristotle, passing off dishes as the existence of technology. His technique reveals a certain “secret” contained in knowledge. Hiddenness is then revealed in production technology, when Heidegger calls the human-controlled technological process “delivery.” In other words, the technological process (“technical manipulation”) puts the mysteries of nature at the service of man.
“The essence of modern technology reveals itself in what we call delivery.” Technology puts a person on the path of revealing the secrets of natural existence. “The essence of technology rests in the installation. His power corresponds to the fate of historical existence." In the development of technology, fate puts a person on the path of risk, where the certainty of existence can only be given by Truth (knowledge), which is only partially represented in technology - delivery.
Heidegger directs the revelation of what is hidden in technical existence towards overcoming technophobia associated with a purely instrumental understanding of technology. In the essence of technology, the philosopher sees “possible sprouts of a saving” liberation of human existence from the oppression of the instrumental existence of technology through the revelation of truth in it - the spiritual freedom of man. Hidden in technology co-existence of art as manifestations of human creativity. In other words, by elevating the technical principle to the level of art, Heidegger uniquely reveals the humanistic essence of technology: “Since the essence of technology is not something technical, the essential understanding of technology and the decisive demarcation from it must occur in an area that, on the one hand, is related to the essence of technology, and on the other hand, it is still fundamentally different from it. One such area is art."
Thus, the development of technology and spiritual world human beings are more closely interconnected than it seems to the public consciousness or metaphysical thinking. The spiritual paradigm appears especially clearly in the era of scientific and technological progress, and this largely explains the formation and development of the philosophy of technology in the 19th-20th centuries.
What methodological advice is possible for a teacher after all of the above?
Experience shows that it is advisable to conduct a full lesson on this topic with graduate students, mastering the minimum candidate program in philosophy.
1. Ontological synthesis of technology and its essence.
2. Epistemological analysis of technology.
3. Subject of technical development.
4. Historical development of technology.
5. Axiological aspect of technology.
6. Spiritual paradigm of technical development.
It is advisable to implement this plan in full for graduate students of technical universities, thereby strengthening the trend of humanitarization of scientific and pedagogical personnel in the field of technical sciences.
Concerning applicants other specialties, then for them the lecture can be structured in a generalized way:
1. Philosophy about the existence and essence of technology.
2. Subject of technical practice and knowledge.
3. Historical development of technology.
4. Technology as a cultural value.
Historical and other illustrative material to explain the theses of the lecture is best taken from the history of industrial technology (for graduate students of technical specialties) and from the general history of technology, modern technical practice (for graduate students of natural sciences and humanities).
Lecture for students Technical universities should be maximally saturated with material from the general and branch history of technology and be built, preferably, according to the following plan:
1. Genesis and essence of technology.
2. Historical development of technology and its subject.
3. Technology as a cultural value.
The main methodological task of the teacher in all cases of covering the topic “Fundamentals of the Philosophy of Technology” is to reveal the humanistic value of technology in all contradictory forms of its existence and to help overcome the worldview of students technical trends both in the form of technophobia and in the form of technocracy. It is also important to direct efforts to overcome the prejudice that equates technology and technical sciences.
Gorokhov V. G., Rozin V. M. Introduction to the philosophy of technology. M., 1998.
History of technology. M., 1962. See also: Shukhardin S.V. Fundamentals of the history of technology. M„ 1961.
Stepin V.S., Gorokhov V.G., Rozov M.A., Philosophy of science and technology. M.,
Shapovalov E. A. Philosophy of science and philosophy of technology // Science and alternative forms of knowledge: Interuniversity collection. St. Petersburg, 1995. P. 240.
Social and environmental problems of our time and new scientific and technological revolution. L., 1981.
Pirogov K. S. Scientific and technical creativity: Social and philosophical problems. L., 1979.
Berdyaev N. A. Spirit and machine // Fate of Russia. M., 1990.
Heidegger M. The Question of Technology // Time and Being. M., 1993. S. 222-224
Heidegger M. The Question of Technology // Time and Being. M., 1993. P. 231.
Right there. P. 232.
Right there. P. 238.
Philosophy of technology in Germany. M., 1989. See also: Engelmeyer P.K. Concept of lectures on the philosophy of technology. Baku, 1922.
Let's consider the features of traditional and technogenic civilizations. The famous philosopher and historian A. Toynbee identified and described 21 civilizations. All of them can be divided into two large classes, according to the types of civilizational progress - traditional and technogenic civilizations. Due to the proximity of the latter, we will talk about technogenic civilization in the singular - as modern Western technological civilization. In the relation that interests us, for the sake of convenience, we will use the terms “civilization” and “society” as synonyms. Technogenic civilization (society) is a rather late product of human history. For a long time this history proceeded as an interaction between traditional societies. Only in the 15th–17th centuries did a special type of development take shape in the European region, associated with the emergence of technogenic societies, their subsequent expansion to the rest of the world and changes in traditional societies under their influence. Some of these traditional societies were simply absorbed by technological civilization; Having gone through the stages of modernization, they then turned into typical technogenic societies. Others, having experienced the inoculations of Western technology and culture, nevertheless retained many traditional features, turning into a kind of hybrid formations.
Comparative analysis traditional and technogenic civilizations (or societies) will be carried out based on the research of V.S. Stepin in the book “Theoretical Knowledge” (Moscow, 2000). The differences between them are radical. Traditional societies are characterized slow pace of social change. Of course, they also have innovations both in the sphere of production and in the sphere of regulation of social relations, but progress is very slow compared to the lifespan of individuals and even generations. In traditional societies, several generations of people can change, finding the same structures of social life, reproducing them and passing them on to the next generation. Types of activities, their means and goals can exist for centuries as stable stereotypes. Accordingly, in the culture of these societies, priority is given to traditions, patterns and norms that accumulate the experience of ancestors, and canonized styles of thinking. Innovative activity is by no means perceived here as the highest value; on the contrary, it has limitations and is permissible only within the framework of centuries-tested traditions. Ancient India and China, Ancient Egypt, states of the Muslim East of the Middle Ages, etc. – these are all traditional societies. This type of social organization has survived to this day: many third world countries retain the features of traditional society, although their collision with modern Western (technogenic) civilization sooner or later leads to radical transformations of traditional culture and way of life.
As for technogenic civilization, which is often designated by the vague concept of “Western civilization,” meaning the region of its origin, this is a special type of social development and a special type of civilization, the defining features of which are to a certain extent opposite to the characteristics of traditional societies. When technogenic civilization was formed in a relatively mature form, the pace of social change began to increase at enormous speed. We can say that the extensive development of history is here replaced by an intensive one; spatial existence is temporary. Growth reserves are no longer sought by expanding cultural zones, but through restructuring the very foundations of previous ways of life and the formation of fundamentally new opportunities. The most important and truly epochal, world-historical change associated with the transition from traditional society to technogenic civilization is the emergence new value system. The value itself is considered innovation, originality, generally new(in a certain sense, the Guinness Book of Records can be considered a symbol of a technogenic society, in contrast to, say, the Seven Wonders of the World - the Guinness Book clearly demonstrates that each individual can become one of a kind, achieve something unusual, and it also calls for this; the seven wonders of the world, on the contrary, were intended to emphasize the completeness of the world and show that everything grandiose, truly unusual has already happened).
Technogenic civilization began long before computers, and even long before the steam engine. Its prerequisites were laid by the first two cultural and historical types of rationality - ancient and medieval. The development of technogenic civilization began in the 17th century. It goes through three stages: first – pre-industrial, then – industrial and finally – post-industrial. The most important basis for its life activity is, first of all, the development of technology, not only through spontaneous innovations in the sphere of production itself, but also through the generation of ever new scientific knowledge and its implementation in technical and technological processes. This is how a type of development arises, based on accelerating changes in the natural environment, the objective world in which man lives. Changing this world leads to active transformations of people's social connections. In a technogenic civilization, scientific and technological progress is constantly changing the methods of communication, forms of communication of people, personality types and lifestyles. The result is a clearly defined direction of progress with a focus on the future. The culture of technogenic societies is characterized by the idea of irreversible historical time, which flows from the past through the present to the future. Let us note for comparison that in most traditional cultures other understandings dominated: time was most often perceived as cyclical, when the world periodically returns to its original state. In traditional cultures it was believed that the “golden age” had already passed, it was behind us, in the distant past. The heroes of the past created models of behavior and actions that should be imitated. The culture of technogenic societies has a different orientation. In them, the idea of social progress stimulates the expectation of change and movement towards the future, and the future is believed to be the growth of civilizational gains, ensuring an increasingly happier world order.
This type of civilization has existed for a little over 300 years, but it turned out to be very dynamic, mobile and very aggressive: it suppresses, subjugates, overturns, drawing traditional societies and their cultures into the orbit of its influence - we see this everywhere, and today this process is underway Worldwide. Such active interaction between technogenic civilization and traditional societies, as a rule, turns out to be a clash that leads to the death of the latter, to the destruction of many cultural traditions, in essence, to the death of these cultures as original entities. Traditional cultures are not only pushed to the periphery, but are also radically transformed when traditional societies enter the path of modernization and technological development. Most often, these cultures are preserved only in fragments, as historical rudiments. This happened and is happening with the traditional cultures of eastern countries that have achieved industrial development; the same can be said about the peoples of South America and Africa, who have embarked on the path of modernization - everywhere the cultural matrix of technogenic civilization transforms traditional cultures, transforming their meaning in life, replacing them with new ideological dominants.
Technogenic civilization in its very existence is defined as a society constantly changing its foundations. Therefore, its culture actively supports and values the constant generation of new samples, ideas, concepts, or innovation. Only some of them can be implemented in today's reality, and the rest appear as possible programs for future life, addressed to future generations. In the culture of technogenic societies, one can always find ideas and value orientations that are alternative to the dominant values. But in the real life of society they may not play a decisive role, remaining, as it were, on the periphery of social consciousness and not setting the masses of people in motion.
The modern development of technogenic civilization is based on the development of technology. Following D. Vig, let us highlight the main meanings of the concept “technology”.
1) Body of technical knowledge, rules and concepts.
2) Practice of engineering professions, including norms, conditions and prerequisites for the application of technical knowledge.
3) Technical means, tools and products(technique itself).
4) Organization and integration of technical personnel and processes into large-scale systems (industrial, military, communications, etc.).
5) Social conditions, which characterize the quality of social life as a result of the accumulation of technical activities.
Russia (more precisely, the Soviet Union) in the twentieth century. went through a modernization period of development and became one of the technogenic societies. In the 80s XX century there were two countries capable of producing any product - the USSR and the USA. But modernization in the USSR did not reach high technologies (HiTech), which is associated with high oil prices, food shortages, loans from Brezhnev and Gorbachev, the collapse of the USSR, and the problems of the 90s.
What is the role of education in a high-tech society? From this brief analysis it is clear that scientific education is becoming one of the system-forming factors of technogenic civilization, and an educated person, a specialist, is its fundamental value and development resource. Moreover, the value of both universal basic education of citizens and the training of specialists with higher education is increasing.
Literature:
2. Kashpersky V.I.
3. Kotenko V.P. History and philosophy of technical reality / V.P. Kotenko. – M.: Triksta, 2009.
4. Popkova N.IN. Philosophy of the technosphere / N.V. Popkova; 2nd ed. – M.: LIBROKOM, 2009. – Chapters 1, 4, 5. – P. 7-77, 206-336.
5. Shitikov M.M. Philosophy of technology. – Ekaterinburg, 2010.
Topic 2. Global problems modernity and humanitarian consequences of scientific and technological progress
Keywords:global problems of our time, human responsibility for maintaining peace on the planet, preserving nature, preserving oneself and one’s humanity
Analyzing the excessive optimism of the technocratic interpretation of the prospects for the scientific and technological development of mankind, we have already talked about the discrepancy between the proclaimed and the actual course of events: the expansion of the field of disasters, the failures of a number of large scientific and technical projects, the alienation of the individual and the simplified nature of thinking. At the same time, we should not fall into the illusion of total doom and dependence on technology. The logic of doom is based on the assertions that we already live within the framework of worldviews dictated by alienation: traditional ideas about the truth of knowledge should be considered an anachronism, humanity lives in an engineered world, an experiment in science is no longer a test of truth, but rather a test a technical structure into which scientific idealizations are adjusted (remember the non-classical concepts of truth).
Global problems exist, but never before has the human community on Earth been able to agree on joint efforts to solve them. They are usually grouped around problems: 1) war and peace, the threat of total mutual destruction of people; 2) the relationship between man and nature (population growth - in October 2011, according to UNESCO, humanity crossed the line of 7 billion people; depletion of resources; deterioration of environmental conditions of existence and a number of other sub-problems); 3) self-alienation of a person, loss of his own identity (crisis of European humanism, problems of freedom; unresolved problems in the world of the relationship between personal and social, or state, or national, or ethnic, religious and other group principles; the increase in stress and catastrophic thinking in technogenic societies , dissatisfaction with life prospects, etc.).
It is the inability to solve these problems that is the cause, or rather, determines many of the reasons for the crisis of the classical ideal of rationality. We conduct a detailed analysis of this ideal and its weakness in comparison with the non-classical one elsewhere. Here it is necessary to say about the conditions for the possibility of solving the above-mentioned global problems.
1. Globalization while preserving cultural diversity, limiting growth (Club of Rome), changing the principles of political and economic interaction between peoples. The alternative is the Huntington scenario or a nuclear apocalypse.
2. The same Club of Rome, co-evolution, noosphere. According to Meadows' "Limits to Growth" - a diagram of the relationship between population and resource endowment. Changing the ecological horizon into a pyramid, transformation in the relationship of sciences (natural science, engineering and humanities).
3. The first two conditions lead to the third as a condition for human self-change. Not the forced cultivation of a new person (for example, a communist experiment), but a consistent transformation of values and goals based on respect for free will. Interests, ultimately, are the qualities of people. Many consider this possibility controversial (see: Peccei A. Human qualities. M., 1985).
The solution to each problem involves the formation of a new cultural-historical type of rationality. But the difficulty is that no noticeable efforts are being made in this direction either by the scientific community, much less by the authorities, and time is irreversible, just as the possibilities of any changes are irreversible.
In recent decades, some philosophers, scientists and politicians have expressed the idea of the possibility of overcoming the crisis of rationality through bringing science and religion closer together . In the spirit of this idea, the concept of introducing religious courses into school education is being actively introduced in our country. In the scientific community, supporters of rapprochement cite the following arguments.
Classical scientific understanding is guided by the ideals of the natural sciences. This means a focus on extracting from scientific texts the objective and timeless meaning enshrined in them. In other words, a scientist of the classical type believes or wants to believe that the language of science contains information about objective reality, which does not depend on the activity and consciousness of either the scientist himself or humanity as a whole and is ultimately absolute in nature. Therefore, he develops logical-mathematical and empirical ways to achieve impartiality and “disinterest”, abstraction from his involvement in knowledge, adding to this confidence in the fundamental accessibility to the mind and the knowability of any objects.
In contrast to what has been said, knowledge of the divine, say supporters of the rapprochement of science with religion, is not abstract and objective; the fullness of being cannot be an object for research. Comprehensibility is realized through passion, passionate interest in the divine and the desire to become involved in it (remember “knowledge by the heart” from l. 7). The objective as the universal is subordinated to personal (existential) meaning. Divine knowledge is revealed grace. In other words, the language of religion embodies what is inaccessible to science: not so much “objective knowledge” as “existential meanings”. His statements - not epistemological, but axiological, value related to what is supposed to be unattainable (transcendental) for us humans, but constitutes the vital meaning of human existence.
How to deal with these arguments? They really document the crisis of the classical ideal of rationality, the “Promethean” type of thinking, the assumption of unlimited external transformation of nature, including the nature of man himself. As Ap says. Paul, the first and most important Temple of the Lord on Earth is man himself. “If anyone destroys the temple of God, God will punish him; for the temple of God is holy; and this temple is you” (1 Cor. 3 – 17). Hence his question about human wisdom: “Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the questioner of this century? Has not God turned the wisdom of this world into foolishness? (ibid., 1-20).
It must be said that many of the great scientists of the twentieth century. supported the idea of complementarity of scientific knowledge and religious faith. M. Planck speaks about this quite directly: “When religion and science profess faith in God, the first places God at the beginning, and the second at the end of all thoughts. Religion and science are in no way mutually exclusive.” A. Einstein, who put forward the beauty of a theory among the criteria of scientific character, is more cautious, but generally agrees with this position. “A man who has lost the power of wonder and awe is dead,” says Einstein. “To know that there is a hidden Reality that reveals itself to us as the highest Beauty, to know and feel this - this is the core of true religiosity.”
It seems to us that in the discussion about the relationship between scientific and religious knowledge in the 21st century, the anthropologization of scientific knowledge finds expression. We understand more and more that the world around us, the earthly world of our time, and we ourselves in it are products of our own qualities. We will return to this in the next lecture. Here it is necessary to fix our principled position on the issue of the relationship between science and religion. In this we agree with academician. V. Ginzburg. Science must continue its development without synthesis with religion. Anyone who forgets that we have a secular state, secular education, does not understand the importance of science in modern world. Science and education must maintain a secular and international character (See: Interview with the Izvestia newspaper. 02.17.2006. P. 5).
Literature:
1. Introduction to philosophy: Proc. manual for universities / author. coll.: I.T. Frolov and others; 4th ed., revised. and additional – M.: Cultural Revolution, Republic, 2007. – Section II. Chapters 8, 9. – pp. 485-537.
2. Kashpersky V.I. Problems of philosophy of science: textbook. allowance / V.I. Kashpersky. – Ekaterinburg: USTU-UPI, 2007.
Topic 3. The alienated nature of the technical worldview. The phenomenon of the anthropological crisis
1. Technical attitude
2. The phenomenon of the anthropological crisis
3. Scientific and technological development modern society: problems and prospects
Keywords:types of world relations, a person's technical attitude to the world and its place in the structure of a person's world relations, technical creativity and consumer society, subjectivity and creativity, human responsibility in the process of carrying out technical activities, the problem of technization of human life, problems and prospects for the development of man and society
Technical attitude
Researchers characterize technology as a certain way of human interaction with the world. A technical relation is a relation mediated by a certain algorithm that has one form or another of expression in culture. O. Spengler tells us that the essence of technology is not in the weapon, but in acting with it. There are non-instrumental techniques: the technique of taking notes on lectures, for example. The algorithm of actions is the essence of technology. Technology is a culturally fixed (objectified) way of interaction between a person and the environment, the relationship of a person as a subject to the world as an object. The main features of this method are its practical orientation and instrumental mediation. Technology is born as a way of relating between subject and object. The main feature of technology: a characteristic way of a person’s relationship to the world, within which (method) the phenomenon of technology, a technical worldview, is born.
Technical attitude is a subsection of a person’s practical attitude to the world. Technology appears before science. If we consider technology as a practical relation to the world, it collides with a pragmatic relation and an aesthetic one. A pragmatic attitude is result-oriented, it is a relationship between people, it involves the use of a person to solve certain goals and objectives. It arises in management systems and social relations. A pragmatic attitude towards the world is an attitude within social relations that involves a person’s use of certain human resources, his or her own or others’.
M. Weber identifies four main types of social actions: affective action (emotional), traditional action (not rational, does not require a reflexive attitude, simple repetition), value-rational action (rational beginning, choice of values), goal-oriented action (choosing a goal, thinking through means, etc. .P.). The technical worldview is built on purposeful, rational actions. And the value-rational is connected with the aesthetic worldview. The technical attitude towards the world is focused on obtaining a practical result, it works in the plane of creating an artificial instrumental reality and action algorithms.
Unlike artistic reality, technical reality is not just artificial, it is created to achieve certain goals. In general, reality is what we are talking about, the current state of affairs. Technical reality is the human world in its technical dimension. Virtual reality is one of its subtypes. Technical reality is a rather late phenomenon of a culture in which technology has reached such an extent in its development that it can swaddle the entire surrounding world with its connections - a world in which a person’s technical attitude towards the world dominates over all other types of attitude towards the world.
Technical reality is born where the technical worldview becomes close to dominant, when the tools around us are not an addition, but components of the system that we call technical reality. Now it is no longer technology that is included in a person’s life, but a person that is included in the world of technology. Such human involvement in the world of technology is not a physical fact, but a worldview fact. When everything that surrounds us is needed to implement certain ways of achieving goals, to implement or meet certain needs, then we say that technical reality is the world in which we live.
The dominance of the technical worldview threatens the fact of human existence. Technical activity is the practical activity of a person, which is realized within technical reality. It presupposes the presence of a subject, an object of activity, and the instrument and algorithm that mediate this technical relationship. A person's tools contain his knowledge and experience. The integration of knowledge and experience in a tool makes it possible to partially replace the actor. Technology is a kind of subject-object, tool, instrument to which a person delegates part of his functions. At the same time, in the instrument, which we call the material carrier of technology, the will and knowledge of man are ideally combined. The activity algorithm is embodied at the level of the possibility of its implementation. A technical object contains both material nature and the ideal substance of human culture.
The pluralism of approaches to the concept of “technology” is due to the diversity of its forms and types, as well as the inalienability of social relations. The basic definitions of the concepts “technique” and “technology” complement each other within the framework of the system of unity of material means and tools, knowledge of their creation and operation, and man as the bearer of this knowledge.
Technical progress - the most important characteristic of the socio-historical process since the primitive era. The fundamental reasons for technological progress are rooted in the contradiction between the dynamic needs of society and disabilities their satisfaction using existing technology.
The relationship between science and technology is of a multilateral nature, both direct (for example, the use of scientific discoveries in the process of technical inventions) and indirect, i.e. through the system of material production. Each subsequent stage of technical progress - from guns to information technologies- causes significant social changes affecting not only the economic sphere, but also the entire system of social relations, contributing to the transition to a new type of social organization.
The essence of technology, its genesis and main types
The question of the essence of technology is fundamental and key in the philosophical study of this complex and multifaceted phenomenon. The origins of the concept of “technology” go back centuries. The ancient Greek word "techne" is translated into Russian as "art, skill, skill, skillful activity." The concept of technology is found already in Plato and Aristotle in connection with the analysis of artificial tools. Thus, Plato understood by technology everything that is connected with human activity, everything artificial, in contrast to the natural.
In the Middle Ages, technology was considered a reflection of divine creativity, with which it was compared. In modern times, man saw in technology primarily the power of his own mind; it was understood as the totality of all those means, procedures and actions that relate to skillful production of all kinds, but primarily to the production of tools and mechanisms. Nowadays, most people associate the word “technology” with machines, mechanisms, apparatus, and various instruments of human activity. But the old meaning of this word has also been preserved, in particular they talk about the technique of an artist, musician, athlete, etc., implying the same skill and skill of a person. The modern content of the concept of “technology” has expanded enormously; there are various interpretations and definitions of it.
To define a technique, it is first necessary to record its essential features, the main ones of which can be considered the following:
- Technology is an artifact, i.e. an artificial formation that is specially manufactured and created by a person (master, technician, engineer). In this case, specific plans, ideas, knowledge, and experience are used.
- Technology is a “tool”, i.e. is always used as a means, an instrument that satisfies or resolves a certain human need (for strength, movement, energy, protection, etc.).
- Technology is an independent world, a reality opposed to nature, art, language, everything living, and finally, man.
- Technology is a specific engineering way of using the power of natural energy.
- Technology is technology, i.e. the totality of production operations themselves, methods of using tools.
Thus, it is customary to proceed from the fact that technology is a set of artificial means, instruments of human activity. In most philosophical publications, technology is defined as “a system of artificial organs and means of human activity, designed to facilitate it and increase efficiency, used to carry out the process of production and serve the non-productive needs of society.”
Technology is often understood as a set of mechanisms and machines. In particular, one of the dictionaries says: “Technology is a set of mechanisms and machines, as well as a system of means of control, production, storage, energy and information created for the purpose of production and servicing the non-productive needs of society.” Flaw this definition is that it does not cover “non-mechanical equipment”, let’s say its chemical and biological types.
In the literature, there are sometimes definitions of technology that combine its characteristics as a means, skill, ability, as well as techniques and operations of labor activity. For example, A.G. Spirkin notes: “Technology is understood as a system of created means and instruments of production, as well as techniques and operations, the skill and art of carrying out the labor process.”
Recently, interpretations of technology have begun to appear, including technology and technical knowledge, abilities, skills and professional skills of a person. In this case, the word “technology” means:
- a field of knowledge that acts as a link between empiricism and theoretical knowledge;
- the area of human activity (including all kinds of means and procedures), the purpose of which is to change nature in accordance with human needs;
- a set of skills and abilities that make up the professional characteristics of a particular type of human activity (perfect mastery of skills), the art and skill of a person engaged in this activity.
Such a broad interpretation of the word “technology” is hardly legitimate - it is eclectic in nature and combines almost all the meanings of this concept. As a result of this, it is almost impossible to present technology as an independent phenomenon, to reveal its originality, place and role in the development of society.
It is important to note that there has long been an idea according to which technology, unlike nature, is not a natural formation, it is created by man, is a material, tangible object and instrument of human activity produced by man. Therefore it is often called artifact (from lat. arte - artificially + factus - made). We can say that technology is a collection of artifacts. This leads to the definition of technology as a system of artificial material means and organs of human activity.
To designate products (elements, devices, subsystems, functional units or systems) that can be considered separately, the phrase “technical object” is often used.
Technical object - is not only an object of technical practice, but also a material means of expedient social activity. It functions in society and is being improved as the technical basis of social production.
Considering all of the above, we can conclude that technique taken in the proper sense of the word, it is the most important component of the productive forces and material culture of society and represents a set of artificial, material means and at the same time the results of expedient human activity, intended to transform the world, natural, social and human existence, to strengthen and increase the efficiency of activity, primarily labor, to create a comfortable living environment.
True, as a result of the expansion of technology, the technization of the world, social and human existence, it acquires a relatively independent ontological status, becomes a technosphere (“technos”), i.e. takes on a broader meaning, is a special world, a certain way of human existence, an integral environment for his habitat.
It is known that the term “environment” is used in biology, geography and medicine and is understood as something external in relation to a living being, including a person - something surrounding him. In this regard, it should be noted that the technosphere is now becoming the internal environment of human and social existence, acquiring a universal character, and is an indispensable element of social space in modern civilization. It is not without reason that the French researcher J. Ellul noted that technology created in the human environment little by little itself becomes an environment in the literal sense of the word, an environment of the world of economic and humanitarian absurdity.
And yet technology is needed mainly as means, instrument, satisfying one or another human need (strength, energy, protection, etc.). In this regard, technology is tool, but this is an instrument on which the fate of civilization now depends.
It should also be noted that technology is a material, material-object formation, although in the process of its production there is a complex dialectic of the ideal and the material, the transformation of ideas into material, artifactual objects.
In technology, thanks to the professional activities of technical specialists and engineers, technical ideas, plans, projects and knowledge are materialized, “reified.” At the same time, the scientific and technical level of the workers operating the equipment, their knowledge, experience, skills and abilities “revive” technical devices and tools, ensuring their normal, efficient and safe functioning, primarily in the production sphere.
There are different concepts regarding the origin of technology. The emergence of technology is often seen in the purposeful activity of man and the need for rational use of the means of this activity. According to the concept proposed by O. Spengler, technology is the result of the joint activity of large masses of people and is a way of organizing this activity. Therefore, it should be considered not as a set of tools, but as a way of handling them, i.e. almost like technology.
The main reason for the emergence of technology is the desire of man to overcome the limitations of his natural nature and organization, to strengthen the influence of his natural organs on the substance and forces of nature. In other words, the contradiction between the physical organization of man and the need to transform nature in order to produce material goods necessary for his existence and development became the main source, the driving force that determined human activity, his activity in creating the first, primitive, archaic technology. The whole point of the further development of technology is that man increases his impact on nature and consistently transfers a number of his labor functions to technical devices.
Modern technology is diverse. There is still no unified and generally accepted typology of technology in the literature. As a rule, it is divided into the following functional sectors:
- production equipment;
- transport and communication technology;
- scientific research techniques;
- military equipment;
- technology of the learning process;
- technology of culture and life;
- medical equipment,
- control technique.
Such types of equipment as construction, space, computer, gaming, sports, etc. are also called.
It is usually noted that the leading place belongs to production technology, within which industrial, agricultural and construction equipment, communications and transport equipment are distinguished. Lately there has been a lot of talk about computer, information technology, which is universal in nature and can be used in a wide variety of areas of human life.
Technology is usually divided into passive and active. Passive technique includes a connecting production system (especially in the chemical industry), production areas, technical structures, and technical means of disseminating information (telephone, radio, television). Active technique consists of tools (instruments), which are divided into tools of manual labor, mental labor and tools of human life (glasses, hearing aids, some prostheses, etc.), machines (industrial, transport, military), control equipment for machines, technological, production and socio-economic processes.
In addition to the horizontal structural analysis of the “section” of the total technology, researchers also use a vertical one. In this case, the relations between the various elements of the technical system are relations between the general and the particular. In the light of this “cut”, the following levels of technology are distinguished: total technology, technical systems and individual technical means.
§ 1. Object
A further modification of the mutual transformation of the ideal and the material is the dialectic of subject and object, the analysis of which in its pure form is a necessary stage of ascent.
Problem subject - object throughout the history of philosophy and sociology has been the subject of widespread discussion. A great many works have been and are dedicated to her. A lot of points of view have been expressed about it: it would not be a mistake to say that there was and is no philosopher, sociologist who did not express his attitude towards it in one way or another. And this is not accidental, for this problem is the sphere of theoretical thinking that, as if in focus, reflects the interests of parties in philosophy, where all the roads of the struggle of materialism and idealism, dialectics and metaphysics, and therefore, ultimately, the struggle of social classes and groups lead.
Therefore, the problem has not lost its relevance today. Moreover, in the era of scientific and technological progress and fundamental social transformations in the lives of peoples, it is acquiring greater relevance and vitality every day, and therefore it is still a subject even more widely and actively discussed by both Marxists and non-Marxists. Marxist authors. At the same time, the needs of continuously developing material practice and scientific knowledge have brought to the fore not only new aspects of this problem and not only the solution of one or another of its moments, “pieces,” but the whole; they have urgently given rise to the need, firstly, synthesis in the highest unity of abstract definitions, ascent to the concrete; secondly, a clear, definite and decisive implementation of the principle mutual conversiontion subject and object, which is actually the essence of the dialectical-materialistic solution to the problem.
The subject-object problem expressed the solution to the fundamental question of philosophy by materialists and idealists. Although ancient philosophy does not yet present it directly, there are elements of an idea about it. The line of Democritus came from a naive materialist, and the line of Plato from a naive idealistic view of the world. Materialists understood the materiality of the world as an object and saw it in one or another sensory-concrete beginning (Thales - in water, Heraclitus - in fire, etc.) - Moreover, this very beginning (or root cause) acts as the subject of changes in all things . In Heraclitus, for example, the human subject coincides with objective substance. Fate, necessity and reason are identical. God is an eternal periodic fire, fate, that is, the mind that creates everything from opposites. Everything depends on fate, which coincides with necessity. For Democritus, man is a microcosm and there is nothing else in it except atoms; man dissolves in the element of the necessary movement of atoms. Consequently, here the subject and the object are not yet dismembered, they are fused together.
The Sophists make the first attempt to consider man as an independent problem. They believe that human laws cannot be completely reduced to the laws of the cosmos - the gods, but must be explained from human nature. In this regard, the position of Protagoras is characteristic: “ man is the measure of all things."Socrates takes a further step towards the study of man, demands to know his soul, consciousness, mind. He will introduce the idea of “daimony”, by which he means reason, his own conscience, common sense. “Socrates is aware that he,” writes Marx, “is the bearer of daimonia... but he does not withdraw into himself, he is the bearer of not a divine, but a human image; Socrates turns out to be not mysterious, but clear and bright, not a prophet, but a sociable person” 1.
U Plato the world of ideas, existing forever, being an object, at the same time acts as the subject of all changes, the creator of the world of “shadows”. Man consists of two substances: soul and body. The soul belongs to the world of ideas, while the body is a manifestation of the world of ideas. Man is thus the bearer of the spirit.
Aristotle makes a further attempt to divide the problem and consider the object and subject separately. In his understanding, matter is the object towards which form is directed. Matter-object is inert, passive, not actual, it is only a possibility, while form-subject is the bearer of activity, effectiveness, it is actual. It is the substance, the root cause and the primary source of changes in matter, the transformation of possibility into reality. The dignity of a subject - a person - is possessed only by the free. Slave is not. a person, but a speaking instrument. Man is a political being. Society is a single whole.
The individualism of the Stoics, skeptics, and Epicureans was directed against the point of view of the unity of man and society, who believed that the universal dominates over the individual, who can receive the highest satisfaction only in solitude.
Pre-Marxist materialism made an important contribution to solving the problem. Defending his materialistic view of the world, he emphasized its objective nature, the existence of an object independent of consciousness. In his understanding, the object is the objective world, and therefore the subject of knowledge.
So, Bacon believed that the subject of science can only be matter (nature) and its properties. Answers to the questions put forward by science must be sought “...not in the cells of the human mind,” but in nature itself. The object is primary, exists objectively, eternally. Unlike Aristotle, he does not deprive matter of internal activity, but considers it as an active, active principle, generating a variety of its objective forms and forces. Whatever the original matter may be, it must necessarily be clothed in a certain form, endowed with certain definite properties, and so constituted that every kind of force, quality, content, action and natural motion can be its consequence and its product.
Bacon believed that matter was initially objectively characterized by primary “forms” integral to matter, which are the source of “natures” or “natures,” i.e., the physical properties of bodies. For Bacon, the primary forms of matter are living, individualizing, inherent in it, creating specific differences in the essence of force. Bacon is trying to prove that, in addition to mechanical, there are other types of motion, of which there are 19. He is trying not to reduce all manifestations of matter to one mechanical relationship, as the later materialist-mechanists do, but sees in matter the ability for comprehensive development, such as aspiration, vital spirit, tension, torment, etc. “U Bacon, As its first creator, materialism, wrote K. Marx, still conceals within itself, in a naive form, the germs of all-round development. Matter smiles with its poetic and sensual brilliance on the whole person” 2.
Thus, in Bacon’s materialism, in a spontaneous form, lies the idea that not only man is a subject, but also matter itself (nature), since the latter itself is the way to qualitative changes.
In philosophy Descartes the subject is definitely opposed to the object. In his understanding, the subject is the inner world of consciousness, the main content of which is innate ideas, consisting of innate concepts (the concept of being, extension, figure, etc.) and of innate axioms, which represent the connection of the former. (Nothing can arise from nothing, a thinking subject cannot not exist if he thinks, “I think, therefore I exist, etc.). An object is an external objective reality, matter, which he identifies with space, since only the latter does not depend on consciousness. The whole variety of natural phenomena is explained by mechanical movement, which is impossible without an external push (God), being the universal cause of movement. This dualism underlies the decision and question about the subject - man. The latter is a connection between a soulless bodily (natural) mechanism and a thinking soul. The task of knowledge is to invent means for the domination of man (the thinking soul) over nature.
Spinoza, developing further the ideas of Descartes, overcame his dualism about material and spiritual substances. Locke developed the doctrine of primary and secondary qualities. Leibniz argued that God is not the source of innate ideas, etc. This is why Marx wrote: “Mechanistic French materialism joined the physics of Descartes in opposition to his metaphysics. His students were anti-metaphysicists by profession, namely physicists... Metaphysics of the 17th century, the main representative of which in France was Descartes, had materialism as its antagonist from the day of its birth. Materialism opposed Descartes in the person of Gassendi, who restored Epicurean materialism. French and English materialism has always maintained a close connection with Democritus and Epicurus. Cartesian metaphysics met another opponent in the person of the English materialist Hobbes" 3.
In essence, Spinoza’s atheistic position - “matter is the cause of itself” (Causa Sui) contains a deep thought that matter is the only and infinite substance - the source of origin and change of all its modes, excluding the presence of any other principle. The object and subject, therefore, for Spinoza is the identity of God and nature, which is the eternal and infinite integral substance, which is not only the source of modes, but also of unchangeable human nature. Considering man to be a part of nature, he considers him from the perspective of his body and soul. The latter is a particle of the infinite mind of God, which consists of a set of ideas and is aimed at the body (object). Moreover, these opposites are mutually independent of each other, since they are caused by two independent attributes of a single substance. Human cognitive activity goes through a number of stages: sensory knowledge (opinion), which is very limited and always contains error; rational knowledge (understanding), which is the source of reliable truths; intuition, which is the highest mind, the basis of reliable knowledge.
A significant step forward in the study of the problem was made by Diderot, Holbach, Helvetius, La Mettrie, Lomonosov, Radishchev, Feuerbach, Herzen, Chernyshevsky and other pre-Marxist materialists. The enlighteners of the 18th and 19th centuries, expressing the interests of developing capitalism, preached the ideal of a developed subject - the individual. The latter is the goal, and society is the means to achieve this goal. Society, the state, is the product of a contract between individuals. Considering man to be a material being, they at the same time essentially identify him with nature, explain human essence from the laws of mechanics (“Man-Machine” by La Mettrie and others) or reduce it to psychophysiology (Feuerbach).
In understanding Feuerbach, a person differs from an animal in that an animal is limited in the way of its existence, and a person is not limited and universal. Therefore, man is the only universal and highest subject of philosophy. Recognizing the materiality of the human body, he did not see the materiality of society: for him there is nature on the one hand, and consciousness as a product of the same nature on the other. In this form he pursues the principle of his anthropological materialism, essentially the principle of naturalism.
But his anthropologism proceeds from the biological, and not from the social, essence of man, thus being an idealism “from above.” He sees human sociality only in ethical interconnection I And You. Sexual love is the basis of all human connections and relationships, and the desire for I and You is the driving force for happiness, the unity of human will. According to Engels, love is everywhere and always a miracle worker for Feuerbach, which must help out of all the difficulties of practical life - and this in a society divided into classes with diametrically opposed interests!
He criticized Hegel's idealism for understanding the essence of man as “pure thinking,” but Feuerbach was unable to oppose him with a consistently materialistic solution to the problem, since his man is an abstract individual, a set of sensory-perceptible biological qualities and properties. In other words, Feuerbach, in understanding the essence of man, did not at all overcome idealism and himself found himself in captivity of idealism. It does not reach real, really existing people, but stops at the abstraction “man” and is limited to the recognition of a real, individual, bodily person in the realm of feelings. Actual social relations are thus replaced by the concepts of “genus” and inter-individual communication. But man is not an abstract being living somewhere outside the world, etc. “He does not notice that the sensory world around him is not at all some thing directly given from time to time, always equal to itself, but that it is a product of industry and social state, moreover, in the sense that it is a historical product, the result of the activity of a number of generations, each of which stood on the shoulders of the previous one, continued to develop its industry and its mode of communication and modified its social structure in accordance with the changing needs. Even objects of the simplest “sensory certainty” are given to him only thanks to social development, thanks to industry and trade relations" 4.
Speaking about Feuerbach’s idealism in understanding the subject, man, Engels wrote: “In form he is realistic, he takes man as his point of departure; but he has no talk of the world in which this man lives, and therefore his man always remains the same abstract man who appears in the philosophy of religion. This man was not born from his mother’s womb: he, like a butterfly from a chrysalis, flew out of the god of monotheistic religions. Therefore, he does not live in a real, historically developed and historically determined world. Although he is in communication with other people, each of them is as abstract as he himself" 5.
Pre-Marxist materialism as a whole “put too much emphasis” on nature as an object, emphasizing the primacy, activity, and decisive role of nature, which was determined by historical conditions and the need for methods of struggle of this materialism against idealism and mysticism.
At the same time, as mentioned above, this materialism not only did not deny the subjective factor of consciousness, but even exaggerated and inflated it, considering ideal driving forces, that is, consciousness as the only driving force in the evolution of social life. He explained social events, processes, phenomena, facts, actions, relationships, etc. from consciousness, considering the latter to be the root cause of the development of society. Even the most progressive materialists of the past, such as the French materialists of the 18th century, Feuerbach and the Russian revolutionary democrats, were materialists “below”, but idealists “above”. In the historical field, F. Engels wrote, the old materialism betrays itself, considering the ideal driving forces at work as the final causes of events, instead of exploring what lies behind them, what the driving forces of these driving forces are. The inconsistency lies not in recognizing the existence ideal these incentives, but in that they stop at them, they do not go further to the driving causes of these ideal incentive forces. This, in fact, is the historical limitation of the old materialism, which strove for the truth and prepared for its discovery.
Summarizing the consideration of the views of pre-Marxist materialists on the “subject-object” problem, it is necessary to note the following: 1) They understood the essence of man as a “kind”, as an abstract inherent in an individual, and not as a set of social relations; 2) The subject was understood as a separate, isolated person; 3) In public life they did not see the most important thing - the material and production activity of people, the decisive role of revolutionary practical activity, and therefore did not understand the real source of the activity of consciousness. The latter was considered only as a product of nature itself, and not as a product of changes in nature by man, that is, not as a product of socio-historical practice; 4) They did not see the dialectic of the material and the ideal, the interaction of the subject and the object was understood as the influence of the object, nature on the subject, which is a passive appendage of the object; 5) They did not cover the actions of the masses of the population, did not see their decisive role in history; 6) Society was understood as a random accumulation of events, facts, etc.; they did not see necessity or regularity in it.
These shortcomings of pre-Marxist materialism, its limitations gave rise to another extreme - an exorbitant inflation of the role of the subject, its absolutization, its hypostatization by subjective idealists (Berkeley, Hume, Mach, etc.), who reject the objective character material world, and the whole subject-object problem is completely transferred into the consciousness of the subject.
In Kant's understanding, man is a combination of the world of nature and the world of freedom. In the first world, he is subordinate to natural necessity, in the second, he is a morally self-determining being. Therefore, Kant’s anthropology considers man from two points of view: physiological, which examines him, that nature makes a person, and pragmatic, which explores what what does he do as a freely acting being?or can and should make of himself. Man is the main subject in the world, because he is his own final goal.
The real subject of cognition in Kant is a certain transcendental consciousness, standing above the individual consciousness of man as a finite subject, which is opposed to the finite, limited object of cognition. Speaking against the “epistemological Robinsonade,” Kant, however, did not understand the decisive role of socio-historical practice in knowledge, which led him to dualism. This dualism was expressed in the fact that the subject and the external “thing in itself” in Kant simply oppose each other, without interpenetrating, without turning into each other. Moreover, an external object is not an object of cognition for the subject at all. For Kant, the act of the subject constructing the objective world is accomplished in some supersensible, otherworldly spheres of the real natural world.
Fichte, developing Kant's subjectivism, eliminates his dualism “on the right”. He completely derives the entire material world-object from the active activity of the subject, which he understands as a set of various mental states. Thus, the initial category in Fichte’s philosophy is active human activity. However, he views it as absolute, not determined by anything, not conditioned by anything, active mental activity, which from itself generates a subject - a set of states of the subject. The pure “I” as universal human consciousness in the process of action posits both itself and its opposite - “not I” (object).
Deep thoughts about the “subject-object” relationship were expressed by Hegel. Criticizing the romantic individualism of old materialism, as well as Kant and the subjective idealists, he points out that the incompatibility of a personal ideal with reality is explained only by the subjectivity of this ideal. What is true in these ideals is preserved in practical activity; It is only from the untrue, from empty abstractions that man must rid himself. The latter is not an isolated monad, but a moment of the universal, which realizes not subjective goals, but objective ones. Being and essence are moments of the formation of the concept, which is a stage of both nature and spirit. Logical forms how the forms of the concept constitute the living spirit of the real.
The goal turned out to be the third member in relation to mechanism and chemistry: it is their truth. Since she herself is still within the sphere of objectivity, she still experiences the influence of appearance as such and is confronted by some objective world with which she relates. On this side, with the conditional relationship under consideration, which is an external relationship, mechanical causality still appears, to which in general chemistry should also be included, but it appears as subordinate to it, as holy in itself.
Commenting on these thoughts of Hegel, V.I. Lenin writes: “The laws of the external world, of nature, divided into mechanical and chemical (this is very important), are the essence of expedient human activity .
In his practical activity, a person has an objective world in front of him, depends on it, and determines his activity by it.
From this side, from the side of practical (goal-setting) human activity, the mechanical (and chemical) causality of the world (nature) is, as it were, something external, as if secondary, as if hidden” 6.
According to Hegel, the mind is as cunning as it is powerful; cunning generally lies in mediating activity, which, by stipulating the interaction and mutual processing of objects according to their nature, without direct intervention in this process, achieves its goal.
Further, commenting on Hegel’s hesitation regarding the fact that “in his tools man has power over external nature, while in his goals he is rather subordinate to it,” V. I. Lenin writes: “Historical materialism as one of the applications and developments of brilliant ideas - grains present in germ in Hegel" 7.
Hegel also expressed correct thoughts about practice as a criterion of truth, which was also highly valued by the classics of Marxism. “Marx, therefore, directly adjoins Hegel, introducing the criterion of practice into the theory of knowledge” 8.
Thus, Hegel’s merit in the historical field lies in the fact that he tries to understand the development of society as a necessary, natural process. He criticizes those who consider the opinion, will of kings, legislators, etc. to be the decisive force in the development of human society, who represent society as a random, chaotic accumulation of events, facts, etc.
Sharply criticizing the dualism of object and subject, characteristic of “rational metaphysics,” Hegel puts forward the concept of the identity of these opposites. The basis of reality, according to Hegel, is the self-development of the absolute spirit, which is an absolute subject that has itself as an object. The subject exists only to the extent that it is an eternal becoming, a movement. The absolute spirit as an absolute subject - object does not exist outside the process of self-development.
The subject, according to Hegel, does not exist outside the activity of a social person to understand and transform the surrounding world and himself. The Phenomenology of Spirit is devoted to the substantiation of this position. "The greatness of Hegel's "Phenomenology" and its final result - the dialectic of negativity as a driving and generating principle, - Marget wrote in this regard, - is ... that Hegel considers the self-generation of man as a process, considers objectification as deobjectification, as self-alienation and the removal of this self-alienation , in that he, therefore, captures the essence labor and understands the objective man, the true, because real, man as the result of his own labor...He views labor as essence, as the self-confirming essence of man" 9.
Although Hegel, according to Marx, knows and recognizes only one type of labor - namely, abstract spiritual labor, he correctly emphasizes the connection between the cognitive and practical activities of social man.
However, at the same time, he mystifies real connections and relationships, considers the main driving force in the development of society to be the “world mind”, the “absolute spirit”, which, in his opinion, is the carrier historical necessity, the only real concreteness. Everything else is abstract, metaphysical. For Hegel, man is a subject of spiritual activity, creating the world of human culture. He is not an individual at all, as materialists understand, but a bearer of universal consciousness, mind, spirit. He is a “humanized idea” - an absolute spirit that has returned to itself through otherness.
Hegel understands the development of the “world mind” as an ascent from the abstract to the concrete. Having first discovered this logical law of development, he applies it to the phenomena of consciousness, to “spirit”. The absolute spirit ascends to itself through a series of steps, representing a series of its abstract manifestations - mechanism, chemistry and organism. By becoming concrete, it manifests itself in society. The economic life of society is also an abstract manifestation of the spirit. In this sphere there are isolated individuals who enter into certain connections with each other in order to preserve their individuality. But here the abstract form of consciousness dominates - reason, which is not concrete. True, it contains opposites, but the latter remain themselves and are not a source of development. Development is ensured by legal activity. But law is a manifestation of the highest essence - purposeful will. The state is a concrete, highest reality, the reality of the general will, the image and reality of reason. The entire material culture of society, according to Hegel, is a product of the development of the spirit, concept or form of its manifestation.
Thus, in Hegelian philosophy, despite the historical understanding of the subject, the latter turns out to be nothing more than an absolute idea standing above the individual, which at the same time posits itself as an absolute object.
It is extremely important in this regard to emphasize that if the classics of Marxism critically overcame the limited understanding of man by past philosophers, including Hegel, and materialistically rethought the right thoughts, grains, created a holistic scientific theory of man as a subject and object, then modern philosophers, In particular, the existentialists, and even earlier their predecessor Kierkegaard, sharply criticize all past philosophy, especially Hegel’s, “from the right,” rejecting everything rational that is contained in the philosophy of the past in order to preach a consistently irrationalistic individualistic anthropology.
Thus, speaking out against the Hegelian understanding of man as a moment of manifestation of the universal, absolute spirit, Kierkegaard believes that man should not be determined by anything, but should be absolutely free in choice and absolutely self-determining. Only in unconditional independence from all connections and external relationships a person can become a person, acquires the absoluteness of his individual choice and is responsible for his actions. The decisive condition for achieving this goal is the will of an absolutely isolated person. Reason is not only not a value, spiritual wealth, but rather an evil that destroys and disfigures the authenticity of a person.
This indetermistic, irrationalistic concept of man is further developed by modern existentialists. The general content of the anthropology of all existentialism is a person absolutely isolated from this world, abandoned by everyone and everything, left alone with himself, despairing, losing faith, yearning and dying.
If we ignore the external form of expression and proceed from the content, then the diversity of pre-Marxist and modern non-Marxist anthropological concepts of man in their essence can be reduced to the following main directions:
- I.Biological. Man is viewed as a natural biological phenomenon, his social essence is rejected, just as the laws of the development of society are absolutely identified with the laws of the development of nature.
- II.Objective-idealistic. A person is considered as a moment of manifestation of a mystical absolute idea, and the laws of development of society are manifestations of the laws of an absolute idea. In other words, the essence of man is mystified thinking.
- III.Subjective-idealistic. Human society and man are derived from the consciousness or will of the individual, from the absolutized Self, and the laws of development of society are considered as manifestations of this consciousness.
- IV.Dualistic. Its essence is that a person is considered as a unity of the natural and social, physical and spiritual: “on the one hand, on the other hand”;
- V.Theological. These are the teachings about the first man as a divine being, the anthropology of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, etc., the essence of which is the divine origin of man, human society, as well as the divine laws of their development.
Of course, all these directions differ not only from each other, but within each of them one can find any number of distinctive features of one concept from another, one point of view from another. However, these differences are not significant and do not change their essence. And the essence is one - idealistic. All these directions represent different varieties and modifications of the idealistic understanding of both society and the laws of its development, and the individual, personality, and individual.
In the light of all that has been said, the great enduring significance of the world-historical revolution that Marxism accomplished in the understanding of both the object and the subject becomes more understandable. The discovery by Marxism of a materialist understanding of society was also the key to the discovery of the dialectic of object and subject. The object, whatever its further definitions, is the opposite of the subject, is what the subject’s activity is directed towards, is what the subject processes, assimilates and from which the latter builds his body. Since an object is something involved in the activity of a subject, it is not identical with nature. The latter is an eternal, boundless, etc., objective reality, which is an object only by those aspects of itself that are involved in the process of subjectification, in the process of activity of the subject. It is the practical and cognitive activity of the subject that is the criterion, or better to say, the side, the line that separates the object from nature. Of course, this area will continuously expand and deepen. However, beyond this sphere, beyond this boundary, the question of what happens in the rest of nature always remains open. “Nature, taken abstractly, in isolation, fixed in isolation from man, is nothing for man” 10. "
However, a reservation must be made here: as shown above, in the history of philosophy the object was often identified with nature, and idealism, in particular Machism, denied objective reality object - nature, adhered to the thesis: “without a subject there is no object,” which materialists rightly resolutely opposed, especially V.I. Lenin in his book “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.”
By object we mean not nature as such, but an object of human activity, which can be one or another side of both the material and the ideal involved in the process of this activity. For example, Marx wrote that with the abolition of capitalism, “workers, as subjects, use the means of production as an object to produce wealth for themselves” 11. It follows that human activity is possible as the identity of opposites - object and subject, and in this sense, these concepts are impossible without each other.
Nature, which exists on its own outside of this activity, has nothing to do with the subject-object relationship and is not an object at all. There is an object-subject relationship attitude. And therefore, it, like any relationship, must have two sides, which are impossible without each other. Consequently, there is no object without a subject and, conversely, a subject is impossible, and therefore unthinkable, without an object and an object without a subject. In the subject-object relation, the object of activity (which will be shown in detail below) is not only the natural, but also the social; even more than that - not only material, but also ideal. That is why reasoning such as that something is only an object, and another is only a subject, has nothing to do with dialectical materialism. Such an abstraction simply does not creatively repeat the opinion of pre-Marxist materialism, which took reality only in the form of an object, and consciousness in the form of a subject. Unfortunately, there are still authors who turn their erroneous judgments into truth by referring to the classics of Marxism. And in this case it could not have happened without it.
§ 2. Subject
Great principle dialectical materialism- a materialistic understanding of history is the basis for a truly scientific solution to the problem of the subject - man, over which the best minds of humanity have puzzled unsuccessfully for centuries and millennia.
In the philosophy of Marxism, for the first time, a social person who carries out material production becomes an actual subject. Not an isolated individual, an “epistemological Robinson,” not an absolute idea, but a person who produces in society and only therefore cognizes reality. Only such an understanding is truly scientific.
At the same time, as Marx pointed out, “one must especially avoid again contrasting “society” as an abstraction with the individual. Individual is a social being. Therefore, every manifestation of his life - even if it does not appear in direct form collective, done together with others, manifestations of life, is a manifestation and affirmation public life" 12.
Society is the highest, concrete generalization of the material world (not nature, as is sometimes claimed), characterized primarily by the interaction of people in the process of their labor activity. Labor as a purposeful activity is a historically and logically decisive condition not only for society as a whole, but also for the individual human individual, the line that separates and distinguishes person from everything the rest of the world. Labor is the essence, there is main containingtion of society. As Marx wrote, labor as expedient sensory activity, as useful labor, is a condition of human existence independent of any social forms, an eternal, natural necessity, without it the exchange of substances between man and nature would not be possible, i.e. there would be no human life itself is possible.
Consequently, a scientific explanation of the genesis and evolution of society can only be given on the basis of its essence, from the labor, labor activity of people, their social existence. People can be distinguished from each other by anything, but they themselves begin to differ from animals as soon as they begin to produce and work. “Labor is, first of all, a process taking place between man and nature, a process in which man, through his own activity, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He himself opposes the substance of nature as a force of nature. In order to appropriate a substance of nature in a form suitable for its own life, he sets in motion the natural forces belonging to his body: arms and legs, head and fingers. By influencing and changing external nature through this movement, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops the forces dormant in it and subordinates the play of these forces to his own power” and “At the end of the labor process, a result is obtained that was already in the mind of a person at the beginning of this process, that is, ideally. Man not only changes the form of what is given by nature; in what is given by nature, he at the same time realizes his conscious goal, which, like a law, determines the method and nature of his actions and to which he must subordinate his will” 13.
In this regard, it should first of all be strongly emphasized social essence of man. This must be done because there is a widespread, even in our literature, erroneous opinion that “man represents a unity of natural and social,” that “man is a complex biosocial being,” etc. Supporters of this opinion are stuck on the purely empirical, rational level and do not want to ascend to reason. They have before them an empirical fact: mechanical, physical, chemical, biological laws function in man. And based on this fact, they conclude that man is “the unity of the natural and the social,” a “bio-social being.”
However, firstly, one must be consistent and declare that man is not only a complex “biosocial”, but a “mechanical-physical-chemical-biosocial being.” Secondly, if “bio” contains lower forms, then why does the social not contain lower forms; otherwise, what sense does this “bio-social” have? Thirdly, the lower form is not contained mechanically in the higher and does not constitute “autonomy” in it, but enters it in a melted, removed form. This means that nature exists in man, in a sublated form, that is, transformed into sociality. Consequently, the essence of man is social from all sides. A man is not on one side a man and on the other something else, but on all sides a man. Previously, it was repeatedly emphasized that the essence is contradictory, but there is no dualism of the essence. But now we are forced to say this again, because the criticized opinion “dilutes” the social essence of man with the natural, drags us back to dualistic anthropology, pursues a line of sophistry, which, simply put, leads to the loss of the essence of man.
Nature is not man, it is not human society. It in itself does not create anything human. Humanity is created by man, and only by him. Human, social is a product, the result of people’s labor activity. Man is “the constant premise of human history; there is also its constant product and result, and premise a person appears only as his own product and result” 14. Various social functions are alternating ways of life of people, which are based on labor production activity.
Society is a dialectical, objective, necessary, natural process, developing according to its own social, public objective laws, and not according to the laws of nature or the hybrid “nature - society”. Proving the objective nature of society and its laws, Marxism did not deny the role of consciousness, since labor, as they said, is not an activity in general, but a purposeful activity. Consequently, in society the material and the ideal are inseparable. But in this unity of the material and ideal sides of society, material life, the production of material goods is the objective existence of society, the content, sources, and basis of its ideal life. It is not the consciousness of people that determines their existence, as was asserted before Marxism and is affirmed today by bourgeois apologetics, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. This famous position of Marx, which signifies a radical revolution in views on society, does not at all belittle the role and importance of consciousness, as critics of Marxism think, but only indicates that social existence is primary, that it is the decisive, defining aspect of society, its essence , and consciousness is secondary, derivative from it, its reflection. It is in this sense that Marx defines society as a set of material and production relations, without denying the ideological phenomena that rise above them, which are also, of course, included in the concept of society.
At the same time, justifying materialistic understanding history, the decisive role of the mode of production in the life of society, Marxism discovered the laws of its development. Whatever the action of numerous ideal motivating forces and aspirations, even such as passion, ambition, hatred, whims of various kinds, etc., no matter how history may seem to us as a kingdom of chance - all this does not eliminate the natural nature of development society. All its events and facts are subject to hidden, internal objective laws of its development.
Further. Society is not a once-for-all given, immobile, and, moreover, chaotic accumulation of things, ideas, and is not simply a sum of people, as metaphysicians think. It is a single social organism developing dialectically, according to its own objective laws, which has its own history, its own qualitatively different stages of development, determined by its own dialectics.
Changes in all social life are ultimately caused by changes in the mode of production; changes in the method of production are caused by changes in the productive forces, and in the productive forces they change primarily guns labor. “By acquiring new productive forces,” wrote K. Marx, “people change their method of production, and with a change in the method of production, the method of providing for their lives, they change all their social relations. A hand mill gives you a society with a sovereign at its head, a steam mill gives you a society with an industrial capitalist" 15.
The instrumental activity of people is the decisive source, the cause of both the emergence of society and all its changes. Improvement and development of tools ultimately always led to profound changes in social life. For example, the transition from a primitive society to a slave society was due to the transition from stone tools to metal ones. Only on the basis of the development of tools of labor in the depths of the primitive system could labor productivity reach a level that made it possible to obtain a surplus of products, and with this the possibility arises alienation from the worker of a part of the produced product, the opportunity for some people to live off the labor of others. Under certain conditions of the social division of labor, this possibility turns into reality. New ones arise from relationships between people - relationships private property on the means of production, relations alienation. The replacement of the previous relations of people, based on public property, with new, slave-holding relations, based on private property, meant the emergence and establishment of social classes, relations of property inequality, exploitation of man by man, domination and subordination, hostility and antagonism, “the war of all Against everyone".
The improvement of the tools of labor and the growth of labor productivity within the framework of the slave system lead to the fact that existing social relations begin to hamper the development of productive forces. At this stage, the objective possibility of attaching slaves to the land arises, the implementation of which meant the transition of society from a slave-owning state to a feudal state.
Further improvement of the tools of labor within the framework of feudalism, the transition from crafts and manual labor to manufacturing, then machine production, the emergence of a mechanical loom, a spinning machine, at the same time, the further growth of the social division of labor, in particular, the technical division of labor within the enterprise, the emergence of a new type of worker, etc. - all this caused the industrial revolution and raised the question of the abolition of feudal production relations. The latter, under the weight of expanded productive forces, began to collapse and were supplanted by new, capitalist social relations. This process meant the transition of society from feudalism to capitalism.
Society as a self-improving, self-developing system has not only changed, but is also changing and will continue to change.
At the same time, changes in society do not mean the loss of the essence of man, as is sometimes believed. Nowadays, especially in connection with scientific and technological progress, all sorts of thoughts are being written. They even agree to the point of absurdity that intensive changes in the tools of labor and technology will ultimately lead to the disappearance of the social essence of man, since it will not be man who will work, but “thinking”, “intelligent”, etc. machines , as if a person is already turning into a “subsystem”, etc., etc.
However, fantasy is fantasy, and scientific truth is that intensive changes in technology and social life as a whole have led and will lead to its enrichment, specification, and more comprehensive and full-blooded development. Society is that universal which is not abstract, but concrete, one that contains within itself the wealth of the individual, the special, the individual. This universal, with each new step of ascent, is enriched, filled with new content, becomes more specific, more meaningful, because each time it absorbs the wealth of the individual, the special. Each human individual, being a manifestation of the universal, through his life activity transfers his final content to this, while at the same time being a form, a way of his being, development, he himself is enriched by this universal.
Summarizing what has been said, we can derive the following definition of a person. In this case, first of all, one should proceed from the fact that the concept of a person is ambiguous. At least two of its aspects are known: a) man is society, humanity; b) a person is a separate individual, a personality. Although both aspects express the same essence, their dialectic is a dialectic of the general and the separate, the individual.
Man is highest state of the material world, characterized by the following specific features or traits.
- The essence of man-society is the totality of all social relations. The human individual is a manifestation, the bearer of this essence. This is a first order abstraction.
- The first - and main - modification of this abstraction is ability to dotools. Production, reproduction, improvement of tools - the basis, the basis of all other social relations.
- On this basis, the production and reproduction of all other means of production.
- Production and reproduction of industrial and individual consumption items.
- Production and reproduction of all material relations in the process of production, exchange, distribution, consumption - in the unity of the material sphere of interaction between members of society.
- Production and reproduction of the spiritual life of society. Consciousness, purposeful activity.
- Verbal language or articulate speech is the immediate reality of consciousness.
- Production and reproduction of the entire system of social relations, the entire system of material and spiritual culture generally.
- The continuation of the race conditioned by all this is the reproduction of the people themselves.
These are, in our opinion, character traits definitions of man. In this regard, the following remark must be made. When we say that an individual person is a manifestation of the universal, a person-society, this should not be understood in the sense that he is a passive, inert “case” who is busy only with waiting for other people to “stuff” him culture created by society. No, of course not, man active subject. Although he cannot fully embody material and spiritual cultures, he embodies it depending on certain historical conditions, that is, especially, specifically, etc. in turn, this enriches the universal, introduces something unique into the general material and spiritual culture of humanity.
At the same time, it is impossible to fully understand either the subject or the volumeproject outside the process, outside their mutual transformation. Reason shows its weakness when it declares something to be an object and another to be a subject and does not go back to their essence. He analyzes these opposites as different, fossilized, frozen (giving, of course, some of their abstract definitions), but at the same time does not explore how the object becomes a subject, and the subject an object, does not go back to their synthesis, but gets stuck at the entrance to dialectic of subject and object. Meanwhile, the main thing is not that there are such opposites - their recognition is not yet a complete departure from the metaphysical method of consideration - but that these opposites mutually transform into each other.
§ 3. Mutual transformation of object and subject
The relationship between object and subject is a continuous process of their mutual transformation. The entire history of mankind is the history of this mutual transformation. But, since, although this is a fact, it is, unfortunately, still unconscious, it is necessary to dwell in more detail on this side of the problem.
- The first correct abstraction in this regard is the thoughts of pre-Marxist materialists (Bacon, Spinoza, etc.) that matter itself is the cause of its changes - Causa sui. This form of expression of a materialistic view of the world was directed against all mysticism. Having dialectically and materialistically rethought these essentially true atheistic positions, Marx put forward the position that matter itself is the subject of all its changes, of course, in the Marxist understanding of the subject of its changes. In Marx’s understanding, matter is not reducible to nature; human society is also matter, the highest state of matter. Moreover, it develops dialectically. Consequently, Marx’s matter is a more concrete, content-rich concept than that of old materialism.
However, despite the historical limitations of the latter, his merit lies in the fact that he, one way or another, in matter-nature itself, discovers its own forces, causes, laws of its changes, consciously rejecting all mysticism, idealism, God, creator, etc. , etc. Therefore, the position of Causa sui or matter, the subject of its changes, played an extremely important role in the struggle of materialism against idealism, and in the development of a scientific understanding of matter itself. - However, this position constitutes not only the strong side of old materialism, but also its weak side, since it stopped at this essentially true, but meager abstraction and did not go further, where it examined neither man-individual nor man-society, as they exist in to yourself. This shortcoming was eliminated by Marx, who gave a comprehensive scientific study of modern bourgeois society and, on the basis of this, developed general laws of social development. According to Marx, the subject is, first of all, human society as a whole, which, through its practical and cognitive activity, transforms the natural into an object of change, realizing its own goal in this. The object and the subject are identical, because they do not exist without each other, they mutually determine, penetrate each other and mutually transform into each other. But they are different at the same time. This difference in this aspect of the object-subject relationship is as follows: in contrast to the laws of object-nature, which are a blind necessity, the laws of society are a necessary, essential, conscious, purposeful activity of people. Genetically, the laws of nature, which have now become an object, functioned without the active objective activity of people, without the use of tools, while social laws are the activities of people with the use of tools made by the people themselves. Both the laws of the object-nature and the laws of the society-subject are objective character do not depend on the will and consciousness of people, however laws of societythere is an appropriateactivityof people. This means that if the laws of the natural object existed before people, without people, without their creativity, then the laws of society do not exist without people, without their activities, but are their actions, their creativity. People, as Marx said, are both authors and performers of their own drama. This thesis is directed against fatalism, against underestimating the role of the people themselves who create their own history.
External alien forces opposing society are transformed in the process of production into intrasocial forces and means. And since production is a continuous process, the transformation of external natural resources into an object and then into raw materials is also a continuous process: and, consequently, into internal elements of productive forces.
“So, in the process of labor, human activity with the help of means of labor causes a predetermined change in the subject of labor. The process fades into the product. ...Labor connected with the subject of labor. Labor is embodied in an object, and the object is processed. What on the side of the worker appeared in the form of activity (Unruhe) now appears on the side of the product in the form of a property at rest (ruhende Eigenschaft), the form of being” 16.
All this means that the labor process is, first of all, the transformation of an object into a subject. At the same time, it is simultaneously the transformation of a subject into an object. As was said earlier, the mutual transformation of opposites is not a movement in a vicious circle, but an ascent, an enrichment. Through its activity, the subject, changing, processing the object, firstly, and transfers all its content into it, objectification of the subject occurs. Labor is always an expenditure of physical, mental, intellectual, etc. strengths and abilities of a person. The latter, in order to produce and change an object, sets in motion the natural forces belonging to his body: arms, legs, head and fingers. Secondly, a change in an object by a subject is a change not only in the object, but also a change in the subject itself - this is, in fact, the same process, the same relationship. Thirdly, with its continuous activity the subject equally continuously expands and deepens the object of its activity. In other words, the activity of the subject is a change in the object. Thus, the process of subjectification of an object and objectification of a subject is the internal content of the subject-object relationship.
Literature
- Marks K., Engels F. Soch. T. 42. WITH. 135.
- Same thing. T. 2. pp. 142-143.
- Same thing. P. 140.
- T and m e. T. 3. P. 42.
- Right there. T. 21. P. 295.
- Lenin V.I. Complete. collection op. T. 29. pp. 169-170
- Same thing. P. 172.
- Same thing. P. 193.
- Marks K., Engels F. From early works. M., 1956. P. 627.
- Marx K., Engels F. Soch T. 42. P 596; T 4 S 593; T. 3. P. 16.
- Same thing. T. 26. Part 2. P. 644.
- Same thing. T. 42. P. 590.
- Right there. T. 23. pp. 188-189.
- Same thing. T. 26. Part 3. P. 516.
- Same thing. T. 4. P. 133.
- Same thing. T. 23. pp. 191 - 192.
Here, in particular, are the aphorisms in which this was expressed: Knowledge is power (Bacon); People stop thinking when they stop reading (Diderot); Fear of the possibility of error should not turn us away from the search for truth (Helvetius); The honest remain fools, and the rogues triumph. Opinions rule the world (French materials of the 18th century); The honor of the Russian people requires that it be shown with speciality and acuity in the sciences. (Lomonosov); Happy will be the era when ambition begins to see greatness and glory in the acquisition of new knowledge and leaves the unclean sources with which it tried to quench its thirst. Enough honors for Alexander Ram! Long live only the Archimedes (Saint-Simon); True knowledge does not lead to tranquility itself, but creates an ever-increasing desire to move forward (Robert Owen).
Object and subject. We must honestly admit: modern work, contrary to the latest trends, has not yet become the first vital need of a person. At the same time, production acts as the most important component of the general conditions of human life.
One of the forms of human self-realization is labor activity, the specific place that a given person occupies in the system of social division of labor, and the nature of the operations he performs.
A person enters into the production process in two forms - as an object and as a subject.
As an object, a person is found in factory buildings, next to Tanks and equipment because his labor force is one of the main factors of production. At the same time, one should also notice the reverse impact that production itself has on a person, shaping his experience and replenishing relevant knowledge.
Production makes specific demands on the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the workforce.
On the quantitative side, the labor force is characterized by the total number of people employed in the national economy (including by industry), as well as the number of different categories of workers, and the age-sex ratio. At the enterprise level, the length of the working day, week, etc. matters.
On the qualitative side - the level of qualifications of the employee, the state of his physical health, educational and cultural level. Such employee characteristics as responsibility and conscientiousness, discipline and enterprise have always been important. Although in many ways features of the moral order, they are nevertheless determined by economic conditions, real production relations, as well as modern processes that form and replenish “human capital.”
Qualitative and quantitative mismatch of labor as a factor of production can arise in any national economy. Its partial manifestation may be, for example, a high proportion of manual workers and the availability of vacant jobs requiring trained specialists, or a low national level of labor discipline, as well as understaffing of new modern industries.
The general correspondence of the main factors of production is expressed by the production function known to us: Q = f (L; K).
It is necessary to distinguish two main forms of inclusion of a person in labor activity.
The first is his characteristics as an individual worker. When using primitive tools, the worker performs the entire set of operations to manufacture a product from start to finish. In this case, individual labor dominates. Each worker (producer) can say: “This is the product of my individual labor.” At the same time, it is clearly visible that we have to deal with a single employee.
With the development and deepening of the division of labor, the formation of a system of social division of labor, in which the labor activity of a worker becomes only part of the total labor to create a product, an individual worker turns into an element of the total worker.
A collective worker is a combined workforce, whose members directly participate in a single production process, creating economic benefits and performing labor functions assigned in an appropriate manner.
The most important stages on the path to the formation of a collective worker were simple cooperation, manufacture and factory (machine production).
The formation of the collective worker is completed with the transition to machine production.
At the stage of modern scientific and technological revolution, this process is further developed.
Thus, the boundaries and composition of the total workforce have noticeably expanded.
The deepening of the social division of labor has led to the fact that the composition of the modern total worker, along with the traditional categories of workers, office workers and engineering workers, should include workers in science and information, services and spiritual production. The qualification composition of workers is changing, the share of highly qualified workers is increasing and the share of low-skilled labor is decreasing. In the developed countries of the world, there is a tendency to reduce the total number and share of industrial workers.
Scientific and technological progress causes changes in the content of work activity. Thus, automation and computerization of production, the creation of unmanned technologies give rise to a situation where the functions of direct control of labor tools are transferred to the machine itself. In the structure of labor costs, the share of mental labor is growing, its dynamism and intensity are increasing. The human worker sets in motion an ever-increasing volume of materialized labor. It is no coincidence that in the real sector of the economy the cost of one job doubles every 10-15 years
On the other hand, each employee acts as a subject of industrial relations.
Of particular importance is the way of combining capital and labor, means of production and labor, objective and subjective factors of production. Depending on the nature of production relations, on the place of the worker in the system of relations of assignment, the social type of worker is formed. Dominance in the economic activity of the slave owner means that the worker can act only as a slave. If a feudal lord dominates, this means that his worker is in serfdom.
Modern production is characterized by the dominance of relations between the employer and the employee. This is a historically special class of labor relations. The hired worker is personally free. Using his ownership of labor, but being deprived of other permanent sources of subsistence, the worker is forced to enter into such an employment relationship. Alienated for him are the means of production, the conditions of production, and the product itself. At the same time, modern management systems are characterized by the desire to overcome or at least mitigate the alienation of property, labor and management. The socialization of ownership and management is being developed, which makes it possible to use intellectual and heuristic types of energy of the hired labor force and maintain an optimal social microclimate in production (see section 6.4).
Economic man. Modern production requires the activity of not just a person, but an economic person.
An economic person experiences the rare limitations of factors of production, strives to achieve greater results at lower costs, and does not consider production as a pleasant walk in a spring garden. An economic person has to constantly make a choice between goals and means of achieving them, make responsible decisions and risk his own well-being, give up one good in favor of another good, that is, bear opportunity costs for adapting to relevant circumstances.
The concept of “economic man” as opposed to “traditional” or patriarchal man was put forward by the English economists A. Smith and D. Ricardo. An economic man constantly strives to improve his position, guided by his own economic interests. Therefore, an economic man chooses a type of activity that would allow him to appropriate more value through exchange. But, striving for his own benefit, an economic man involuntarily acts for the benefit of the whole society.
I. Bentham emphasized that economic man is characterized by “calculative rationalism” - the ability to count all actions leading to well-being. A. Wagner identified as the main characteristic of such a person “a feeling of lack of goods and the desire to eliminate it.” Human economic activity was believed to be governed by the desire for profit and fear of need, a sense of honor and fear of shame, hope for approval and fear of punishment.
Therefore, an economic person is a rational subject of production relations who thinks long-term, since obtaining additional benefits in the future always requires a refusal to consume certain goods today.
Achieving an adequate quality of working life presupposes the availability of fair and appropriate remuneration for work, as well as working conditions that are safe for life and health. The quality of working life depends on the degree of self-expression of a working person and on the opportunities to develop abilities. These processes reflect the establishment of labor democracy and legal protection, and the availability of opportunities for professional growth. For an economic person, work activity occupies a worthy place in his life, which is enhanced by the awareness of the need for work activity and the social usefulness of the work performed.
In anticipation of future benefits, modern economic man invests in “human capital” (see Chapter 3).
The quality of work life largely determines the quality of human life. An economic person is not only a producer, but also a consumer. An economic person is interested in the level of satisfaction of his needs, their composition, and prospects for his own development. The main parameters of quality of life are: health;
level of consumption of food, clothing, etc.; education, employment, employment and working conditions; living conditions, social security, clothing; rest and free time; human rights (53).
An economic person, being a subject of production relations, has a developed value system.
Production and labor management. The most important component of modern technical, organizational and economic relations is management.
Initially, the capitalist owner monopolized all basic business functions, including management. But at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, under the influence of the growth in the scale of production, the complication of equipment and technology, management emerged as a special type of labor activity. Based on the corresponding theoretical developments, the science of production management was formed. Following A. Marshall, management is considered as a special factor of production.
Management acts as an activity that involves achieving coordination of joint actions with the goal of an optimal combination of production factors.
F. Taylor interpreted management as “the art of knowing exactly what needs to be done and how to do it in the best and cheapest way.”
There are four main functions of management (management) in production:
a) foresight, which involves developing a program of action to achieve a strategic goal;
b) organizing actions, which involves identifying and creating a material base, forming the most appropriate organizational structure;
c) coordination, or coordination, of the actions of many production participants, which involves combining the efforts of the relevant workers and structures into a single whole;
d) control, which involves determining the compliance with the reality of the given order, measuring the quantity and quality of the work done, and the presence of feedback between the manager and the managed.
In the complex of management theories, two main paradigms can be distinguished - old and new.
In the old or “rational” paradigm, each entrepreneurial firm is viewed as a “closed system.” It is believed that the success of a company depends primarily on internal factors. The main problems of production management are defined as: specialization, control, discipline and diligence, social microclimate, labor productivity and economy. With this structural approach, the basis for the company's success is seen in skillfully distributing responsibilities and powers among staff.
From the perspective of the new paradigm, an entrepreneurial firm is viewed as an “open system.” Therefore, when organizing intra-company or intra-production relations, special measures are provided to reduce resistance to change and to develop staff readiness for high risk. With this behavioral approach, the focus is always on the person, his interests and moods.
One of the main factors of production is labor.
Therefore, labor management is the central problem of modern management. Moreover, it is labor that directly needs organization and management. Methods and means of labor management do not remain unchanged. The adopted labor management model is always directly influenced by: a) the level of development of productive forces, the nature of the technology used; b) forms of ownership and mechanisms for its implementation; c) the method of realizing ownership of labor; d) the management concept dominant in the national economy; d) accumulated experience.
Economic theory identifies the following historical types labor management:
a) handicraft, which is characterized by a process of increased division of labor, the emergence of a part-time worker, the acquisition of skills to obey a single command and discipline, the dominance of manual labor, and the reduction of wages to the subsistence level;
b) technocratic, which is characterized by maximum division of labor, separation of executive and organizational functions, and strict forms of control over personnel; the isolation of managerial labor as a special type, as well as the widespread use of machines;
c) innovative, or modern, type, when the emphasis is on increasing the creative and organizational activity of personnel, on the use of highly qualified labor endowed with “human capital”, as well as group forms of labor organization in conditions of flexible production, focusing on changing needs and effective demand .
In the context of scientific and technological progress, special developments in the field of labor management appear: F. Taylor, T. Emerson, F. Gilbreth, etc.
Economic and social aspects are gradually being strengthened in labor management. The worker is seen less and less as a mere appendage of the machine. When developing modern labor management models, the value of recommendations from psychologists and sociologists increases. At the same time, external government regulation of labor relations is strengthening (overtime, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, occupational health and safety, retirement conditions).
Technocratic concepts, which increased the alienation of labor and thereby came into conflict with scientific and technological progress, are receding into the background. Technocrats view man as a lazy creature who has a negative attitude towards work. Therefore, it is necessary to push him, threaten him with punishment, etc. On the contrary, from an innovative position, the idea that people like attractive work is defended. They strive for independence, they need respect and goodwill, signs of attention and approval of activities. Therefore, it is necessary to abandon petty supervision and fully develop “human relations” in production.
As a result, various models of innovative management are being developed (“compressed work week”, “profit sharing”, co-management, team contracting, “quality circles”). Functional cost accounting or internal entrepreneurship (intrapreneurship), as well as temporary work teams that are created to solve a specific problem, are widely used. With successful results, such temporary work teams receive additional material and financial resources, and some of them acquire the status of venture entities or independent units.
Let us note in passing that many of these effective “innovations” have been proposed for implementation by domestic economists and production organizers since the 60s. But under the conditions of state socialism, they either did not receive proper distribution, or were formalized beyond recognition by the dominant administrative-command system.
It is not so rare today that such thoroughly simplified innovations are offered by the West, often as a special type of “humanitarian” assistance.
Salary. Wage. For many entrepreneurial firms, labor costs are the main part of production costs. In addition, the procedure for using labor as an economic resource differs significantly from other factors of production. Thus, an employee can resign of his own free will, acquire another profession and give up his previous job. It must also be taken into account that labor conditions are always strictly regulated by national legislation.
These and other circumstances force us to take a particularly careful approach to organizing the hiring and use of labor.
When hiring, a questionnaire is used and an interview is conducted to not only collect the necessary information, but also to introduce the candidate to the workplace.
Of particular importance is the candidate’s preparation - the ability to perform specific work, that is, to apply knowledge in practice, as well as his education. The most important element of workforce management is the assessment of the execution of tasks and instructions, which is necessary to differentiate wages and improve incentives. At the same time, it is important to identify parameters for reducing existing staff turnover. In many cases, some staff turnover is either inevitable (retirement, change of residence, etc.) or expedient (influx of new people with new ideas). But still, an inflated turnover of labor has a negative impact on productivity and increases the costs of training the workforce and adapting it to a specific workplace.
The key task of labor management is to organize an effective remuneration system. This affects the economic interests of both employers (profitability and profitability of production) and employees (conditions for the reproduction of the labor force).
The position that a person occupies in society depends not only on the extent of his involvement in the ownership of the means of production, but also on his position in the labor market, on the level of this kind of income.
Somewhat later, in the Microeconomics course, we will carefully analyze the patterns of functioning of the labor market.
For now, let us note that wages act as a kind of transformed form of the price of hired labor.
This means that, even before entering the market, before the meeting between the employer and the employee, the value, or cost, of labor power is determined in household conditions. The fact is that one of the most important functions of wages is reproduction. Wages are intended to ensure the emergence of conditions sufficient to acquire the necessary economic goods or consumer goods and restore the ability to work.
Following the classical school of economic theory, we highlight the main factors that determine the cost of labor or the national level of wages: 1)
natural and climatic conditions; 2)
historical and cultural traditions; 3)
expenses on education and training (formation of “human capital”); 4)
expenses for raising children in the family as potential carriers of the future labor force; 5)
level of labor intensity; 7)
labor productivity in sectors of the national economy that supply consumer goods needed by households.
At different times and different countries Each of these factors has a different impact. But we note that the first six items listed above directly determine the composition and volume of a kind of “consumer basket”. This formation is directly influenced by the general law of increasing the needs of man and society, naturally - against the general background of socio-economic progress.
As for the last factor (labor productivity), it allows us to convert the volume and weight of the consumer basket into monetary form. In the next chapter, in the analysis of value, it will be shown that an increase in labor productivity helps to reduce the cost, or price, of an economic good. With an increase in labor productivity, there is a prerequisite for reducing the cost of consumer goods, following a decrease in the overall costs associated with their production. Consequently, due to this, it becomes possible to determine the cost, or price, of labor in less monetary terms.
In addition to the reproductive function, wages as an economic category also perform another equally important function - stimulating.
A high salary allows you to expand the pool of candidates when filling vacancies and hope to reduce staff turnover. But a high salary in itself does not guarantee high labor productivity or strong production discipline. In some cases, fluctuations in salary levels can be compensated by other social conditions.
In general, in the field of labor management and in organizing the wage system, an entrepreneurial company pursues several important tasks:
a) hiring a trained and disciplined workforce;
b) stimulating labor productivity, achieving high quality.
The main forms of salary are:
a) time wages;
b) piecework wages;
c) combined forms or systems.
Each form (or system) of wages has its advantages and disadvantages.
Thus, time-based wages, with low hourly wages, force the employee (on his own initiative) to look for ways to lengthen his working day, that is, to look for additional income in order to ensure a decent level of subsistence. At the same time, with time-based wages, labor intensity remains outside direct control. To a large extent, this problem is automatically mitigated by the use of modern equipment and technology, which are able to set the desired rhythm of the labor process. Time wages are widely used when it is necessary, first of all, to mobilize not the physical, but the intellectual abilities of the employee.
Piece wages, on the contrary, make it unnecessary to control the intensity of labor, develop individual independence, and increase competition between workers performing the same operation. At the same time, it needs a justified subsystem of labor regulation.
In order to develop responsibility for the final results of work, team remuneration systems are used, as well as chord and other forms and systems of remuneration.
Income integration. For a long time, distribution systems were built in such a way that in reality the diffusion of income dominated. This meant that the owner of each specific factor of production appropriated only part of the newly created value (net income) in a certain economic form. These include, for example, wages, profits or surplus value, land rent, as well as business income and loan interest.
At the same time, the economic interests of the hired worker were strictly limited to his salary, the entrepreneur - to profit, or business income, etc.
In modern conditions, something opposite is observed - active integration of income. Thus, a worker’s personal annual income can consist of his salary (the function of a part-time employee), a dividend (income from shares of an enterprise or other joint-stock companies), as well as a personal bonus (a special quality of “human capital”) or received taking into account the final result of the work of the entire company , for example, for a year. In the latter case, the participation of the employee in the distribution and appropriation of part of the company’s profit is already clearly visible.
For the employee, participation in profits is even more realized through the assignment of dividends on acquired shares of the enterprise. As for the entrepreneur, being the director of the enterprise, he applies for the administrator’s salary and the corresponding types of profit, and acting in other categories - for dividends, for a share in the capital, etc.
As a result, such a system of income integration, taking into account the equal use of all factors of production, acts as a real economic force capable of establishing a balance of interests of subjects of production relations.
Therefore, it often makes no sense for an employee to seek a direct increase in the current salary at any cost. Moreover, if his labor force as a factor of production is already highly valued. After all, an unreasonable increase in current wages reduces net profit, stock returns, reduces the company’s ability to invest, and as a result, all this can jeopardize employment stability, that is, the future of a particular workplace.
The actual level of wages is a matter for the entrepreneurial company itself, naturally within the country’s accepted “economic freedom” corridor. National (general) agreements, including agreements between entrepreneurs, trade unions and the government, restrictions from the state, as well as recommendations of political parties, etc., as a rule, relate to the minimum wage, the level of the first category tariff rate, and less often - regulation of the average national level wages or remuneration for women's labor.
Technocracy. A special place in the management structure of modern production is occupied by technocracy - the “general management” of enterprises, firms, and their associations.
These blue collar workers openly monopolize the production management function. Moreover, as a rule, they are not the owners of this or that enterprise. In relation to the upper echelon of management and the owner himself, the technocracy acts as an executor. Its place in the division of labor is determined by its position and “human capital” - specific knowledge of technology, technology and economics of production.
In terms of its socio-economic status, technocracy acts as hired highly qualified personnel included in the highest levels of property management.
In fact, technocracy (enterprise administration, management team), on behalf of and with the consent of the owner of capital, only performs the function of managing the property complex and finances of the enterprise. Direct or indirect deprivation of the technocracy's functions of entrepreneurship or restrictions of this kind always increase tension in relations with the owner.
In turn, technocracy in every possible way limits the participation of other layers of hired personnel in production management and tends to ignore social problems production. For a technocrat, the hired worker acts as a cog in the technical-social system. Absolutized technocratic thinking is free from the categories of morality, conscience and human experience.
Technocratic thinking is always a serious obstacle to reform, which envisages limiting the powers of “blue collar” workers. With great readiness, the technocracy is ready to support proposals for the decentralization of production and all other measures that contribute to the preservation of technocratic traditions. She is also an opponent of the broad democratization of economic processes, since democracy and openness put “blue collar” workers under public control.
Such basic features of technocracy should be taken into account when reforming an administrative-command economy. Failure to respect the interests of technocracy during the transition period from an administrative to a market economy can provoke a constant redistribution of property.
The technocratic concept of labor management, generated by the peculiarities of large-scale machine production, is characterized by the maximum separation of executive labor from organizational labor. It must be taken into account that modern production involves the use of special technical and economic knowledge, professional methods of organization and management. It must also be seen that the level of professionalism in modern management is constantly rising.
At the same time, management today is not only technocratic coordination, but also the implementation of humanistic values in the labor process (trust, freedom, respect for the individual, self-realization of man as a tribal being). Therefore, the constructions of D. MikeGregor (the “U” concept), F. Herzberg (the theory of “motivational hygiene”), as well as R. Blake, J. Mouton (the theory of “stress balance”) and their numerous modern followers, where the idea of the possibility of such work that would bring satisfaction is defended.
Socially oriented management displaces openly technocratic schemes and develops the thesis about “participatory management”, i.e. the importance of including personnel in the management process, starting from the workplace, in the form of “quality circles”, “teams of enthusiasts”, then production co-management and etc.
Thus, the democratization of management relations has an objective nature. This obliges us to form an organizational and corporate culture, taking into account modern standards. Updating the production management system on a democratic basis is of particular importance in the context of continuously changing market conditions.
Choosing a management model. When determining a production management model, a structural analysis of management relations acquires particular value. When solving this scientific and practical problem, it is necessary to highlight organizational, technical, economic and social aspects.
In the first case - the organizational and technical aspect - management manifests itself as a separate function of joint labor. Its content is the coordination of the labor activities of the total employee. Management is designed to establish consistency between individual works and coordinate the activities of the constituent elements of a single production organism. When performing this function, specific knowledge is required in the field of technology, organization of production and marketing of products, collection and processing of economic information.
The organizational and technical aspect of management concerns primarily the management of things and technological processes. In the spirit of technocratic traditions, the worker is perceived as an element of the production mechanism or productive forces. The components are issues of technology and control over its compliance, ensuring the rhythm of production, organizing material flows within the enterprise, the optimal combination of production factors, issuing production tasks and monitoring their implementation, as well as labor discipline. The management decisions made require appropriate clarification on a daily basis.
The second (economic) aspect of management involves the interpretation of management as a direct function of the owner, and in some cases as a special object of appropriation. Management acts as the most important point in the system of appropriation and implementation of economic interests and raises at the enterprise level questions about the profile of production, the scale of development and investment, attraction of borrowed funds (loan capital), the degree of participation of the enterprise in integration processes, the procedure for the formation and distribution of income.
The third (social) aspect of management is associated with the social side of the implementation of ownership of the means of production and labor. It concerns, first of all, issues of wages, hiring, working conditions, environmental safety of production, as well as the ability to mobilize the human factor, create an optimal microclimate, take into account the influence of national mentality and traditions, religion, etc.
Of course, key decisions on the economic and social aspects of management must be made by the owner of the factors of production. Sufficiently broad powers for technocracy are usually provided in the coordination of technical-organizational relationships. That part of the technocracy that is directly involved in the preparation of strategic decisions should be under the control of the owner.
The innovative model of modern management involves the development of production co-management (self-government), which is associated with the desire to “humanize” production relations, mobilize the subjective factor of economic growth, and form a modern type of economic consciousness among workers.
Production co-management solves the problem of creating an optimal social microclimate in production through the development of collegiality, entrepreneurship and social partnership, as well as the introduction of corporate (joint-stock) varieties of private ownership of the means of production. For this purpose, an appropriate infrastructure of production co-management is created (management bodies, the right to participate in planning and management, elections of members of the directorate, the right to receive information about the state of affairs, certification of middle-level managers, civilized regulation of labor disputes). Today it turns out that the prestige of a company, the conditions for the reproduction of capital, the quality of products, etc. directly depend on the socio-economic realization of labor as a factor of production. At the same time, the fate of the worker and his personal prestige also depend on the economic and financial position of the company.