Spiritual Level of Existence1
Elena Alexandrovna Tinyakova
candidat of philosophical sciences, assistant professor
the department of general humanitarian and natural sciences
Sergiev-Posad branch of Moscow State humanitarian University
named after Sholokhov
Moscow region, Sergiev Posad-district, st. Razin, 1-a.
elena-cathy@yandex.ru
Abstract: The article regards spiritual level of existence from the ancient times up
to our contemporary period. There is an attempt to point periods in its
development. The notion of spirituality is projected to nature: we try to understand
how a man occupied his predominant position, but he searches for contacts with,
first of all, living beings of the world surrounding him. There is a searching
thought in our considerations: how the notion of God appeared. We pursue the
dialogic approach to spiritual space: the good – the evil, the beauty – the ugliness,
the form – the content. The role of the language in the appearance and
development of spiritual space is analyzed.
Key words: world, cosmos, nature, spiritual, soul, a man, a language, ancient,
contemporary, life, death, eternity, science, human intellect, existence, civilization,
philosophy, religion.
The developing of the spiritual picture of the universe may be divided into
three stages:
1.
The first stage: from nature to man. The world which surrounded
primitive people was stuffed by casualties, and our ancestors took the natural
forces influencing them being similar to themselves. That work of nature was
anthropomorphic. By and by natural forces became more concrete, so totemism
appeared. The ancient man developed his spiritual nature after animals and other
living beings. Those who adhere the religious conception of a man's appearance
shouldn't misunderstand that a man was derived from natural world. A man was
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Духовный уровень существования
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undefended from aggressive world of animals and he protected himself by his
adaptation, his rituals and traditions. He imitated the fauna beings. Hunting didn't
exist then and people communicated with animals freely. The ancient man tried to
be equal to other beings in the turbulent nature.
2.
The second stage: from man to nature. This period began when people
started to develop conscious contacts with nature. By extracting true knowledge
about nature through regular appearance of details men added spiritual, emotional
scope to the knowledge to make the existence more stable. So the second stage of
men's spiritual ripening produced truths about nature, coated by emotional
interpretation. In Renaissance time the position of a man in nature in comparison
with other living beings raised to the utmost. A man recognized his cognitive force
and thus understanding his supreme position he coated himself in the perfect image
of nature beauty. Spiritual level of existence was focused on the man himself. This
supreme authority of a man has been preserved up to nowadays. Though its content
changed throughout the chain of epochs, a man began to structure the spiritual being
in symbols. But the symbols kept the anthropologic essence. In traditional culture
this is the world of fairy tales where animals behave as people. The anthropologic
vision of living beings in nature makes up the merit level of ecological
consciousness. The further development of ecological ethics leads to the unity of
the world on the merit level. The model of widening human consciousness attracts
researchers since it blends with animal consciousness and hence the BIOS reason
is constructed into one whole unity.
3.
The third stage: cosmic spiritual universe. Contemporary philosophy
resurrects medieval pneumatology, according to which cosmos is inhabited by
spiritual beings. The ideal picture of human existence includes the world, prior to
the life processes on the earth and the prolonging of life after human biological
death. Human spiritual experience penetrates into real human life. This is the
compensatory mechanism of human psychic: its variants are the emotional coating
of
goal-oriented
construction,
prognosis-making,
defense
from
negative
impressions, memory reservoir for linguistic communication. The background of
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human spiritual existence is made up by the notion of soul. The imaginations
connected with a soul appeared at the dawn of civilization and has kept up to
nowadays. When the souls of dead people built a substantial space in human
consciousness the idea of a spiritual subworld came, it was the description which
appeared in myths of various peoples, religious pictures of the world. Human souls
began to make up the ideal modus of existence. Both ancient people and
contemporary ones can't believe that human life has the end in the form of death. It
is a trait of human psychic from the ancient times and a trait of adaptation. If
ancient people recognized the end of their life then they couldn't experience joy
from their existence. The aspiration for eternity in existence has been and is the
main factor in adaptation of people to reality. The idea of prolonging human life
beyond death gave stimulus for real, concrete practice. Traditions and customs
played a connecting role between the real world and the ideal world. Let's pay our
attention to the fact that the ancient form of human language had only past time.
The picture of the past contained useful and illusory life experience. Many nature
facts and processes, not understood or not put into a logical chain of reason –
consequence, were also used to build up ideal existence.
In ancient times the world of the past was the spiritual source from which
individual human psychic developed. People felt their past by means of intuition.
And since the reservoir of intuition contained very few images of life experience,
primitive people made their contacts by means of chaotic "yes" and "no". In other
words they were on the initial stage of bringing their reminiscences of the past,
given by nature, in order. In further process of human psychic development the
ideal image of the past which was the spiritual platform of human life began to be
brought in accordance with directions to live out for people. That image of the past
was marked by the trait of eternity, even in those ancient times. Primitive people
searched for eternity, that was kept in the depth of their ancient psychic, that was
the ideal image of their adaptation to nature.
The important period of developing human spiritual existence was the
division of a man from animals. It occurred in the X-XIth centuries. The animal
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style of mixing up human and animal traits was condemned. Though the image of a
man had been still interwoven into the nature picture, its fauna and flora up to the
Renaissance. And a man was glorified in the portraits of this period in culture
development. The division of a man from other nature beings was blessed by
Christian Church at the end of the medieval times. Then when Ch. Darwin
developed his evolution theory, in the middle of the XIXth century, his idea to
compare the evolution of men and primates was squeezed into a common branch.
The echo of condemning unification of men to animals from the late medieval
times pursued Darwin's theory throughout the XXth century and turned into a
warlike dialogue between evolutionists and those who keep to the creationism
theory. That is why with the growth of social sphere there appeared an opposition
between human and animal worlds. Almost the whole XXth century witnessed this
scientific conflicts and it has lead to ecological crisis in the end. That is why
researchers don't consider animal world primitive and incomparable with human
life and try to resurrect the broken tries in contacts of people with animals. There
appeared such problems in research: animal language and communication,
sociobiology, animal therapy.
Contemporary science makes up spiritual existence, uniting men and
animals. Sociobiology recognizes socium among animals, thus trying to unite the
spiritual picture of animal world with that of human one. A man transports his
spirituality to other beings of nature and resurrects the spiritual influence coming
to people from living nature depths. For example, a man puts a question of
monkey rights in nature similar to human scope of the question. The contemporary
man develops and trains the sense of eternity another way. Contemporary eternity
is the result of understanding the world in details. If something breaks or vanishes
into nothingness it means that we have broken one of nature's laws. In ancient
times, by the reason of very scanty knowledge about the world, breaking of
eternity proceeded from a man's intrusion into the natural system in a chaotic
form: magical knowledge, that didn't practice laws of nature, but rather played the
emotional strings of human psychic, put a man sometimes in contradiction to
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nature. The ancient man tried to overcome the contradiction, and one of the ways
of doing it was the atrocious trait of ancient traditions and customs: human wishes
were brought into collision with severe reality.
Contemporary vision of eternity among people proceeds from the following:
1. to overcome the breaks from one generation to the other;
2. to preserve what is dear and not to let it vanish from human life;
3. to protect people from the global fear of the Earth's destruction, as a result
of military aggression by modern weapons;
4. eternity is made up by the world of art, constructed by specifically
anthropologic symbols: anthropologic image is still widening thanks to different
branches of art and becomes more formal due to the reason that the contemporary
man develops his creative forces and aspires to achieve the ideal of the universe;
5. contemporary eternity is presented by fantasy and scientific fantasy;
8. contemporary eternity is also presented by artificial intelligence, it is
thinking reality, detached from the biological nature of a contemporary man.
One of the important stages in spiritual development of mankind is the
polarization of the good and the evil. The ideal stretching of these opposite traits of
human existence went in opposite directions: into the past and into the future. The
hell absorbed all negative doings of people, the heaven included not only positive
results of human doings, but also played a role of psychic compensation with
regard to on-going life. In further cultural development spiritual polarity was built
into real life in the form of merits. The culture space is based on the dialogue of the
good and the evil, these two basic qualities of existence are inseparable. The
dichotomy of the good and the evil was transformed into the dichotomy of the
beauty and the ugliness. It was only partly supported by the dichotomy of the good
and the evil, because the beauty may contain both the good and the evil, the same
about the ugliness. It means that the good and the evil polarize the beauty and the
ugliness simultaneously. The spiritual dialogue between the beauty and the ugliness
is still more dynamic than the dialogue of the good and the evil. Pragma
(usefulness) and satisfaction somewhat stabilized the beauty and the ugliness. The
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dichotomy of the good and the evil, the beauty and the ugliness by and by began to
be pierced by the third vector of dichotomy – the form and the content. So these
are the three main pairs of vectors in spiritual existence: the good and the evil, the
beauty and the ugliness, the form and the content. These vectors went into the
depth of our reality, into limitless space unconceivable for people. The very
problem to conceive the vectors began to produce human spiritual experience,
which began to be brought in accordance with main religions.
Analysing human spirituality in the process of its development we should
mark the growing tension of the oppositions. The conflict often took the tragic way
of resolution. Tragedy began to be associated with eternity: concrete facts could
vanish, but human thoughts, ideas were transported from generation to generation.
The desire to transport spirituality in the historic development gave people ideal
means – human language. Here belongs a hypothesis of language origin: a man
needed a way to construct the spiritual world which his soul worked out.
The world, created by human intellect, searched for abstractions which could
be constructed by men. Being a concrete creature a man began to wish to construct
the spiritual world. It is as though a man has heard the voice of God. We may
explain the appearance of religions in this respect. The more men doubted about
their existence the more complicated were the abstractions, which contained
human images of the world. The idea of harmony came from antiquity. It was the
way of surviving for ancient men. The apogee of harmony development came in
the XVIIIth century. This idea is supported by Hegel's philosophy, first of all. In
further development the single focus of spiritual world became impossible due to
widening of individual subjective perceptions of reality. The variants began to
overlap each other and the trait of irrationality in spiritual world started to grow. The
contradictory spiritual world made real existence more and more unstable. By
nowadays we perceive traits of a global crisis, that realizes itself on the ecological
level. The social sphere widens and grows in its diversification, politics sharpens
the contradictions in social sphere. Political power is a special sphere of the
spiritual world, in many ways it predominates because it is supported by concrete
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forms. The extreme position of a man's misunderstanding the beauty and the good
leads to destructive activity. From the point of view of civilization development the
destructive consequences of human spiritual and real experience are the logical
misgeneralization. A man has begun to be afraid of himself, of the one – similar to
him in the world. In contemporary situation philosophy tries to play the role of the
center of gravity in human spiritual world, it becomes its focus. If in ancient times
spiritual existence of separate men strove to unite and to be brought to unity locally,
then nowadays people try to take something to stabilize their being from the
common spiritual source which will lead them to live out in extreme conditions.
These are the global problems of our time.
Let's compare the geometrical representation of human existence in
medieval times, Renaissance and our times. In medieval times a circle was the
main geometrical abstraction, it signified eternity. But since the human reason was
subject to the Holy Writings, in European context─ the Bible, a circle symbolized
the canon (metaphorical sense of eternity). In Renaissance human activity raised
very high, a man was compared to God in his creative force. So a circle was
changed by strictly linear lines. Besides a line symbolized endless continuity, the
chain of reasons and consequences, which realized God's creative meaning.
Nowadays we have a fractal geometry of nature. It is connected with the theory of
chaos. We have come to the paradox: the more we know, the less we understand. It
is a trait of contemporary information crisis. Spiritual world of our times can
hardly be brought in accordance with any form of logic. The consequence of such a
situation is active esoteric forms of spirituality. It is magic practice. Let's make a
venture to interpret this side of spiritual world, practiced by human being. Its
source loses its origin in the most ancient period of human existence. The more
ancient we move into our past the higher this spiritual level is detached from the
earth. We may put forward a hypothesis: ancient magic practice was the initial
separation of human, psychic from the cosmic, natural spirit of the world. Later on
when people got more learned in understanding reality, for example Greek
antiquity of the VIth–VIth centuries B.C., there appeared the notion of the meaning
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of the universe – "noos". One of logical supports for this hypothesis is the idea that
Greek thinkers presupposed global explanation of the world of nature, which keeps
true up to nowadays. Today we recognize that antique thinkers put forward all
fundamental research problems, which haven't lost their popularity up to
nowadays. This agrees with the very contemporary idea of human psychic:
individual psychic is somewhat of a field in physics (W. James, an American
psychologist). Today we speak of the individual bio-fields of people.
Now let's again return to ancient times. From the view point, presented
above, ancient magic is a man's inexperienced use of the energy of the universe.
Even in the XVth century the apogee of Renaissance, people attached ideal,
meaningful, prognostic coating to stones, metals, grasses, sea-shells, talismans, etc.
P. della Mirandola searched to decipher the magic qualities of the Jewish language
in the oral and written forms. Campanella raised the magic theory of the language
up to the cosmic level. According to him stars in the sky emanated their rays to
people, the rays communicated meanings as well.
Oratorical art which came from antiquity attached to human language
magical force. Orators could captivate people who listened to them, gave spiritual
impulses for activity. Even one word could play the role of a switch for a turbulent
historical action. The theory of the magic force of a language came through the
New times and the Enlightenment, got somewhat clarified since thinkers began to
understand the importance of the possibilities of the language to hold the truth.
And the theory about the magic force of the language got a new way of life in
Romanticism. In this period the magic force of the language becomes individual.
Poets, writers created their own individual spiritual fields around their works. In the
XVIIIth century W. von Humboldt, considered to be the founder of contemporary
linguistics, determined human language as the carrier of spiritual energy.
According to him human language moulds the experienced material of the world
into words and puts not only meanings into words, but also energy which helps to
discover the unknown reality. By now there have appeared two notions of the
magic force of the language – narrow and broad. The broad notion presupposes the
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spiritual coating of linguistic communication as a whole. It is not even since
artistic language is more emotionally concentrated. The first narrow notion means
the following: a magic language is a very narrow part of human communication, it
is aimed at changing the surrounding reality by linguistic means, intensified by
metalinguistic attributes. Magic language, in the narrow sense of the word,
presupposed mystification, rituals and appealing to unconcealed reality. According
to K. Sornig (1990), magic notion doesn't manipulate the being but the
understanding of the existence. Magic language in the narrow sense of the notion
develops in the opposite direction with relation to linguistic communication. The
more illogic it is the stronger its spiritual force. Magic language makes up spiritual
mystery of existence. With relation to normal conditions it stands out as a negative
force. People who have a command of magic language are very strange in
appearance, even exotic. Below we point out characteristics of magic language.
1. Impossibility of direct understanding generates magic effect per se.
Interpretation of a magic text is not possible for everyday consciousness, its whole
content is oriented to a certain purpose, and it is known only to the initiator of the
magic.
2. Magic language leads communication not from a man but from living and
non-living nature. The meta-linguistic context is separated into the evil-carrying
components and the good-carrying ones. Very often the connections with the
surrounding world are individual initiatives of experts on magic.
3. Magic language has a higher concentration of images and symbolic
thinking. Magic language as though waits for the transformation of the media to
which communication is directed.
4. Magic language is phonetically closed as though isolated from the rest of
communication. For magic language it is more important to build ties with nature
than with men. Magic communication is somewhat dissolved in nature.
5. Magic language is supported by folk traditions, customs and beliefs.
Let's put a question: what language has a broader scope of embracing
nature – the really human language or the magic one. First of all, a magic language
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has a very small space of communication, it serves to very specific needs, then the
very act of communication includes a very scanty number of people. That is why a
really human language makes a stronger influence on culture process on all three
levels: social, professional and literary. Really human language includes all people
into communication process. Its force is intensified by means of communication:
radio, television, press, telegraph, telephone and other means of distant
communication. Linguistic communication, thanks to the enumerated means, as
though stands above human existence and nature beings and makes up a strong
spiritual force, which influences the world around.
Let’s draw our attention to the opposition of mysterious magic
language─to religious communication. We'll answer the question by means of
Christian religion. Christian religion condemns magic. Why? Because a magician
contradicts God, he is too arrogant and wants to surpass in his creative activity all
people, besides he tries to keep his creative forces in secret from all other people.
Religious communication is addressed to God. God is hospitable to give his forces
of constructing the good to as many people as possible. Through the main
Christian merit─universal love─God wants to build the world of happiness for all
people on the Earth.
Saintness is the state of sinlessness, saturated by lofty God's essence.
Saintness is a perfect state, emanated from God. The more sincere a man's address
to God is, the more of God's essence he can attach to his soul. In Catholicism and
eastern Christian religion there are saints: these are the memory of those who
overcame severe sufferings and after their physical death go on living in our world
on spiritual level. We should understand this situation so that they returned to the
realm of God's being in spirit and emanate their perfectness to people thus curing
them from various sins. So in Catholicism and eastern Christianity saintness keeps
anthropologic traits, and in Protestantism the ideal being is presented only by
Christ. The supertragic real life of saints testifies to the fact that the opposition of
God's world to our reality is very strong. The world inhabited by people is
overwhelmed by human sins: lies, cruelty, etc. Negative forms of morals also make
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up a spiritual world, which presses Gods' ideal world by its energy. And this
opposition is sometimes decided in the form of severe tragic concrete human
actions. So the good is more fragile, but has a stronger potential for eternity. The
evil is stronger in action, but has no potential of eternity. So saintness is an
outward fragility with a very strong inner potential of spirit. The more concretely
understood world of the good is the being where angels exist. The more concretely
understood world of the evil is the being where demons exist.
In Buddhism the transition from the real world to the ideal one which
stands closer in its perfection to God's level is not so tragic as in Christianity.
Aspiration to moksha, devoid of karma, is the spiritual strategy to all people.
The main branches of human spiritual development are various forms of
saturation of real ongoing life with God's meaning. But in the practice of
civilization development there are limits to the acquisition of God's senses by
people. This fact explains periods of destruction of cultural merits and creation of
new cultural objects which could be more hospitable to the ideal perfect senses.
These periods pursue the path of training and mistakes, and to compensate the
losses of valuable merits civilization awarded people by the skills and habits of
restoration of those lost. Spiritual experience of men exists on the historical
artifacts which have been preserved and coats newly created objects. What
platform is more important for human spiritual experience? We can't answer this
question only one way, because the concrete real world is constructed by the
principle of polarity. One pole generates ideas which are positive for it, but they
are negative for the other pole of existence. There is an attempt to overcome this
opposition by contemporary conception of global scope of deciding problems. It is
a strategy to transform contradictory oppositions into compensating each other.
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