40)Cosciousness: essence and origin.

Consciousness is the brilliance of the supreme self illuminating the whole of existence with the radiance of knowing from within and beyond all forms of life. It is the mysterious power of cognition that constitutes the essence of creation, the very substance that makes the evolution of intelligence possible. Consciousness is the light of recognition without which reality would vanish into naught  It has been defined as: subjectivity,awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.^[2] Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.^[3] As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."^[4]

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38)The philosophical conception of Man. Man as a biopsychosocial being

Man as a biopsychosotial being. We approach man along three different dimensions of his existence: biological, psychical, and so­cial. The biological is expressed in morphophysiological, genetic phenomena, as well as in the nervous-cerebral, electrochemical and some other processes of the human organism. The psychical ele­ment covers the inner spiritual and intellectual world—conscious and subconscious processes, will, emotional experiences, memory, character, temperament, and so on. But not one aspect taken separ­ately reveals the phenomenon of man in its integrity. Man, we re­peat, is a reasonable being. So what sort of an object is his thought, then? Is it subject to biological laws alone, or is it dominated only by social laws? Any categorical answer would be an obvious oversim­plification: human thought is a highly organized biopsychosocial phenomenon whose material substratum certainly has a biological (or, to be more precise, physiological) dimension, but whose con­tent, the concrete filling, so to speak, is undoubtedly an interweav­ing of the psychical and the social—an interweaving in which the so­cial, being mediated by the emotional-intellectual-volitional sphere, appears as the psychical

The general concept of man. A wise man of antiquity once said that nothing was more interesting to man than man himself.

Philosophy has always striven to grasp the integral nature of man, fully aware that a mere sum of knowledge embodied in the concrete sciences of man will not provide the image we are looking for. Phil­osophy therefore tried to work out its own means of cognizing the essence of man in order to define his place and role in the world, his attitude to the world, and his capacity for "making" himself, i.e. for forging his own destiny.

A great many conceptions of man have been offered in the his­tory of philosophy. The philosophers of antiquity primarily regarded man as part of the cosmos, as a kind of microcosm subordinated to fate as the highest principle. In the Christian worldview, man began to be perceived as an indissoluble and contradictory unity of two hypostases, the spirit and the body, qualitatively opposed to each other as the noble and the base. Thus St. Augustine presented the soul as independent of the body, and it was that soul that he identi­fied with man, while Thomas Aquinas regarded man as a unity of body and soul, a being intermediate between animals and angels. In the Christian view, the human flesh is the abode of base passions and desires, the work of the devil. Hence man's constant attempts to free himself from the devil's grasp and to see the divine light of the truth. This determines the nature of man's attitude to the world: there is an obvious desire not so much to understand one's own es­sence as to gain access to an essence of a higher order, to God, and thus to gain salvation on Judgement Day. The idea of the finality of being is alien to this mentality: faith in the immortality of the soul makes existence on this earth, often very hard existence, seem less painful.

The philosophy of the early Modern Times, being mostly idealis­tic, followed Christianity in stressing man's spiritual essence. We s till enjoy the best works of this period with their precious and subtle observations on the human spirit, on the meaning and form of the operations of human reason, and on the secret springs of the human psyche and activity going on in the depth of personality. Freed from the ideological dictates of Christianity, natural science was able to create unsurpassed models of naturalist studies in man. But a still greater merit of the early Modern Times was the uncondi­tional recognition of the autonomy of the human mind in the cogni­tion of its own essence.

The idealist philosophy of the 19th and early 20th centuries exag­gerated the spiritual element in man, some scholars reducing his es­sence to the rational element and others, to the irrational. Although the understanding of man's true essence was already taking shape in various theories and was more or less adequately formulated by some philosophers (e.g., by Hegel, who viewed the individual in the context of the socio-historical whole as a product of intense interac­tion in which the human essence is reified, and the whole of the ob­jective world around man is nothing but a result of that reification), there was still no consistent and coherent theory of man. On the whole, this process reminded one of a volcano ready to erupt but still tarrying, awaiting the last and decisive bursts of inner energy. Starting with Marxism, man became the focus of philosophical knowledge out of which radiated the lines which connected man, through society, with the entire infinite universe. The foundation of a dialectical-materialist conception of man was laid. The construc­tion of an integral philosophy of man harmonious in all its aspects is a process of human self-cognition which in principle cannot be com­pleted, the manifestations of human essence being extremely varied, comprising reason, will, character, emotions, labor, communica­tion, and so on. Man thinks, enjoys things, loves or hates, constantly aspires for something, achieves the desirable and, unsatisfied with it, aspires for new goals and ideals.

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