Vol 35, No 3 (2024)

The inevitability of humanity’s transition to a new qualitative state is becoming the dominant feature of public consciousness these days. Crisis fears are artificially fueled to a large extent, but there are good reasons for them. One of them is the decrease in the biological stability of the current human species, in particular the depopulation of the population of the most developed regions of the modern globalized world. Similar phenomena in the evolution of wildlife have always pointed, on the one hand, to the lagging of endangered species from the pace of environmental changes, on the other hand, to the formation of new species more adapted to these changes. In modern culture, some prerequisites for such shifts have already developed. The progress of information and digital technologies at the turn of the XX–XXI centuries extremely accelerated the renewal of the artificial environment of human existence, as a result of which, in terms of its rate of change, it surpassed such basic biological parameters of human life as the life span of an individual and the period of generational renewal. Thus, humanity has reached the “point of biological singularity”. Objectively, a speciation situation is being created, that is, the prospect of biological transformation of the human species. Proponents of transhumanism propose to accelerate this process using the achievements of science. An alternative option comes from understanding the phenomenon of life as an evolutionarily progressive combination of creative and destructive changes, where death is a condition for optimizing some stages of the life process. At the stage of biological evolution, death remains a spontaneously acting and fatally uncontrollable factor, but at the stage of cultural evolution it becomes possible to convert its destructive potential into a means of regulated influence on metabolic processes in the human body in order to infinitely expand the temporal boundaries of the existence of the individual and the entire human race.

The solution of the problem of moral heroism by the famous Soviet ethicist O.G. Drobnitskii is analyzed. The essence of the problem lies in the fact that the value-normative content of morality is traditionally interpreted as universal, though moral heroism paradoxically implies performing exceptional acts or leading an exceptional way of life (separate heroic deeds or long-term altruistic service). In contemporary ethics, moral heroism is characterized primarily as a form of supererogatory behavior, i.e., having high moral value but not obligatory. The existence of such behavior is explained by the mismatch between the two moral classifications of actions: deontic and axiological. For critics of supererogation, allowing this mismatch is identical with ignoring the obvious good-ought tie-up. Drobnitskii holds a position similar to that of the critics of supererogation. For him, the ought-moment of morality has an absolute priority over the value-moment. It follows that, for him, it is impossible to identify an action as morally positive, promoting the moral good and not consider it a fulfillment of some requirement (an obligatory one). The idea of supererogation is incompatible with Drobnitskii’s strict universalism, objectivism and imperativism. However, he considers moral heroism to be a real phenomenon and a product of the individualization of moral requirements. Drobnitskii understands moral heroism and selfless devotion to a cause as transformations of general moral duty in special, extreme circumstances. A moral hero fulfils some additional obligations and surrenders some of his rights, and he is also able to act in situations where implementing moral principles requires self-sacrifice, but does not entail obvious morally significant results in the short-term perspective.

The article is devoted to the study of identification strategies claiming to be universal, proposed by the French representative of poststructuralist anthropology Philippe Descola. Speaking of identification, it implies a scheme for establishing the identity and difference of “I” and “others”, based on identifying analogies and detecting discrepancies in appearance, behavior, as well as specific features attributed to oneself and others. A person perceives himself as a set of physical and internal properties necessary in order to recognize or deny the presence of other properties in others. Thus, combining the properties of the “inner” world and physical properties, Descola comes to four possible identifications: animism (recognizes the similarity of the inner worlds and the difference in physical properties); totemism (recognizes the similarity of the inner worlds and the similarity of physical properties); naturalism (recognizes the difference of the inner worlds and the similarity of physical properties) and analogism (recognizes the difference between the inner worlds and the difference in physical properties). On the basis of ethnographic studies of the peoples of Central and South America, the features of identification mechanisms according to these strategies are revealed. It has been found that these principles of identity construction do not exclude each other, but may occupy a dominant position at a particular historical moment. The digital environment, acting as a natural and cultural continuum, is considered, to which the proposed by P. Descola is an identification strategy of analogism. Conclusions are drawn about the prospects of the “human” in the studied identity strategies.

The article presents the results of an exploratory empirical study devoted to the study of the psychological effects of interaction between man and nature based on content analysis of descriptions of subjective experiences of unity between man and nature. The study was conducted online and involved 416 respondents from 17 to 70 years old (average age 35.3 years SD = 11.05; 35% men and 65% women). The concepts of psychological restoration and the restorativeness of the natural environment were used for the analysis. Psychological restorative effects are represented in the descriptions by the presence of positive emotions, a state of relaxation and solitude. The results show that most often a person experiences these effects in such environments as forest and water spaces, perceiving them as integral systems, focusing both on individual elements (trees, leaves, waves, landscape) and on temporal characteristics (seasons, days). The positive stimulation of the forest and aquatic natural environments, as well as the aesthetic appeal of landscapes, can be considered as factors determining the restorative potential of nature.

The creativity of Vladimir Solovyov, more specifically his work “The Meaning of Love”, is considered as one of the origins of Alexander Kozhev’s philosophical anthropology. Attention is drawn to the fact that Kozhev addressed this Solovyov text not only in his dissertation “The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov” (1926), but also in his article “The Religious Metaphysics of Vladimir Solovyov” (1934‒1935), that is, at the time of his lecture course, later called “Introduction to the Reading of Hegel”. The general characterization of Solovyov’s philosophy of love and its comparison with Kozhev’s doctrine of man and concept of history are given. As a result of comparative analysis of both philosopher’s views, four conceptual moments present in both Solovyov’s erotosophy and Kozhev’s philosophical anthropology are revealed. Attention is drawn to the fact that Solovyov’s “love” and Kozhev’s “desire for recognition” are related by the fact that they are both removed from the material, natural order. It is noted that both of these concepts can function only in the presence of the figure of the other, whose absolute individuality they produce. It is emphasized that both “desire for recognition” and “love” presuppose reciprocity and universality (“universal recognition” / “sisygic unity”). It is fixed that their full realization is possible only after the end of the historical process. At the same time, it is argued that it is impossible to identify Kozhev’s “desire for recognition” and Solovyov’s “love”, since in Kozhev’s texts, in addition to passages bringing love closer to recognition, there is also a consistent philosophical critique of love (its lack of “Action”, risk, struggle, universality). In conclusion, we identify four main differences between Kozhev’s anthropology and Solovyov’s erotosophy (individualism, antagonism, atheism, sexual indifference) and hypothesize that Kozhev combines both Hegelian and Solovievian components in the “desire for recognition”, which is why he brings this notion closer to love and then draws strict distinctions.

The results of a complex research on the Columbine phenomenon, which was conducted by the authors in 2020-2021 in Tatarstan, became the basis for the writing of the article. Adolescents and young people aged 13 to 23, who share the values of the Columbine subculture, became the object of the research. The study was carried out in a concept of interpretive sociology and the theory of frames, with the use of qualitative methods such as frame analysis to monitor the open groups in social networks and select the informants, as well as the method of focused interview. The total number of theme groups, in social networks such as VKontakte and Telegram, that were included in the monitoring was not less than 50. Furthermore, 25 interviews were conducted with members of Internet groups in Kazan and Naberezhnye Chelny. The aim of the research was to analyze the impact of framing narratives of the subculture on the personal and group attitudes of the participants in the general context of conflict risks of social interaction. In this article, the authors tried to analyze the nature of the relationship between the virtual environment and the real social space on the example of a well-known destructive subculture, which received the official status of a terrorist movement in Russia in 2022. The causal and latent motives for adolescents, as well as youth representatives getting involved in Columbine communities, were considered. Situations and factors that form misanthropic imperatives were typologized. It was suggested that there are successive stages of indoctrination that cause psychological and social transformations of the individual. A method for identifying participants in the subculture with a high degree of involvement to prevent possible destructive acts was proposed. The presented research contributes to modern socio-anthropological knowledge in terms of critical analysis of existing subcultural practices aimed at dehumanizing social space and manifests the value of protecting human-centric values and dignity of the individual.

A drawing is a graphic artifact; it is formed on a plane as a figure, from connected lines, dots, strokes and spots. The article examines the anthropological role of such artifacts in history. As a new species, man creates an artificial reality from objects, acting as Homo faber. On the basis of signs, he creates a language and acts as Homo symbolicum. Based on images, he forms systems of images that allow him to express emotions and feelings, acting as Homo pictor, or “the мan drawing”. The identified spheres intersect in reality, but for research purposes they can be differentiated. The article considers drawing as a media, as a mediator in the processes of perception and expressive activity. The ability of people to create things is associated with a counter movement, when things change a person, these processes give rise to a practical expansion of the sphere of contacts with the world, the process of expanding the mind. A phenomenological consideration of images involves studying the influence of human corporeality on the practices of producing graphic artifacts. Here, a person’s encounter with the world begins with the touch of a pencil to paper. A drawing made of lines and dots is not a copy of an object, it is a version of the thing made from special materials. The purpose of the article is to expand the panorama of the anthropological vision of man, to reveal the connections between the characteristics of Homo рictor and other features of Homo sapiens — the transformation of the objective world and the transformation of oneself. Images play an important role in the formation of visual media in culture, in the development of visual thinking, the processes of mastering the space and time of the life world, and the development of individual reflection. To study drawing is to study our speech about drawing, to study drawing as thinking.