The Person and the Machine in the Russian Religious Philosophy

Abstract

The article considers the views of Russian philosophers on the problem of human existence in the face of scientific and technological progress. Their reflections revealed deep discrepancy of a relation of scientific and technical progress with those meanings which are found by the person aiming at a spiritual unification with the world around. The Russian thinkers with great emotional power expressed feeling of danger of the deadening operation of the machine as the factor simplifying and averaging public life, destroying integrity of life of the person and as natural being and as beings spiritual. To this action they considered necessary to contrast a spiritual and moral eminence of the person. However the requirement to limit expansion of the machine to strength of mind, pushed by the Russian thinkers, found the abstractness. Search of means of restriction of the impetuous expansion of technical achievements threatening with catastrophic consequences led to the fact that some of them saw science which is a basis of technical progress as one of such means, to deliver borders for which, they required. There were ideas about need of the appeal to quite terrestrial levers on technical progress from which force of the state relying, besides, on scientific ideas of the nature and society acts as the main thing. The impossibility to leave this circle became one of the reasons of the tragic vision of history peculiar to the Russian philosophy according to which in it, according to Berdyaev, there is an increase of a contradiction between the Divine and the beginning devil, between the good and evil which unsolvability can become the reason of the end of terrestrial history of mankind.

Keywords

• person
• machine
• scientific and technical progress
• science
• spirit