ISSN 2313-7525
In Practice of Leading Scientific Schools
2017 – 1 (19)
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Ethics in captivity of phenomena: needs, violence,
religion, morality
Turban, Viktoria
Professor, Dr. of Psychology, PhD, Academic secretary of the G.S. Kostiuk Institute of psychology of the National Academy of Education of Ukraine, Kiev
Email: [email protected]
Copyright © 2017
Article info The article attempts to analyze the phenomenon of the most famous social ethics, needs, violence, religion and morality in the context of public relations. It is shown that all four regulatory system - needs, violence virospovidalnist (religion) zvychayevist (morality) - have separate spheres of influence in its pure form do not overlap. Thus, the proposed quadrisyllabic regulatory system meets the requirement of analyticity. Shown completeness of the system, the four of objectivity in their substantiality.
Keywords: ethics, needs, violence, religion, morality, society, public relations, law,
government, politics. Received
22 December 2016
Accepted 06 February 2017
Turban, V. (2017). Ethics in captivity of phenomena: needs, violence, religion, morality. Fundamental and
Applied Researches In Practice of Leading Scientific Schools, 1 (19), 3-8.
Introduction
Violence is a direct transition from individually-physical to socio-physical life of an individual. It is well known that body can force, morality and religion can force, but does it mean that we have to present violence just as a kind of manifestation of sociality, just as a regulatory instrument, and deprive it of its own idea, and to consider it not ontologically but purely phenomenologically? This is a serious issue. In its essence it is the question of ontology of ideas in general: Plato's eternal theme. Do good or evil, beauty and ugliness, justice and hierarchy exist? These questions gave origin to idealistic philosophy. Philosophy is still preoccupied with these questions. And the society is also
preoccupied with them. It is of no importance for society whether justice actually exists or whether it exists only in Eidos. Another thing is important for it: whether the direct relationships are perceived (understood, evaluated) as just, or do they cause resentment, contempt, equilibristics of excuse?
Materials and Methods
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Results & Discussions
For Christian ontology violence is a consequence of the Fall. [1]. We do not know another world, except sinful. Our consciousness, using Berdyayev’s terminology, is fully objectified. So it is very difficult to judge life in terms of absolute freedom. Everything that we see, and, unfortunately, experience first-hand is violence, violence always and everywhere, from brutal enforcement to Jesuit encouragement. Violence, of course, is not identical to needs, of course, if you do not regard as normal psychological preferences praised by our countryman Sacher-Masoch. On the contrary, violence is opposite to needs. Moreover, it even prevents implementations of volition. Use of force indicates that volition is not selfsufficient, that it is inadequate. This is a display of a conflict and the method for resolving it by searching a coordinated system. Links with conflicts reveal non legitimacy of violence and inconsistencies between moral systems and accepted standards. Here we see the fundamental discrepance between morality and violence. Morality, of course, may provide for brutal enforcement. But is morality about just positive assessements? Crime renounced by official canons can be interpreted very loyally by informal morality. And our culture gives plenty of examples of such moral duality.
But violence can not be narrowed down to a moral norm as well. Violence is always a denial of rules. At the most it is the denial of key concepts of certain morality. This conflict with morality, violence manifestations against adherers to morality – it is the establishment of alternative values. Violence always includes alternative morality. Alternative morality can provide for violence. But here it always goes about violence against others, strangers or an enemy. Thus, we see that violence originates from morality itself - it is the realization of a conflict with alternative morality, the result of its rejection and the way of negation. So violence is not identical with needs, which tend to be self-sufficient and unconditional, not identical with morality, which can envisage its shadowy manifestations, but still, does not include them. Violence is a conflict between moral values [2].
The distinction between violence and religion is more transparent. History knows an endless
nimber of religious wars. But these are wars between religious and not very religious people. Ancient mythology is also full of grand narratives of theogony. Wars of Gods are absolutely all-out, they involve in their whirlpool immortal gods and mortals, and the whole nature. But they say that these wars have ended, although some beleive that these wars were a play of imagination. With all the time that has passed it is difficult to state something for sure. But in any case if violence was caused by whims of the Olympians, still it was fueled with human passions.
Violence is not a religious, but social phenomenon. Michel de Montaigne, reflecting on the religious confrontation in France, noted that the Catholic and Protestant creeds contain dozens (if not more) sophisticated, soundly proved postulates. And very few of those who for dear life fought in defence of one or another tradition, knew and understood them. The roots of religious violence are not in the doctrines themselves, but in the attitude to them. The same can be said about Islam. As can be seen from Muhammad's biography, written by Vladimir Solovyov, the armed conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim communities broke out not on the grounds of faith, but as a result of quite earthly contradictions. Description of the military projection of Islam, done by Soloviev, is the best illustration of the territory of aggression of Leonard Berkowitz: frustration gives rise to aggression.
What are the specifics of regulatory mechanisms of religion? In general, it was described by Max Weber: human labor is not just about daily bread (or not about bread at all), but above all it is about soul salvation; labor is liturgy, a mystery of making excuses to transcendent. But the regulatory function of faith is revealed not only in labor morality. Generally it is very difficult to talk about faith here. We can speak about religious influence only in the broadest sense, which includes not only the followers of faith, but also quite unbelieving people. Religiosity is an appeal to the last boundary of human existence and it defines all human existence.
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nor religiosity. And, certainly, it is sociality, customs and legal rules. The rules stemming from the conditions of coexistence. Morality is a product of multiplicity. Morality is an attitude to the other, to society and oneself (reflexive process). The first two dimensions – attitude to the other and to society- are of greater relevance for society. They are emphasized in all studies on morality issues.
Human being is a disintegrated creature: he cries with one eye and laughs with the other, irrespective of what he senses, feels and wants to think and to do. It is this dichotomy that gave rise to ethics and morality . Man is often characterized as microcosm. And in this, though small, but space, man never remains a Robinson. Psychologists often speak about the birth of Self, when a three years old child stops calling himself by his social name, and starts using the word Self . But somehow they tend to forget that the birth of Self does not interfere with preservation in consciousness of one’s social name. Man remains double-natured: Self and a proper name. Even on a deserted island, Self turn to himself in vocative form - "Robinson". It is an eternal dialogue of man with himself and it is a source of inner morality. Morality, as the product of communication, is created by at least two subjects. Victor Malakhov, is absolutely right when he speaks about communicative nature of morality. However, it is necessary to give it a more exact definition - morality does not originate from the fact of communication as such. It originates, according to Aristotle, out of "communication for the common goal". And this common goal has to be (at least partially) acceptable for the both sides of communication for their ideal coexistence.
As we have mentioned above, morality actually legalizes needs, but it has no power over their manifestations. Morality legitimizes violence, but it becomes imperceptible when it encounters another morality. It legitimizes attitude to the transcendent, forming a religious culture, but its encounter with metaphysics has an intimate nature, and tend to gravitate to affection.
Every Institutionalised religion fights with this hidden intimacy, demanding ritual and publicity from the "churched persons". At the times when Jesus abandoned his disciples, and went into a desert or the garden of Gethsemane, he was
seeking refuge from the future church morality that apparently he could already discern in the eyes of "catchers of souls." Church is a moral institution. Faith knows no morality, because it does not have neither customary beliefs, nor customary habits. John Chrysostom in one of his appeals raises the question which is still relevant: Is it possible to be a true Christian without going to church and communicate with God in seclusion? He has a good answer to it: appealing to God in church, together with other believers, a Christian strengthens in his faith, and from this arises the Truth of the Church as the body of Christ. A solitary prayer is feeble and faith is shallow and crippled. This is all true and there’s nothing to argue about. However, instability and vagueness are immanently inherent in faith. There is no faith without doubt, fatigue, disappointment, frustration and other plethora. Without them faith is not faith at all. It is only dogma and bigotry, and scholarly memorized questions and answers, gestures and facial expressions. Confidence is inherent to knowledge. Faith appears only in the absense of knowledge. Therefore, faith can not avoid secrecy and intimacy. It is based on them. The rise of Protestantism in itself was an attempt to find the ingenuousness of faith hidden behind the Organ snuffle and Latin recitative. But Protestantism as church demanded publicity, the public eye. Such intimate confessionalism transformed into public confessions, with all the rhetorical passages similar to emotional striptease. Faith is an appeal to the unknown, to the obscure hereafter, to the unknown in ourselves. All said is true: everything that we know about God is not God. But in the same way another idea can be true: everything that we know about God in ourselves is not God. And man, after all, is made in the image and likeness of God. All the things unknown and unstudied that lead to faith, always remain foreign and slip between the fingers of hasty thoughts and motions of feelings. Anticipation of something that does not exist in the worldly life. And no morality can customize this anticipation.
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from knowledge, sympathy and rumors. Fashion is flesh and blood of morality. The phenomenon of fashion proves that morality can be not just conservative, but playful as well. Contemporary humanitarism runs mad from the word "game". Morality can also play games. Everything is within the range of morality. And it does not aim at Immensity. Under the influence of the famous work by Johan Huizinga one expressed a paradoxical hypothesis that a game that up till now was considered a prerogative of childishness, is actually a realm of adult culture [3]. Childishness and adolescence readily manifest playfulness, precisely because it contradicts the natural definiteness of their growing up. Instead, people in adulthood become largely free from their own physicality, they, as it at least seems to them, can take care of it, they are accustomed to its challenges. Thus, feeling free from bodily matters, a grown man can easily plunge into a game, the real adult game with serious rules and serious rates. Consideration of culture as primarily a game, can by no means diminish the importance of morality. On the contrary, here morality appears in all its wholeness. Because custom is the most important game attribute. Without custom game escalates into a confrontation. Discourse of the gaming culture gives very clear distinctions between morality and violence. Where the moral- game ends (or a game into morality), there starts the violence.
So it becomes evident that all four regulatory system – needs, violence, religious faith (religion), custom (morality) – they all have their separate spheres of influence and they do not intersect in their pure form. Thus, the proposed four-aspect regulatory system meets the requirements of analyticity. However, we need the answer to the question about this system completeness. That is, does some additional factor affect behavior and consciousness of an individual and a community? For example, is it advisable to single out the law as a separate factor? After all, sometimes the law (and sometimes it happens very often) contradicts morality. The fact that juridical norms are based on customary norms, of course, indicates the genetic unity of law and morality. But this genetic unity and it alone, does not allow us to conclude that they are absolutely connected. Moreover, the very attention that the State pays to the law, indicates its certain unsteadiness and impossibility to exist only on
the basis of moral condemnation or encouragement. State is the instrument for the strict law implementation. One can give this definition to the state on the basis of the fact that State is an instrument for strict implementation of juridical norms. This definition can be given to the state if we regard the law as a self-sufficient entity. Therefore the law should be defined as follows: it is a self sufficient, internally integral system of autonomous rules that change and define the subject of regulation in the process of their spread, and implement themselves in the form of state will.
Historically the legal ontology is the purely conservative idea justifying any norm. But the experience of justifying law by history requires an answer to the question about factors shaping the course of history. Each entry on the page of history is consequential to legal entries on its previous page. Is history a history of law, or is the law just a random storyline of history? This is the question. However, the law does not claim for such an outstanding role in history. Historical Theory of Law is concerned only with its adequacy to a particular historic time. And therefore it can not be self-sufficient. Pragmatic theory is a separate branch of historical theory. We live here and now, in a particular historical era. We did not choose it, and we’d better not change it. So finding ourselves in a completely strange and objective situation, we try to find the most convenient and advantageous place there, and we hide behind a wall of laws. Pragmatic theory is genetically close to historical theory, as it recognizes definiteness and objectivity of history, but still it contradicts it, because for it it is of no value. Pragmatic recognizes only the history that started with his birth. For sure, pragmatism is pathetically objective. But who said (apart from Hegel and his followers), that history is objective, and that the notion of objectivity is really objective (true)? Objectivity is taken as a kind of conventionality, which can be easily demolished, but what for? This objectivistic element of pragmatism indicates the other pillar of it, and namely, naturalness.
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nature. But what exactly can be said about this very nature? Man and existence, and God are the most general, and the most common concepts. The idea of naturalness was introduced for concretizing this universality. As Alexei Losev showed in his "Aesthetics of the Renaissance", analogy of naturalness had both its sublime and modified, shadow content. All the greatness of the Renaissance (including pantheism) was grounded on Neoplatonic ideas. Neoplatonism as the doctrine of the spirituality of the material world was not always fully comprehended (as is happened with the works of Leonardo), but still it was the dominant worldview of the era, and a prerequisite for any creative work. [4]. The shadowy side of naturalness is Rabelaisianism. It really takes a lot so as to find spirituality in the feast of flesh. Losyev’s concept is convincing. The modified tytanism, pursuit of happiness and all-permissiveness have a mystical side to it. Every volition is unconditional. But the central theme of Alexei Losev’s works is the tragedy of the creativity idea. However, we won’t find even shadows of this tragedy in Rabelaisianism. The idea of naturalness includes not only a certain ideal of man, but also to the idea of human impeccability, of certain narcissism. But narcissism can be tragic, as the ancient myth tells us. Remember, the beauty of Narcissus was absolute. However, passion, in contrast to love, can sayisfy itself with surrogates: "I admired your white dressing gown/not revering fine dreams any more", as wrote Alexander Blok. Rabelaisianism can be satisfied with just a white dress, but "revering fine dreams" – it is something ephemeral, some genuine obstacle to fullness of life. Natural law theory contains at its core the Neoplatonic idea of spirituality of the world. The world is regarded as a realm of consistent patterns, correctness and harmony. That is why the world is integral. Maybe it would be better to organize human coexistence on the same principles, on the basis of regularity, wholeness and harmony similar to the natural world?
Objectivism theory appeared as the direct continuation of the naturalistic theory, it was the so-called "objective law school". Apology of nature involves respect for intellect, which can comprehend this nature and hence, respect for the cultural sphere, taking care of this knowledge and, namely, science. Legal objectivism is a
branch of social sciences. Transfer of ideas of natural determinism to social relations, the assumption that, similar to nature, where certain causes lead to certain consequences (cause-effect relationship), and much the same certain actions produce certain effects in society, all this gave rise to social science as a science. For science to become real science one needs more than just the concept of cause-effect relationship. We also need ideas about stability of environment with its recurring phenomena, which can be described as cause and effect phenomena. First, this environment should be perceived not only as sustainable but also as closed. One should admit the assumption that no other factors except those present in the environment affect the course of events in it. Secondly, this environment is taken not only independently, and autonomously, but also qualitatively, with its inherent properties of stable and immanent nature. Study of natural and social systems (objects) can take place in natural conditions (which calls for the description of inherent properties of the subject), but also in artificial conditions of a laboratory experiment (the classic example - the "white tower" of Ivan Pavlov).
In the attempts to model social relationships, the law had to transform into politics. And it did transform into it in the form of political science. Objective right is one of the pillars of political science. Failing to perform predictive functions and fully take into account all the social factors, the law, the objective right had to turn to the historicity of social run of events, revert to the practice of primary creation on the basis of legitimation of randomly colored relations.
This example proves that law does not act as an autonomous regulator of social life. Its existence is fully dependant on morality and politics. It is morality and politics that regulate origin and ending of legal rules - they are the Alpha and Omega of law. Morality as spontaneously established relationships defines legal norms. Political will is realized through monopolization of legal forms. But morality and politics can easily reject the statutory limits. No legal regulation contradicts current morality. And any regulation can be swept away by political whim.
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We also heard about the principle of legitimacy. But what kind of legitimacy? The legitimacy of political practice. Thus, the law protects society from political tyranny. But we should not forget about the essence of legitimate political will. Democratic regime is now the sole source of political-constitutional reforms. And no matter how ugly the will of the majority may be, the will is sacred to law, and it is also one of the manifestations of politics. We should give great credit to Georg Jellinek who substantiated the necessity to protect minority rights. But can anyone hear the voice of the minority at the feast of democracy? What crumbles can be left over from the norms protecting minority at the times of triumph of the majority will, which is eternalized in constitutional articles? In this way one draws the boundaries of law. They confine the raging storms of politics. And the majestic continents of law run the risk of turning into beautiful coral reefs, swallowed by the ocean of politics.
Conclusions
So one can’t help but wonder whether politics can be regarded as a regulatory system. Of course it can. Politics is an important factor in social life. And will is its ontological basis, the will which breaks all the conventions and moral principles, steps over needs, overcomes resistance by force, rejects intuition of faith and preaches from demolished altars. Politics is the main manifestation of the very possibility of regulation . But politics in this embodiment goes beyond the limits inherent in social life. Politics can be also regarded as a factor. That is, like an acknowleged interest. Basically Politics is a dialogue. It is a simple platitude, where heroism is reduced to cleaning the Augean stables. This politics does not demand even the word "politics". It can easily do with other labels, such as "social government".
If we separate pure forms of social self-regulation – needs, violence, customs, religion - and detach them from the law and politics, then we’ll have to define their essential characteristics. Until now, one separated these pure forms from other forms only phenomenologically. In other
words, pure and synthesized methods of regulation were distinguished according to the type of their implementation. Pure were considered self-sufficient. Synthesized are the forms woven from the pure and dependent on them (e.g. law), or the forms that are not aimed at regulation. Despite all the contempt for objectivism, it is necessary to note that pure forms are objectively predetermined and self-sufficient forms of social life. Pure forms are defined by two criteria: 1) objectivity and 2) self-sufficiency.
Why naturalness, traditions, responsibility and violence are objective? Not only because they exist. Politics and art, love and hate, all manifestations of natural and cultural life – they also exist. Objectivity of theses four systems is based on their substantiality. One can imagine life without politics, law, art and without any complicated forms of life. But can one imagine life without customs, violence, without faith and needs that make us live! Life is custom, and custom in any form of its implementation. Custom becomes law in natural life. Custom determines all the diversity, the very progress of social life. Life and Violence: life is violence. Birth is violence. Death is violence. Even in the process of simplest movements a living creature has to overcome the violence of gravity. Realization of the simplest act of will is associated with violent resistance to circumstances and with committing violence against circumstances.
References
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(1931). Оназначении человека. Париж:
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