Ideas and Ideals

The article deals with the problems of the essence of consciousness manipulation in the process of self-preservation of a social group by holding holidays. One of the most complex and unambiguously interpreted scientific problems at the present time is the problem of determining the place and various functions of the sacral in the everyday life of society. Of course, the traditional understanding of a holiday as a ritual action that transcends the transcendental nature of being has been preserved to some extent to this day, however, with the development of different social arrangements in the context of life, not only collective, but also individual, has somewhat changed its character. Strictly speaking, the development of philosophical thought with respect to this problem was extremely diverse, but at the same time it had certain homogeneity, manifested in the traditional understanding of a particular area of this aspect. The original understanding of the holiday as sacralization of being, which really exists here and now, was extremely important in the development of the history of the existence of an individual and his relationship with the objectively surrounding world. Of course, the birth of manipulation should not be directly proportional to the existential aspect of life as such. On the contrary, life, according to its dual nature, can not but perform various kinds of manipulation to determine the essence of its existence. The concept of dualism of being has acquired completely different features with the development of a philosophical view of the problems of this kind in the process of historical and philosophical consideration. The initial perception of this phenomenon was absolutely authentic, for it found responses in the determination of the One as the Absolute in its individual kind through the disintegration into plurality, revealing certain regularities in terms of transcendental being. Manipulation of consciousness in the process of research actually appears as a kind of technology of domination of the sacral over everyday life. Holiday as a ritual allows us to manifest the essence of sacralization, determining the place of man in the process of his own being through manipulative character in the context of interaction with the objective world.

The article considers the essence and nature of a human. The authors substantiate the necessity of a holistic view of a person in modern conditions, when the human development has become the goal of civilized development. The authors discuss various approaches to understanding of human entity. The article criticizes unreasonable use of the mechanistic model of an “economic man”. Forming the empirical models of a human, it is suggested coming from his essence as a socio-natural-spiritual phenomenon.

For the survival of Homo sapiens, joint efforts and a strong desire for expansion were of the utmost importance. Our today's emotions and instincts are a relic of the era of hunters and gatherers. External expansion against rival communities and internal expansion, aimed at a closer social organization, gave birth to a mass man, a man of the crowd, who dominated the world until the 19th century. The modern mass man, Homo billionis, whose global civilization covers the entire planet, appeared only in the twentieth century. His archaic craving for expansion gave birth to industrial civilization as the dominant form of life. Today Homo billionis encounters natural boundaries, which are perceived as a hindrance, but he fails to understand that destruction of self-regulating nature is caused by his activities. Behind both world wars, there was a belief in the need to maximally expand the exploitation of nature and other people for the sake of one’s own freedom. This expansion and the freedom won at someone's expense have come to their logical end. For the last two generations, the planet of unlimited possibilities has turned into a closed market, where everyone seeks to displace the other, and where not only individual freedom but also national identity fades away steadily. The mass man as a modern version of Homo sapiens and monotheistic ideological constructions are closely connected with each other. They have to be overcome in order to avoid the death of civilization as the result of further exponential growth. This requires two conditions: the rejection of the expansionist idea of the state and the recognition of differences between people.

The authors analyze the rare experience of philosophical understanding of the accounting phenomenon reflected in the scientific heritage of one of the American accounting tradition founders – Charles Ezra Sprague. The article reveals the ideas of the American scientist on the nature, the form and construction of an account as a key category of accounting theory, his view on logic of communication between accounts and the balance sheet, and specific author's interpretation of balance sheet equation and objects of accounting. Basing on the historical parallels and analogies built between Ch. E. Sprague's ideas and urgent provisions of modern theories of financial accounting the authors come to the conclusion about the need to ensure a balance of foresight research in the field of accounting practice and historical, philosophical and science studies of the accounting theory and methodology.

The article is devoted to the problem of development of a new project of reality that has overcome the post-nonclassical stage and faced difficulties in understanding human-like technoobjects in the present. The authors associate the emergence of "new structures" with transformation of human selfness, its practices of "disintegration", alienation from oneself. The beginning of this process launched by the medieval culture of thought, in which real, conceptual and nominal have appeared. They are recorded in the practices of discovering sinful within yourself; cashing out itself in contact with similar (other); revealing a formal (name). In the period of New European philosophy, a cognizer, tied to contemplation and will, begins to practice. He focuses on experience of reflection – a repeated inspection, control over the self, through which its "property" or aggressive withdrawal of irrational opportunities is established. The authors claim an idea that practice of a cognizer with ever-increasing estrangement from oneself generates a new reality in our time – the objects of kogito (virtual, conceptual, linguistic), objects that "complete" the embodiment (biotechnical structures). They are practitioners standing within the boundaries of will-kreacio, aimed at rational extension, transformation of cognizer. A purposeful will that has a rational intention, collects its own reality from the fragments or "traces" of the expressed, described, everyday, etc., constructs it from fragments of social action, text, experience. A methodology, built on the framework of mathematical and natural sciences, is gradually replaced by an activity-practical, hermeneutic, engineering-sociological approaches. Comprehension of science through spiritual experience of cognizer makes it possible to assess it not as something external, civilizationally fateful but as a conscious action, a choice, relying in a special fixation, self-examination.

This article analyzes a number of social and anthropological implications of the sharp increase in the flow of information, which have acquired since the mid-20th century the character of "information explosion". The authors analyze the postmodern concepts by identifying major characteristics of post-industrial society that brings these concepts together with the theories of the information society. The authors substantiate the hypothesis that, on the basis of the convergence of certain postmodern concepts with the theories of the information society there can be conceptual synthesis. The authors show that the informational approach, which is not used explicitly, is present in the works of post-modern artists as the concept of a special type of society, a society living and reproducing itself mostly in virtual reality based on mass production of sign-symbolic artifacts - signs, symbols, values and meanings, aggregated into streams of information. Information flows are the main "building material" and a resource for the construction of symbolic information and communicative space. The authors identified the following characteristics of the society after the "information explosion": there is a change in the content of communication; the symbolic world becomes increasingly unrecognizable for a human being; there is depersonalization of social codes; virtual strata appear; people experience information trauma of consciousness; human existence becomes fragmented; "information schizophrenia" sets in; "intellectual extinction" of mankind syndrome shows up; and then comes "normal anomie".

The article examines the role of a social ideal in history on the example of evolution of the perfect man image. The ideal is understood as a due thing, which allows to assess the present existing nature and to determine the direction of its development. Aspiration to the ideal, which is an essential intention of a person necessary in acquiring ideal traits of a man, is one of the driving forces of history. Every historical period constructs its own image of an ideal person and strives to get closer to it. Ideas about the perfect man have been regularly formed throughout history, this fact proves that there is a permanent innate human sense of dissatisfaction with him/herself (and with the whole world), the lack of self realization, the intention to discover their own inner identity. The first "perfect man" was a beast. In the primitive societies people conquered the “outer” beast, in Antiquity – the “inner” one. There appeared the first identity crisis as a consequence of inadequate self-esteem ("man as the measure of all things"). God was a "perfect man" of the Middle Ages. If a beast turns out to be in the inaccessible past then God is in the eternal unattainable future. So, the second identity crisis comes into existence. A Man becomes an ideal in Modern Times. There appeared a concept of a perfect man (as a real possibility). However, depriving a person of metaphysics leads to the third identity crisis. Nowadays the "perfect man", increasingly, appears to be a machine resembling a "man", devoid of human weaknesses with improved human qualities. The analogy between a human and a machine leads to the fourth identity crisis. "The new perfect man" is a man as a unique result of the development of all human culture, the synthesis of the unique and the universal.

The reforms carried out over the past fifteen years in the RF education system are not related to the discoveries in pedagogy, but to the changes in social orientations, which are imposed by external "Bologna commitments". The forcefully introduced "competence approach" to the planning of education in higher education gave rise to many difficulties, because it was actually incompatible with the Russian educational tradition. The development of "competence" rhetoric at the reporting level had almost no effect on the methodology of teaching in domestic universities, but the goals and ideals of education have radically changed. Now they are formulated not by the society and the state, but by perspective "employers", transnational corporations are usually meant by them. Instead of "comprehensive harmonious development of the personality," the competence approach actually involves preparing a person for the labor market with the subsequent sale of human qualities. Expanding of the buying and selling sphere is the result of the globalization processes, today only state sovereignties can prevent this expansion, and within traditional societies only "family and school" have to stop this expansion. The author considers this gradual transformation of traditional pedagogy into "market pedagogy" from the point of view of modern inter-civilizational confrontation. The triumphant "economic dominant" is not a universal "innovation", but the result of the expansion of Western civilization. The author substantiates the idea that introducing this competence approach, borrowing the goals and ideals from alien cultures hamper the natural development of our national educational system.

This article is dedicated to Bulgarian Bogomils’ ideology research. Bogomilism is one of the most popular and influential Christian heresies, appeared in mediaeval Bulgaria in 10^th century. Ideology, interpreted in terms of Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes as a structured sign-expressed world image, is divided into different levels. There are the Bogomils’ ideas of politics, economy, corporeality and mysticism. Bulgarian heretics’ world-view was based on religious dualism – a concept of existence of opposite fundamentals (spiritual and material in that case), with a human as their battlefield. Negation of everything material, based on religious dualism, thereby is Bogomilism’s world-view basis. The Bogomils’ revolutionary character, noted by some scholars, appeared not only in politics (denial of authorities) – this religious movement tended to a social ideal, that supposed a much deeper changes of society (created by Sathan) and human nature. The process of making of this “new human” presents as a consecutive negation of everything, connecting him with material world: from social position, property and family till his own body.