Love as a vital value. The highest meaning of love. Love and family

06.11.2019

In a broad sense, love is a moral and aesthetic feeling, expressed in a disinterested and selfless striving for its object, in a need and readiness for self-giving. Love is an unusually capacious, multi-valued and multifaceted concept: it includes love for people (humanism), and love for the Motherland (patriotism), for art, nature, travel, and parental love, and the love of children for parents. But the love of a woman and a man occupies the minds of people most of all.

Love is a feeling of purposeful attachment to a subject or object, requiring constant and close contact with them. The main difference between love and friendship is that the object of love can be anything, while friendship is a two-way relationship with another person. In addition, friendly relations, despite their individuality and specificity, are more unified in their forms of manifestation than love relationships. Love has the most diverse forms and ways of manifestation. Love refers to an extremely dynamic reflection of feelings and relationships. Friendship, having arisen and created its own rituals, does not change over the years. Love is constantly evolving, changing its strength, direction, forms of existence. But it is wrong to think that love is an attitude only to a specific person, to the object of love. If a person loves only one, this is an attitude of extended egoism, love is a form of attitude towards the world as a whole.

Common signs of love: the need to connect with the object of love, whether it be things, people, material objects, processes or spiritual entities. That is, you can love jewelry, parents, picking mushrooms or poetry and strive to get what you love or do what you love, enjoy intimacy with the object of love. It cannot be said that love always has the same moral value: one cannot compare love for chocolate and love for a mother, love for animals and love for one's country. But any love has a moral value in the context of human behavior. If for the love of chocolate a person is ready to steal it, then his love is immoral and socially dangerous.

It is quite difficult to build a hierarchy of the moral value of types of love. We can single out: a general attitude towards love, i.e. openness to the world, the need for closeness, the ability to care, pity, compassion, the moral value of which is in the elevation of the individual; love for objects, so to speak, of a higher order - the Motherland, one's people, which, combined with a sense of duty, honor, responsibility, forms the basis of a moral worldview; individual love for parents, children, a man or a woman, which gives a special meaning to life to a particular person; love for objects and processes, which has an indirect moral value.

Individual sexual love is interpersonal unity with another person. However, can any interpersonal unity be called love? To love in the moral sense means, first of all, to give, not to receive. But by sharing his life, a person spiritually enriches another person. In this way, we encourage the other to give in the same way, and on this basis we create something new. The ability to love, giving depends on the development of personality.

The ancient Greeks recognized four types of love:

Eros is an enthusiastic love, bodily and spiritual passion, a violent craving for the possession of a loved one. This passion is more for oneself, there is a lot of egocentrism in it. She is "male type", it is rather the feeling of an ardent youth or a young man; it is less common in women.

Philia - love-friendship, a more spiritual and calmer feeling. Psychologically, she is closest to the love of a young girl. Among the Greeks, philia connected not only lovers, but also friends.

Agape is an altruistic, spiritual love, full of sacrifice and self-denial, built on indulgence and forgiveness, similar to motherly love. This love is not for yourself, but for the sake of another. For the Greeks, this is not only a feeling of love, but also the ideal of humane love for one's neighbor.

Stporge - love-tenderness, family love, full of gentle attention to the beloved. It grew out of a natural attachment to relatives and emphasizes the carnal and spiritual kinship of those who love. The ethical, moral nature of love is deeply revealed by the Russian philosopher Vl. Solovyov in the treatise "The Meaning of Love". According to Solovyov, the meaning of human love is "the justification and salvation of individuality through the sacrifice of egoism."

Love for Solovyov is not only a subjective experience, but also an active intrusion into life. As the gift of speech does not consist in speaking in itself, but in the transmission of thought through the word, so the true purpose of love is not in the simple experience of feeling, but in the fact that thanks to it the transformation of the social and natural environment takes place.

Solovyov sees love in five possible ways of development - two false and three true. The first false path of love is "hellish" - a painful unrequited passion. The second, also false - "animal" - indiscriminate satisfaction of sexual desire. The third way (the first true) is marriage. The fourth is asceticism. The highest, fifth way is Divine love, when we are confronted not with sex - “half of a person”, but with a whole person in combination of male and female principles. Man becomes in this case a "superman"; it is here that he solves the main task of love - to perpetuate the beloved, to save him from death and decay. At the same time, the essence, the meaning of love is determined by him through the measure. But how can love be measured? It is very difficult to determine this. No one could do this as accurately as Blessed Augustine, who said: "The measure of love is love without measure."

Love is the greatest value, property and right of a free person… A person who loves becomes more sensitive to beauty. A special aesthetics of love arises - a person's craving for a perfect life, which is built according to the laws of beauty, goodness, freedom, justice. Love unites one person with another, helping him overcome feelings of isolation and loneliness. There is a paradox in love: “two beings become one and remain two” (E. Fromm).

However, love is not a fluke or a fleeting episode; love is an art that requires self-improvement, dedication, readiness for an act of self-sacrifice from a person. E. Fromm identifies five elements of love: giving, caring, responsibility, respect and knowledge.

Love as a giving is the highest manifestation of the power of a person who is able to give, the forces that give rise to reciprocal love are a way of self-realization, which consists in giving, not taking.

Love as a manifestation of care and interest implies a spiritual response, an expression of diverse feelings in relation to a loved one. It is creative and fruitful, it resists destruction, conflict, enmity. It is a form of productive activity.

Love as responsibility is a response to the expressed or unexpressed needs of another human being, a state and readiness to "respond". A loving person feels responsible for his neighbors, just as he feels responsible for himself. In love, responsibility concerns, first of all, the spiritual needs of another person.

Respect in love is the ability to see and accept a person as he is, and not as I need him as a means to my ends. It is a willingness to be aware of its uniqueness and individuality.

But “it is impossible to respect a person without knowing him: care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge” (E. Fromm). Knowledge is a necessary aspect of love that allows one to penetrate into the essence, the “secret” of a loved one and realize all other aspects of love. Absolutely complete, all-encompassing love presupposes the organic unity of all these aspects.

So, love is not only the highest moral value, but also a real earthly attitude, and attraction, and a relatively independent desire, and need, and in this capacity it is the highest form of interpersonal communication.

There are two extremes in the evaluation of love as a factor in life.

There are people who are dismissive of it or consider it optional for life.. One can only feel sorry for them. They deprive themselves of an essential part of life. Most of these people somehow fall in love, get carried away and have sex. But still, they do not value love and succumb to its charms, as if reluctantly, satisfy their love desires in the simplest, most primitive form. Meanwhile, love is the most powerful engine-factor of life, thanks to which its other aspects and itself as a whole acquire meaning, are enriched, and are colored with thousands of colors. Under the rays of love, everything is presented in the best possible light, life itself not only acquires meaning, but also becomes a constant source of joy and pleasure. A loving person is predisposed to good, to harmonious relations with other people, in general with the whole world. A loving person, of course, loves nature, animals, plants. A loving person loves himself, his body and soul, his love, wants to match it, its enchanting beauty-harmony, wants to be better, learn, improve to infinity, create, create, dare, be worthy of the object of love (beloved or beloved).

Love has the greatest value due to the fact that it is one of the strongest sources of positive emotions, pleasure and joy. And the value of positive emotions is difficult to overestimate. They encourage, mobilize and, on the other hand, soften the effect of various stressors. If there are few positive emotions, then life gradually turns first into a stagnation, an empty existence, and then into a real hell.

Without love, without love comforts, a person loses a significant part of positive emotions. Because of this, he can become a misanthrope, a psychopath, quickly wither, become decrepit, grow old, etc.

If love serves evil, then this is an incidental circumstance for it. Love itself is neither a vamp nor a killer... In most cases, it normal i.e. the way she is must be or occurs in most men and women.

Love itself within itself is a whole world, delightful and beautiful!

Another extreme in the evaluation of love: its absolutization. This absolutization can be of different nature. For young people, love can be equal to life, and they sometimes put the question point-blank: if there is no love, then it is not worth living (there is no life without love). How many dramas and tragedies because of this! How many suicides, crippled lives! Fiction is replete with such stories. Let us recall at least Shakespeare's famous tragedy Romeo and Juliet or Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. Love is worth living for, but not worth dying for.

Another absolutization of love: when for the sake of love a person sacrifices not life, but other essential aspects of it, for example, a favorite thing, creativity ... Immersion in love sometimes overshadows everything else. A person becomes a slave of love, turns into a sex machine, into a rag, wastes his life on love affairs or becomes a scoundrel, a moral monster, a criminal, a murderer.

A kind of absolutization of love is also the preaching of universal love, when it is placed at the center of individual and social life. Above, I criticized such an absolutization of love in Tolstoy's work. I repeat, in addition to love for “others”, there is also a struggle with “others”. This is not necessarily a war of annihilation. It can be fair competition, healthy competition. It can be a struggle between the new and the old, the advanced against the obsolete. This, finally, can be a fight against evil, with the bearers of evil. Such a struggle with “others” is no less significant for life than love for “others”. Love is only one pole of life. Its other pole is struggle.

So, who pays too much attention to love, he, as a rule, becomes its victim. Falling into love is just as dangerous as running away from love. In general, it is very important, on the one hand, to recognize the vital importance of love, and on the other hand, not to overestimate its significance.

Love as self-worth

Love is relatively independent of both the lover and the beloved, that is, of the subject and object of love.

Its relative independence from the lover is manifested in the fact that it can take him by surprise or arise even against his will and reason.

Its independence from the object of love is manifested in the fact that a particular object may not be the best option and, moreover, as in the saying “love is evil, you will love a goat”, the object may simply be insignificant or dangerous for the lover.

So that love does not take a person by surprise and does not dictate its conditions to him, he must prepare for it, gain experience, learn to recognize a possible love fever and those “beloved ones” from whom he needs to stay away.

There are two extremes in the evaluation of love as a factor in life.

There are people who dismiss it or consider it optional for life. One can only feel sorry for them. They deprive themselves of an essential part of life. Most of these people, one way or another, fall in love, get carried away and have sex. But still, they do not value love and succumb to its charms, as if reluctantly, satisfy their love desires in the simplest, most primitive form. Meanwhile, love is the most powerful engine-factor of life, thanks to which both its other aspects and itself as a whole acquire meaning, are enriched, and are colored with thousands of colors. Under the rays of love, everything is presented in the best possible light, life itself not only acquires meaning, but also becomes a constant source of joy and pleasure. A loving person is predisposed to good, to harmonious relations with other people, in general with the whole world. A loving person, of course, loves nature, animals, plants. A loving person loves himself, his body and soul, his love, wants to match it, its enchanting beauty-harmony, wants to be better, learn, improve, create, create, dare, be worthy of the object of love (beloved or beloved). Love has the greatest value due to the fact that it is one of the strongest sources of positive emotions, pleasure and joy. And the value of positive emotions is difficult to overestimate. They encourage, mobilize and, on the other hand, soften the effect of various stressors. If there are few positive emotions, then life gradually turns first into a stagnation, an empty existence, and then into a real hell. Without love, without love comforts, a person loses a significant part of positive emotions. Because of this, he can become a misanthrope, a psychopath, quickly wither, grow decrepit, grow old ...

If love serves evil, then this is an incidental circumstance for it. Love itself is neither a vamp nor a killer... It cannot be demonized or presented as some kind of sweet poison. In most cases, love is normal, that is, the way it should be or takes place in men and women.

Love itself within itself is a whole world, delightful and beautiful!

Another extreme in the evaluation of love: its absolutization. This absolutization can be of different nature. For young people, love can be equal to life, and they sometimes put the question point-blank: if there is no love, then it is not worth living (there is no life without love). How many dramas and tragedies because of this! How many crippled lives, suicides! Fiction is replete with such stories. Consider Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Love is worth living for, but not worth dying for.

A kind of absolutization of love is also the preaching of universal love, when it is placed at the center of individual and social life.

The value of love. It must be borne in mind that love is relatively independent of both the lover and the beloved, that is, of the subject and object of love. Its relative independence from the lover is manifested in the fact that it can take him by surprise or arise even against his will and reason. Its independence from the object of love is manifested in the fact that a particular object may not be the best option and, moreover, as in the saying “love is evil, you will love a goat”, the object may simply be insignificant or dangerous for the lover. So that love does not take a person by surprise and does not dictate its conditions to him, he must prepare for it, gain experience, learn to recognize a possible love fever and those “beloved ones” from whom he needs to stay away.

Normative ethics Varieties of love Origins of love The moral meaning of love Love is the answer to the problem of human existence Objects of love The place of love in the history of mercy Love as an important value in religious philosophy Love is the top of the hierarchical ladder of values Is love an art? The practice of love Love between a child and his parents Love and its decay in modern society

The ancient Greeks recognized four types of love:

Philia - love-friendship, a more spiritual and calmer feeling. Psychologically, she is closest to the love of a young girl. Among the Greeks, philia connected not only lovers, but also friends.

Respect in love is the ability to see and accept a person as he is, and not as I need him as a means to my ends. It is a willingness to be aware of its uniqueness and individuality.

Essence of professional ethics

Professional ethics is a set of moral norms that determine a person's attitude to his professional duty. The moral relations of people in the labor sphere are regulated by professional ethics. Society can function normally and develop only as a result of a continuous process of production of material and valuables. The content of professional ethics are codes of conduct that prescribe a certain type of moral relationship between people and ways to justify these codes.

Professional ethics studies:

Relations between labor collectives and each specialist individually;

Moral qualities of a specialist's personality, which ensure the best performance of professional duty;

Relationships within professional teams, and those specific moral standards inherent in a given profession;

Features of professional education.

The situations in which people find themselves in the process of performing their professional tasks have a strong influence on the formation of professional ethics. In the process of labor, certain moral relations develop between people. They have a number of elements inherent in all types of professional ethics.

Firstly, this is the attitude towards social labor, towards the participants in the labor process,

Secondly, these are the moral relations that arise in the area of direct contact between the interests of professional groups with each other and with society.

Professional ethics is not a consequence of inequality in the degree of morality of various professional groups. It's just that society shows increased moral requirements for certain types of professional activity. Basically, these are such professional areas in which the labor process itself requires the coordination of actions of all its participants. Particular attention is paid to the moral qualities of workers in the field that are associated with the right to dispose of people's lives, here we are talking not only about the level of morality, but, first of all, about the proper performance of their professional duties (these are professions from the fields of services, transport, management, healthcare, upbringing). The labor activity of people in these professions, more than any other, is not amenable to preliminary regulation, does not fit within the framework of official instructions. It is inherently creative. The peculiarities of the work of these professional groups complicate moral relations and a new element is added to them: interaction with people - objects of activity. This is where moral responsibility becomes crucial. Society considers moral qualitiesemployee as one of the leading elements of his professional suitability. General moral norms should be specified in the labor activity of a person, taking into account the specifics of his profession. Thus, professional morality should be considered in unity with the generally accepted system of morality. Violation of the work ethic is accompanied by the destruction of general moral principles, and vice versa. The irresponsible attitude of an employee to professional duties poses a danger to others, harms society, and can ultimately lead to the degradation of the individual himself.

Now in Russia there is a need to develop a new type of professional morality, which reflects the ideology of labor activity based on the development of market relations. This is primarily about the moral ideology of the new middle class, which constitutes the vast majority of the labor force in an economically developed society.

In modern society, the personal qualities of an individual begin with his business characteristics, attitude to work, level of professional suitability. All this determines the exceptional relevance of the issues that make up the content of professional ethics. Genuine professionalism is based on such moral norms as duty, honesty, exactingness towards oneself and one's colleagues, responsibility for the results of one's work.

Each kind of human activity (scientific, pedagogical, artistic, etc.) corresponds to certain types of professional ethics.

Professional types of ethics are those specific features of professional activity that are aimed directly at a person in certain conditions of his life and activity in society. The study of the types of professional ethics shows the diversity, versatility of moral relations. For each profession, certain professional moral norms acquire some special significance. Professional moral norms are rules, samples, the order of internal self-regulation of a person based on ethical ideals.

The main types of professional ethics are: medical ethics, pedagogical ethics, ethics of a scientist, actor, artist, entrepreneur, engineer, etc. Each type of professional ethics is determined by the uniqueness of professional activity, has its own specific requirements in the field of morality. So, for example, the ethics of a scientist presupposes, first of all, such moral qualities as scientific conscientiousness, personal honesty, and, of course, patriotism. Judicial ethics requires honesty, justice, frankness, humanism (even to the defendant when he is guilty), fidelity to the law. Professional ethics in the conditions of military service requires a clear performance of duty, courage, discipline, devotion to the Motherland.

Currently, the importance of professional ethics in the regulation of various types of labor activity is increasing. This is due to the desire to constantly improve professional standards in relation to changing social relations.

The professional ethics of society cannot represent the absolute truth in the behavior of people. Each generation must solve them again and again independently. But new developments must be based on the moral stock created by previous generations.

Today, when there is a rapid development of technical aspects and a lag in cultural aspects, it is very important to understand that ethical knowledge is necessary for the stabilization of society.

Bibliography

N.A. Baranov

Baranov N.A. Love in the system of universal values // Organisms and Mechanisms: Control Problems in Social and Technical Systems: Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Scientific Seminar. St. Petersburg: Publishing House "Book House", 2003. P. 164-167.

Love in the system of universal values

The most powerful, mysterious, exciting feeling that a person experiences is love. Love in this aspect refers to the feelings experienced by a person for himself like the opposite sex. Why homo sapiens (a reasonable person) becomes homo amans (loving person)? What is love in human life: a physiological need for procreation or something else?

These, as well as other questions relating to this great feeling, have been pondered for many centuries by the best minds of mankind. Painters and writers, musicians and poets dedicated their works to him. Love made significant adjustments to the policy of states, to the behavior of political leaders. Such facts testify to the enduring power of love and its priority position in the human value system. K. Marx wrote to his wife Jenny Marx: "... Love for your beloved ... makes a person a person again in the full sense of the word."

Love opposes feelings to reason, often determining the priority of the first over the second. The volcano of passions inherent in love captures a person, focusing on emotional perception. Reason recedes into the background. A person begins to be guided not by common sense, but by the internal, at first glance, unreasonable needs of his nature. But these needs are quite obvious: empathy, compassion, a kind of catharsis that brings a person to a new quality of life, to a new worldview.

Worried about the unpredictable influence that love has on human life, the English philosopher F. Bacon came to the conclusion that “the one who, since it is impossible to prevent love, keeps it in its proper place and completely separates it from their serious deeds and actions, does better.” in life". He was echoed by J. Locke, who argued that "the control of one's passions is true progress on the path of freedom."

Love is a voluntary slavery of feelings, complete dependence on another person, or, as S. L. Frank said, the absolute value of a loved one, "satisfaction of one's own being through service to another." A paradoxical state arises when a person falls in love with the image he created. As V.V. Rozanov wrote, “the lover sees, in fact, not a specific person, but, as it were, the angelic side of a specific person, his double, and the best, heavenly double.”

What makes an individual give up personal freedom and become a controlled person? What is the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious? The author believes that a loving person is in a state of constant tension of feelings. The feeling of an invisible spiritual connection that arises in relation to the object of worship is so exciting that a person is unable to break it without consequences for himself. The sharpness of the feelings experienced is unusually strong and attractive, so a person wants to experience such a state again and again. This is comparable to a person's drug addiction - the inability to live without a vital force stimulant.

Love has an altruistic beginning, since a loving person cares, first of all, not about himself, but about his beloved, seeks to satisfy the needs and needs not so much personal as of a loved one. In the words of E. Fromm, love is not possession, but being. Unlike possession, which is expressed in the desire to turn everything into one's own property, being is a way of existence in which a person does not have and does not crave to have anything, he is happy, being in unity with his love, with the object of love.

Love makes a person improve. If an individual does not consider it necessary to develop his abilities, knowledge, experience, then he is deprived of a sense of love. E. Fromm rightly believes that without a person’s desire to more actively develop his personality as a whole, without the ability to love his neighbor, without true humanity, without courage, faith and discipline, all his attempts at love are doomed to failure.

Love is a continuation of life - not so much physiological as spiritual. As civilization improves and develops, love from its original purpose - procreation - gradually becomes a spiritual need of a person. Moreover, love is directly dependent on the intellect of a person. As it rises, the attitude towards this feeling changes: the physiological component increasingly gives way to the spiritual, and the reproductive function fades into the background.

At the same time, arising as a spiritual feeling, love gradually develops into a physical attraction. Physical intimacy is the culmination of love, as a symbiosis of the spiritual and physical principles. V.S. Soloviev believed that the combination of physical and spiritual needs of a person leads to harmony in love. “All love,” the Russian religious philosopher argued, “is a manifestation of a person’s ability to live not only in himself, but also in another ...”.

Physical attraction is a logical continuation and completion of the spiritual beginning, turning into a new quality of human life, a separate existence of two human beings. In the words of the German romantic end XVIII - early XIX century J. Görres "as if through electrical conductors, a spark of life runs through them and enters a new generation."

Love is the realization of the physical and spiritual impossibility of living without another person. A person who wants to dedicate all the best in life, admire him, attributing to him non-existent qualities, but which seem quite natural and real for a lover.

Love makes a person better, cleaner, brighter, kinder. With some lovers, truly inexplicable metamorphoses occur: the stingy become generous, the silent become talkative. Consequently, additional human resources are included in the work, which were not involved and only under the influence of a feeling of love found their embodiment.

It can be said without exaggeration that when an individual loves, he manifests the best human qualities inherent in him by nature.

A man in love is happy, and happy people beautify the world: they are not aggressive, but benevolent, oriented towards compromise, not confrontation, towards peaceful resolution of problems, not violence. Not without reason, when the boss comes to work in an aggressive state, his subordinates assume that he is not all right in his relationship with his wife or in his personal life. This stereotype has been tested by people for centuries and, for the most part, from their own experience.

Love opens a person’s eyes to those moments and phenomena in life, to those emotional experiences that he had not noticed before or did not pay attention to them, that is, a person in love cognizes the world in a different way, starting to notice what was previously outside attention. On this occasion, B. Pascal noted that love “comes into its own as our mind improves, prompting us to love what seems beautiful to us, even if we have never been told what is beautiful.”

Love as a vital value. The highest meaning of love. Love and family

Baranov N.A. Love in the system of universal values // Organisms and Mechanisms: Control Problems in Social and Technical Systems: Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Scientific Seminar. St. Petersburg: Publishing House "Book House", 2003. P. 164-167.

Love in the system of universal values

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Baranov N.A. Love in the system of universal values ​​// Organisms and Mechanisms: Control Problems in Social and Technical Systems: Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Scientific Seminar. St. Petersburg: Publishing House "Book House", 2003. P. 164-167.

Love in the system of universal values

Report a typo

Text to be sent to our editors:

Your comment (optional):

Baranov N.A. Love in the system of universal values // Organisms and Mechanisms: Control Problems in Social and Technical Systems: Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Scientific Seminar. St. Petersburg: Publishing House "Book House", 2003. P. 164-167.