A lot of sciences are engaged in the life and inner world of people, but only philosophy discusses purpose, place and essence in the world. We can say that the problem of man in philosophy is one of its main questions. Since ancient times, there have been many definitions of belonging to the human race. Even in ancient times they jokingly talked about a “two-legged creature without feathers”, while Aristotle spoke very accurately and succinctly - a person is a zoon politikon, that is, a rational animal that cannot live without social communication. In the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola in his “Speech on the Essence of Man” stated that there is no definite place for people in the world and no clear boundaries - they can rise above angels in their greatness, and fall below demons in their vices. Finally, the French existentialist philosopher Sartre called man "an existence that precedes essence", meaning that people are born as a biological being, and then become rational.
Man in philosophy appears as a phenomenon with specific features. Man is a kind of "project", he creates himself. Therefore, he is capable not only of creativity, but also of “self-creation, ” that is, self-change, as well as self-knowledge. However, human life and activity are determined and limited by time, which, like a sword of Damocles, hangs above it. Man creates not only himself, but also a "second nature", culture, in this way, as Heidegger put it, "doubling being." In addition, he, according to the same philosopher, is "a being that thinks about what Being is." And finally, a man imposes his measurements on the whole world around him. Protagoras also stated that man is the measure of all things in the universe, and philosophers from Parmenides to Hegel tried to identify being and thinking.
The problem of man in philosophy was also posed in terms of the relationship of the microcosm — that is, the inner world of man, and the macrocosm — of the surrounding world. In ancient Indian, ancient Chinese and ancient Greek philosophy, man was understood as part of the Cosmos, a single timeless "order", nature. However, already ancient pre-Socratics, such as Diogenes from Apollonia, Heraclitus and Anaximenes, also took a different view, the so-called "parallelism" of the micro- and macrocosm, viewing man as a reflection or symbol of the macrocosm. From this postulate a naturalistic anthropology began to develop, dissolving man in space (man consists only of elements and elements).
The problem of man in philosophy and attempts to solve it also led to the fact that cosmos and nature began to be understood anthropomorphically, as a living and spiritualized organism. This idea is expressed in the most ancient cosmogonic mythologies of the “universal great man” (Purusha in the Indian Vedas, Ymir in the Scandinavian “Edda”, Pan Gu in Chinese philosophy, Adam Kadmon in Jewish Kabbalah). Nature emerged from the body of this person, which also had a “cosmic soul” (Heraclitus, Anaximander, Plato, the Stoics agreed), and this nature is often identified with a certain immanent deity. Cognition of the world from this point of view often acts as self-knowledge. Neoplatonists dissolved Cosmos in the soul and mind.
Thus, the presence of a body and soul in a person (or, more precisely, a body, soul and spirit) has generated yet another contradiction, which characterizes the problem of man in philosophy. According to one point of view, the soul and body are two different types of the same essence (Aristotle's followers), and according to the other, they are two different realities (Plato's followers). In the doctrine of the transmigration of souls (characteristic of Indian, Chinese, partially Egyptian and Greek philosophy), the boundaries between living beings are very mobile, but it is only human nature to strive for "liberation" from the yoke of the wheel of existence.
The problem of man in the history of philosophy was considered ambiguously. The ancient Indian Vedanta calls the essence of man atman, in its internal content identical to the divine principle - Brahman. For Aristotle, man is a creature with a rational soul and ability to social life. Christian philosophy has advanced man to a special place - being “the image and likeness of God, ” he is at the same time bifurcated by the fall. In the Renaissance, the autonomy of man was pathetically proclaimed. The European rationalism of the New Age made Descartes’s expression as a slogan that thinking is a sign of existence. The thinkers of the eighteenth century — Lametry, Franklin — identified human consciousness with a mechanism or with an “animal that creates the means of production”. German classical philosophy understood man as a living whole (in particular, Hegel said that man is a step in the development of the Absolute Idea), and Marxism is trying to combine the natural and social in man with the help of dialectical materialism. However, twentieth-century philosophy is dominated by personalism, which focuses not on the “essence” of man, but on his uniqueness, uniqueness and individuality.
