simple human values. Relationships and personal life. Decide on the main criteria
Every day we are faced with the need to solve some problems and circumstances that constantly test our strength. And in today's world of all sorts of worries and stresses, our life values, which are a kind of pointers on the path of life.
If everything we say and do is in line with ours, life is correct and meaningful, and we ourselves are satisfied and confident in ourselves. However, it often happens that our actions diverge from deep-seated beliefs, which is why irritability. And this is an indicator that something is wrong. In addition, such feelings can make us unhappy, and only when we always act according to our conscience, both self-esteem and a state of happiness are preserved.
A person's life values can be safely called his internal compass, according to which it is necessary to compare all steps. After all, when there are certain attitudes, it is much easier for a person to think through actions and, which is the basis of a productive and fulfilling life.
But let's think about what our life values can be.
Human values are an extremely topical issue. We all know them well. But hardly anyone tried to define them clearly for themselves. Our article is devoted to just this: the awareness of modern values.
Definition
Value is something that a person consciously or unconsciously reaches for, which meets his needs. Of course, people are all different, which means that human values are also purely individual, but one way or another there are common moral guidelines: goodness, beauty, truth, happiness.
Positive and negative values of modern man
It is clear to everyone that it is normal to strive for happiness (eudemonism) or for pleasure (hedonism). Now it is even more clear than, for example, 100 or 200 years ago. Despite the fact that office workers certainly get tired at work, life has now become much easier than it was for our grandparents. Russia is still shaken by various crises, but still these are not wars, not besieged Leningrad and other horrors that the insane twentieth century has awarded history.
Our contemporary may well say, looking back at history: "I'm tired of suffering, I want to enjoy." Of course, here he does not mean himself, but man as a generic entity, embodied in various bodily shells from ancient times to the present day.
Therefore, the actual reality, perhaps more than all other historical realities, sets him on the pursuit of happiness and pleasure ( positive values person) and escape from suffering and pain (negative constants of his being). We have the joy (albeit of a very dubious quality) to watch how the classical ethical triad of "goodness, beauty, truth" gives way to such landmarks of human existence as money, success, happiness, pleasure. They are difficult to assemble into some kind of design, but if you try, then happiness and pleasure will definitely be at the top, money at the bottom, and everything else in between.
The time has come to talk about such a concept as a “human value system”.
religious values
It is clear to sane people that the world is capitalist, i.e. one where everything or almost everything is decided by money is not eternal and not unique, and the order of values that is offered to them is not universal. Also, it is almost self-evident that the natural opposition is the religious interpretation of reality, which is subject to moral and spiritual laws. By the way, the eternal duality of being between its spiritual and material aspects does not allow a person to lose his humanistic essence. That is why the spiritual values of a person are so important for his moral self-preservation.
Christ as the initiator of a spiritual upheaval
Why was Christ a revolutionary? He did a lot to deserve this honorary title, but the main thing in the context of our article is that he said: "The last will be the first, and the first - the last."
Thus, he overturned the entire structure that is called the “human value system”. Before him (as now) it was believed that wealth, fame and other charms of a life without spirituality are precisely the highest goals of human existence. And the Messiah came and said to wealthy people: "It is difficult for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven." And they thought that they had already bought everything for themselves, but no.
Jesus grieved them, and the poor, the unfortunate and the disadvantaged had some hope. Some of the readers who do not believe too much in paradise will say: “But can the goodness promised after death atone for the existing suffering in the earthly existence of a person?” Dear reader, we completely agree with you. Future happiness is little consolation, but Christ gave hope to the losers of this world and charged them with strength to fight against his unenviable fate. In other words, the values of a person, the values of the individual have become different and have gained variability.
vertical world
In addition, Christianity made the world vertical, i.e. all earthly values are henceforth recognized as base and unimportant. The main thing is spiritual self-improvement and unity with God. Of course, a person will still pay harshly for his spiritual aspirations in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, but still, the feat of Jesus is extremely significant even outside a religious context, because the prophet showed, by sacrificing his life, that other values are possible in a person’s life, that fit harmoniously into the system.
Variations in value systems
From the previous section, it became clear that the system of human aspirations can be completely different. It all depends on what the individual or group is oriented towards. There is, for example, a sociological approach to this issue: the vertical of the significant is built from the highest to the lowest in accordance with the interests of the collective. The latter can mean both individual groups and society as a whole. And we know those periods when some nations put the collective above the individual. This argument will fit perfectly with the topic "Values of the individual and society."
Individualization
The individualized world has its own priorities and its own understanding of higher and lower. We can observe them in our contemporary reality: material well-being, personal happiness, more pleasure and less suffering. Obviously, this is a rough sketch of significant human landmarks, but one way or another, each of us falls into this picture. There are not enough ascetics now.
Formal and real values
If someone asks what role values play in a person's life, then this question is difficult to answer. It is one thing what a person says, and another thing what he does, i.e. the difference between its formal and real semantic priorities. For example, in Russia, many consider themselves believers. Temples are being built. Soon every courtyard will have its own temple, so that pious people do not have to go far. But this is of little use, because, as the bishop from the third part of the movie saga "The Godfather" says to the main character of the film: "Christianity has been surrounding a person for 2,000 years, but it has not penetrated inside." In fact, most people perceive religious institutions as conditional, and they are not particularly interested in the problem of sin. It is also strange that, thinking about God, believers completely forget about their neighbors; the social values of a person are in a certain sense in the paddock. Naturally, in such a situation it is difficult to speak of true faith.
Pitirim Sorokin and his valuable periodization of cultures
The well-known sociologist and public figure P. Sorokin based his typology of cultures on nothing other than values. He quite rightly believed that every culture has its own face, its own individuality, which stems from a guiding principle or idea. The scientist divided all cultures into three types.
- Idiational - when religious beliefs prevail over material goods and such a dominant attitude determines the values and norms of a person and culture as a whole. This is reflected in architecture, philosophy, literature, social ideals. For example, during the European Middle Ages, a saint, a hermit or an ascetic was considered the canon of a person.
- Sensual type of culture. The most striking example is, of course, the Renaissance. Religious values are not only trampled, they are actually canceled. God begins to be perceived as a source of pleasure. Man becomes the measure of all things. Infringed in the Middle Ages, sensuality wants to reveal and manifest itself to the fullest extent of its capabilities. From this arise the famous moral conflicts of the Renaissance, when a significant cultural upsurge is adjacent to a fantastic moral decline.
- Idealistic or mixed type. In this model of culture, the material and spiritual ideals and aspirations of a person find agreement, but the primacy of the latter over the former is affirmed. Focusing on high moral ideals helps a person to live the smallest in the material sense and believe in spiritual self-improvement.
In this construction of P. Sorokin there are no extremes of the two previous types, but there is one significant drawback: it is impossible to choose real example such a culture. One can only say that this is how people live who have fallen into extremely difficult life circumstances (illness, poverty, natural disasters, poor neighborhoods of countries around the world). The poor and the handicapped voluntarily have to minimize bodily needs and keep a high moral ideal before their eyes. For them, this is an indispensable condition for survival and existence within a certain moral framework.
This is how the article turned out, the focus of which was the cultural values of a person. We hope that it will help the reader to understand this difficult and at the same time extremely interesting topic.
Value is the significance, importance, usefulness, and usefulness of something. Outwardly, it acts as one of the properties of objects or phenomena. But their usefulness and significance are not inherent in them due to their internal structure, that is, they are not given by nature, they are nothing more than subjective assessments of specific properties involved in the public domain, they are interested in and need them. In the Constitution Russian Federation It is written that the highest value is the person himself, his freedom and rights.
The use of the concept of value in various sciences
Depending on what kind of science is studying this phenomenon in society, there are several approaches to its use. So, for example, philosophy considers the concept of value as follows: it is the socio-cultural, personal significance of specific objects. In psychology, value is understood as all those objects of the society surrounding the individual that are of value to him. This term in this case is closely related to motivation. But in sociology, values are understood as those concepts that are called sets of goals, states, phenomena worthy of people striving for them. As you can see, in this case, there is a connection with motivation. Moreover, in terms of these social sciences, there are the following types and spiritual. The latter are also called eternal values. They are not tangible, but sometimes they are much more important for society than all material objects put together. Of course, they have nothing to do with economics. In this science, the concept of value is considered as the cost of objects. At the same time, two types of it are distinguished: consumer and the former represent one or another value for consumers, depending on the degree of usefulness of the product or its ability to satisfy human needs, and the latter are valuable because they are suitable for exchange, and the degree of their significance is determined by the ratio that is obtained with an equivalent exchange. That is, the more a person is aware of his dependence on a given object, the higher its value. People living in cities are completely dependent on money, because they need it to purchase the most necessary goods, namely food. For rural residents, monetary dependence is not as great as in the first case, since they can get the products necessary for life regardless of the availability of money, for example, from their own garden.
Various definitions of values
The simplest definition this concept is the statement that values are all those objects and phenomena that can satisfy human needs. They can be material, that is, tangible, or they can be abstract, like love, happiness, etc. By the way, the totality of values that are inherent in a particular person or group are called Without it, any culture would be meaningless. And here is another definition of value: it is the objective significance of the variety of components (properties and features of an object or phenomenon) of reality, which are determined by the interests and needs of people. The main thing is that they are necessary for a person. However, value and significance are not always equivalent. After all, the first is not only positive, but also negative, but the value is always positive. What satisfies cannot be negative, although here everything is relative...
Representatives of the Austrian school believe that core values are a specific amount of goods or benefits that are necessary to satisfy what more human its dependence on the presence of this object is realized, the higher its value. In a word, the relationship between quantity and need is important here. According to this theory, goods that exist in unlimited quantities, such as water, air, etc., are of little importance because they are non-economic. But the goods, the quantity of which does not satisfy the needs, that is, there are less of them than necessary, are of real value. This view has both many supporters and opponents who fundamentally disagree with this opinion.
Changeability of values
This philosophical category has a social nature, since it is formed in the process of practice. As a result, values tend to change over time. What was significant for this society may not be so for future generations. And we see this from our own experience. If we look back into the past, we can see that the values of the generations of our parents and ours differ in many ways from each other.
Main types of values
As noted above, the main types of values are material (contributing to life) and spiritual. The latter give a person moral satisfaction. The main types of material values are the simplest goods (housing, food, household items, clothing, etc.) and goods of a higher order (means of production). However, both of them contribute to the life of society, as well as improving the quality of life of its members. A people need spiritual values for the formation and further development their attitudes, as well as worldviews. They contribute to the spiritual enrichment of the individual.
The role of values in society
This category, in addition to being of some importance to society, also plays a certain role. For example, the development of different values by a person contributes to the acquisition of social experience, as a result of which he joins the culture, and this, in turn, affects the formation of his personality. Another essential role values in society is that a person strives to create new goods, while maintaining the old, already existing ones. In addition, the value of thoughts, actions, various things is expressed in how important they are for the process. community development, that is, the progress of society. And at the personal level - the development and self-improvement of a person.
Classification
There are several classifications. For example, according to it, material and spiritual values are distinguished. But according to their significance, the latter are false and true. Classification is also carried out by areas of activity, depending on their carrier, and by the time of action. According to the first, economic, religious and aesthetic values are distinguished, the second - universal, group and personality values, and the third - eternal, long-term, short-term and momentary. In principle, there are other classifications, but they are too narrow.
Material and spiritual values
Regarding the first, we have already managed to tell above, everything is clear with them. These are all the material goods that surround us that make our life possible. As for the spiritual, they are the components inner peace people. And the initial categories here are good and evil. The first contribute to happiness, and the second - everything that leads to destruction and is the cause of discontent and unhappiness. Spiritual - these are the true values. However, to be so, they must coincide with significance.
Religious and aesthetic values
Religion is based on unconditional faith in God, and it does not require any proof. Values in this area are guidelines in the life of believers, which are determined by the norms and motives of their actions and behavior in general. Aesthetic values are all that gives a person pleasure. They are directly related to the concept of "beauty". They are associated with creativity, with art. The beautiful is the main category of aesthetic value. Creative people dedicate their lives to creating beauty, not only for themselves, but also for others, wanting to bring true joy, delight, and admiration to those around them.
Personal values
Each person has their own personal orientations. And they can differ from person to person. What is important in the eyes of one may not be valuable to another. For example, classical music, which brings lovers of this genre into a state of ecstasy, may seem boring and uninteresting to someone. On the values of the individual have big influence factors such as upbringing, education, social circle, environment etc. Of course, the family has the strongest influence on the personality. This is the environment in which a person begins his primary development. He gets his first idea of values in his family (group values), but with age he may accept some of them and reject others.
Personal values include the following types of values:
- those that are components of the meaning of human life;
- the most general semantic formations, which are based on reflexes;
- beliefs that have to do with desired behavior or completing something;
- objects and phenomena to which the individual has a weakness or is simply not indifferent;
- what is important for each person of a person, and what he considers his property.
These are the types of personal values.
A new approach to defining values
Values are opinions (beliefs). Some scientists think so. According to them, these are biased and cold ideas. But when they begin to activate, they mix with feelings, while getting a certain color. Others believe that the main values are the goals that people strive for - equality, freedom, well-being. It is also a way of behavior that contributes to the achievement of these goals: mercy, empathy, honesty, etc. According to the same theory, true values should act as some kind of standards that guide the assessment or choice of people, actions and events.
2. Philosophy of values
3. Values in literature
4. Values of life and culture of modern youth (sociological study)
Conclusion
Bibliographic list
Introduction
The system of value orientations, being psychological characteristic mature personality, one of the central personal formations, expresses the meaningful attitude of a person to social reality and, as such, determines the motivation of his behavior, has a significant impact on all aspects of his activity. As an element of the personality structure, value orientations characterize the internal readiness to perform certain activities to meet the needs and interests, indicate the direction of its behavior.
Each society has a unique value-oriented structure, which reflects the identity of this culture. Since the set of values that an individual learns in the process of socialization is “transmitted” to him by society, the study of the system of value orientations of an individual seems especially topical issue in a situation of serious social changes, when there is some “blurring” of the social value structure, many values are destroyed, disappear social structures norms, contradictions appear in the ideals and values postulated by society.
In essence, the whole variety of objects of human activity, social relations and natural phenomena included in their range can act as values as objects of value relations, can be evaluated in the dichotomy of good and evil, truth and error, beauty and ugliness, permissible or forbidden, fair and unfair.
1. Values: concepts, essence, types
The cybernetic understanding of society consists in presenting it as belonging "to a special class of universal adaptive-adaptive systems".
From a certain point of view, culture can be considered as a multidimensional program of adaptive control that sets the main parameters for the self-organization of communities and coordinates the joint activity of fairly autonomous individuals. At the same time, culture can also be understood as a kind of structural generator inherent in any highly organized system: “Order is achieved by limiting the variety of possible states of the elements of the system by establishing the dependence of some elements on others. In this respect, culture is similar to biological and technical programming devices.”
Culture itself is defined axiologically as a set of material and spiritual values and ways of their creation and transmission. Values as such are inextricably linked with the socio-cultural context and can be considered as certain quanta of the general cultural field. It is in this sense that values can be considered as structural invariants of different cultures, which determine not only the content specificity of a particular culture as an arsenal of effective adaptive strategies, but also the features of its dynamics and development. Chavchavadze N.Z. and defines culture as "the world of embodied values", distinguishing between values-means and values-goals.
A person's value system is the "foundation" of his attitude to the world. Values are a relatively stable, socially determined selective attitude of a person to the totality of material and spiritual public goods.
“Values,” wrote V.P. Tugarinov, is what people need to meet their needs and interests, as well as ideas and their motivations as a norm, goal and ideal.
The value world of each person is immense. However, there are some "cross-cutting" values that are practically pivotal in any field of activity. These include diligence, education, kindness, good breeding, honesty, decency, tolerance, humanity. It is precisely the decline in the significance of these values in a given period of history that always causes serious concern in a normal society.
Value is one of such general scientific concepts, the methodological significance of which is especially great for pedagogy. Being one of key concepts modern social thought, it is used in philosophy, sociology, psychology and pedagogy to refer to objects and phenomena, their properties, as well as abstract ideas that embody moral ideals and act as standards of due.
In essence, the whole variety of objects of human activity, social relations and natural phenomena included in their circle can act as values as objects. value relations, can be evaluated in the dichotomy of good and evil, truth and error, beauty and ugliness, permissible or forbidden, fair and unfair.
Value as a concept defines "... significance anything other than existence object or its qualitative characteristics.
There are a huge number of values and they can be divided into two large groups: material and spiritual:
We classified material values as: a car, an aquarium, a garage, jewelry, money, food, a house, toys, cosmetics, musical instruments, books, clothes, apartment, tape recorder, computer, TV, telephone, furniture, sports equipment;
To the spiritual: active life, life wisdom, life, family, love, friendship, courage, work, sports, responsibility, sensitivity, honesty, good breeding, beauty, mercy, creativity, freedom, human, peace, justice, self-improvement, health , knowledge.
We can touch, see, buy material values, and they depend on the time in which a person lives. For example, 300 years ago there were no cars, which means that there was no such value.
Spiritual values, unlike material ones, we cannot always see and they are not bought, but we can feel them through our actions and the behavior of the people around us. For example, if beauty is important for a person, then he will strive to create it around himself, to perform beautiful deeds. Thus, these are higher values that are universal and significant at all times.
2. Philosophy of values
In philosophy, the problem of values is considered inextricably linked with the definition of the essence of man, his creative nature, his ability to create the world and himself in accordance with the measure of his values. A person forms his values, constantly destroys the contradictions between the existing world of values and anti-values, uses values as a tool to maintain his life world, protection from the destructive effects of entropic processes that threaten the reality he is born. A value approach to the world requires consideration of objective reality as a result of human self-affirmation; With this approach, the world is, first of all, a reality mastered by a person, turned into the content of his activity, consciousness, personal culture.
M.A. Nedosekin in his work "On the Question of Values and Their Classification" (Internet resource) defines value representations, understood as the basis of assessments and the prism of a goal-oriented vision of reality, as needs and interests translated into the language of thoughts and feelings, concepts and images, ideas and judgments . Indeed, for the assessment it is necessary to have developed ideas about the values that act as orientation criteria for the adaptive and activity activity of the individual.
On the basis of their value ideas, people not only evaluate what exists, but also choose their actions, demand and achieve justice, and carry out what is good for them.
E.V. Zolotukhina-Abolina defines values as a non-rational regulator. Indeed, behavior regulated by reference to value criteria is ultimately focused on achieving maximum emotional comfort, which is a psychophysical sign of achieving a specific goal associated with the assertion of a particular value.
N.S. Rozov distinguishes several evolutionary types of the development of the worldview of communities: mythological consciousness, religious consciousness and ideological consciousness. This kind of classification is more than obvious. However, few dare to renounce the finality of the last form of social consciousness and even suggest the possibility of the birth of a new one, completely unlike the previous ones. N.S. Rozov did this: "For the role of the leading form of worldview in the coming historical era value consciousness is most likely to claim." Values within the framework of value consciousness as a new form of worldview, firstly, emerge from a subordinate position, and secondly, they absorb and rethink all the variety of existing worldviews, since communication and the search for productive compromises between representatives of these different worldviews... The concept of value consciousness is not reduced to a combination of the meanings of the two words that make up this name.This concept is built, first of all, normatively: value consciousness is a form of worldview based on values that satisfies the above requirements.
The world of values that teleologically determine their object, to which it is initially directed, does not hang in the air. It is rooted in the affective life of the psyche no less than the vital needs. The first contact with values occurs through communication with significant persons - parents. From the initial stages of ontogenesis, they interfere with the spontaneous functioning of vital needs, introducing into them the order necessary for the entire society. And if the emerging consciousness draws its strength mainly from affective images of significant persons, then in the future it is freed from the need for such support and, in striving for a goal-value, self-organizes and produces its structure and content, moving in line with objective laws. The existing hierarchy of values, teleologically defining its subject - human consciousness, can give rise to such values that lead out of the sphere of immediate vital needs of a given society. This is the axiological basis of progress.
