Culture is an important component of public consciousness. It is a means of forming a social personality, a sphere of communication between people and the realization of their creative potential. The sphere of spiritual culture and its features are the object of study of philosophers, culturologists, intellectuals who seek to determine the role of spiritual culture in society and in human development.
The concept of culture
Human life has been shaped into culture throughout history. This concept covers the widest sphere of human life. The meaning of the word "culture" - "cultivation", "cultivation" (originally - land) - is due to the fact that with the help of various actions a person transforms the surrounding reality and himself. Culture is an exclusively human phenomenon, animals, unlike people, adapt to the world, and a person adjusts it to his needs and requirements. During these transformations, shebeing created.
Due to the fact that the spheres of spiritual culture are extremely diverse, there is no single definition of the concept of "culture". There are several approaches to its interpretation: idealistic, materialistic, functionalist, structuralist, psychoanalytic. In each of them, separate aspects of this concept are distinguished. In a broad sense, culture is all the transformative activity of a person, directed both outside and inside oneself. In the narrow sense, this is the creative activity of a person, expressed in the creation of works of various arts.
Spiritual and material culture
Despite the fact that culture is a complex phenomenon, there is a tradition to divide it into material and spiritual. It is customary to refer to the field of material culture all the results of human activity embodied in various objects. This is the world that surrounds a person: buildings, roads, household utensils, clothing, as well as a variety of equipment and technologies. The spheres of spiritual culture are connected with the production of ideas. These include theories, philosophies, moral norms, scientific knowledge. However, such a division is often purely arbitrary. How, for example, to separate works of such art forms as cinema and theater? After all, the performance combines the idea, the literary basis, the play of the actors, as well as the subject design.
The emergence of spiritual culture
The question of the origin of culture still causes lively debate between representatives of different sciences. Social science, the sphere of spiritual culture for whichis an important research area, proves that cultural genesis is inextricably linked with the formation of society. The condition for the survival of primitive man was the ability to adapt the world around him to his needs and the ability to coexist in a team: it was impossible to survive alone. The formation of culture was not instantaneous, but was a long evolutionary process. A person learns to transfer social experience, creating for this a system of rituals and signals, speech. He has new needs, in particular the desire for beauty, social and cultural values are formed. All this becomes a platform for the formation of spiritual culture. Comprehension of the surrounding reality, the search for cause-and-effect relationships lead to the formation of a mythological worldview. It symbolically explains the world around and allows a person to navigate in life.
Main areas
All spheres of spiritual culture eventually grow out of mythology. The human world evolves and becomes more complex, and at the same time, information and ideas about the world become more complex, special areas of knowledge are distinguished. Today, the question of what the sphere of spiritual culture includes has several answers. In the traditional sense, it includes religion, politics, philosophy, morality, art, and science. There is also a broader view, according to which the spiritual sphere includes language, a system of knowledge, values and plans for the future of mankind. In the narrowest interpretation to the spherespirituality consider art, philosophy and ethics as the area of ideal formation.
Religion as a sphere of spiritual culture
The first of the mythological worldview stands out religion. All spheres of spiritual culture, including religion, are a special set of values, ideals and norms that serve as guidelines in human life. Faith is the basis for understanding the world, especially for a person of antiquity. Science and religion are two antagonistic ways of explaining the world, but each of them is a system of ideas about how a person and everything that surrounds him was created. The specificity of religion is that it appeals to faith, not to knowledge. The main function of religion as a form of spiritual life is ideological. It sets the framework for a person's worldview and worldview, gives meaning to existence. Religion also performs a regulatory function: it controls the relations of people in society and their activities. In addition to these, faith performs communicative, legitimizing and cultural-transmitting functions. Thanks to religion, many outstanding ideas and phenomena appeared, it was the source of the concept of humanism.
Morality as a sphere of spiritual culture
Moral and spiritual culture is the basis for regulating relationships between people in society. Morality is a system of values and ideas about what is evil and good, about the meaning of people's lives and the principles of their relationships in society. Researchers often consider ethics to be the highest form of spirituality. Morality is a specific area of spiritual culture, and its featuresdue to the fact that it is an unwritten law of human behavior in society. It is an unspoken social contract, according to which all peoples consider the highest value of a person and his life. The main social functions of morality are:
- regulatory - this specific function is to control the behavior of people, and they are not dominated by any institutions and organizations that control a person. Fulfilling moral requirements, a person is motivated by a unique mechanism called conscience. Morality establishes the rules that ensure the interaction of people;
- evaluative-imperative, i.e. a function that allows people to understand what is good and what is evil;
- educational - it is thanks to her that the moral character of the individual is formed.
Ethics also performs a number of such socially significant functions as cognitive, communicative, orienting, predictive.
Art as a sphere of spiritual culture
Human activity aimed at creative transformation and knowledge of the world is called art. The main need that a person satisfies with the help of art is aesthetic. The desire for beauty and self-expression is in human nature. The areas of art are focused on creative development and knowledge of the possibilities of the world. Like other spheres of spiritual culture, art performs cognitive, communicative, and transformative functions. But in addition, art performs a creative, emotive andaesthetic function. It allows a person to express his inner worldview, share his emotions and his ideas about the beautiful and the ugly. Spectacular arts - cinema and theater - have a powerful influencing effect, therefore this form of spiritual culture also has a suggestive function. Art has unique properties, it can evoke the same emotions in different people and unite them. Art in a non-verbal form is able to convey ideas and meanings intelligibly and effectively.
Cinema and theater
Cinema is one of the youngest and at the same time the most popular arts. Its history is short compared to the thousand-year history of music, painting or theater. At the same time, millions of spectators fill the cinema halls every day, and even more people watch films on television. Cinema has a powerful impact on the minds and hearts of young people.
Today theater is less popular than cinema. With the ubiquity of television, it has lost some of its appeal. In addition, theater tickets are now expensive. Therefore, we can say that visiting the famous theater has become a luxury. Yet the theater is an integral part of the intellectual life of every country and reflects the state of society and the minds of the nation.
Philosophy as a sphere of spiritual culture
Philosophy is the oldest human intellectual activity. Like other spheres of spiritual culture, it grows out of mythology. It organically combines the features of religion, art and science. Philosophersfulfill an important human need for meaning. The main questions of being (what is the world, what is the meaning of life) receive different answers in philosophy, but allow a person to choose his life path. Its most important functions are ideological and axiological, it helps a person to build his own system of views and criteria for evaluating the world around him. Philosophy also performs epistemological, critical, prognostic and educational functions.
Science as a sphere of spiritual culture
The latest formed sphere of spiritual culture was science. Its formation is quite slow, and it is intended primarily to explain the structure of the world. Science and religion are forms of overcoming the mythological worldview. But unlike religion, science is a system of objective, verifiable knowledge and is built according to the laws of logic. The leading need that a person satisfies through science is cognitive. It is human nature to ask various questions, and the search for answers gives rise to science. Science is distinguished from all other spheres of spiritual culture by the strict evidence and verifiability of postulates. Thanks to it, a universal human objective picture of the world is formed. The main social functions of science are cognitive, worldview, practice-transformative, communicative, educational and regulatory. Unlike philosophy, science is based on a system of objective knowledge that is verifiable through experiments.
