Предпосылки Индивидуализма (Статья Вторая)
The Emergence of Individuality. Part Two

Summary/Abstract: This article discusses the question of how the personal element, which became the starting point of the movement toward individual thinking, manifested itself in the culture of ancient Israel and the culture of ancient India. The article attempts to describe the features of these cultures, which unlike the ancient Egyptian and Sumero-Akkadian, allowed to pass this way to the end. The process of formation of monotheism from the pre-state period to the great prophets is traced. It is noted that socio-political life, which determined with such force the status of man in a number of other Near Eastern cultures, in Israelite culture was subordinated to religious life, which otherwise determined the consciousness of man's status. In doing so, henotheism is gradually overcome. In the consciousness of the Israelite people the idea of complete dependence on God, who reveals himself through the prophets and establishes the requirement of a personal relationship to him, is established. At the same time, God, acting as a guarantor of justice, is revealed through the problem of theodicy, which can be posed only by a free personality. The movement of thought in ancient India turns out to be the opposite of what we see in ancient Israel: while the latter is affirmed through a long but persistent movement towards monotheism, Indian Brahmanism accepts the great diversity of divine reality and through the affirmation of its unity only multiplies the number of its components The decisive period for the emergence of individual consciousness was the period of the Upanishads. At this time, the deepened comprehension of the texts of the Vedas leads to the fact that a philosophical knowledge is built over religious knowledge. The specificity of Indian consciousness is determined by the long period of its oral existence, when the sounding speech in ritual or in the process of meditation acquires the key importance in the realization of the unity of the world. Individual consciousness is manifested in the process of concentration, directed towards understanding rather than mere reproduction of ritual mantras. The practice of asceticism played a role here. Just like in some other cultures in India real authorship emerges in the Axial period as an important sign of awareness of individual creativity.

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