"ABOUT THE MIND"(De lʼEsprit) – first book K.A. Helvetia , published in Paris in 1758 (vols. 1–2) and in the same year condemned by the Parisian parliament to be burned. In it, the author tried to summarize and develop the views of French enlighteners on man. In this regard, the book criticizes absolutism and the theological approach to man, and also develops the concept of utilitarianism. The book consists of a preface and four Discourses. In the 1st discussion, “On the mind in itself,” nature is interpreted as the totality of material bodies objectively existing in time and space, human nature is reduced to physical sensitivity, and the main desire of a person is the desire for physical pleasure, and the main feeling is selfishness. This is the basis for a system of utilitarian conclusions, the substantiation of which is devoted to the 2nd discussion “On Mind in Relation to Society,” where selfish interest is recognized as the main motivating motive of human society. “If the physical world is subject to the law of motion, then the spiritual world is no less subject to the law of interest” (Works in 2 volumes, vol. 1. M., 1973, p. 187). Although Helvetius often speaks of public interest and even emphasizes its priority, the main thing for him nevertheless remains personal interest - “the only criterion for the dignity of things and individuals” (ibid., p. 214). Starting from him, Helvetius explains all the feelings of a person, his behavior, and even the very fact of the emergence of society. So, in love, everyone seeks first of all physical pleasure, in friendship - he wants to find a person who would help him financially, etc. “Honesty from the point of view of an individual is only the habit of doing what is beneficial for this person” (ibid., p. 187), and the desire to conclude social contract arises from the desire to satisfy one’s needs, because it is impossible to do this alone. High government positions attract the opportunity to receive the greatest material benefit, and the need to become respected people also pushes this. The sermons of moralists, according to Helvetius, cannot change this, because “people are not evil, but only follow their own interests” (ibid., p. 203).
There are very few people in the world “who consider those actions useful for themselves that are fair and consistent with the common good” (ibid., p. 185). Therefore, it is necessary to organize society in such a way that it is beneficial for everyone to become virtuous, i.e. so that personal interest is combined with public interest. This is the topic of the 3rd discussion. A wise legislator must enact laws that would encourage a person to act morally for his own benefit. The prerequisite for this, according to Helvetius, is the establishment of political and legal equality, the transformation of all citizens into members of the third estate, and the elimination of too great differences in property ownership. Despotism is dangerous for society primarily because it promotes the development of vices, because It is they who become profitable here. These ideas are developed in section 3, “On the Mind,” which also deals with the education of people, including monarchs, and the role of chance in this process. The Helvetian ideal is a federal union of several democratic republics. In the 4th discussion, “On the various names of the mind,” the phenomena of genius, talent, subtlety of mind, etc. are analyzed. Russian translation, ed. E.L. Radlova (1917).
French philosopher. Born January 31, 1715 in Paris. In 1751 he met Voltaire and Montesquieu, and from that moment science became the main work of his life. In 1758 he published his main work, “On the Mind.” The life of this work was short - by decision of a Parisian court it was burned. But this work brought the author enormous popularity and nationwide fame.
In the social sphere, Helvetius recognized human consciousness and passions as the main force of social development. He believed that it was necessary to eliminate landowner property and the state and public institutions it generated, and pinned his hopes on an enlightened philosopher-sovereign. The activities of Helvetius played an important role in ideological preparation French Revolution. Died December 26, 1771 in Paris.
Great minds reach equally great vices and great virtues.
A sure way to judge a person's character and intelligence is by his choice of books and friends.
In every country the art of forming people is so closely connected with the form of government that any significant change in public education is hardly possible without changes in the state system itself.
If you want to act honestly, take into account and believe only the public interest. Self-interest is often misleading.
If a person with early years He has acquired the habit of work; work is pleasant to him. If he does not have this habit, then laziness makes work hateful.
Desire is the driving force of the soul; a soul devoid of desires stagnates. You need to desire in order to act and act in order to be happy.
The purpose of art is to move hearts.
Knowledge of some principles easily compensates for ignorance of some facts.
Of all passions, envy is the most disgusting. Hatred, betrayal and intrigue march under the banner of envy.
Only by the actions of people can society judge their virtue.
Love burns differently according to different characters. In a lion, a burning and bloodthirsty flame is expressed in a roar, in arrogant souls - in disdain, in gentle souls - in tears and despondency.
People are not born, but become who they are.
The science of man is the science of the sages.
Lack of intelligence should not be attributed to lack of memory.
There is nothing more dangerous than passions that the mind controls in ardor.
Society recognizes and respects only those merits that have been proven in practice. Whoever wants to know what he is worth can only learn it from the people and, therefore, must submit himself to their judgment.
Equal happiness is to be a winner or a loser in the battles of love.
Experience shows that a person considers every person erroneous and every book bad that disagrees with his views.
The eagle gaze of passions penetrates into the foggy abyss of the future, while indifference is blind and stupid from birth.
The basis of people's morals lies not in their speculative principles, but in their tastes and feelings.
The patrons of ignorance are the most bitter enemies of humanity.
The difference between intelligence and common sense lies in the difference in the reasons that give rise to them. The first is a consequence of strong passions, the second is a consequence of their absence.
The most courageous state is the one in which valor is best rewarded and cowardice is most severely punished.
Tell me who you are close to and I will tell you who you are.
Competition produces geniuses, and the desire to become famous produces talent.
The justice of our judgments and our actions is nothing more than a successful coincidence of our interest with the public.
Passions are reptiles when they enter the heart, and violent dragons when they have already entered it.
The essence of love is to never be happy. Jealousy, anxiety, loss of property; much has been said about the good and bad sides of this passion. To be happy, you need to know not passionate, but voluptuous love.
Only by actions do we judge internal movements, thoughts, actions, and other feelings.
Only a friend's hand can tear the thorns out of the heart.
The mind is like health: those who have it do not notice it.
A scientist can understand an ignoramus because he himself was one in childhood; an ignoramus cannot understand a scientist, for he has never been one.
A person who is not familiar with the art of horse riding will not undertake to give advice on how to break horses. But in morality we are less modest. Here we always consider ourselves knowledgeable and able to give advice to all people.
To be completely devoid of courage, one must be completely devoid of desires.
K. A. HELVETSIY
Constantly arguing about what should be called mind; everyone gives a definition of pus; This word is associated with different meanings, and everyone speaks without understanding each other.
To be able to give the correct and precise definition the word mind and the various meanings given to the word, it is necessary first to consider the mind in itself.
The mind is either considered as the result of the ability to think (and in this sense, the mind is only the totality of a person’s thoughts), or is understood as the ability to think itself.
To understand what mind is in this latter sense, we must find out the reasons for the formation of our ideas.
We have two abilities, or, if I dare say so, two passive forces, the existence of which is clearly recognized by everyone.
One is the ability to receive various impressions made on us by external objects; it is called physical sensitivity.
Another is the ability to retain the impression made on us by external objects. It is called memory, which is nothing more than a lasting but weakened sensation.
These abilities, in which I see the reason for the formation of our thoughts and which are characteristic not only of us, but also of animals, would, however, excite in us only an insignificant number of ideas, if they were not associated in us with a certain external organization.
If nature had created at the end of our hand not a hand with flexible fingers, but a horse’s hoof, then, without a doubt, people would not have known either crafts or homes, would not have been able to defend themselves from animals and, preoccupied exclusively with obtaining food and the desire to avoid wild animals , would still be roaming the forests in timid herds...
Let's consider nature. She shows us objects; these objects are in certain relationships with us and among themselves; knowledge of these relations constitutes what is called mind; our mind is more or less extensive depending on the greater or lesser breadth of our knowledge in this area.
The human mind rises to the knowledge of these relationships; but there is a limit here that he never crosses. Therefore, all the words that make up all kinds of languages and which can be considered as a collection of signs of all human thoughts, or reproduce images (as oak, ocean, sun), or they denote ideas, that is, various relationships of objects among themselves...
From everything I have said, the following follows: if all the words of different languages do not mean anything except objects and the relations of these objects to us and among themselves, then the whole mind, therefore, consists of comparing our sensations and our ideas, that is, noticing similarities and the differences, correspondences and inconsistencies that exist between them.
All our false judgments and our delusions come from two causes, which presuppose in us only the ability to sense; that it would, therefore, be useless and even senseless to admit in us a faculty of judgment that does not explain anything that could not be explained without us. In approaching this question, I declare that there is no false judgment that is not the result of either our passions or our ignorance.
Helvetius K.A.
Essays. In two volumes
Compilation and general editing by Kh.N. Momjyan
M.: “Thought”, 1973/1974. - 647/687 pp.
Series Philosophical heritage(vol. 57, 58)
Format: DjVu
Size: 16.4 / 17.2 MB
Quality: scanned pages + text layer + table of contents
Language: Russian
Helvetius K.A. - famous French thinker Enlightenment XVIII V. The first volume of the Collected Works includes Helvetius's Notebooks (first published in Russian) and one of his main works, On the Mind. The second volume includes the philosopher's work "On Man" and "Thoughts and Reflections", as well as letters. The publication is supplied with notes, name and subject indexes.
CONTENT
VOLUME 1
Momjyan. Claude Adrian Helvetius (5)
Notebooks (73)
About the mind (143)
Preface (145)
Discourse I. On the mind in itself (148)
Reasoning II. About intelligence and attitude towards society (180)
Reasoning III. About the mind (326)
Reasoning IV. On the various names of the mind (482)
Notes (607)
Index of names (633)
Subject index (640)
VOLUME 2
ABOUT THE PERSON (5)
Preface (7)
Section I. The education of different people is necessarily different: it is perhaps the cause of that mental inequality, which has hitherto been attributed to the unequal perfection of organs (19)
Section II. All people with an ordinary, normal organization have the same mental abilities (67)
Section III. On the General Causes of Inequality of Minds (172)
Section IV. People with an ordinary, normal organization are all accessible to the same degree of passion; the unequal strength of their passions is always the result of the difference in the situations in which case puts them. The unique character of every man is (as Pascal notes) the product of his first habits (181)
Section V. On the errors and contradictions of those whose principles, different from mine, boil down to a statement about the unequal perfection of feelings, about the unequal mental level (257)
Section VI. About the disasters caused by ignorance; that ignorance does not at all destroy effeminacy; that it is new and does not ensure the loyalty of its subjects; that the opo judges the most important issues without knowing them. About the disasters into which these judgments can sometimes plunge a nation. About the fact that one should despise and hate the patrons of ignorance (301)
Section VII. The virtues and happiness of a people are the result not of the holiness of their religion, but of the wisdom of their laws (345)
Section VIII. About what constitutes the happiness of individuals; on the basis on which the edifice of national happiness should be erected, necessarily consisting of the happiness of all private individuals (378)
Section IX. On the possibility of indicating the correct legislative plan; of the obstacles which ignorance places in its publication; about how ignorance ridicules all new idea and every in-depth study of morals and politics; how it attributes to the human spirit an inconstancy incompatible with the continued existence of good laws; of the imaginary danger to which (if ignorance is to be believed) states must be exposed by the discovery of a new idea, and especially of the true principles of legislation; about the too destructive indifference of people to the study of moral or political truths; that the same views are called true or false depending on temporary interest (426)
Section X. On the power of education; about ways to improve it; about the obstacles and ways of progress of this science. About the ease with which, after removing these obstacles, it will be possible to outline a plan for ideal education (504)
THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS (569)
LETTERS (603)
Notes (651)
Name index (667)
Subject index (673)
Introduction to mental abilities- philosophy of Helvetius
Rice. 63.
Claude Adrien Helvetius (1715-1771) was born in Paris, the son of a court physician. The father insisted on a career as a financier for his son, but Helvetius (Fig. 6.3), who spent some time as a general tax farmer, abandoned his financial career and took up philosophy.
Of the philosophers of his time, Locke had the greatest influence on him, under whose impression Helvetius's main work, On the Mind, was written. The fate of this book is surprising, since after publication in 1758 it lasted only a month and was condemned “to be burned by the hand of the executioner” by the Parisian archbishop, Pope Clement XIII and the Parisian parliament. Over a hundred accusations were brought against the book. The hostility with which the work was received was unexpected for the author and forced him to fear for his freedom. He wanted to flee France, but under pressure from his loved ones he was forced to renounce his work, and he did this more than once. Soon Helvetius began writing his second and final work, “On Man.” It took about 11 years, he completed it two and a half years before his death and bequeathed it to be published posthumously, which was done by his publisher.
Main works:“About the Mind” (1758), “About Man” (1769).
In his treatise “On the Mind,” Helvetius consistently answers a number of questions that are significant for understanding the process of cognition and the essence of human mental abilities. The basis of cognition, according to Helvetius, is made up of two human mental abilities: sensory processes - sensations and perceptions - and memory. The mind is the ability to notice and understand the relationships between objects, but since it works with images or words (signs of images), it never goes beyond what comes with sensation - “here is a limit that it never crosses.”
Errors (misconceptions) in knowledge depend on ignorance, passions and a false understanding of the meaning of words. On the issue of passions, Helvetius speaks out in two ways. He believed that there are passions (pride, fear, vanity) that lead to delusions, since they do not allow one to study the subject comprehensively. Another type of passion, for example ambition, is the engine of knowledge. In general, Helvetius believed that passions are the engine of the process of knowledge: “people become stupid when they cease to be gripped by passion.” Among the words about which philosophers do not agree, Helvetius includes such scientific concepts as “matter”, “space”, “infinity”, as well as terms from the field of morality and ethics: “freedom”, “honesty”, “interests” ( personal, individual social groups, interests of the state and universal ones).
Helvetius defines science as a set of facts and foreign ideas stored in memory, and the mind as a set of new ideas. Such an understanding, without clarifying the medium and volume of information, of course, cannot satisfy the modern reader. However, the author made the first attempts to define the concepts of “spider” and “human intellectual abilities”.
Helvetius can also be credited with one of the historical attempts to classify types of mind at the level of their description. The classification is based on the semantic field of connections between the word “mind” and the adjectives used. In the chapter “On the Various Names of Mind,” he names the following types of mind:
- genius (one who invented or discovered something new);
- the artistic and poetic mind is based on the ability to invent images;
- subtle mind (creates ideas that can be seen with some difficulty);
- strong mind (creates interesting knowledge and makes a strong impression);
- bright mind (illuminates with light);
- broad mind;
- insightful, deep mind (able to reduce distinct ideas to even simpler and clearer ones, “until the last possible solution is found”).
It is assumed that any new knowledge is accessible to an ignorant person, but his mind must be prepared to perceive the new, since “a new thought, like a wedge, cannot be driven in from the wide end.”
Answering the question of what influences the mind more - natural abilities or environmental factors, Helvetius leans toward the so-called “environmental” position. He writes that by nature people are equal, and the diversity of the human mind arises as a result of upbringing. Upbringing is a collection of different factors, and people get different upbringings, learning even from one teacher, since they listen to him based on previous experience, which differs for everyone. “I maintain that no one receives the same education, for everyone’s mentors are... the form of government under which he lives, and his friends, and his mistresses, and the people around him, and the books he reads, and, finally, chance ". Helvetius uses the following metaphor to explain his thoughts: “Men are like trees of the same species, the seeds of which, being absolutely the same, grow into an infinite variety of different forms, because they never fall into the same soil and do not experience exactly the same action of the sun, winds, rain." Among the factors influencing the formation of the mind, a case is given. Helvetius actually pays great attention to the case. He writes that it is chance that “puts known objects before our eyes, therefore, gives us especially successful ideas and sometimes leads us to great discoveries.” As an example, Helvetius cites the case of Newton, who accidentally found himself in an apple orchard and observed apples falling from the branches, which was the beginning of his thoughts about the force of gravity.
For the development of the mind, it is important to have an interlocutor, a like-minded person, someone “who understands”: “The mind is a string that sounds only in unison.” To determine the degree of unanimity between scientists, Helvetius proposes to conduct the following hypothetical experiment: “If you instruct ten smart people, each independently, to note in a work that has not yet been published, ... new, those places that made the strongest impression on them, then I am convinced that that each of them will point to different places... and each will praise the place that is similar to his way of seeing and understanding things.”
Paying tribute to the problem of education in the last chapter of the treatise “On the Mind,” Helvetius writes: “The art of education is nothing more than knowledge of the means for the formation of stronger and stronger bodies, more enlightened minds and more virtuous souls.” The first goal is achieved by exercise, as the Greeks showed. The second is the choice of objects that fill our memory. The third is the “ignition of passions” (ambition), with the help of which a person will serve the public good.
The text of the treatise “On the Mind” contains many digressions in which the author reflects on the relationship of a person with society and power, on social stratification and social injustice, which later
It served as the basis for the development of theories of the social structure of society and, ultimately, the basis for the creation of the French sociological school of the late 19th - early 20th centuries.
The treatise “On Man” is a work that generally repeats the theme of the treatise “On the Mind”, but it discusses in more detail the social issues of a fair world order, the problem of power, poverty and social inequality before the law.
- Momdzhan X. D. Claude Adrian Helvetius: preface // Helvetius. Essays. In 2 t.T. 1. M.: Mysl, 1973. P. 5-72.
