Culture is an important component of public consciousness. It is a means of forming a social personality, the 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 by philosophers, culturologists, intellectuals who seek to determine the role of spiritual culture in society and in human development.
Concept of culture
Human life activity in the whole history develops into a culture. This concept covers the broadest sphere of human life. The meaning of the word "culture" - "cultivation", "cultivation" (originally - land) - is due to the fact that with the help of his various actions a person transforms the surrounding reality and himself. Culture is a purely human phenomenon, animals, unlike people, adapt to the world, and people adapt it to their needs and requirements. In the course of these transformations, it is 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, individual aspects of this concept are highlighted. In a broad sense, culture is all the transformative activity of man, directed both outside and inside himself. In the narrow - this is a 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, complex phenomenon, there is a tradition to divide it into material and spiritual. To the field of material culture, it is customary to attribute all the results of human activity embodied in various subjects. This is the world around a person: buildings, roads, household utensils, clothes, as well as a variety of equipment and technologies. The spheres of spiritual culture are associated with the production of ideas. These include theories, philosophical teachings, moral standards, scientific knowledge. However, often such a division is purely conditional. How, for example, to divide the 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 studies, the sphere of spiritual culture for which is an important research area, proves that cultural genesis is inextricably linked with the formation of society. The prerequisite for the survival of a primitive man was the ability to adapt the world around him and his 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 transmit social experience, creating for this a system of rituals and signals, speech. He has new needs, in particular, a desire for beauty, social and cultural values are being formed. All this becomes a platform for the formation of spiritual culture. Understanding the surrounding reality, the search for causal relationships lead to the formation of a mythological worldview. It symbolically explains the world around us and allows a person to navigate in life.
Main areas
From the mythology over time, all spheres of spiritual culture grow. The human world is evolving and becoming more complicated, and at the same time, information and ideas about the world are becoming more complicated, special areas of knowledge are highlighted. Today, the question of what the sphere of spiritual culture includes includes several answers. In the traditional sense, it includes religion, politics, philosophy, morality, art, science. There is also a broader view, according to which the language, the system of knowledge, values and plans for the future of mankind is included in the spiritual sphere. In the narrowest interpretation, the sphere of spirituality includes art, philosophy, and ethics as the field of formation of ideals.
Religion as a sphere of spiritual culture
The first of the mythological worldview is religion. All areas 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 of the world, especially for man 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 was created and everything that surrounds him. The specificity of religion is that it appeals to faith, and not to knowledge. The main function of religion as a form of spiritual life is worldview. It gives a person a framework of 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 culturally 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 the regulation of 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. Often, researchers consider ethics to be the highest form of spirituality. Morality is a specific area of spiritual culture, and its features are due to the fact that it is an unwritten law of the behavior of people 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 no institutions and organizations that control a person dominate them. Fulfilling moral requirements, a person is motivated by a unique mechanism called conscience. Morality establishes rules that ensure the interaction of people;
- evaluative and imperative, that is, a function that allows people to understand what is good and what is evil;
- educational - it is thanks to her that the moral image of the personality is formed.
Ethics also performs a number of such socially significant functions as cognitive, communicative, orienting, and prognostic.
Art as a sphere of spiritual culture
Human activities aimed at creative transformation and knowledge of the world are called art. The main need that a person satisfies with the help of art is aesthetic. The pursuit of beauty and self-expression is in the nature of man. Areas of art focused on the creative development and knowledge of the possibilities of the world. Like other areas of spiritual culture, art performs cognitive, communicative, transformative functions. But in addition, art performs recreational, emotive and aesthetic functions. It allows a person to express their inner attitude, to share emotions and their ideas about the beautiful and the ugly. Spectacular forms of art - cinema and theater - have a powerful impact effect, so this form of spiritual culture also has an inherent suggestive function. Art has unique properties, it is able to evoke the same emotions in different people and combine them. Art in a non-verbal form is able to intelligibly and effectively convey ideas and meanings.
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, cinema halls are filled daily by millions of viewers, and even more people watch films on television. Cinema has a powerful effect on the minds and hearts of young people.
Today, theater is less popular than cinema. With the ubiquity of television, he lost some of his appeal. In addition, theater tickets are now expensive. Therefore, we can say that visiting the famous theater has become a luxury. Nevertheless, the theater is an integral part of the intellectual life of each country and reflects the state of society and the minds of the nation.
Philosophy as a sphere of spiritual culture
Philosophy is the oldest intellectual activity of man. Like other areas of spiritual culture, it grows out of mythology. It organically combines the features of religion, art and science. Philosophers satisfy the important need of people to make sense. The main questions of being (what is the world, what is the meaning of life) receive various 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. Also, philosophy performs epistemological, critical, prognostic and educational functions.
Science as a sphere of spiritual culture
The latest emerging 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 man 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 strict evidence and verifiability of postulates. Thanks to her, a universal objective picture of the world is being formed. The main social functions of science are cognitive, worldview, practice-transforming, communicative, educational and regulatory. In contrast to philosophy, science is based on a system of objective knowledge, which is verified in the course of experiments.