Methodological potential of the concept of catharsis in philosophical anthropology

Abstract

The concept of catharsis, which is used mainly in aesthetic and art history discourses, has considerable methodological potential in philosophical research in general, and in philosophical anthropology in particular. The aim of the study is to bring together the philosophical-anthropological, aesthetic-psychological, and psychophysiological discourses regarding the study of love as a phenomenon that is the core of the human soul. The human soul (in turn) becomes the main subject of research in philosophical anthropology. The subject of the study is the methodology of applying the concept of catharsis to the study of the phenomenon of love. The research uses the dialectical method, which is concretized through the method of ascent from the abstract to the concrete. Empirical methods of studying the physiology of higher nervous activity go back to the theoretical analysis and synthesis of the human essence. Psychology of art L. S. Vygotsky explains catharsis through the law of unipolar expenditure of energy and the law of psychic damming. These laws explain the very psychological nature of catharsis and how the mental tension that is released during catharsis is formed. Psychophysiology, through the concept of redundant neural networks, allows us to explain how catharsis is made possible. Philosophical discourse on the phenomenon of love is limited to stating the presence of beauty in it, and stops there. Psychology of art L. S. Vygotsky explains exactly how the aesthetic sense of catharsis arises, what patterns of mental work lead to its appearance, and how an artist can cause catharsis with his own work. But the discourse of the psychology of art ignores the phenomenon of love, referring it to “simple» feelings, not aesthetic ones. Thus, as it were, denying love in aesthetic coloring. Psychophysiological discourse closely approaches the justification of catharsis and higher feelings, but does not use catharsis and love as constitutive of mental activity, limiting itself to the study of the acquisition and use of information. Meanwhile, human is a single whole, and as a whole he is indifferent to the division of sciences and aspects of the study of these sciences. The human soul and the phenomenon of love, which this soul is capable of feeling, also appear whole. A synthetic study of human allows us to think of him as the unity of the multifaceted in the unity of man and the world. The article is theoretical. The scientific novelty consists in the theoretical synthesis of the data of psychology and psychophysiology for the philosophical and anthropological study of the phenomenon of love.