Definition of culture the main types of culture. spiritual realm

For the final end of the Time of Troubles, it was necessary not only to elect a new monarch to the Russian throne, but also to ensure the safety of the Russian borders from the two most active neighbors - the Commonwealth and Sweden. However, this was impossible until a social consensus was reached in the Moscow kingdom, and a person appeared on the throne of the descendants of Ivan Kalita who would fully suit the majority of the delegates of the Zemsky Sobor of 1612-1613. For a variety of reasons, 16-year-old Mikhail Romanov became such a candidate.

CONTRIDENTS TO THE MOSCOW THRONE

With the liberation of Moscow from the interventionists, the zemstvo people got the opportunity to proceed with the election of the head of state. In November 1612, the nobleman Filosofov told the Poles that the Cossacks in Moscow were in favor of electing one of the Russian people to the throne, “and they were trying on Filaret’s son and the thieves’ Kaluga one,” while the elder boyars were in favor of electing a foreigner. The Cossacks remembered "Tsarevich Ivan Dmitrievich" in a moment of extreme danger, Sigismund III stood at the gates of Moscow, and the surrendered members of the Seven Boyars could at any moment again go over to his side. Behind the back of the Kolomna prince stood the army of Zarutsky. The chieftains hoped that at a critical moment, old comrades-in-arms would come to their aid. But the hopes for the return of Zarutsky did not materialize. In the hour of trials, the ataman was not afraid to unleash a fratricidal war. Together with Marina Mnishek and her young son, he came to the walls of Ryazan and tried to capture the city. Ryazan governor Mikhail Buturlin came forward and put him to flight.

Zarutsky's attempt to get Ryazan for the "Vorenka" failed. The townspeople expressed their negative attitude towards the candidacy of "Ivan Dmitrievich". Agitation in his favor began to subside in Moscow by itself.

Without the Boyar Duma, the election of the tsar could not have legal force. With a thought, the election threatened to drag on for many years. Many noble families claimed the crown, and no one wanted to give way to another.

SWEDEN PRINCE

When the Second Militia stood in Yaroslavl, D.M. Pozharsky, with the consent of the clergy, service people, settlements, feeding the militia with funds, entered into negotiations with the people of Novgorod about the candidacy of the Swedish prince for the throne of Moscow. On May 13, 1612 letters were written to Metropolitan Isidore of Novgorod, Prince Odoevsky and Delagardie and sent to Novgorod with Stepan Tatishchev. For the sake of the importance of the matter with this ambassador, the Militia went and the elected ones - from each city, one person. It is interesting that Metropolitan Isidore and the voivode Odoevsky were asked how the relations between them and the Novgorodians with the Swedes were? And Delagardie was informed that if the new Swedish king Gustav II Adolf releases his brother to the throne of Moscow and orders him to be baptized in Orthodox faith, then they are glad to be with the Novgorod land in the council.

Chernikova T. V. Europeanization of Russia inXV-XVII centuries. M., 2012

ELECTION TO THE KINGDOM OF MIKHAIL ROMANOV

When quite a lot of authorities and elected officials gathered, a three-day fast was appointed, after which councils began. First of all, they began to talk about whether to choose from foreign royal houses or their natural Russian, and decided not to elect the Lithuanian and Swedish king and their children and other German faiths and none of the states of the non-Christian faith of the Greek law on the Vladimir and Moscow state, and Don’t want Marinka and her son in the state, because the Polish and German kings saw in themselves a lie and a crime of the cross and a peaceful violation: the Lithuanian king ruined the Muscovite state, and the Swedish king Veliky Novgorod took it by deceit. They began to choose their own: here intrigues, unrest and unrest began; everyone wanted to do according to his own thought, everyone wanted his own, some wanted the throne themselves, bribed and sent; sides formed, but none of them prevailed. Once, says the chronograph, some nobleman from Galich brought a written opinion to the cathedral, which said that Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov was the closest in kinship with the former tsars, and he should be elected tsars. Dissatisfied voices were heard: “Who brought such a letter, who, from where?” At that time, the Don ataman comes out and also submits a written opinion: “What did you submit, ataman?” - Prince Dmitry Mikhailovich Pozharsky asked him. “About the natural tsar Mikhail Fedorovich,” answered the ataman. The same opinion, submitted by the nobleman and the Don ataman, decided the matter: Mikhail Fedorovich was proclaimed tsar. But not all of the elected were in Moscow; there were no noble boyars; Prince Mstislavsky and his comrades left Moscow immediately after their liberation: it was embarrassing for them to remain in it near the liberators; now they sent to call them to Moscow for a common cause, they also sent reliable people around the cities and counties to find out the people's thoughts about the new chosen one, and the final decision was postponed for two weeks, from February 8 to February 21, 1613. Finally, Mstislavsky and his comrades arrived, the belated elected representatives also arrived, envoys from the regions returned with the news that the people gladly recognized Michael as king. On February 21, the week of Orthodoxy, that is, on the first Sunday of Great Lent, there was the last council: each rank submitted a written opinion, and all these opinions were found to be similar, all the ranks pointed to one person - Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov. Then the Archbishop of Ryazan Theodorit, the Trinity cellar Avraamy Palitsyn, the Novospassky Archimandrite Joseph and the boyar Vasily Petrovich Morozov went up to the Lobnoye Mesto and asked the people who filled Red Square who they wanted to be king? "Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov" - was the answer.

1613 CATHEDRAL AND MIKHAIL ROMANOV

The first thing the great Zemsky Sobor, which elected the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov to the Russian throne, was to send an embassy to the newly elected tsar. When sending the embassy, ​​the cathedral did not know where Michael was, and therefore the order given to the ambassadors said: “To go to Sovereign Mikhail Fedorovich, Tsar and Grand Duke of All Rus', to Yaroslavl.” Arriving in Yaroslavl, the embassy here only found out that Mikhail Fedorovich lives with his mother in Kostroma; without delay, it moved there, along with many Yaroslavl citizens who had already joined here.

The embassy arrived in Kostroma on March 14; On the 19th, having convinced Mikhail to accept the royal crown, they left Kostroma with him, and on the 21st they all arrived in Yaroslavl. Here, all Yaroslavl residents and noblemen who had gathered from everywhere, boyar children, guests, merchants with their wives and children met the new tsar with a procession, brought him images, bread and salt, and rich gifts. Mikhail Fedorovich chose the ancient Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery as the place of his stay here. Here, in the cells of the archimandrite, he lived with his mother, nun Martha, and a temporary State Council, which was made up of Prince Ivan Borisovich Cherkassky with other nobles and the clerk Ivan Bolotnikov with stewards and solicitors. From here, on March 23, the first letter from the tsar was sent to Moscow, informing Zemsky Sobor about consent to the adoption of the royal crown.

There is one small and easy-to-learn topic in the course of social studies. This article will focus on "Culture".

The term itself culture " has a lot of definitions, but I would choose the following: " culture - everything that is transformed by human activity ".

Culture can be both material and spiritual. Under material culture It is customary to understand things created by human hands. And in turn, under spiritual , are understood as non-material goods that satisfy the spiritual needs of people. If we take material culture, then a table, a chair, a car, a building can be taken as an example. and vice versa, a book, film, music will become an example of spiritual culture.

We talked about science in a previous article. For the term art , we can single out the following definition: as one of highest activities people, aimed at understanding the world with the help of artistic images.

spiritual culture may also appear in the following forms : folk culture (folklore), elite (high) culture and mass (screen).

characteristic features folk culture are:

b) a reflection of the life of the people;

c) predominantly oral form of content.

Character traits elite culture :

a) difficulty of perception;

Character traits mass culture :

a) ease of perception;

b) lack of cultural significance;

c) the desire for profit (commercial orientation).

Good day, dear readers of our blog!

Let's talk about what occupies the top of Maslow's pyramid, about the spiritual and the beautiful. The question of the spiritual and cultural, a person carries throughout his existence, and you and I will have to figure out at least a small, but theoretically studied part of this bravado of information.

Culture is a complex phenomenon, which can be confirmed by giving new interpretations and definitions, but three approaches are considered the most common:
- technological approach (culture, as a set of all achievements in the development of the material and spiritual life of the whole society);
- activity approach (culture as a creative activity carried out in the spheres of the material and spiritual life of society);
- value approach (culture as a practical implementation of universal values ​​in the affairs and relations of people).
It follows from this that culture has its own structure, system, functions, forms, etc. Thus, we are talking about culture as an institution of society, which is historically determined by a number of factors. Opening the historical information about the origin of culture, we will come across the first mention in the 1st century. BC e. and use as a philosophical concept in the 18th - n. 19th century
Today, the concept of "culture" is interpreted in a broad and narrow sense, which helps to understand and evaluate this phenomenon.
!Culture (Shir)- a historically conditioned dynamic complex of constantly updated in all areas public life forms, principles, methods and results of active creative activity of people.!
!Culture (narrow)- the process of active creative activity, during which spiritual values ​​are created, distributed and consumed.!

As we noted earlier, culture is endowed with a number of functions that it is called upon to perform as a phenomenon of social life. And so, the main cultural functions :

• cognitive- forms an idea of ​​where we live or about a particular people, country or era;
• estimated- carries out the differentiation of values, including the enrichment of traditions;
• regulatory- forms norms and attitudes in society in all areas of life and activity;
• informative— transfers knowledge, values ​​and experience of previous generations;
• communicative– preservation and transmission of cultural values, as well as their development through communication;
• socialization- the development by the individual of knowledge, norms, values, awareness and readiness to fulfill social roles and the desire for self-improvement.

Assessing these functions, you come to the conclusion that culture plays a huge role in our life, and this is part of a large space called “spiritual life of society”. This is the area of ​​being in which objective reality is given in the form of opposing objective activity, but as a reality that is present in the person himself, which is an integral part of his personality.
Speaking about the spiritual, the following associations immediately arise in the head: knowledge, faith, feelings, experiences, needs, abilities, aspirations - all that makes up the spiritual world of a person. The elements of the spiritual sphere of society are morality, science, art, religion and, to some extent, law. Let us present the structure of the spiritual life of society in the form of a diagram (see below).

Having carefully examined the presented scheme, one can imagine how multifaceted spiritual life is, and one can only guess the breadth and scope of each of its elements, especially affecting culture.
Culture has a variety of forms and varieties, in the literature it is customary to distinguish three culture forms: elite, popular and mass; And two varieties : subculture and counterculture.
Consider the forms and varieties, indicating their main features.
Culture Forms:

1. Elite
   created by a privileged part of society, or at their request by professional creators who have special knowledge in this area of ​​the creation process.
2. Folk
   created by anonymous creators who do not possess prof. or special knowledge (myths, legends, epics, songs and dances).
3. Bulk
   form characterizing modern cultural production and consumption.

Varieties of culture:

1. Subculture
   part of a common culture, a system of values ​​inherent in a certain group (religious, ethnic, criminal groups).
2. Counterculture
   opposition and alternative to the dominant culture in society (hippies, punks, skinheads, etc.).

And what is most surprising, each form and variety surprises with its breadth of views, and how many needs and interests it can satisfy.

As a result, I would like to say that each of us is the creator of our own culture, which in many years will be mentioned in history books, and it is very important that we leave behind us, mass culture is a product of globalization, and we need not to forget about the originality of our multinational and great people.

© Maria Rastvorova 2015.

From all of the above, it becomes obvious that culture plays an important role in life, which consists primarily in the fact that culture acts as a means of accumulation, storage and transmission of human experience.

This role of culture is realized through a number of functions:

Educational and educational function. You can say what culture does. An individual becomes a member of society, a person as socialization, i.e., mastering knowledge, language, symbols, values, norms, customs, traditions of his people, his own and all of humanity. The level of a person's culture is determined by his socialization - familiarization with the cultural heritage, as well as the degree of development of individual abilities. Personality culture is usually associated with developed creativity, erudition, understanding of works, fluency in native and foreign languages, accuracy, politeness, self-control, high morality, etc. All this is achieved in the process and.

Integrative and disintegrative functions of culture. E. Durkheim paid special attention to these functions in his studies. According to E. Durkheim, the development of culture creates in people who are members of a particular community a sense of community, belonging to one nation, people, religion, group, etc. Thus, culture unites people, integrates them, ensures the integrity of the community. But uniting some on the basis of some subculture, it opposes them to others, separates wider communities and communities. Within these broader communities and communities, cultural conflicts can arise. Thus, culture can and often performs a disintegrating function.

Regulatory function of culture. As noted earlier, in the course of socialization, values, ideals, norms and patterns of behavior become part of the self-consciousness of the individual. They shape and regulate her behavior. We can say that culture as a whole determines the framework within which a person can and should act. Culture regulates human behavior in school, at work, at home, etc., putting forward a system of prescriptions and prohibitions. Violation of these prescriptions and prohibitions triggers certain sanctions that are established by the community and supported by force. public opinion And various forms institutional coercion.

The function of translation (transfer) of social experience often called the function of historical continuity, or informational. Culture, which is a complex sign system, transmits social experience from generation to generation, from era to era. In addition to culture, society has no other mechanisms for concentrating the entire wealth of experience that has been accumulated by people. Therefore, it is no coincidence that culture is considered the social memory of mankind.

Cognitive function (epistemological) is closely connected with the function of transferring social experience and, in a certain sense, follows from it. Culture, concentrating the best social experience of many generations of people, acquires the ability to accumulate the richest knowledge about the world and thereby create favorable opportunities for its knowledge and development. It can be argued that a society is as intellectual as it fully uses the richest knowledge contained in the cultural gene pool of mankind. All types of society that live today on Earth differ significantly primarily on this basis.

Regulatory (normative) function connected primarily with the definition (regulation) of various aspects, types of social and personal activities of people. In the sphere of work, everyday life, interpersonal relations, culture in one way or another influences the behavior of people and regulates their actions and even the choice of certain material and spiritual values. The regulatory function of culture is supported by such normative systems as morality and law.

Sign function is the most important in the system of culture. Representing a certain sign system, culture implies knowledge, possession of it. It is impossible to master the achievements of culture without studying the corresponding sign systems. Thus, language (oral or written) is a means of communication between people. Literary language acts as the most important means of mastering the national culture. Specific languages ​​are needed for understanding the world of music, painting, theater. also have their own sign systems.

Value, or axiological, the function reflects the most important qualitative state of culture. Culture as a certain system of values ​​forms a person's well-defined value needs and orientations. By their level and quality, people most often judge the degree of culture of a person. Moral and intellectual content, as a rule, acts as a criterion for an appropriate assessment.

Social functions of culture

Social Features that culture performs allow people to carry out collective activities, in the best way to satisfy their needs. The main functions of culture are:

• social integration - ensuring the unity of mankind, a common worldview (with the help of myth, religion, philosophy);
• organization and regulation of the joint life of people through law, politics, morality, customs, ideology, etc.;
• provision of people's livelihoods (such as knowledge, communication, accumulation and transfer of knowledge, upbringing, education, stimulation of innovations, selection of values, etc.);
• regulation of individual spheres of human activity (culture of life, culture of recreation, culture of work, culture of food, etc.).

Thus, the system of culture is not only complex and diverse, but also very mobile. Culture is an indispensable component of the life of both society as a whole and its closely interconnected subjects: individuals,.

adaptive function

The complex and multi-level structure of culture determines the diversity of its functions in the life of a person and society. But regarding the number of functions of culture among culturologists there is no complete unanimity. Nevertheless, all authors agree with the idea of ​​multifunctionality of culture, with the fact that each of its components can perform different functions.

adaptive function is essential function cultures, ensuring the adaptation of man to the environment. It is known that the adaptation of living organisms to their environment is a necessary condition for their survival in the process of evolution. Their adaptation occurs due to the work of the mechanisms of natural selection, heredity and variability, which ensure the survival of individuals that are most adapted to the environment, the preservation and transmission of useful traits to the next generations. But it happens in a completely different way: a person does not adapt to the environment, to changes environment, like other living organisms, but changes the environment in accordance with its needs, redoing it for itself.

When the environment is transformed, a new, artificial world is created - culture. In other words, a person cannot lead natural image life, like animals, and in order to survive, creates an artificial habitat around itself, protecting itself from adverse conditions external environment. A person gradually becomes independent of natural conditions: if other living organisms can live only in a certain ecological niche, then a person is able to master any natural conditions for the estimates of the formation of an artificial world of culture.

Of course, a person cannot achieve complete independence from the environment, since the form of culture is largely determined by natural conditions. From natural and climatic conditions depend on the type of economy, dwellings, traditions and customs, beliefs, rites and rituals of peoples. So. the culture of mountain peoples differs from the culture of peoples leading a nomadic way of life or engaged in sea fishing, etc. Southern peoples use a lot of spices in cooking to delay spoilage in hot climates.

As culture develops, humanity provides itself with ever greater security and comfort. The quality of life is constantly improving. But having got rid of the old fears and dangers, a person stands face to face with new problems that he creates for himself. For example, today one can not be afraid of the formidable diseases of the past - the plague or smallpox, but new diseases have appeared, such as AIDS, for which no cure has yet been found, and other deadly diseases created by man themselves are waiting in the military laboratories. Therefore, a person needs to protect himself not only from natural environment habitation, but also from the world of culture, artificially created by man himself.

The adaptive function has a dual nature. On the one hand, it manifests itself in the creation of specific means of human protection - necessary for a person means of protection from the outside world. These are all the products of culture that help a person to survive and feel confident in the world: the use of fire, the storage of food and other necessary things, the creation of a productive Agriculture, medicine, etc. At the same time, they include not only objects of material culture, but also those specific means that a person develops to adapt to life in society, keeping him from mutual extermination and death - state structures, laws, customs, traditions, moral standards, etc. d.

On the other hand, there are non-specific means of protecting a person - culture as a whole, existing as a picture of the world. Understanding culture as a "second nature", a world created by man, we emphasize the most important property of human activity and culture - the ability to "doubling the world", separating in it sensory-objective and ideal-figurative layers. Linking culture with the ideal image world, we get the most important property of culture - to be a picture of the world, a certain grid of images and meanings through which it is perceived the world. Culture as a picture of the world makes it possible to see the world not as a continuous flow of information, but as ordered and structured information. Any object or phenomenon of the outside world is perceived through this symbolic grid, it has a place in this system of meanings, and it will be assessed as useful, harmful or indifferent to a person.

Sign function

Sign, significative function(naming) is associated with culture as a picture of the world. The formation of names and titles is very important for a person. If some object or phenomenon is not named, does not have a name, is not designated by a person, they do not exist for him. Having given a name to an object or phenomenon and assessing it as threatening, a person simultaneously receives the necessary information that allows him to act in order to avoid danger, since when marking a threat, it is not only given a name, but it fits into the hierarchy of being. Let's take an example. Each of us at least once in his life was sick (not with a mild cold, but with some fairly serious illness). At the same time, a person experiences not only painful sensations, feelings of weakness and helplessness. Usually, in this state, unpleasant thoughts come to mind, including about a possible fatal outcome, the symptoms of all diseases that you have heard about are recalled. The situation is straightforward according to J. Jerome, one of the heroes of whose novel "Three Men in a Boat, not counting the dog", studying a medical reference book, found in himself all diseases, except for puerperal fever. In other words, a person experiences fear because of the uncertainty of his future, because he feels a threat, but knows nothing about it. This significantly worsens the general condition of the patient. In such cases, a doctor is called, who usually makes a diagnosis and prescribes treatment. But relief occurs even before taking medication, since the doctor, having made a diagnosis, gave a name to the threat, thereby inscribing it in the picture of the world, which automatically gave information about possible means fight with her.

It can be said that culture as an image and picture of the world is an ordered and balanced scheme of the cosmos, it is the prism through which a person looks at the world. It is expressed through philosophy, literature, mythology, ideology and in human actions. Most members of the ethnos are fragmentarily aware of its content; in full, it is available only to a small number of specialist in cultural studies. The basis of this picture of the world are ethnic constants - the values ​​and norms of ethnic culture.

cognitive function

Cognitive (epistemological) function most fully manifests itself in science and scientific knowledge. Culture concentrates the experience and skills of many generations of people, accumulates rich knowledge about the world and thus creates favorable opportunities for its knowledge and development. Of course, knowledge is acquired not only in science, but also in other areas of culture, but there they are a by-product of human activity, and in science, obtaining objective knowledge about the world is the most important goal.

Science for a long time remained a phenomenon of only European civilization and culture, while other peoples chose a different way of understanding the world around them. So, in the East, for this purpose, the most complex systems of philosophy and psychotechnics were created. They seriously discussed such ways of understanding the world, unusual for rational European minds, as telepathy (transmission of thoughts at a distance), telekinesis (the ability to influence objects with thought), clairvoyance (the ability to predict the future), etc.

Accumulation function

Information accumulation and storage function is inextricably linked with the cognitive function, since knowledge, information are the result of cognition of the world. The need for information on a variety of issues is a natural condition for the life of both an individual and society as a whole. A person must remember his past, be able to correctly assess it, admit his mistakes; must know who he is, where he comes from and where he is going. To answer these questions, man has created sign systems that collect, organize and store the necessary information. At the same time, culture can be represented as a complex sign system that ensures historical continuity and the transfer of social experience from generation to generation, from era to era, from one country to another, as well as the synchronous transfer of information between people living at the same time. Various sign systems help a person not only understand the world, but also fix this understanding, structure it. Humanity has only one way to preserve, multiply and disseminate accumulated knowledge in time and space - through culture.

The means of storing, accumulating and transmitting information are the natural memory of the individual, the collective memory of the people, fixed in the language and spiritual culture, symbolic and material means of storing information - books, works of art, any objects created by man, since they are also texts. Recently, electronic means of storing information have begun to play an increasingly important role. Society also created special institutions to perform this function of culture - libraries, schools and universities, archives, other services for collecting and processing information.

Communicative function

The communicative function of culture provides communication between people. A person cannot solve any problem of any complexity without the help of other people. People enter into communication in the process of any kind labor activity. Without communication with his own kind, a person cannot become a full-fledged member of society, develop his abilities. A long separation from society leads the individual to mental and spiritual degradation, turning him into an animal. Culture is the condition and result of human communication. Only through the assimilation of culture do people become members of society. Culture gives people the means to communicate. In turn, communicating, people create, preserve and develop culture.

Nature has not endowed a person with the ability to establish emotional contacts, exchange information without the help of signs, sounds, letters, and for communication, a person has created various means of cultural communication. Information can be transmitted by verbal (verbal) methods, non-verbal (facial expressions, gestures, postures, distance of communication, information that is transmitted through material objects, for example, with the help of clothing, especially uniforms) and paraverbal (rate of speech, intonation, volume, articulation, voice pitch and so on.).

To communicate with other people, a person uses natural languages, artificial languages ​​and codes - computer, logical, mathematical symbols and formulas, signs traffic, as well as a variety of technical devices.

The communication process consists of three stages:

• coding of information to be transmitted to the addressee, i.e. translating it into some symbolic form;
• transmission over communication channels, while interference and loss of some information are possible;
• decoding of the message received by the addressee, and due to differences in ideas about the world, different individual experiences of the sender and recipient of the message, decoding occurs with errors. Therefore, communication is never 100% successful, more or less losses in it are inevitable. The effectiveness of communication is ensured by a number of cultural conditions, such as the presence of a common language, channels of information transmission, appropriate motivation, ethical, semiotic rules, which ultimately determine who, what, when and how can be reported and from whom and when to expect a response message.

The development of forms and methods of communication is the most important aspect of the formation of culture. In the early stages of human history, the possibilities of communication were limited to direct contacts between people, and in order to transmit information, they had to approach at a distance of direct visibility and audibility. Over time, people have found a way to increase the range of communication, for example, with the help of special devices. This is how signal drums and bonfires appeared. But their capabilities were limited to transmitting only a few signals. Therefore, the most important stage in the development of culture was the invention of writing, which made it possible to transmit complex messages over long distances. In the modern world everything greater value acquire the means of mass communication, primarily television, radio, print, as well as computer networks, which come to the fore as a means of communication between people.

IN modern conditions the importance of the communicative function of culture is growing faster than any other function. The development of communication capabilities leads to the erasure of national characteristics and contributes to the formation of a single universal civilization, i.e. globalization processes. These processes, in turn, stimulate the intensive progress of means of communication, which is expressed in an increase in the power and range of means of communication, an increase in information flows, and an increase in the speed of information transmission. Along with this, people's mutual understanding, their ability to sympathize and empathize are progressing.

The integrative function of culture is related to communicative and is connected with the fact that culture unites any social communities - peoples, social groups and states. The basis for the unity of such groups is: a common language, a single system of values ​​and ideals that creates a common worldview, as well as common norms that regulate the behavior of people in society. As a result, there is a sense of community with people who are members of their own group, as opposed to other people who are perceived as "strangers". Because of this, the whole world is divided into “us” and “them”, into We and Them. As a rule, a person has more confidence in "their own" than in "strangers" who speak an incomprehensible language and behave incorrectly. Therefore, communication between representatives of different cultures is always difficult, there is a high risk of mistakes that give rise to conflicts and even wars. But recently, in connection with the processes of globalization, the development of mass media and communication, intercultural contacts are being strengthened and expanded. This is largely facilitated by modern mass culture, thanks to which many people in different countries books, music, achievements of science and technology, fashion, etc. become available. The Internet plays a particularly important role in this process. It can be said that the integrative function of culture has recently contributed to the rallying not only of individual social and ethnic groups, but of humanity as a whole.

Normative (regulatory) function culture manifests itself as a system of norms and requirements of society for all its members in all areas of their life and activity - work, life, family, intergroup, interethnic, interpersonal relations.

In any human communities, it is necessary to regulate the behavior of their constituent individuals in order to maintain balance within the community itself and for the survival of each individual. The products of culture that a person has at his disposal outline the field of his possible activity, make it possible to predict the development of various events, but do not determine how

a person must act in a given situation. Each person must consciously and responsibly perform their actions, based on the norms and requirements for the behavior of people that have historically developed in society and are clearly entrenched in our consciousness and subconsciousness.

The norms of human behavior, both permissive and prohibitive, are an indication of the permissible limits and boundaries in which a person must act in order for his behavior to receive a positive assessment of other people and society as a whole. Every culture has its own code of conduct. There are cultures with a strong normative side (China) and cultures in which normativity is less pronounced (European cultures). The question of the existence of universal norms remains debatable.

Through the norms, culture regulates, coordinates the actions of individuals and human groups, develops optimal ways to resolve conflict situations, and makes recommendations when solving vital issues.

Regulatory function culture is carried out at several levels:

• morality and all norms that are strictly observed, despite the absence of special controlling institutions; violation of these norms is met with sharp condemnation of society;
• rules of law, which are detailed in the constitution and laws of the country. Their observance is controlled by specially created institutions - the court, the prosecutor's office, the police, the penitentiary system;
• customs and traditions, which are a stable system of people's behavior in different spheres of life and different situations, which has become the norm and is passed down from generation to generation. As a rule, they take the form of a certain stereotype, they are stable for centuries with any social changes;
• norms of human behavior at work, at home, in communication with other people, in relation to nature, including a wide range of requirements - from elementary neatness and observance of good manners to general requirements to the spiritual world of man.

Axiological (evaluative) function culture is associated with its value orientations. Cultural regulation of human activity is carried out not only normatively, but also through a system of values ​​- ideals that people strive to achieve. Values ​​imply the choice of one or another object, state, need, goal in accordance with the criterion of their usefulness for human life and help society and a person to separate good from bad, truth from error, fair from unfair, permissible from forbidden, etc. The selection of values ​​occurs in the process practical activities. As experience accumulates, values ​​form and disappear, are revised and enriched.

Values ​​provide the specificity of each culture. What is important in one culture may not be important at all in another. Each nation forms its own hierarchy of values, although the set of values ​​has a universal character. Therefore, it is possible to conditionally classify the core values ​​as follows:

• vital values ​​- life, health, safety, well-being, strength, etc.;
• social - social status, work, profession, personal independence, family, gender equality;
• political - freedom of speech, civil liberties, legality,
• civil world;
• moral - good, good, love, friendship, duty, honor, disinterestedness, decency, fidelity, justice, respect for elders, love for children;
• aesthetic values ​​- beauty, ideal, style, harmony, fashion, originality.

Each society, each culture is guided by its own set of values, which may lack some of the above values. In addition, each culture represents certain values ​​in its own way. So, the ideals of beauty among different nations are quite different. For example, in medieval China, aristocratic women, in accordance with the then existing ideal of beauty, should have tiny feet; the desired was achieved by painful foot-binding procedures, which girls from the age of five were subjected to, as a result of which they became literally crippled.

Values ​​guide people's behavior. A person cannot equally treat the opposites that make up the world, he must give preference to one thing. Most people believe that they are striving for goodness, truth, love, but what seems good to one may turn out to be evil for others. This again leads to cultural specificity of values. Based on our ideas about good and evil, we act as “appraisers” of the world around us all our lives.

Recreative function of culture(mental release) is the opposite of the normative function. Regulation and regulation of behavior are necessary, but their consequence is the restriction of freedom of individuals and groups, the suppression of some of their desires and inclinations, which leads to the development of hidden conflicts and tensions. A person comes to the same result due to excessive specialization of activity, forced loneliness or excess of communication, unsatisfied needs for love, faith, immortality, intimate contact with another person. Not all of these tensions are rationally resolvable. Therefore, culture is faced with the task of creating organized and relatively safe ways detentes that do not violate social stability.

The simplest, natural individual means of discharge are laughter, crying, fits of anger, confession, declaration of love, speaking frankly. Specifically cultural collective forms of detente fixed by tradition are holidays and leisure freed from direct participation in production. IN holidays people don't work, they don't follow the everyday norms of life, they arrange processions, carnivals, feasts. The meaning of the holiday is the solemn collective renewal of life. During the holiday, the ideal and the real seem to merge, a person who is attached to the festive culture and knows how to celebrate feels relief and joy. Holidays also take place according to certain rules - with the observance of the appropriate place and time, playing stable roles. With the destruction of these formalities and the intensification of sensual inclinations, physiological pleasure can become an end in itself and will be achieved at any cost; as a result, alcoholism, drug addiction and other vices will appear.

Rituals are also means of collective relaxation and regulate highlights in the lives of people related to the sphere of the sacred (sacred) in a given culture. Among the ritual events are birth and death, marriage, rites of growing up (initiation), which are especially important in primitive and traditional cultures. This group also includes religious rituals and ceremonies, the performance of which is one of the better ways cultural compensation. The rituals are characterized by a special solemnity, cultural richness.

Also, as a collective relaxation, a game is effectively used that satisfies the desires by symbolic means. The symbolism of the game will create a special psychological setting, when a person both believes and does not believe in what is happening, it encourages him to use all his strength and skill to achieve the goal. The game allows you to defuse unconscious impulses that are forbidden or unclaimed by culture. So, in many games there are competitive, sexual motives - sports, lottery, contests, dances. In such games as collecting, accumulative inclinations are realized, which are evaluated in everyday life as a manifestation of greed. Finally, there are games that play on the meaning of death - bullfighting, gladiator fights.

On the one hand, today we can talk about the humanization of games, the replacement of many entertainments of the past, such as street fisticuffs and public executions, sports, television, cinema. But on the other hand, cinema and television show many scenes of violence in films and programs, traumatizing the psyche of people, especially children.

The function of socialization and inculturation, or human-creative function, is the most important function of culture. Socialization is the process of assimilation by a human individual of certain knowledge, norms and values ​​necessary for life as a full member of society, and inculturation is the process of assimilation of skills and knowledge necessary for life in a particular culture. These close processes are possible only with the help of systems of upbringing and education specially created by culture. Outside of society, these processes are impossible, so a real person would never have come out of Mowgli or Tarzan. Children who, for some reason, grow up among animals, remain animals forever.

The processes of socialization and inculturation involve the active inner work of the person himself, striving to acquire the information necessary for life. Therefore, having mastered the complex of knowledge that is obligatory for a given culture, a person begins to develop his individual abilities, his natural inclinations. This may be the development of musical or artistic abilities, mathematical or technical knowledge, which may be useful in mastering future profession or become the occupation of man in his leisure hours.

Socialization and inculturation continue throughout a person's life, but the most important knowledge is acquired in childhood. Then the child learns to speak his native language, learns the norms and values ​​of his culture. This mostly happens automatically when the child imitates first the behavior of the parents and then of peers, teachers and other adults. This is how the social experience accumulated by the people is assimilated, the cultural tradition is preserved and passed on from generation to generation, which ensures the stability of culture.

Culture is an extremely diverse concept. This scientific term appeared in ancient Rome, where the word "cultura" meant the cultivation of the land, upbringing, education.

In sociology, there are two types of culture: material(products of handicrafts and production; tools, tools; structures, buildings; equipment, etc.) and intangible(representations, values, knowledge, ideology, language, the process of spiritual production, etc.).

1. The main function is human-creative, or humanistic function. Cicero spoke of her - "cultura animi" - cultivation, cultivation of the spirit. Today, this function of "cultivating" the human spirit has acquired not only the most important, but also largely symbolic meaning. All other functions are somehow connected with this one and even follow from it.

2. The function of translation (transfer) of social experience. It is called the function of historical continuity or information. Culture is a complex sign system. It acts as the only mechanism for the transfer of social experience from generation to generation, from era to era, from one country to another. Indeed, besides culture, society does not have any other mechanism for transmitting the entire wealth of experience that people have accumulated. Therefore, it is no coincidence that culture is considered the social memory of mankind.

However, culture is not a kind of "warehouse", "repository" of stocks of social experience, but a means of objective assessment, rigorous selection and active transmission of the best "examples" that have truly enduring significance. Hence, any violation of this function is fraught with serious, sometimes catastrophic consequences for society. The gap in cultural continuity dooms new generations to the loss of social memory (the phenomenon of "mankurtism") with all the ensuing consequences.

3. Regulatory (normative) function is associated primarily with the definition (regulation) of various aspects, types of social and personal activities of people. In the sphere of work, life, interpersonal relations, culture in one way or another influences the behavior of people and regulates their actions, actions, and even the choice of certain material and spiritual values. The regulatory function of culture is supported by such normative systems as morality and law.

4. Semiotic or semiotic (Greek semenion - sign) function is the most important in the system of culture. Representing a certain sign system, culture implies knowledge, possession of it. Without studying the corresponding sign systems, it is not possible to master the achievements of culture. Thus, language (oral or written) is a means of communication between people. The literary language acts as the most important means of mastering the national culture. Specific languages ​​are needed for understanding the special world of music, painting, theater (Schnittke's music, Malevich's Suprematism, Dali's surrealism, Vityk's theater). The natural sciences (physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology) also have their own sign systems.

5. Value, or axiological (Greek axia - value) function reflects the most important qualitative state of culture. Culture as a certain system of values ​​forms a person's well-defined value needs and orientations. By their level and quality, people most often judge the degree of culture of a person. Moral and intellectual content, as a rule, acts as a criterion for appropriate evaluation

Cognitive, epistemological function.

It is closely connected with the first (human-creative) and, in a certain sense, follows from it. Culture concentrates the best social experience of many generations of people. It (immanently) acquires the ability to accumulate the richest knowledge about the world and thereby create favorable opportunities for its knowledge and development. It can be argued that a society is as intellectual as the richest knowledge contained in the cultural gene pool of mankind is used.

Culture is determined by a certain criterion of knowledge, mastery of the human forces of nature and society, as well as the degree of development of the "human" in man himself. Encompassing all forms of social consciousness, taken in their unity, culture gives a complete picture of the knowledge and development of the world. Of course, culture is not reduced to the totality of knowledge about the world, but systematized scientific knowledge is one of its most important elements.

However, culture not only characterizes the degree of human knowledge of the surrounding world. At the same time, culture reveals not only the degree of development of forms of social consciousness in their unity, but also the level of skills and abilities of people manifested in their practical activities. Life is extraordinarily complicated and all the time it poses more and more new problems for people. This causes the need for knowledge of the processes taking place in society, their awareness from both scientific and artistic and aesthetic positions.

So the efforts of great thinkers who called for seeing in culture only a condition for development human qualities, have not been wasted. But the real life of culture is still not limited to the human-creative function. The variety of human needs served as the basis for the emergence of a variety of functions. Culture is a kind of self-knowledge of a person, since it shows him not only the world around him, but also himself. This is a kind of mirror where a person sees himself both as he should become and as he was and is. The results of knowledge and self-knowledge are transmitted in the form of experience, worldly wisdom, through signs, symbols from generation to generation, from one people to another.

activity function

Let's start with the fact that the very term "culture" originally meant the cultivation of the soil, its cultivation, i.e. change in natural object under the influence of man, as opposed to those changes that are caused by natural causes. A stone polished by the surf remains a component of nature, and the same stone, processed by a savage, is an artificial object that performs a certain function accepted in a given community - tool or magic. Thus, in this original content of the term, an important feature of culture is expressed - the human principle inherent in it - and attention is focused on the unity of culture, man and his activity.

According to the most common understanding of this term today, culture is a meaning-bearing and meaning-transmitting aspect of human practice and its results, a symbolic dimension of social events that allows individuals to live in a special life world, which they more or less understand, and to perform actions, the nature of which is understood by everyone else. .

Any great spiritual tradition is a cleverly built machine for fighting against time, but no matter what tricks, time eventually breaks it. Such disturbing considerations must have crossed the minds of teachers of traditional cultures more than once, and they tried to find a way out of the impasse. One of possible solutions What common sense suggests is to strengthen the reliability of the transmission of culture by all means, to carefully protect it from all conceivable distortions, reinterpretations, and especially innovations. Unfortunately for some and fortunately for others, it actually turns out that “the use of such means, no matter how locally successful it may be, is not able to save culture from internal necrosis.

Information function.

This is the transfer of social experience. In society, there is no other mechanism for the transfer of social experience other than culture. The social qualities of a person are not transmitted by the genetic program. Thanks to culture, the transmission, transmission of social experience is carried out both from one generation to another, and between countries and peoples.

Culture performs this important social function through a complex sign system that preserves the social experience of generations in concepts and words, mathematical symbols and formulas of science, peculiar languages ​​of art, in the products of human labor - tools of production, consumer goods, i.e. contains all those signs that tell about a person, his creative powers and capabilities. In this sense, culture can be called the "memory" of mankind. However, it must be emphasized that culture is not just a "pantry" of social experience accumulated by mankind, but a means of its active processing, selection of exactly the information that society needs, which is of national and universal value.

The informative function of culture is highly appreciated by representatives of the semiotic approach to culture. In this function, culture links generations, enriching each subsequent generation with the experience of the previous ones. But this does not mean that it is enough to live in today's world and read modern books in order to join the experience of world culture. It is necessary to distinguish between the concepts of "cultural" and "modernity". To become cultured, a person needs to go through, as I.V. Goethe, "through all epochs of world culture".

Here, culture is seen not as something external to a person that determines the forms of his life, but as a way to realize his creative potential.

Culture cannot live by tradition alone; it is constantly supported by the pressure of new generations entering society in somewhat changed historical conditions. This feature of the socio-historical process forces the representatives of the new generation to engage in creative processing of the cultural achievements of the past. Continuity and innovation permeate the cultural life of society.

The unique possibility of culture is manifested in its dialogue. Culture is impossible without internal “roll call”. The “characters” of past cultures do not leave the stage, do not disappear and do not dissolve in the new, but carry on a dialogue both with their brothers in the past and with the heroes who have come to replace them. And to this day, people are worried about the tragic images of Aeschylus and Sophocles; Pushkin's and Shakespeare's heroes make us continue to think about good and evil, and Kant's ideas about the universal world are in tune with our era. Appeal to the culture of the past, rethinking its values ​​in the light of modern experience is one of the ways to realize the creative potential of a person. Comprehending and rethinking the past, a thinker and an artist, a scientist and an inventor create new values, enrich the objective world of culture.

Working with this subject field, a person involuntarily objectifies himself, expanding the range of his needs and abilities. This circle includes ends and means. Innovative goals, as a rule, are based on the results obtained, which, in turn, involve the transformation of existing material and spiritual values.

Man himself is a cultural value, and the most important part of this value is his creative potential, the whole mechanism for the implementation of ideas and plans: from the natural inclinations involved in the creative process, the neurodynamic systems of the brain to the most refined and sublime aesthetic ideals and “wild” scientific abstractions, from emotional experiences, rushing to be expressed outside, to the most complex sign systems. And it is natural that an adequate way to realize the creative potential of a person is culture, the meaning-bearing and meaning-transmitting aspect of human practice and its results.

Thus, in culture, it closes as a subjective world creative personality and the objective world of cultural values. It closes so that a person can break this unity with all the tension of his difficult life and once again, on a new basis, recreate it with his creative efforts. Without such unity, human existence is impossible.

The role of culture as a way of realizing the creative potential of a person is diverse. Culture not only invites the individual to create. She also imposes restrictions on her.

These restrictions apply not only to society, but also to nature. But the absence of cultural restrictions in attempts to control the forces of nature is also dangerous. Culture as a way to realize the creative potential of a person cannot but include an understanding of the value of nature as a habitat for people, as an unshakable foundation for the cultural development of society.

communicative function.

This function is inextricably linked with information. Perceiving the information contained in the monuments of material and spiritual culture, a person thereby enters into the indirect. Indirect communication with the people who created these monuments.

The means of communication between people is, first of all, verbal language. The word accompanies all the processes of people's cultural activity. Language, primarily literary, is the "key" to mastering a particular national culture. In the process of communication, people also use specific languages ​​of art (music, theater, cinema, etc.), as well as the languages ​​of science (mathematical, physical, chemical and other symbols and formulas). Thanks to culture and, above all, art, a person can be transported to other eras and countries, communicate with other generations, people in whose images the artist reflected not only his own ideas, but also contemporary feelings, moods, views.

The cultures of different peoples, as well as people - representatives of different cultures, are mutually enriched due to the informative function. B. Shaw compares the results of the exchange of ideas with the exchange of apples. When apples are exchanged, each side has only an apple; when ideas are exchanged, each side has two ideas. The exchange of ideas, unlike the exchange of objects, cultivates in a person his personal culture. The point is not only in obtaining knowledge, but also in that response, in that reciprocal ideological or emotional movement that they give rise to in a person. If there is no such movement, then there is no cultural growth. A person grows towards humanity, and not towards the number of years lived. Culture is a cult of growth, as they sometimes say. And growth occurs because a person joins, without losing himself, to the wisdom of the human race.

The concept of "mass culture" reflects significant shifts in the mechanism of modern culture: the development of mass media (radio, cinema, television, newspaper, magazine, gramophone record, tape recorder); the formation of an industrial-commercial type of production and the distribution of standardized spiritual goods; relative democratization of culture and an increase in the level of education of the masses; increase in leisure time and spending on leisure in the family budget. All of the above transforms culture into a branch of the economy, turning it into mass culture.

Through the system of mass communication, printed and electronic products reach the majority of members of society. Through a single mechanism of fashion, mass culture orients, subjugates all aspects of human existence: from the style of housing and clothing to the type of hobby, from the choice of ideology to the forms of rituals of intimate relationships. At present, mass culture has swung at the cultural "colonization" of the whole world.

The birth of mass culture can be considered the year 1870, when a law on compulsory universal literacy was passed in the UK. The main type of artistic creativity of the 19th century became available to everyone. - novel. The second milestone is 1895. In this year, cinematography was invented, which does not require even elementary literacy to perceive information in pictures. The third milestone is light music. The tape recorder and television strengthened the position of mass culture.

Despite the seeming democratic nature, mass culture is fraught with a real threat of reducing the human creator to the level of a programmed mannequin, a human cog. The serial nature of its products has a number of specific features:

a) primitivization of relations between people;

b) entertaining, amusing, sentimental;

c) naturalistic savoring of violence and sex;

d) the cult of success, a strong personality and the desire to own things;

e) the cult of mediocrity, conventionality of primitive symbolism.

The catastrophic consequence of mass culture is the reduction of human creative activity to an elementary act of thoughtless consumption. High culture requires high intellectual effort. And meeting the “Monna Lisa” in the showroom is not at all like meeting her on a matchbox label or on a T-shirt.

Elite culture acts as a cultural opposition to mass culture, the main task of which is to preserve creativity and pathos in culture.

A person cannot communicate. Even when he is alone, he continues to conduct an inaudible dialogue with people close or distant to him, with the heroes of books, with God or with himself, as he sees himself. In such communication, it can be completely different than in live communication. The culture of live communication involves not only politeness and tact. It implies the ability and ability of each of us to bring the communicativeness of culture into the circle of such communication, i.e. our connection to humanity that we felt when we were alone. Being oneself and recognizing the right of another person to do so means recognizing the equality of everyone in relation to humanity and its culture. This is about feature or about the norm of humanism. Of course, in culture there are many norms and rules of behavior. All of them serve one common goal: the organization of the common life of people. There are norms of law and morality, norms in art, norms of religious consciousness and behavior. All these norms regulate human behavior, oblige him to adhere to some boundaries that are considered acceptable in a particular culture.

From time immemorial, society has been divided into social groups. Social groups- relatively stable populations of people who have common interests, values ​​and norms of behavior that develop within the framework of a historically defined society. Each group embodies some specific relationships of individuals among themselves and with society as a whole.

Group interests can be expressed through caste, estate, class and professional interests.

Caste is most fully revealed in the culture of India. To this day, India has stubbornly held on to this divisive phenomenon. Even modern education cannot defeat in the Hindu his adherence to caste.

Another characteristic example of the manifestation of the group principle in culture is chivalry:

Knights are representatives of the ruling class, but their life was subject to strict regulations. The knight's code of honor prescribed complex procedures and etiquette, a departure from which, even in small things, could lower the knight's dignity in the eyes of other members of the privileged class. Sometimes the regulation of this etiquette looked devoid of common sense. For example, having galloped to the king in the midst of a battle with an important report, the knight could not turn to him first and waited for the sovereign to speak to him. But in these moments the fate of the battle and his comrades in arms could be decided.

The knight was instructed to know and perform a number of court ritual functions: to sing, dance, play chess, fencing, perform feats for the glory of a beautiful lady, etc. The knight had to be himself. example of court etiquette.

A manifestation of the group in culture is also class. Classes are perceived as stable socio-economic groups of society, belonging to which dictates to individuals a certain culture of behavior.

The consistent implementation of the class approach is realized through relations of domination and subordination, where some - knowledgeable, enlightened, advanced and conscious - command others, instructing everyone to follow the same method, to clearly implement the principle: "who is not with us is against us."

Of course, the class approach has the right to exist, and as long as classes exist, it is inevitable. It is pointless to stigmatize it and oppose it to universal human values. It only makes sense to understand that the priority of universal human values ​​does not exclude an objective assessment of class interests, but opposes the attitude that considers class values ​​to be the highest and the only ones. Class values ​​are not abolished, but take their place within universal human values, next to non-class ones.

What is universal?

It is believed that the universal is a pure idealization, something unrealizable and not existing in reality. But people have ideas about them, designate them with different terms and want to join them. These are the ideals that people create so that life has a purpose and makes sense.

Another interpretation is more prosaic: universal - these are the conditions for the life of people and the rules of human coexistence common to all historical epochs. Here, “natural interests” are presented as universal human: hoarding and consumerism, the thirst for life and the desire for personal power, the danger of death and the fear of it. But in each religion these "natural interests" are treated differently.

It is naive to think that universal human values ​​can simply be invented. Neither philosophers, nor politicians, nor church fathers will be able to impose them on society. The universal cannot be outside of time and space. The universal is an ideal form of universality, which has actually been achieved by mankind at a given stage of history and which directly reveals itself in the dialogue of cultures.

aesthetic function culture, first of all, manifests itself in art, in artistic creativity. As you know, in culture there is a certain sphere of "aesthetic". It is here that the essence of the beautiful and the ugly, the sublime and the base, the tragic and the comic is revealed. This sphere is closely connected with the aesthetic attitude to reality, to nature. V. Soloviev noted that “beauty, spilled in nature in its forms and colors, is concentrated, condensed, emphasized in the picture”, and the aesthetic connection between art and nature “consists not in repetition, but in the continuation of that artistic work that was started by nature ".

The aesthetic sense of beauty accompanies a person constantly, lives in his home, is present at all the most important events of his life. Even in severe moments in the history of mankind - moments of death, destruction, feat - a person again turns to the beautiful. At the time of the death of the English steamer Titanic, which collided with an iceberg, the musicians, who did not have enough boats, played Beethoven's Heroic Symphony. And how many times during the Great Patriotic War the sailors of Russia courageously accepted death with a song about the immortal "Varyag".

The World of Art defended the freedom of individual self-manifestation in art. Everything that the artist loves and worships in the past and present has the right to be embodied in art, regardless of the topic of the day. At the same time, beauty was recognized as the only pure source of creative enthusiasm, and modern world, in their opinion, is devoid of beauty. Life interests representatives of the "World of Arts" only insofar as it has already expressed itself in art. The leading genre in painting is the historical genre. History appears here not in mass movements, but in particular details of the past life, but life is necessarily beautiful, aesthetically designed.

The heyday of the theatrical and decorative activity of the “World of Arts” is associated with the Russian seasons of Diagelev in Paris, where the largest forces of Russian art were attracted: F. Shalyagosh, A-Pavlova, V. Nezhinsky, Fokin and others.

Turning to Western European culture, it is not difficult to detect the first attempts to comprehend elitism in the works of Heraclitus and Plato. Plato divides human knowledge into knowledge and opinion. Knowledge is accessible to the intellect of philosophers, and opinion is accessible to the crowd. Consequently, here for the first time the intellectual elite stands out as a special professional group- the keeper and bearer of higher knowledge.

It is in relation to them that the humanist community puts itself in the position of the chosen society, the intellectual elite. This is how that category of persons appears, which later became known as the “intelligentsia”.

The theory of the elite is the logical conclusion of the processes that took place in the artistic practice of Western European culture in the second half of the 19th - mid-20th centuries: the collapse of realism in the plastic arts, the emergence and victorious march of impressionism to post-impressionism and even cubism, the transformation of the novel narrative into the “stream of life” and the “stream of consciousness” in the work of M. Proust and J. Joyce, an unusually flowery symbolism in poetry, manifested in the work of A. Blok and A. Bely.

The most complete and consistent concept of elite culture is presented in the works of J. Ortega y Gasset. Observing the birth of new forms of art with their countless scandalously loud manifestos, extraordinary artistic techniques, Ortega gave a philosophical assessment of this avant-garde of the 20th century. His assessment comes down to the assertion that the Impressionists, Futurists, Surrealists, Abstractionists split art lovers into two groups: those who understand the new art, and those who are not able to understand it, i.e. to the “artistic elite and the general public”.

According to Ortega, there is an elite in every social class. The elite is the part of society most capable of spiritual activity, endowed with high moral and aesthetic inclinations. It is she who makes progress. Therefore, the artist quite consciously refers to it, and not to the masses. Turning his back on the layman, the artist abstracts from reality and endows the elite with complicated images of reality, in which he combines real and unreal, rational and irrational in a bizarre way.

Associated with aesthetic function hedonistic function. Hedonism in Greek means pleasure. People enjoy reading a book, visiting architectural ensembles, museums, visiting theaters, concert halls, etc. Pleasure contributes to the formation of needs and interests, and influences people's lifestyle.

All the functions mentioned above are somehow connected with the formation of personality, human behavior in society, with the expansion of his cognitive activity, the development of intellectual, professional and other abilities.

The main, synthesizing function of culture, reflecting its social meaning, is humanistic function

The humanistic function is manifested in the unity of opposite, but organically interconnected processes: the socialization and individualization of the individual. In the process of socialization, a person masters social relations, spiritual values, turning them into his inner essence. personality, in their social qualities. But a person masters these relations, values ​​in his own way, uniquely, in an individual form. Culture is a special social mechanism that implements socialization and ensures the acquisition of individuality.