UDC 141+304.2

There are a number of scholarly works devoted to philosophical anthropology, some of which are classics: works by C. Valverde, A. Gehlen, W. Dilthey, E. Cassirer, H. Plessner, H. Rickert, M. Scheler, and others. Modern scholars in the field of philosophical anthropology include O. Marquard (2008), who sees philosophical anthropology as an exclusively German doctrine that emerged under the dominance of speculative "school philosophy". V. Kremen and V. Ilin (2021), exploring the transformation of the image of man in the paradigm of knowledge evolution, identify the technical and economic dimension of human life as the basis of anthropological evolution in the New Age, and hence, cognition has acquired the features of one of the driving forces of public progress. W. Tate (2020) notes the relevance of broadening the fields in which anthropology and ethnography intersect with politics, using the concept of "political anthropology" as a branch of political anthropology. N. Khamitov (2021) proposes to consider philosophical anthropology in two dimensions – as a philosophy of man at any time, in any culture, and as a series of philosophical theories of man rooted in early last century German philosophy.

Key aspects of biopolitics, particularly in relation to philosophical anthropology, are reflected in modern scientific research of both foreign and domestic scholars. S. Peterson and A. Somit (2011) reduce the origins of biopolitics to political theories and show that the impact of biology on human politics is as significant today as it was in the Antiquity era. C. J. Cavanagh (2014) draws on the ideas of M. Foucault in his reflections on biopolitics, but offers a broader conceptual framework of biopolitics in the context of the current historical and geographical state. V. Marchezini (2015) focuses his research on the biopolitical preconditions of national governments’ practices in responding to geo-environmental disasters and natural hazards. K. Schuller (2018) analyses the genesis and connection of human races and sexes in the context of science of the 19th century; he talks about the taxonomy of feelings, the human body as a text system. P. Ironstone (2019) characterizes microbiopolitics, considering the human microbiome as one of the dominant biomedical structures. S. Cruzada (2020) argues that the pathogen of COVID-19 is the "species" with which humans do not want to coexist, so it is necessary to break the human-virus relationship. A. Kravets (2019) emphasizes the importance of exploring the biopolitical basis of local self-government and civil society as self-organized communities in the context of a pandemic threat. Some aspects of biopolitics in relation to philosophical anthropology are reflected in the publications of one of the authors, in particular in the monographic study "The Biopolitical Framework of the Educational Concept in a Civil Society" (Kostiuchkov, 2015).

Purpose

In view of the above, the purpose of the article is to substantiate philosophical anthropology as a space for the development of fields of scientific knowledge, one way or another related to the philosophical problems of man; to justify the organic connection between philosophical anthropology and biopolitics, which emerges as a relatively new synthetic scientific knowledge of the political in the biological (and vice versa – biological in the political) with a focus on the problematic of being of "political human".

Statement of basic materials

In the twenty-first century, the awareness of the constant changes in society actualises the search for, and the production and application of new philosophical paradigms traditionally aimed at the cultivation of wisdom and its application in the process of human knowledge and assimilation of the world around, in order to improve the quality of life of each person and society as a whole. At the beginning of the third millennium, humanity was faced with active manifestations of new, in the format of "black swans", the challenges of history: it is about the transformation of political and socio-economic crises into anthropological crisis. Since the status of human life is the basis of the modern system of socio-political ideas and values, there is a need for constant updating of the fundamental tenets of philosophical anthropology, adequate to the modern socio-cultural reality. Accordingly, the modus vivendi of human existence in the political-time continuum is changing, asymmetry in the interaction between the individual, the state and civil society is increasing, the influence of social, political and economic factors is progressing, generating the activity of a complex of certain constructive or destructive processes in the social space, the extremes of which are consensus and conflict.

At different times, philosophers of different schools and research directions have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to find answers to the question of man’s place and role in the world, his genesis and evolution, historical purpose and civilizational mission, meaning of existence, and how past, present and future determine the characteristics of human existence, the extent and forms of his interconnection with the surrounding world – natural and social. It is the analysis of the essence and being of man that is the goal of philosophical anthropology, whose subject area includes a variety of processes and phenomena, etiologically affiliated with the constantly expanding spectrum of aspects of human problems. One of the most important points of such an analysis is its metaphysical problems – the direct entry of constructive emotion into the realm of the transcendental: the view of man as such sub specie aeternalis – from the standpoint of eternity.

Let us emphasize that the problem of man per se has come to the forefront of twentieth-century philosophy, despite the fact that the idea of separating the anthropological component from the body of philosophy was suggested by Kant, who had a positive attitude towards anthropological ideas. The textbook Kantian questions "What can I know?", "What should I do?", "What can I hope for?", which over time have taken on the outlines of transcendentalist doctrines, are concentrated in the key one – "What is man?". Thus, anthropology, which focuses on all these issues, is a priori related to man, and therefore – philosophical anthropology can not claim the status of transcendental philosophical discipline. In the late 1920s, philosophical anthropology generated heated debates in the European philosophical tradition and became the subject of thorough scholarly disputes. In this context, a logical and pertinent question arises – how and when did philosophical anthropology emerge?

As noted in previous studies

For a post-industrial society biological and somatic (bodily) measurements, transformation of man corporeality, his or her orientation to artificiality, caused by necessity of technological intervention to save health and life of person (exo- and endoprosthesis, pacemakers, therapeutic complexes connected with so-called "machine aggression"); restructuring of individual consciousness in the direction of virtualization of real and realization of virtual become relevant. The implication of the biological life of man (zoe) and the political spheres (polis), that is, the politicization of life as such, is an extremely important process characterizing the postmodern era. (Коstyuchkov, 2018, р. 107)

It should be noted that philosophical anthropology has experienced periods of optimism and scepticism, mono-aspect and pluralism of views on its recognition and further development. The philosophers of the New Age traditionally particulate a certain spectrum of concretised, generalised positions on the essence and nature of human existence in the world. The concept of "anthropology" was applied for the semantic fixation of such views, but in this period philosophical anthropology did not acquire the format of a full-fledged science. The integration of philosophical ideas into the cultural space requires these ideas to be essentially concretized – it is philosophical anthropology that potentiates the knowledge of human development from general philosophical abstractions to their concretisation in relation to human interaction with the natural and social world around us. The genesis of philosophical anthropology is illustrated by the German philosopher and educator Odo Marquard (2008), who argues that philosophical anthropology is a historically German product that emerged under the dominance of speculative "school philosophy" (Schulphilosophie) of metaphysical trend circa 1600 as the generalised knowledge about the world for schoolchildren.

The formation of new philosophical ideas in the field of human studies was determined not only by local problems and contradictions, but most importantly by powerful transformations in social life, changes in its political, economic, legal, cultural colouring, and modernisation of social interaction models in view of continuously emerging civilisation challenges. It was in such a paradigm that the formation and establishment of a new trend – philosophical anthropology, represented by the creative legacy of C. Valverde, A. Gehlen, W. Dilthey, H. Plessner, M. Scheler and other researchers – was activated. But the attitude to philosophical anthropology was far from unambiguous. For example, such authoritative German neo-Kantian philosophers as H. Rickert and E. Cassirer recognized the academic status of philosophical anthropology and manifested the results of their own reflections in this field. At the same time, German philosophers E. Husserl (1989), the founder of phenomenology, and M. Heidegger (1991), a recognised authority on ontology, were firmly against philosophical anthropology as a scientific discipline.

The modern Ukrainian philosopher N. Khamitov proposes to consider philosophical anthropology in two dimensions – the broad and the narrow ones. In a broad sense, it is a "philosophy of man at all times and in all cultures" (Khamitov, 2021, p. 82). In a narrow sense, philosophical anthropology appears as "a series of philosophical theories of man, rooted in early 20th century German philosophy, especially in the teachings of Max Scheler, who is considered the founder of modern philosophical anthropology" (authors’ transl.) (Khamitov, 2021, p. 82).

It was the German philosopher and sociologist M. Scheler who saw his research task in creating a holistic philosophical doctrine of man that would unite the anthropological concepts available at the time. If you ask an educated European, wrote M. Scheler, what his thoughts arise at the word "man", then

…almost always three incompatible circles of ideas will appear in his mind. First, it is an idea of the Judeo-Christian tradition of Adam and Eve, creation, paradise and the Fall. Second, these are the Greco-ancient ideas, in which self-consciousness rose for the first time in the world to an understanding of the special position of man… The third circle of ideas… is the circle of ideas of modern natural science that man is the result of the development of the Earth, a being that differs from the forms that preceded him in the animal world only in the degree of complexity of the combination of energies and abilities, which themselves are already found in an inferior, in comparison to human, nature. (authors’ transl.) (Scheler, 1988, р. 31)

It should be noted that modern philosophical anthropology is not a ready-made knowledge of the most general patterns of human development on planet Earth, but much more broadly, it is a search for truth regarding the phenomenon of Man as a unique form of being of the world. One should accept the assessment regarding philosophical anthropology viewing it as a reflection of the widest possible range of interdisciplinary knowledge about man, as the most perfect creation of nature. Philosophical anthropology is the result of a specific reaction of philosophical thought to a specific cognitive complication arising in the problematic context of sciences, which in their subject arena are in one way or another related to man in different dimensions – civilizational, biological, social, cultural, spiritual, etc. Following a certain approach, we note that philosophical anthropology makes it possible to identify the fundamental laws of human cognition per se, using, as a methodological basis, certain philosophical ideas or specific philosophical systems.

According to the Spanish philosopher C. Valverde, philosophical anthropology has a personalist orientation, with a focus on the fact that personalism in philosophy implies the primacy of the value of the personality over the individual. Personality is an individualized goal and purpose, it not only performs a reproductive function in a social group, but also realizes itself as a representative of the group and with it. Thus, the perfect self-realization of the personality presupposes individual immortality and, accordingly, the spiritual nature of the soul. The personality is

…itself in so far as it gives itself to others… Therefore, a personality exists for a society and a society for a personality. They need each other and complement each other. Personality is free and therefore can be the subject of moral duties. Because it has duties, it also has rights and deserves all respect. It is guided in its decisions by consciously made value judgements. So, the personality has power over itself and gives itself freely. (authors’ transl.) (Valverde, 2013)

Philosophical anthropology considers man as a natural (biological), social and spiritual phenomenon, as a whole, the indivisibility of which is embodied in the personification of man as a person who realizes himself in society, in particular – in the space of political life. In terms of anthropological evolution, human is seen as a biosocial being, fixing his belonging simultaneously to two spheres of existence – natural-biological and social. Over time, humans have been transformed into a unique biological species, within which individuals possess reason, consciousness, articulate speech, the ability to assimilate social practices, culture, technology, etc. As rightly noted by domestic researchers V. Kremen and V. Ilin

The basis of anthropological evolution in the modern epoch was the technical and economic attitude to life, which defined the pragmatic effectiveness of knowledge as the dominant of socio-economic progress. Both science and education in this period are aimed not only at obtaining knowledge, but also at its practical implementation. At the same time, a new type of man is formed, the ontological basis of whom is rational self-organization, self-presentation, individual isolation. The emergence of this type of anthropological characteristics is the result of unprecedented information and energy "explosion". (Kremen & Ilin, 2021, р. 9)

W. Tate (2020) stresses the importance of expanding the spheres in which anthropology and ethnography overlap with politics in today’s world. The scientist uses the concept of "anthropology of politics" as a branch of political anthropology, which focuses on political projects of society management (W. Tate places emphasis on English-speaking ethnic groups). However, according to the researcher, anthropological explorations of the impact of politics on society in anthropological and ethnographic contexts is experiencing significant retardation due to significant methodological and ethical issues. We consider it expedient to add that both the anthropology of politics and political anthropology should be considered in the connotation of philosophical anthropology.

In our opinion, the formation of new ideas in the sphere of the national philosophical anthropology is caused not only by internal problems and contradictions in the space of philosophical knowledge in general but, on a larger scale, by sweeping transformations in the Ukrainian society, changes in its intellectual state, modernization of social interaction models in view of new civilization challenges, including COVID-19 pandemic and hybrid war by the Russian Federation as concentrated expression of neototalitarianism apologia; these include trends in transhumanism with a focus on gender innovation; scientific research in the fields of artificial life and artificial intelligence, controlled biosynthesis, genetic engineering, biological cybernetics, genetic code programming, cloning of living objects, anthropologisation of technical systems, practices of gene modification, development of digital organisms, hybridisation and chimerisation, etc.

It is worth agreeing with the statement of domestic philosophers about the depth of the initial origins of personalistic tendencies in modern Ukrainian philosophical anthropology. They can be clearly traced in philosophical and anthropological reflections of M. Berdyaev, G. Skovoroda, T. Shevchenko, P. Yurkevich, setting the trend of modern and prospective explorations in the field of philosophical anthropology. The methodology of metaanthropological potentialism proposed by Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine S. Pyrozhkov and Professor N. Khamitov (2020) in the monographic study "Ukraine as a Civilizational Subject: From Potencies to a New Worldview and Human Existence" is considered productive. The relevance of modern domestic philosophical anthropology, according to the authors, lies not only in the preservation and development of its classical tradition, but also in the fact that the Ukrainian society in conditions of armed aggression on the part of the Russian Federation defends its independence and state sovereignty, responding to the challenges and threats arising before the global society.

The connections of philosophical anthropology with such branches of scientific knowledge as philosophy of culture, psychology, human biology, ethics, aesthetics, culturology, social philosophy, philosophy of law, sociology, biophilosophy, philosophy of education, political science, etc. are considered fruitful and promising. It should be noted that philosophical anthropology is meaningfully related to biopolitics – the result of the interpenetration of natural, biological and socio-humanitarian knowledge. However, while philosophical anthropology focuses on the question – who is Homo sapiens, given the biosocial nature of man, biopolitics seeks an answer to the question – who is homo politicus (political man) in the modern socio-political space with a humanocentric approach dominating in the social and humanitarian sciences. Biopolitics in the process of its own evolution is the result of two convergent processes – the humanization of biology and a certain biologization of the social sciences and humanities.

It should be noted that contemporary biopolitical problems are closely connected with a profound rethinking of the methodology of sociopolitical systems research and the key provisions of the political sciences, in addition to this – with an avant-garde, postmodern aesthetic of the art of arranging political life, in the space of which there is a trend towards the virtualisation of the real and realisation of the virtual in today’s realities. The postmodern political project offers political power a certain autonomous status, as a result, the events of public life are presented as a pure and self-valuable product of power, taking into account the role of historical progress. "Adorned" with a powerful complex of stochastic and eventual factors, the realities of the 21st century form the ideology of postmodernism, one of the components of which is that politics in the process of legitimization asserts itself as a space of free human self-expression, conditioned by the complexity of human nature and limited only by laws. In the list of the main research areas of biopolitics, human nature occupies a prominent place – this is what primarily connects it with philosophical anthropology, as the said aspect is of dominant importance in the conditions of a qualitatively new political configuration of the world order based on general, historically conditioned principles.

Without claiming a detailed gallery of the key stages in the evolution of biopolitical knowledge, we emphasize that modern domestic and foreign researchers on this issue accentuate the important role of political rather than biological concepts, which have taken place in philosophy from the ancient period to the present day. They focus on the philosophical and political origins of biopolitics: for example, S. Peterson and A. Somit (2011) reduce the origins of biopolitics to political theories and note that "allusions to biological influences on human politics are as old as the Greek philosophers" (р. 3). It is in the ancient period that an interest in man emerges, particularly in the context of his behavioural manifestations in society. Here it is appropriate to recall Plato with his concept of the "ideal state" and Aristotle, who called man a "political animal". In his Politics, the thinker emphasizes that people from birth are divided into those who are called upon to rule and those who are doomed to obey (Aristotle, 1996).

We consider the creative legacy of Hobbes (2000), author of Leviathan, in which biology and politics intersect in an original way, to be an important stage in the evolutionary development of biopolitics. The philosopher stresses that human art imitates nature in the sense that it is capable of making an "artificial animal". However, art is capable of almost impossible – it imitates the most beautiful work of nature – Man. It is art that created that gigantic Leviathan called the Republic, or the State; he is only an artificial Man, though larger and stronger.

Biopolitics helps to study the manifestations of mass human behaviour, the principles of which are associated by ethology researchers with similar processes in the animal world. This aspect of biopolitics is reflected in Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti’s (1980) classic work "Crowds and Power", which addresses in particular the crowd as "a common form of general excitement", the phenomenon of humans’ and primates’ propensity for destruction pronounced in the modern world, as well as the biosocial principles of parliamentarism, the biological origins of slavery, etc.

The French philosopher M. Foucault proposed a peculiar interpretation of biopolitics – as a set of political measures to influence and control the biological – vital basis of man for the sake of socially significant goals. M. Foucault sees the body as a kind of game of discursive systems – the physiological component of the body recedes to the periphery, and the logical and semantic structures of human corporeality interpret the body as an alternative to the social subject – the so-called "social body". Studying the problem of political theory and practice, M. Foucault emphasizes:

Societal control over individuals does not operate simply through consciousness or ideology, but begins in the body and through the body. It was in the biological, the somatic and the corporeal that capitalist society made its greatest investments. The body thus became a bio-political reality; medicine, urbanism and demography are bio-political strategies. (Foucault, 2006, p. 82)

The content of M. Foucault’s concept is that the relationship between the biological life of man (zoe) and the political sphere (polis), in other words, the politicization of life as such, is one of the defining processes of the modern world. The Italian philosopher G. Agamben attributes a certain regression of modern politics to the deep interpenetration of the biological life of man and the political sphere in the sphere of social consciousness. All political problems of the modern world, according to G. Agamben, are solved only on the biopolitical ground, which, in fact, is the basis on which they were formed.

Only within a biopolitical horizon will it be possible to decide whether the categories whose opposition founded modern politics (right/left, private/public, absolutism/democracy, etc.) – and which have been steadily dissolving, to the point of entering today into a real zone of indistinction – will have to be abandoned or will, instead, eventually regain the meaning they lost in that very horizon. (Agamben, 2011, р. 11)

G. Agamben uses the term homo sacer (Latin for sacred man) as a definition of a person who can be killed under Roman law, but cannot be the object of sacrifice.

The American political scientist and biopolitician R. Masters (1989), the author of "The Nature of Politics", based on extensive empirical material, substantiates, in particular, the role of such forms of behaviour as altruism and egoism, viewing them in the context of biopolitics as the main prerequisites of political behaviour. R. Masters also notes that the "new naturalism" will give mankind the impetus to produce new standards of social life and the choice of democratic forms of government as opposed to the unconditionally archaic autocratic or totalitarian ones.

It should be noted that among contemporary researchers in the field of biopolitics there is a certain unity of views on the structure of biopolitical knowledge, its genesis, interdisciplinary nature and the range of practical application of its theoretical provisions. Ukrainian researcher A. Kravets (2019) proposes to classify biopolitics among modern evolutionary theories in the same order as political anthropology and anthropology of power. This position coincides quite well with the views of the classics of biopolitics S. Peterson and A. Somit (2011), who emphasized, "At the heart of biopolitics is evolutionary theory. This is the intellectual core" (p. 5).

К. Schuller (2018) in "The Biopolitics of Feeling" analyses the genesis and connection of human races and sexes in the context of the 19th century science; in particular, in the work the author talks about taxonomy of the feelings, the human body as a textual system, comparing race to a palimpsest – a manuscript that was already in use. K. Schuller examines the issue of racial origins of sex differences in human populations, and touches on the ethical problem of biophilanthropy in relation to the children of migrants.

Developing the idea of biopolitics, Norwegian scholar Connor J. Cavanagh (2014) proposes, drawing on the creative legacy of M. Foucault, a conceptual framework for biopolitics in contemporary historical and geographical contexts. The researcher applies the notion of "anthropocene" to describe an era with exponentially increasing levels of human activity to transform nature. C. J. Cavanagh examines the action of so-called "biopower" in different ways, in particular in the format of ensuring the conservation of "charismatic megafauna", as well as the action of the international community to destroy or contain those forms of life that threaten ecosystems and/or social groups, even at the level of the planetary community. It should be noted that the Norwegian scientist’s reflections have gained particular relevance in the context of the progressive threat of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, which can without exaggeration be considered one of the most threatening challenges in the history of civilization, has actualized a wide range of problems at all levels, from local to global, and in all spheres of social life – political, economic, social, cultural, spiritual. Under such conditions, the public and political resonance of scientific, in particular biopolitical research is continuously growing; the pandemic threat has stimulated the scientific, medical community to develop effective vaccines to combat COVID-19, and political leaders to produce fundamentally new or modernized mechanisms of containment/elimination of the pandemic consequences. Modern biopolitics defines the direction and content of the transition from the microcosm of viruses and bacteria to the macrocosm of socio-political relations, which makes it possible to speak of a new field of biopolitical knowledge – microbiopolitics.

The emergent-ecological aspect of biopolitics is developed by the Brazilian sociologist V. Marchezini (2015) in his research. The increase in the number of natural disasters forces the governments of modern states to develop a set of measures to manage catastrophic events, which are usually emergent in nature. The researcher analyses the fundamental biopolitical components of the practical actions of government agencies in response to natural disasters, particularly in Brazil. V. Marchesini focuses on the unpredictable negative consequences of biopolitical governance, in particular the devaluation of social life, using the notion of an "anthropology of disasters".

The Canadian researcher P. Ironstone (2019) uses the concept of "microbiopolitics", considering the human microbiome (a set of microorganisms inhabiting a particular environment) as one of the predominant biomedical structures. The microbiopolitics of the human microbiome is contrasted with L. Pasteur’s model, in which the "Self" of the human body is strengthened and protected from the negative influence of the microbial "non-Self". According to the researcher, the human body consists of multiple ecosystems that are negatively affected by external influences such as antibiotics. Attempts to eradicate supposedly harmful microorganisms must yield to positive microbiopolitics, which must be based on generative interspecific relationships.

The Spanish researcher S. Cruzada (2020), developing a microbiopolitical discourse, argues that the causative agent of coronavirus is a "species" with which humans do not want to coexist: it is necessary to break the human-virus relationship. Forced individual isolation radically transforms human life performances, behaviour and attitudes are changed, and values are devalued. S. Cruzada declares the "hygienised" and "biosafe" reality that is shaped by the collective efforts of governments, international organisations, scientific and medical institutions, and civil society structures. This, according to the researcher, is the very "microbiopolitics" that manifests the diversity of cultural reactions to the need to accept the conditions posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures – socio-political, economic, legal, cultural-humanitarian – to overcome it.

Considering the above, we can actually say that the concepts of biopolitics turn out to be necessary in the process of studying various manifestations of political behaviour and the production of specific social technologies that have significant potential to contribute to the solution of the most important tasks of humanity’s survival strategy and the preservation of civilisation. The bipolarity of biopolitics lies in the fact that, first, as a certain derivative of philosophical anthropology, it is contemporary scientific knowledge, and, second, it is realized as an effect of "dispersion" of scientific knowledge by mass media and communication, being a kind of factor of primary political reflection.

Originality

The philosophical anthropology is substantiated as the contextual space for the evolution of biopolitics from ancient natural philosophy to modern microbiopolitics, since the key thesis of philosophical anthropology "everything is human" is congenial to the biopolitical maxim "everything is politics". Various aspects of contemporary biopolitics are analysed, in particular those of microbiopolitics, the context of which determines the directions and content of the influence of the microcosm of viruses and bacteria on the macrocosm of socio-political relations.

Conclusions

Agamben, G. (2011). Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. Moscow: Yevropa. (in Russian)

Aristotle. (1996). The Politics and Тhe Constitution of Athens (S. Everson, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. (in English)

Valverde, C. (2013). Antropología filosófica. Valencia: EDICEP. (in Spanish)

LIST OF REFERENCE LINKS

Агамбен Д. Homo sacer. Суверенная власть и голая жизнь. Москва : Европа, 2011. 256 с.

Valverde C. Antropología filosófica. Valencia : EDICEP, 2013. 325 р.

С. К. КОСТЮЧКОВ^1*, І. І. КАРТАШОВА^2*