CONCEPT OF PERSONALITY AS A RELICT OF MODERN ERA

Abstract

The cardinal socio-cultural transformations of today are manifested in the profound transformations of the economic, political and social life of society, causing the depreciation of those ideological and axiological constants that have determined the life of the European community for long. Everything that has been recently considered both a norm, and a peculiar ideal, the ultimate goal that characterized the life of society and every individual, loses its explanatory power, turning into an illusion that enslaves a person by depriving him/her of his/her right to his/her own life and freedom, which is manifested in a particularly clear way in the failure of modern educational system to meet socio-cultural demands of society and meet the requirements of time. Of course, the inability of the ideology and values of the modern paradigm to meet the challenges of the present has led to the formation of new ideological narratives, which, however, do not always acquire the universality and legitimacy inherent in the ideals and norms of the modernist paradigm. Thus, one of the key issues of discussion, which, in spite of all worldview and socio-cultural transformations, remains the core of the sociohumanitarian science, is the concept of a person that invariably continues to be used both in intellectual discourse and in serving as the core or even a peculiar social ideal of pedagogy and psychology. Alongside, in the philosophical discourse the tendency towards the imbalance of the universal social project of modernity with its inherent belief in the liberation of man from external coercion through the introduction of utopian humanistic ideals is most clearly manifested. After all, history has shown that wise management of social processes, based on rational calculation, control and full predictability of the results of influence, is not only a utopian project that cannot be realized, but above all a program whose implementation could lead to new ones more terrible forms of enslavement of a person. The discovery of the failure of the social project of modernity was initiated in the works of F. Nietzsche, and subsequently found its conceptual shaping in the writings of M. Foucault, J. Lyotard, J. Delos, F. Guattari, J. Lacan and others, who focused their attention not only on criticizing the weaknesses of the modern project, since the adoption of the concept of «personality» in the European intellectual discourse was the result of an attempt to put into practice the social projects of secular humanism, which was conceptualized as a social program which would ensure the liberation of man from all forms of enslavement and coercion by means of reason, thus laying the foundation for the formation of an «ideal society» of free, equal and egalitarian people. The social ideal thus formed, was a kind of goal, the realization of which would become possible in the event that all people would be liberated from the rule of tradition and especially religion, and turned into conscious and independent legislators of their own lives. Instead, the paradigm of the postmodern problem of man and, above all, the concept of personality, loses its meaning, since no mode of life can be less or more authentic. It is emphasized that the change in the image of a person is the result of a change in ontological representations – the destruction of the inherent modern intellectual discourse of the concept of the integrity of the world brings the idea of discreteness and chaos to the avant-garde of philosophical discourse. In other words, the postmodern world is deprived of any stable nucleus – the «meta-narrative», which would help to navigate the person in the world. Having blown up the basic principles of the modernist paradigm, postmodernism has become a peculiar point of bifurcation, a transitional stage on the way of shaping the image of a person of the future, whose peculiarity will be determined not only by the metanarrantive, which in due time the secular humanism turned into, but also by humanochnologies, which, leading to the formation of a post-person at the best would lead to the practical realization of an ideal society, and, at worst – create new forms of inequality and enslavement, thereby laying the foundations for preserving the concept of «personality», its meaningfulness being substantially transformed.