Evolution of perception of “living” in religious and philosophical discourse

Abstract

Modern scientific discourse, basing on the postnonclassical scientific world picture and on the permanent-transitive fluctuations of the postmodern period, still includes such eternal questions as the problem of a man, human life and health, the fundamental factors of the world and human being in the world.
Life is the only biologically possible way of human being in the world. Its value lies not only in the specificities of existing biological forms and various manifestations, which are nevertheless a unique phenomenon of being in their totality, but also in the possibility of self-reflection, conscious experience of the phenomenon itself and the ability to form symbolic pictures of the existential world on this basis.
The purpose of the article is to examine the transformation of scientific discourse on the concept of “living” within the framework of the formation and development of religious and ethical studies.
To achieve this purpose, the author analyzes the categorical framework of the concept of “living”. Analyzing classical philosophical and modern scientific approaches to the definition of the concept of “living”, the author distinguishes two main approaches to the definition of life: substrate and functional.
In the article the main attention is focused on the analysis of religious and bioethical discourses in the study of “living”.
Bioethical discourse proceeds from the need for identifying moral norms and imperatives that can answer the question of the limits of the existence of “living” and determine the moral possibilities of impact (expansion or narrowing) on these limits. One of the fundamental problems of bioethics is the problem of life as a value. In modern bioethical discourse there are two main points of view in this regard. The first may be named the ethics of the sacrality of life or life as the highest value (sanctity of life), the second – the ethics of the quality life (quality of life). The sacrality of life implies an attitude to the phenomenon of “living” as to the object of exceptional weight, of the most important value, and on this basis requires a reverent attitude to it. This approach has the most clear and full representation by modern religious discourse.
The religious content of the bioethical discourse on “living” is manifested, firstly, in approval of the objective ontological status of the human personality by the Christian personalism; secondly, in the teachings of Christian theologians who claim the beauty and righteousness of life created by God, where nature and human are understood as something sacral, and therefore the actions against them are sinful and unacceptable; thirdly, the basis of human life is rooted in the spiritual world of human himself related to the divine transcendence.
In is concluded that modern religious and ethical discourse forms a system of categories and concepts that describe applied ethical conceptual constructs in order to form a person’s moral attitude to all living. The proposed author’s approach allowed establishing the essence of modern bioethical discourse in the study of “living”.