Anthropology Searches by Alexander Bogdanov

The article aims to reconstruct Alexander Bogdanov's anthropology searches. The sources of the material for the research were: Bogdanov's theoretical & methodological works; works of art; social and political journalism; notebooks (RSASPH. Fund 259); philosophical works of representatives of socialist thought and Russian religious philosophy. Bogdanov understands human as a whole, as a microcosm organizing the world for oneself, but also as a mechanical organization of "complexes of elements of experience" and as a reflection, part of the whole-nature. The antagonism between the organizer and the doer, according to Bogdanov, turned the human into a part-fraction-limitation. The "integration" of the human, the return to an all-round person-whole is an overcoming of this antagonism, which starts in industrial capitalism where the proletarian is not only a doer, but also an organizer of the machine. People's labor transforms external nature and themselves. Bogdanov defined creativity in a positivist key: the new is a recombination of the elements of the old. At the same time, Bogdanov acknowledges nature as the primary source of creativity (= position of Russian religious philosophy). Capacity for creativity can make the proletariat an active social subject, a fighter for a new world, from which stems the idea of proletarian culture. The comradely method of thinking formed, according to Bogdanov, within proletarian collectives supplants authoritarian and individualistic views of the world and becomes dominant in socialism. Bogdanov's view of a person is contradictory. Rejection of authoritarianism often goes to belittling a person as a point to which social forces are applied. On the other hand, Bogdanov holds that, in the realm of collectivism, personality will flourish most magnificently. Bogdanov criticizes Taylor's scientific management, which he sees as a transformation of a person into a machine; Bogdanov is close to Berdyaev's position in this issue. At the same time, Bogdanov believes in the advantage of scientific and technical standards over legal and moral norms, without going, unlike Berdyaev, beyond the ethics of law into the ethics of creativity. Pronouncing his otherworldliness in the issues of morality, in his notebooks Bogdanov asserts: the aim-cause does not justify vile means; he contrasts the elastic conscience and cynicism of the bourgeois political culture to the adherence to principles and serving the bright ideals of socialism. In Red Star, Bogdanov makes a warning: consistent cold rationalism leads to the danger of a physical obliteration of another historical and cultural community on account of a lack of resources for further progressive development. However, later, in Tectology, he calmly continues affirming the leadership, monism of the natural-scientific model of cognition. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that Bogdanov, being a successor of the "second positivism" and a Marxist simultaneously, has a contradictory vision of the human as a utilitarian-mechanistic annex of social forces and as a many-sided and original creator of oneself, an organizer of society and nature.

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