Utopianism and social being: reconstruction of interaction factors

The history of spiritual culture demonstrates permanent presence of the utopianism phenomenon in various manifestations of social activity. The present variety of definitions of utopia, utopian consciousness and utopianism often contradicting one another indicates nevertheless that there is no clear approach in the research of the relevant problem domain. The objective of the research is thereby characterizing of essential components of utopia phenomenon and specification of its position in the social progress. Since ancient times the human nature itself demonstrates qualities that can produce utopian intensions under certain conditions. Among such qualities are object setting, self-consciousness inclusive of consciousness of own limitedness and creativeness. The consequence of such development of those qualities was human ability to transcend universal senses which found its expression in form of ideals. Utopian images as one of the consistent consequences of projective human nature, tendency of exceeding inner and outer existential bounds can be also regarded as a component of transcendent, ideal world. However, abstract necessity being characteristic for an ideal can't be sufficient for a utopianist. On the contrary, he isinterested in that the necessity becomes tangible. The demand of perceptional and visual manifestation of social ideals is represented in utopias. The latter ones, similarly to ideals, possess the modality of necessity, but in contrast to those, they are specified and visually circumscribed. The orientation of consciousness on the transcendent utopian ideal inevitably causes a negative estimate and extreme rejection of the social order being habitual for the utopianist. In other words, there are two kinds of invariant essential features of utopia; notably, they are absolute rejection of the present reality and proposal of a transcendent alternative project of social order that is implied to replace the reality being rejected. In consideration of the correlation between those two components the researched phenomenon could be defined as a range of methods and consequences of spiritual activity intended for the development and assimilation of images of transcendent necessity in reality. It can be easily discerned what importance the dialectical correlation of utopia and reality has for utopian projects in social processes. Utopia implies a radical transformation of social being and thus displays its creative and conspicuously destructive power. The acquired ability of a man to transcend universal senses, the human ability to create images of a desirable reality, consciousness of own limitedness in space and time, the tendency of surmounting of the limitedness were manifested thereby in the phenomenon of utopia. The phenomenon is based on existential elements of human subjectivity, creative human nature and can be regarded as an important component of social progress

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