Spirituality and Freedom

Abstract

The approach of the academician V.A. Lektorsky to the problem of the relation­ship between spirituality and rationality is analyzed. He distinguishes “secular” and religious understanding of this problem. The common point between them is that spirituality as the highest level reached by free personal development is de­fined by orientation to super-individual values. Religion calls a source of these values the Absolute and secular culture – “spiritual production”. From the Abso­lute, there is no direct way to the spirituality of the personality in her concrete manifestations, and “spiritual production” can make not spirituality but its imita­tions. The prospect of the emasculation of spirituality and its devastation is so of­fered. Substitution of spirituality by its pseudo-rational substitutes in a so-called “technological civilization” threatens a destructive crisis. Overcoming a crisis demands the merging of spirituality and rationality in synthetic unity. In many innovative works, V.A. Lektorsky critically estimates the possibilities of this merge and offers a new vision of civilization development prospects. In the arti­cle, understanding spirituality as the potential of personal freedom realized con­cerning universal cultural values is offered. The relationship between the person­ality and culture defines its positive or negative sense. For this culture, the spirituality of the person, which promotes its stability, and supports its valuable structure, is positive; vice versa, the protest spirituality, loosening this structure, is called “anti-cultural”, negative. Spirituality is not an honorary title given to persons, society, or the culture for certain advantages or virtues. On the contrary, it is recognition of an opportunity to realize freedom internally inherent in them. Freedom – is a necessary condition of spirituality.