MANIFESTATION
OF THE COLLECTIVISM
OF THE HUMAN INDIVIDUAL
p The formation of the individual as a personality was initiated with the emergence of collectives of thinking beings mutually connected through social labour and through common spiritual interests. This was one of the conditions ensuring the relative stability of the human collectives as distinct from the herd, and further providing for the emergence of a specifically human feature, the need for affirmation as a personality.
p The spiritual commonality of humans is a social necessity. Material and social causes are of overriding importance in establishing this necessity. However this unity emerges as a result also of the human striving for cognition of the surrounding world and for confirmation of the supremacy of the human over nature. Thus it may be said that broad and universal human demands contribute to the emergence of spiritual unity. In substance the demonstration of the human propensity for collectivism also lies at the basis of morality.
p Concrete forms of morality are determined by the forms of human association and by the level of the social consciousness of the members of a given grouping. Since one and the same person simultaneously belongs to several interlocking yet highly divergent (in terms of the nature of the ties) social groups, each individual is the bearer of an entire complex of moral principles: class, national, religious, to name a few. These principles are sometimes in harmony and sometimes in conflict depending on the circumstances for they are influenced by the vagaries and peripetia of his social existence. Nevertheless, seen as a whole these principles form not a conglomerate, but rather a complex system of interacting moral principles, among which in class society the dominant role is performed by those which are determined by the class status of their bearer. Marxist-Leninist science of society has demonstrated that the moral principles of the ruling class of contemporary society—the working class, offer the most coherent solutions to universal human problems, that communist ethics and morality embody those principles imperative for the harmonious 52 spiritual unity in the future of all individuals on the basis of voluntary service to society, posited as the highest spiritual need of its members.
p The universal elements of morality emerged during the early stages of social development—when people became cognizant of the fact that there is a human race and that, independent of the vagaries of individual life, each person remains a member of the human race and is therefore called upon to bear spiritual responsibility for its continued existence. This responsibility before society came to be expressed in terms of individual moral responsibility, for example in the form of responsibility before God—quite fully reflecting, however, earthly relations and human experience.
Science brought the question of the spiritual responsibility of man before the human-species down from heaven to earth. Confirming the objectivity of truth, the equality of all before the truth, and the appeal of scientific truths to all thinking people, science and conviction based upon knowledge became one of the pillars supporting human spiritual unity. Science proclaimed specific moral principles having an all-pervasive nature and universal significance.
Notes