The “Idea of Human” Literary Category: Epistemological Potential
Authors:   North Caucasus Federal University (Stavropol, Russian Federation), Golovko Vyacheslav M. 
Published: September 2021

The “idea of human” (“type of attitude to the world”) is considered as a relevant category of the conceptual apparatus of the modern science of literature. The aim of the work is to analyze the theoretical and methodological potential of this category on the basis of large typological units of the literary process, marked with the concepts of “historical and literary era”, “artistic and cognitive cycle”, “literary direction”, “big style”, “artistic method”. The research used the methods of a typological and complex study of literary works, which in the synthesis of literary criticism and philosophy determine the strategy of searches in the field of theoretical and methodological content of the “idea of human” category as the foundation of the literary and philosophical anthropology of cultural and historical eras. The historical and genetic links between the worldview aesthetic principles and the artistic practice of literary trends are problematized. The logic of the research reveals the concept “object – knowledge”, fundamental for epistemology, in the aspects of the structuring of the knowledge of the methodological semantics of the “idea of human” category and of the functioning of the definitions “generalized idea of human”, “type of attitude to the world”, “concept of human and reality”, “whole of human”, “human as a value”. The article shows that the “idea of human” as a philosophical and aesthetic interpretation of the nature and essence of human at a certain stage in the development of artistic consciousness, worked out by the whole culture (R.R. Moskvina, G.V. Mokronosov) and defining integrity and logical consistency of the artistic system, is a synergistically functional semantic core of the historical and cultural era, and this core contains the dialectical potential of “negation of the negation”. As a variable, the historical “idea of human”, in the perspective of the stage development of artistic consciousness, undergoes dramatic changes and is realized in the logic of the successive change of historical and cultural epochs and their philosophical paradigms, in the constant alternation of “realistic” and “mystical”, materialistic and idealistic methods of cognition and images of human and the world (D.I. Chizhevsky, A.M. Panchenko, and others). The conclusions are substantiated that the successive development of literary trends, creative methods and their axiological systems is conditioned by the dynamics of “types of attitude to the world”; that the functioning of the “idea of human” category in literary discourse is focused on argumentation of the ontological nature of fiction, on the identification of philosophical and aesthetic principles that determine the systematic nature and the successive change of artistic and cognitive cycles; that the evolution of the “idea of human” within the framework of one artistic and cognitive cycle is fixed by the dynamics of genre systems since, in the correlations of method, genre and style, “the idea of human” acts as a factor in genre formation.