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Philosophy and Culture
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Goryunov M.A. Post-Religious Emotionalism and Immaneul Kant's Affect Theory

Abstract: Post-religious emotionalism is one of the most nettlesome topics today. There have been researches undertaken both to study psychophysiological sources of emotions and to describe contemporary cultural forms of emotions. In his article Goryunov offers to pay ttention to the very beginning of the epoch of Enlightenment when the sensuality raised by religious rituals tried to find a place in the new secular world. Peter Sloterdijk's thoughts on the general cynicism and Jean Baudrillard's observation of the loss of emotionality are interpreted by the researcher as the description of unsuccessful experience of the transfer from clerical sensuality to secular sensuality. As the opposition to these views, the researcher describes the ideas of Epicurus, the ancient philosopher. Goryonov also performs a brief analysis of one of the attempts to avoid the aforesaid problem, i.e. Kant's suggestion to view natural human affects as the substitution for high feelings experienced by religious people during praying or church service. The main idea is to allow strong irrational feelings to be felt and shown. Affects or passions cannot be stopped by the reason. On the contrary, the reason is influenced by them, too, and therefore takes the religious side fast. This is why the researcher suggests that we should replace church rituals with the aesthetic experience of high feelings. In his research Goryunov has applied the methods of the phenomenological analysis, deductive and inductive logic, technology of the historical comparison and hermeneutics. The article presents the researcher's attempt to describe the initial stage of Enlightenment not as the history of ideas but the history of emotions and the rapid transfer from religious sensuality ro secular sensuality based on Kant's affect theory. Conclusions. Firstly, the transfer from the clerical picture of the world to the secular world view involves not only the adoption of new ideas but also a new model of feelings and emotional experience. Secondly,  this is a long and difficult transfer because our emotions are not regulated by our mind so well. Sometimes this creates particular phenomena such as cynicism. Thirdly, the model of emotional adaptation to new post-religious views offered by Kant and based on the concept of emotions typical for those times allows to overcome the cynical 'burnout' of emotions. 


Keywords:

world view, philosophy, enlightenment, reason, passion, feeling, emotion, affect, religion, ritual


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