On the "Spiritual": An Essay in Categorial-Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

The concepts of "spirit" [dukh], "spiritual," and "spirituality" have had a strange fate in philosophy. It seems that they are constantly and more widely utilized in the literature—as well as when the solution of the basic question of philosophy is formulated as the "relation of matter and spirit," when the "spiritual life of society" or "spiritual culture" is investigated, and when the issue concerns the "spirituality" of the individual as the manifestation of a high level of development of the socialist personality. At the same time, the categorial status of these concepts not only is not recognized in our philosophy, but in encyclopedic dictionaries and monographs it is asserted that "spirit" is an obsolete concept, a favorite of idealistic philosophy, and that in Marxist science it is replaced by the concept of "consciousness."1