Perfection as a value-regulatory principle of ethics of humanism and Renaissance culture of the 14th-16th centuries

Abstract

The article presents and systematizes the fundamental concepts of a philosophical approach to the human perfection in the European spiritual culture of the 14th-16th centuries, namely, in the philosophical pursuits during the period of the Italian Renaissance and the establishment of civic humanism. The research is focused on the basic trends in the inception of the idea of human perfection as well as on its characteristics. Under the analysis are the essential traits of the philosophy of man in the treatises of a number of distinguished thinkers of the period of European Renaissance of the 14th-16th centuries. The article argues that the issues of the free will, natural structure, harmony as well as individual and social dialectics are indicative of a broad spectrum of the Philosophy of Man in the spiritual culture of the 14th-16th centuries. These issues point to the emergence and moulding of a social person, a citizen and a legal entity.
 A special emphasis in the research is laid on the importance and the need to seek the standards and ideals of human life and to provide a philosophical and ethical search for the implementation of the principles of human life and the revival of the standards of human perfection in its universal ascension to the ultimate truths.
 The author offers his own assessment of the formation and development of the issues related to a perfectly wise human being. The concusions are drawn pertaining to the evolution of the philosophy of man in the spiritual culture of the 14th-16th centuries.
 The author comes to the conclusion that, in general, the divine in human nature and man in the divine continuum in all the beauty of self-expression and harmony is one of the main elements of philosophical reflections on perfection as a valuable universe of humanistic ethics. Perfection as an invariant function of a person’s self-regulation in a degree comparison received much less development next to the ethical-aesthetic and spiritual foundations of the formation, development and regeneration of the Renaissance man.
 As a spiritual-intellectual, aesthetic, psychological complex, humanism was characteristic of the worldview and worldview of certain strata of society, in which the principle of perfection was a practical-humanistic regulatory-value principle. The function of theoretical internalization of the person in the philosophy of humanism undoubtedly had a place. The problems of free will, natural organization, harmony, the dialectic of the individual and the social testify to a wide range of intra-subjective philosophical analysis in the systems of the 11th and 11th centuries, and, at the same time, philosophical and ethical searches were aimed at realizing the principles of human life, on the revival of standards of human perfection in his universal ascent to higher truths.