It took me about thirty-three years to get all this into my head. It should be noted that at that time I was not familiar with the theories of Vernadsky and Gumilyov, had not read Schopenhauer and Toynbee, and had not heard the name Chizhevsky. It was 1981, and the country was closed inside and out. I had to think for myself, since there was nothing else to do; It was generally a time of thinking.

Mikhail Weller

All about life

PART ONE

My favorite character is Sandy Pruel. I have a tattoo on my arm: “I KNOW EVERYTHING.” The funny thing is that this is true.

This truth is sometimes creepy. As sound dissipates into echo, the horror dissipates into loneliness.

It all happened on a March night: a spring thunderstorm. I was approaching my thirty-third birthday: that same age. I was poor, lonely and unknown. I lived in a foreign country. I felt bad. Why-why-why? I could have a career, a family, money, position. I was more talented, more worthy than those who flourished in literature. How was the world arranged - unfairly - that I felt bad?

I chose my path myself. And I came to a result that I foresaw as one of the possible, which was undesirable to me. Why didn't I want to change path?

How did this situation come about? Why did I do this? How am I structured, and how is the world structured, and what is the point of all this?..

Where is the frame of reference where human aspirations and suffering are linked to the forward movement of history, what is the final goal and meaning of this movement? How was man created, and how was this world created? Blue lightning flashes blazed, peals of heavenly thunder crashed: it was four o'clock in the morning. Water was gushing into the glass.

Well, somehow, I understood. If you think long and conscientiously, you will always understand in the end. It's just that few people think well. Year after year, on long nights, I lay and came up with My Book. It's a pleasant activity. What was my hurry? There's nowhere to go anyway. And when I came up with it, I began to come up with epigraphs for it. There were many epigraphs. It turns out that all great people were thinking about the same thing. It was a shame to throw them away - they were so suitable. In the end, I left about seven of them: let them stand:

CHAPTER I. Main move

1. Know yourself

Knowing yourself was recommended (Inscription on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi) by Socrates - with his usual sly malice - as initially necessary, the most seemingly simple and at the same time inexhaustibly complex, in order to later know everything else, external. There is peace in man; and there is a person in a world that embraces everything, including man.

Ancient philosophy explored the world using ordinary words and without losing common sense. Later philosophy, delving deeper into knowledge, fragmented the world into separate phenomena and fragmented itself, invented professional terminology, broke up into private and additional disciplines - and in the end turned into a huge set of obscure currents, understandable only to professional “philosophers”.

These “philosophers” explained to people in different ways what people had always known. Much knowledge does not teach wisdom. Mastering the jargon of “philosophers” has never made anyone an Ecclesiastes.

We experience the world through ourselves and through ourselves. Through your feelings and thinking, through your central nervous system. We deal not with the world, but with our ideas about it. Any honest philosophy is idealistic, Schopenhauer rightly said. Now I’ll die and destroy the Universe, Vonnegut said. Even undeniable truths can be proven, Wilde said.

But when a brick falls on your head, then you are dealing with the outside world, without having any idea about it, since your consciousness was instantly knocked off by this brick, which did not stop it from regularly hitting you on the skull. The illustrious contradiction between materialism and idealism regarding the primacy of matter or consciousness is a paradox, and a far-fetched paradox. The war between the sharp ends and the blunt ends. The idealist and the materialist both study an object by its reflection in the mirror.

Philosophy is the science of reflecting objects, says the first. No, about objects in reflection, the second objected. If you can’t tell whether it’s tea or coffee, then what difference does it make to you, asks the waiter? Both seek truth, cognizing through themselves the world outside themselves. Both deal with the system: I - the world. Dialectical unity. And if all people disappear, will the rest of the world remain? Yes. (Although what will actually happen then will be discussed below... this is a key, fundamental moment!) Does this mean that matter exists without its reflection by consciousness? Yes. How do we know this? From experience, i.e. because we have already reflected it in ourselves. And if they didn’t reflect it, then what?

My favorite character is Sandy Pruel. I have a tattoo on my arm: “I KNOW EVERYTHING.” The funny thing is that this is true.

This truth is sometimes creepy. As sound dissipates into echo, the horror dissipates into loneliness.

It all happened on a March night: a spring thunderstorm. I was approaching my thirty-third birthday: that same age. I was poor, lonely and unknown. I lived in a foreign country. I felt bad. Why-why-why? I could have a career, a family, money, position. I was more talented, more worthy than those who flourished in literature. How was the world arranged - unfairly - that I felt bad?

I chose my path myself. And I came to a result that I foresaw as one of the possible, which was undesirable to me. Why didn't I want to change path?

How did this situation come about? Why did I do this? How am I structured, and how is the world structured, and what is the point of all this?..

Where is the frame of reference where human aspirations and suffering are linked to the forward movement of history, what is the final goal and meaning of this movement? How was man created, and how was this world created? Blue lightning flashes blazed, peals of heavenly thunder crashed: it was four o'clock in the morning. Water was gushing into the glass.

Well, somehow, I understood. If you think long and conscientiously, you will always understand in the end. It's just that few people think well. Year after year, on long nights, I lay and came up with My Book. It's a pleasant activity. What was my hurry? There's nowhere to go anyway. And when I came up with it, I began to come up with epigraphs for it. There were many epigraphs. It turns out that all great people were thinking about the same thing. It was a shame to throw them away - they were so suitable. In the end, I left about seven of them: let them stand:

“There is no happiness in life”

Tattoo

“Why are boring people quite happy, but smart and interesting people ultimately manage to poison the lives of themselves and everyone close to them,” he thought?

Ernest Hemingway

"Strong souls require food"

Stendhal

“If we assume that life can be controlled by reason, then the very possibility of life will be destroyed”

Lev Tolstoy

"Libidos and Thanatos"

Sigmund Freud

Albert Einstein

"For the time is near..."

Apocalypse

“And I’m Mishka—the end of your mansion!”

Russian folktale

Knowing yourself was recommended (Inscription on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi) by Socrates - with his usual sly malice - as initially necessary, the most seemingly simple and at the same time inexhaustibly complex, in order to later know everything else, external. There is peace in man; and there is a person in a world that embraces everything, including man.

Ancient philosophy explored the world using ordinary words and without losing common sense. Later philosophy, delving deeper into knowledge, fragmented the world into separate phenomena and fragmented itself, invented professional terminology, broke up into private and additional disciplines - and in the end turned into a huge set of obscure currents, understandable only to professional “philosophers”.

These “philosophers” explained to people in different ways what people had always known. Much knowledge does not teach wisdom. Mastering the jargon of “philosophers” has never made anyone an Ecclesiastes.

We experience the world through ourselves and through ourselves. Through your feelings and thinking, through your central nervous system. We deal not with the world, but with our ideas about it. Any honest philosophy is idealistic, Schopenhauer rightly said. Now I’ll die and destroy the Universe, Vonnegut said. Even undeniable truths can be proven, Wilde said.

But when a brick falls on your head, then you are dealing with the outside world, without having any idea about it, since your consciousness was instantly knocked off by this brick, which did not stop it from regularly hitting you on the skull. The illustrious contradiction between materialism and idealism regarding the primacy of matter or consciousness is a paradox, and a far-fetched paradox. The war between the sharp ends and the blunt ends. The idealist and the materialist both study an object by its reflection in the mirror.

Philosophy is the science of reflecting objects, says the first. No, about objects in reflection, the second objected. If you can’t tell whether it’s tea or coffee, then what difference does it make to you, asks the waiter? Both seek truth, cognizing through themselves the world outside themselves. Both deal with the system: I - the world. Dialectical unity. And if all people disappear, will the rest of the world remain? Yes. (Although what will actually happen then will be discussed below... this is a key, fundamental moment!) Does this mean that matter exists without its reflection by consciousness? Yes. How do we know this? From experience, i.e. because we have already reflected it in ourselves. And if they didn’t reflect it, then what?

And then there wouldn’t be this conversation, which otherwise turns into scholasticism. What is scholasticism? This is a system of logical constructs where there is no single frame of reference common to all issues under consideration. And philosophy precisely does not exist without including human consciousness. What is the essence of the aporia about Achilles and the tortoise? The fact is that the time counting system is arbitrarily closed: instead of a single scale, it is assumed that each period of time is equal to 1/10 of the previous one. Logically impeccable, but the initial violation of a single frame of reference turns the problem into a scholastic one. It’s exactly the same with the “key question of philosophy.”

These are natural sciences, exact ones - physics, chemistry, mathematics - give results that do not depend on the personality and consciousness of a person as such, but philosophy is also based on history, psychology, sociology, i.e. human sciences; try to remove from philosophy everything that concerns man - and there will be no philosophy left. How can one talk about the conclusions of philosophy, conditionally isolating man from the picture of the world? Logically this can be elegant. From the point of view of internal scientific discussions - fruitful: interesting! field for debate! Libraries have been written about this for centuries. It is believed that they have enriched the treasury of human thought. Great minds have compiled a Pantheon in which you will not be crowded.

But man still suffers, does stupid things, is torn between feeling and duty, tries to understand his behavior in this world and often does not understand why he is no happier than the ancient Greeks, say, if since then, over thousands of years, there have been so many great minds have built so many philosophical theories. Not to mention material prosperity and progress.

And this person, my soul, is You. You are. And no one else. And you won’t understand anything in life until you understand yourself. Because you are exactly half, one side, of dialectical unity: you are the world.

If you don’t know well, don’t understand yourself well, you won’t understand anything in this world. Because the world is you. Everything that exists is somehow reflected in you. It is by this reflection that you judge the world. Everyone judges for himself, yeah; There is nothing truer than banal truths - they are confirmed by time, Vambery said. And this lame man understood something.

What is life? Why do some live this way and others live differently? These are some of the most significant questions of humanity that people have thought about in all centuries. Moreover, this topic is so deep that rarely does anyone dive into it seriously, studying various theories and hypotheses, comparing facts, using historical data.

Mikhail Weller's book “Everything about Life” reflects his philosophical thoughts. The concept he proposes has a clear rationale. It is presented in simple language, thanks to which it became famous not only among philosophers, but also among ordinary people interested in philosophy and the laws of the universe. This work is considered one of the most significant in the philosophical literature of the second half of the 20th century.

The author of the book talks about the relationship between human life and the Universe. He writes that all processes are built on the mutual exchange of energy. The Universe can give energy to a person, which he embodies in actions to improve his life. This does not always happen, but even suffering and other negative emotions also have energetic power.

It is worth noting that the author does not impose his point of view. He seems to be thinking out loud, and the reader becomes a witness to this thought process. The book does not tell you how to live or not, it is a deep reflection on the essence of life as such. Not only human life is considered, but also the life of everything in the Universe.

The work belongs to the Prose genre. It was published in 1998 by AST Publishing House. The book is part of the "Same Book" series. On our website you can download the book “Everything about Life” in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format or read online. The book's rating is 4.02 out of 5. Here, before reading, you can also turn to reviews from readers who are already familiar with the book and find out their opinion. In our partner's online store you can buy and read the book in paper form.

Mikhail Weller

Everything about life

PART ONE

My favorite character is Sandy Pruel. I have a tattoo on my arm: “I KNOW EVERYTHING.” The funny thing is that this is true.

This truth is sometimes creepy. As sound dissipates into echo, the horror dissipates into loneliness.

It all happened on a March night: a spring thunderstorm. I was approaching my thirty-third birthday: that same age. I was poor, lonely and unknown. I lived in a foreign country. I felt bad. Why-why-why? I could have a career, a family, money, position. I was more talented, more worthy than those who flourished in literature. How was the world arranged - unfairly - that I felt bad?

I chose my path myself. And I came to a result that I foresaw as one of the possible, which was undesirable to me. Why didn't I want to change path?

How did this situation come about? Why did I do this? How am I structured, and how is the world structured, and what is the point of all this?..

Where is the frame of reference where human aspirations and suffering are linked to the forward movement of history, what is the final goal and meaning of this movement? How was man created, and how was this world created? Blue lightning flashes blazed, peals of heavenly thunder crashed: it was four o'clock in the morning. Water was gushing into the glass.

Well, somehow, I understood. If you think long and conscientiously, you will always understand in the end. It's just that few people think well. Year after year, on long nights, I lay and came up with My Book. It's a pleasant activity. What was my hurry? There's nowhere to go anyway. And when I came up with it, I began to come up with epigraphs for it. There were many epigraphs. It turns out that all great people were thinking about the same thing. It was a shame to throw them away - they were so suitable. In the end, I left about seven of them: let them stand:

“There is no happiness in life”

Tattoo

“Why are boring people quite happy, but smart and interesting people ultimately manage to poison the lives of themselves and everyone close to them,” he thought?

Ernest Hemingway

"Strong souls require food"

Stendhal

“If we assume that life can be controlled by reason, then the very possibility of life will be destroyed”

Lev Tolstoy

"Libidos and Thanatos"

Sigmund Freud

Albert Einstein

"For the time is near..."

Apocalypse

“And I’m Mishka—the end of your mansion!”

Russian folktale

CHAPTER I. Main move

1. Know yourself

Knowing yourself was recommended (Inscription on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi) by Socrates - with his usual sly malice - as initially necessary, the most seemingly simple and at the same time inexhaustibly complex, in order to later know everything else, external. There is peace in man; and there is a person in a world that embraces everything, including man.

Ancient philosophy explored the world using ordinary words and without losing common sense. Later philosophy, delving deeper into knowledge, fragmented the world into separate phenomena and fragmented itself, invented professional terminology, broke up into private and additional disciplines - and in the end turned into a huge set of obscure currents, understandable only to professional “philosophers”.

These “philosophers” explained to people in different ways what people had always known. Much knowledge does not teach wisdom. Mastering the jargon of “philosophers” has never made anyone an Ecclesiastes.

We experience the world through ourselves and through ourselves. Through your feelings and thinking, through your central nervous system. We deal not with the world, but with our ideas about it. Any honest philosophy is idealistic, Schopenhauer rightly said. Now I’ll die and destroy the Universe, Vonnegut said. Even undeniable truths can be proven, Wilde said.

Mikhail Weller

All about life

PART ONE

My favorite character is Sandy Pruel. I have a tattoo on my arm: “I KNOW EVERYTHING.” The funny thing is that this is true.

This truth is sometimes creepy. As sound dissipates into echo, the horror dissipates into loneliness.

It all happened on a March night: a spring thunderstorm. I was approaching my thirty-third birthday: that same age. I was poor, lonely and unknown. I lived in a foreign country. I felt bad. Why-why-why? I could have a career, a family, money, position. I was more talented, more worthy than those who flourished in literature. How was the world arranged - unfairly - that I felt bad?

I chose my path myself. And I came to a result that I foresaw as one of the possible, which was undesirable to me. Why didn't I want to change path?

How did this situation come about? Why did I do this? How am I structured, and how is the world structured, and what is the point of all this?..

Where is the frame of reference where human aspirations and suffering are linked to the forward movement of history, what is the final goal and meaning of this movement? How was man created, and how was this world created? Blue lightning flashes blazed, peals of heavenly thunder crashed: it was four o'clock in the morning. Water was gushing into the glass.

Well, somehow, I understood. If you think long and conscientiously, you will always understand in the end. It's just that few people think well. Year after year, on long nights, I lay and came up with My Book. It's a pleasant activity. What was my hurry? There's nowhere to go anyway. And when I came up with it, I began to come up with epigraphs for it. There were many epigraphs. It turns out that all great people were thinking about the same thing. It was a shame to throw them away - they were so suitable. In the end, I left about seven of them: let them stand:

“There is no happiness in life”

Tattoo

“Why are boring people quite happy, but smart and interesting people ultimately manage to poison the lives of themselves and everyone close to them,” he thought?

Ernest Hemingway

"Strong souls require food"

Stendhal

“If we assume that life can be controlled by reason, then the very possibility of life will be destroyed”

Lev Tolstoy

"Libidos and Thanatos"

Sigmund Freud

Albert Einstein

"For the time is near..."

Apocalypse

“And I’m Mishka—the end of your mansion!”

Russian folktale

CHAPTER I. Main move

1. Know yourself

Knowing yourself was recommended (Inscription on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi) by Socrates - with his usual sly malice - as initially necessary, the most seemingly simple and at the same time inexhaustibly complex, in order to later know everything else, external. There is peace in man; and there is a person in a world that embraces everything, including man.

Ancient philosophy explored the world using ordinary words and without losing common sense. Later philosophy, delving deeper into knowledge, fragmented the world into separate phenomena and fragmented itself, invented professional terminology, broke up into private and additional disciplines - and in the end turned into a huge set of obscure currents, understandable only to professional “philosophers”.

These “philosophers” explained to people in different ways what people had always known. Much knowledge does not teach wisdom. Mastering the jargon of “philosophers” has never made anyone an Ecclesiastes.

We experience the world through ourselves and through ourselves. Through your feelings and thinking, through your central nervous system. We deal not with the world, but with our ideas about it. Any honest philosophy is idealistic, Schopenhauer rightly said. Now I’ll die and destroy the Universe, Vonnegut said. Even undeniable truths can be proven, Wilde said.

But when a brick falls on your head, then you are dealing with the outside world, without having any idea about it, since your consciousness was instantly knocked off by this brick, which did not stop it from regularly hitting you on the skull. The illustrious contradiction between materialism and idealism regarding the primacy of matter or consciousness is a paradox, and a far-fetched paradox. The war between the sharp ends and the blunt ends. The idealist and the materialist both study an object by its reflection in the mirror.

Philosophy is the science of reflecting objects, says the first. No, about objects in reflection, the second objected. If you can’t tell whether it’s tea or coffee, then what difference does it make to you, asks the waiter? Both seek truth, cognizing through themselves the world outside themselves. Both deal with the system: I - the world. Dialectical unity. And if all people disappear, will the rest of the world remain? Yes. (Although what will actually happen then will be discussed below... this is a key, fundamental moment!) Does this mean that matter exists without its reflection by consciousness? Yes. How do we know this? From experience, i.e. because we have already reflected it in ourselves. And if they didn’t reflect it, then what?

And then there wouldn’t be this conversation, which otherwise turns into scholasticism. What is scholasticism? This is a system of logical constructs where there is no single frame of reference common to all issues under consideration. And philosophy precisely does not exist without including human consciousness. What is the essence of the aporia about Achilles and the tortoise? The fact is that the time counting system is arbitrarily closed: instead of a single scale, it is assumed that each period of time is equal to 1/10 of the previous one. Logically impeccable, but the initial violation of a single frame of reference turns the problem into a scholastic one. It’s exactly the same with the “key question of philosophy.”

These are natural sciences, exact ones - physics, chemistry, mathematics - give results that do not depend on the personality and consciousness of a person as such, but philosophy is also based on history, psychology, sociology, i.e. human sciences; try to remove from philosophy everything that concerns man - and there will be no philosophy left. How can one talk about the conclusions of philosophy, conditionally isolating man from the picture of the world? Logically this can be elegant. From the point of view of internal scientific discussions - fruitful: interesting! field for debate! Libraries have been written about this for centuries. It is believed that they have enriched the treasury of human thought. Great minds have compiled a Pantheon in which you will not be crowded.

But man still suffers, does stupid things, is torn between feeling and duty, tries to understand his behavior in this world and often does not understand why he is no happier than the ancient Greeks, say, if since then, over thousands of years, there have been so many great minds have built so many philosophical theories. Not to mention material prosperity and progress.

And this person, my soul, is You. You are. And no one else. And you won’t understand anything in life until you understand yourself. Because you are exactly half, one side, of dialectical unity: you are the world.

If you don’t know well, don’t understand yourself well, you won’t understand anything in this world. Because the world is you. Everything that exists is somehow reflected in you. It is by this reflection that you judge the world. Everyone judges for himself, yeah; There is nothing truer than banal truths - they are confirmed by time, Vambery said. And this lame man understood something.

Knowing yourself requires perhaps only two things: honesty and time. Honesty - to calmly get to the bottom of yourself to the truth, and time for the same. Because if you cannot see the truth in yourself - a mirror that reflects the whole world - then how can you expect to see it outside of yourself? In a sense, honesty and intelligence are synonymous. Both are the ability to see the truth. Here honesty is mental integrity. A person delves into himself, his doubts, good and evil feelings and thoughts, understanding the motives of his actions, being aware of them - even and especially if it is unpleasant for him: he does not like himself this way.

People tend to embellish themselves in accordance with morality. Like many mortals, Captain Levasseur was least interested in the truth about himself. Let's think honestly - this is the highest morality, said de Cartes.

Truth and morality are different things, like the nominative and the imperative. It is often necessary to act according to morality, but to think correctly is possible only according to the truth. Morality is the ready-made and aged fruit of other people’s thoughts.

There is not a single trait in a person that he cannot question. To see the world, you must first wipe the mirror in which this world is reflected until clear. A good memory is needed here. You need to know some biology, anatomy, physiology, psychology. You need to imagine how your body works. You need to read the biography of your soul;

And only then can you throw up your hands and cry out: “Oh Lord, where has this taken me? Where did I end up?!”