Rebekah Frumkina. In Memoriam

In Memorial
Rebekah Frumkina

Publication date: January 25, 2000

Yu.A. Schrader "Ethics: an introduction to the subject." Moscow, "Text", 1999.

Everyone chooses for themselves

Time for love and for prayer.

Yu. Levitansky

Nowadays, a scientist expresses himself primarily in three genres: article, review, book. Everyone writes articles and reviews, many people write books. Articles present their own results, reviews discuss those of others, books reflect the results of long-term personal efforts or, if they belong to a group of people, demonstrate the state of science at the moment. However, there is one more genre: unlike those listed above, it is the lot of a few daredevils. This genre is textbook. The great thing about textbooks is that they are either very good or not textbooks at all. After all, offering a book as a textbook is only the intention of the author, and whether it is actually destined to become a textbook depends on the reader. So, the book becomes a textbook.

Therefore, for now I will talk about Yu.A. Schrader’s book as such. Let me begin with the fact that in modern Russia, ethics as a science with its own subject and methods, even to an educated humanist, does not seem to be a completely clearly defined area of ​​knowledge. Of course, in our culture certain names are associated with ethical problems - Socrates and Epicurus, Spinoza and Kant, Nietzsche and Tolstoy. People who do not consciously identify themselves with any denomination often emphasize that they share Christian ethics.

In everyday life, ethics is often identified with a set of moral norms: we evaluate any action as ethical or unethical, meaning compliance with or violation of moral norms. Thus, when the author in the preface defines ethics as a branch of philosophy that studies the phenomenon of morality, he places further exposition in a frame that is absolutely necessary for the general reader - it is to him that the book is addressed. A more difficult and risky task cannot be imagined, which is why I consider the author who decided to write a textbook, especially a textbook on ethics, to be a daredevil.

I see the author’s particular success in the fact that, as an introduction to the subject, he proposed to analyze the situation of moral choice. It seems to me that here the author managed to pick up a truly “golden key” to the reader’s mind and, no less important, to his heart. Everyone knows that it is extremely difficult to present any section of philosophy in an accessible manner. This is the case for at least two reasons:

1) the reader understands only those answers for which he has questions;

2) the least questionable thing is that which, although it seems obvious, is not so at all.

Yu.A. Schrader “hit the bull’s eye” because the situation of moral choice was given to us in direct personal experience. It is truly familiar to everyone, regardless of the depth of reflection, level of culture and richness of the vocabulary. Life forces us to choose, and the question of whether we acted properly or improperly is forgotten at best, or repressed at worst.

Without condescension to the reader, but with maximum accessibility, the author was able to explain, using everyday examples, the difference between practical morality, which we are guided by in situations of moral choice, and ethics, which does not teach how to act, but explores the very phenomenon of a moral situation and the grounds on which we choose. I see another success in the following. Intending to present various ethical concepts - from antiquity to the present day, the author first discussed with the reader where the difference in ethical systems generally comes from (p. 23 et seq.). At the same time, the author convincingly showed that the main sets of moral prohibitions in different ethical systems are very similar. Yu.A. Schrader himself comes from the Christian ethical system, but reminds that other religions have their own moral guidelines, which he is not ready to judge due to the lack of proper competence. As a result, anyone who has read to Chapter 1, which talks about the prerequisites for moral choice, will almost certainly not put the book aside. After all, the author chose his reader as an equal and worthy interlocutor, and it would be strange to interrupt this conversation mid-sentence. Yu.A. Schrader managed to maintain the position of “conversation on equal terms” throughout the entire space of the book. At the same time, he did not fall into the primitive, which is so characteristic of most American philosophical books “for everyone,” and did not decorate the presentation, like a Christmas tree, with garlands of poetic quotes, which is so tempting for the Russian tradition. I note that the difference between simplicity and primitiveness is not as obvious as it seems at first glance. For example, the author considered it necessary to give as precise a definition as possible of the concept act , emphasizing the moment of a person’s conscious preference for one possibility from a fan of others. And it is right. Talking with my younger colleagues, I discovered that when thinking about someone’s unseemly or adventurous actions, they forget that the space of action today is radically different from what it was five years ago - it has expanded dramatically. The due remained the same, but the will to resist temptation in a number of cases turned out to be insufficient.

I would like to draw special attention to the tone of the book, which is related to the religious orientation of the author. Yu.A. Schrader is a practicing Catholic. At the same time, he was able to speak out on the most subtle ethical issues in such a way that his text is equally intelligible and acceptable for non-confessional people (to which the author of this review counts himself), and, I dare to believe, for people of other faiths, and also, of course, for non-religious people.

The book introduces us to the ethical views of different authors. And be it St. Bernard of Clairvaux or St. Gregory Palamas, Descartes or Spinoza, Pope John Paul II or the Russian theologian N.O. Lossky, Leo Tolstoy or the great pianist G.G. Neuhaus, every time we see first of all the noble faces of people, each of whom fulfilled the Testament in one way or another. They thought, felt, sinned, suffered, loved their neighbors and sought truth and goodness. Is it possible after this to doubt that “there is an unshakable rock of values”?