This thesis is a comprehensive scientific review of individualism in the classical philosophy of law. In this research a new direction of actualization of panoramic vision of creating ‘the self’ is embodied in the process of philosophical and historical cognition of individualism. The object of the paper is to amplify and to deepen the motivated theory in terms of present-day extrapolated project of understanding the individualism phenomenon through the length of future-oriented evolutionary rationale of the semantics of its sense of being in the light of science.
Philosophic and legal and historical approach to comprehension of meanings of natural and legal categories calls for, in particular, taking into account the changes in historical types of philosophizing and their sociocultural conditionality. Every epoch from the historical point of view represents its own philosophical stereotypes (samples), which retain their cultural importance up to the present day. In this respect it is worth starting ‘ab ovo’ from the philosophical classics of the Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Early Modern period, the Enlightenment, and the Classical German Philosophy.
We discovered that the legal ideology of the Renaissance epoch greatly influenced the generation of the philosophic and legal thinking based on the awareness that the philosophic and legal truth is impregnated with individual judgement; the crucial role in its discovery belongs to the personality as a subject of reality and law. The basis of the Renaissance legal culture is the human’s awareness of their individuality, their right to life space, their own originality, self-awareness, self-actualization, and access to benefits of the world. For this very reason the individualist of that epoch is endowed with such traits as will power, goal commitment, adaptability, flexibility of mind, insatiable zeal, tirelessness, self-sufficiency, love of freedom, etc. The philosophic and legal principles of the humanistic individualism were established, such as: humanism, anthropocentrism, deism and equality, inherent value, sovereignty, autonomy, self-cognition, naturalism, harmony, rationalism, morality, freedom and responsibility, tolerance.
It is substantiated that individualism in Classical German Philosophy is a dualistic individualism, since in solving of virtually any problem it contains contradictory trends that also contributed to the attempts either to divide these trends artificially, or to synthesize them in a new manner. We believe that, in spite of its nature of this kind, this individualism was valuable for development of this phenomenon on the whole by its common patterns as follows: a human is a moral person endowed with dignity, independence and autonomy; a human depends on freedom as a conscious objective necessity; perception of a human as a being that acts accordingly, development of a human is possible only due to their activity; a human is a law-maker of theoretical and practical activity; deduction of the evidence of existence of the outer world from acts of subjectivity, i.e. interest to the inner moral subjective state of the individual; the claim that a human is a perfect part of nature; disclosure of the mental human nature, their moral law; acknowledgement of intellectual autonomy of a personality, when cognition is an activity; a statement that there is free will before any action; recognition of equivalent moral abilities and the identity of free will with moral act; other personalities are viewed through the human’s moral law; the evidence that the basis of virtue is underlying in the human mind; everything in the world matters only as means, and only the human is autotelic; identity of free will with moral action; the human is a personality due to their self-awareness; the human’s personal microcosm is a model of the macrocosm; consideration of the existence as a product of the human’s creative freedom, their activity; the human must act in a moral manner in harmony with a-priori duty only, respectively, it is the reason that reminds the human about the necessity to follow the supernatural requirements of duty; the sense of guilt makes up the foundation of the moral, which transcendental, deep source is the free will; it is spirituality, which is the internal unity of immaterial personality, that is the basis of practical reason, morality; interpretation of free self-determination of an individual as a manifestation of rational, universal, transcendental, moral principle, one of the requirements of which is the compatibility of the individual’s freedom of action with the freedom of action of every other individual
