Philosophical Aspects of the Problem of "Artificial Man" in Fiction

Gorokhov Pavel Aleksandrovich Doctor of Philosophy Professor, Department of Humanitarian and Socio-Economic Disciplines, Orenburg Branch of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration; Educational Center “Eurasia” 460000, Russia, Orenburgskaya oblast', g. Orenburg, ul. Kuracha, 26 erlitz@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Many significant problems of classical and modern philosophy before their conceptual design in special works were first put on the pages of masterpieces of world literature. Philosophy subsequently only systematically formalized those ideas that were already "floating in the air" of the epoch, although it gave them a special ideological significance. In this regard, the problem of the creation of artificial man and the creation of artificial intelligence is no exception – issues that have now become not just potential, but also actual scientific tasks and often turn out to be the subject of consideration of modern philosophy. The original genetic kinship of philosophy and literature as forms of human culture and meaning formation made it possible to comprehend the most important problems in works rich in ideological content and beautiful in form.

The problem of the creation of an artificial man and the stories associated with it were born in the depths of European literature of the XVIII-XIX centuries, and then they fruitfully developed in the twentieth century, and to this day they continue to attract the attention of writers and philosophers with their newly discovered facets. The purpose of this article is to explore the philosophical aspects of the problem of artificial man in the classic works of fantasy literature of the XIX–XX centuries. This goal is achieved by consistent consideration and comparison of philosophical and anthropological ideas that can be isolated from the works of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Mary Shelley, Herbert George Wells and M.A. Bulgakov.

Over the past three decades, such domestic and foreign researchers as Fred Botting ^[17], P.A. Gorokhov have addressed the philosophical aspects of the problem of artificial man in the works of these classics ^{[2;3;4;5;6;7;8]}, Y. Kagarlitsky ^[9], I.B. Krieger ^[11], Nicholas Michod ^[20], K.A. Svasyan ^[12], Christopher Selbanev ^[21], I.N. Pavlova ^[13].  

Hermeneutical methods such as interpretation and reconstruction of meanings, comparative historical analysis, and philosophical comparative studies are used as the methodological basis of this historical and philosophical research.

In world literature, an artificial man, created by inquisitive scientists, first appeared in the great drama of the German thinker and poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe "Faust" - of course, coming not only from the canons of purely fantastic literature, but also in general narrow literary classifications. Goethe (1749-1832), among other things, was an untalented naturalist who was quite actively engaged in natural science (for example, he discovered the mandibular bone in humans) and created the doctrine of color, an alternative to Newtonian. In Goethe, an artificially created human being - a homunculus - is created by the scientist Wagner, who is obsessed with a passion for purely dogmatic knowledge and was once a pupil of Faust.

In the first part of the tragedy, Faust characterizes Wagner aptly and unflatteringly: "an insignificant worm of dry science." But it is the aged and gained empirical knowledge Wagner in the second part of the tragedy, together with Mephistopheles, creates an artificial man in a flask. Already such an ambiguous co-authorship of this invention makes one think about its "dark" side, about those diabolical potentials that may be hidden in it. But Wagner is naively delighted with his creation, and he sincerely dreams of the coming era when scientists will be able to create artificial people.:

But in the future , the mind is undoubtedly

Victory is to be won over the case,

And a similar brain, thinking perfectly,

More than once the thinker will create! ^{[2, p. 349]}

(translated by N. Kholodkovsky)

As you know, in "Faust" Goethe used alchemical concepts, according to which a homunculus (from the Latin word "man") is a human-like creature that can be created by mixing blood and sperm in a test tube and pronouncing special spells. This kind of creation was traditionally called by alchemists "the child of the Sun and the Moon." Even in his youth, Goethe devoted a lot of time to the study of alchemical works, including he read the books of Paracelsus, in which the homunculus and the ways of its creation were described. In the XVIII century, biology was going through a period of formation and conceptualization; in it, as in chemistry, theories and ideas dominated, which today seem completely ridiculous. Back in the XVI – XVII centuries, animalculists - supporters of the active male principle - believed that the human embryo (homunculus) was entirely present in the sperm. Once in a woman's body, this embryo grows and becomes a full-fledged person. They were opposed by ovists who believed that the homunculus was hidden in the egg.    

Telling the story of the creation of the homunculus, Goethe invited the reader to reflect on the question of the expediency of the scientist's rivalry with wildlife. No wonder Mephistopheles makes fun of Wagner when he says that he has already met such "crystallized people". And although these people did not appear from the retort, but quite naturally, but, nevertheless, they are completely devoid of soul and thought. These are the associates and future followers of Wagner, the "insignificant worm of dry science". Even in the scene with the student from the first part of Faust, Goethe, through the mouth of Mephistopheles, perfectly characterizes the supporters of such a mechanistic, devoid of a living soul of natural science:

A living object wanting to study,

In order to get a clear knowledge of him, -

The scientist first expels the soul,

Then the object is dismembered into parts

And he sees them, but it's a pity: their spiritual connection

Meanwhile, she disappeared, took off! ^{[2, pp. 169-170]}

(translated by N. Kholodkovsky)

These lines from the great drama correlate with the epistolary reflections of the young Goethe, the impetus for which was a butterfly caught in the entomologist's net: "The poor creature struggles in the net, erases its most beautiful colors, and when it is caught intact, it lies already stiff and lifeless; the corpse is not an animal in its integrity, something else is missing here, something important, something very important: life" ^[18]. Here Goethe remembers an old philosophical truth: the whole is always more than just the sum of the parts that make up this whole. For living beings, principles are valid that are suitable only for a living whole, and not just for disparate inanimate parts. These principles are fundamental to nature, and it is these principles that Goethe calls "spiritual connection". It is about the spiritual connection, about the mysterious potentials of the human spirit, that Wagner and other creators of "artificial people" described in world literature will completely forget.

Principles that are suitable only for the whole are overlooked when applied exclusively to analysis - especially if the analytical method prevails not only in thinking, but also serves as the only way to know living nature. Then the living and feeling creature of nature perishes. It is not for nothing that Kant gave such a definition of the organism itself in paragraph 66 of the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment: "An organic product of nature is one in which everything is a goal and at the same time a means."    

Analysis was thought by Goethe to be effective only in inseparable connection with synthesis. The one-sided application of the analytical method was unacceptable for Goethe: "Before we dealt with the whole as giants, now we look at the parts as dwarfs" ^[19]. 

Scientists like Wagner, obsessed with the passion to dismember wildlife, cannot create anything productive and viable. Wagner is the bearer of dead and soulless knowledge, which does not help to improve human life on earth. On the contrary, such knowledge can lead to the death of all living things. The dead cannot give birth to anything alive, but only the dead. And the homunculus created under the patronage of Mephistopheles is not able to become a full-fledged person, because it can exist only in a test tube, in which it was created by evil-minded scientists. Wagner's wisdom is evil, and at best, simply soulless.   

It should be noted that Wagner in the Goethe tragedy most likely gave impetus to the creation of images of Dr. Wagner in Umberto Eco's novel "Foucault's Pendulum" and Arthur C. Clarke's story "Nine Billion Names of God". In the latter, the initiator Wagner, a kind of typical "physicist" from the sixties, who does not particularly think about morality and the possible consequences of his inventions, installs a powerful computer in a Tibetan monastery, with which monks make a list of all the names of God, which leads to catastrophic consequences. In the ballad "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", Goethe also shows such an arrogant sage who tried to challenge the powerful forces of the universe:

I called without knowing

Spirits to our yard

And I forgot churanye,

How to fight back!

(translated by Boris Pasternak)

P.A. Gorokhov notes: "Goethe understood that humanity, having known Good and Evil equally, had not yet had enough. Perhaps he argued with the Enlightenment thinkers about the rainbow portrait of the ideal Person that they painted" ^{[4, p. 10]}. For the first time in Modern times, Goethe raised the question of the expediency of incrementing scientific knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself. Pure curiosity is a wonderful feeling, but in relation to wildlife, curiosity, not restrained by moral and axiological regulators, can lead to sad and even catastrophic consequences.

And further: "Goethe understood that a person sometimes voluntarily gives himself up to the yoke of that haste that comes, as we know, from the devil. The thinker called this yoke "velocifer" with a brilliant word formation, that is, he combined the Latin word Velocitas (haste, haste) and the name of the devil Lucifer" ^{[3, pp. 162-163]}. If Faust is trying to curb his "velocifer" intentions and embark on the path of genuine productivity in the knowledge of living nature, which Goethe himself sought to follow all his life, then Wagner is truly not only obsessed with a purely diabolical desire to know nature as quickly as possible and regardless of possible sacrifices and losses, but also to challenge nature, artificially creating the "crown of creation". The possible death of living beings who have become victims of experiments, as well as the fate of the creatures created by them, are of little concern to such scientists.

Goethe's doubts about the expediency of daring challenges to mother nature were repeatedly repeated in works of fiction and philosophical treatises. In 1817, when Goethe was still full of energy, and the second part of Faust had not yet been published (it will be published a year before the thinker's death, in 1831), the novel Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus, was written - a work that became the cornerstone of philosophical fiction and is directly dedicated to the creation of an artificial man. If Goethe emphasized the impossibility of creating a living organism from its inanimate parts, then the hero of Mary Shelley's novel (1797-1851), a young doctor Victor Frankenstein, is obsessed with the idea of creating a person from parts of dead bodies and reviving a constructed cadaver using the forces of natural electricity. Having survived the passing of several loved ones, Frankenstein defies death itself. In the end, his experiments were crowned with success.

Bertrand Russell, in The History of Western Philosophy, wrote that Shelley's novel "contains what can almost justifiably be regarded as an allegorical prophetic history of the development of Romanticism. Frankenstein's monster is not just a monster, as it has become in the vernacular, it was initially a kind being, striving passionately for human affection, but it causes hatred and incites violence to the horror that its ugliness inspires those whose love it is trying to achieve" ^{[14, p. 800]}.

Although Queen Victoria herself was born only in 1819, Shelley's novel can be considered as the forerunner of Victorian Gothic, which put on the pages of such masterpieces as The Strange Story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by R. Stevenson or The Turn of the Screw by G. James, the most important moral, aesthetic and philosophical problems. It is widely known that the novel "Frankenstein" was written as the result of a bet between Lord Byron, his family doctor John Polidori and the Shelleys. In this competition, both Byron, who sketched an excerpt of a vampire story, and Polidori, who wrote a short story "The Vampire", took part in creating scary stories, but young Mary Shelley certainly won this bet. As M.A. Bulgakov's Voland said, "Blood is a great thing": Mary was the daughter of the untalented writer and philosopher William Godwin and the writer Mary Waltonskraft, who went down in history as one of the first feminists in England. Probably, the genes of feminism explain the freedom of morals of Mary herself, who ran away with Shelley and her half-sister abroad at the age of 16, and subsequently let Lord Byron into the family bed.

Critics are unanimous in their assessment that the novel "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus" (1817) was destined to open a new era not only in English romanticism, but also in the entire world of fantastic and philosophical prose. Many of the ideas of the enlighteners were reflected in this novel so vividly, and the plot fascinated the reader so much that Byron did not even believe at first that a nineteen-year-old girl could write such a mature novel, turning her nightmare into a narrative full of hidden meanings. It seems that it is not necessary, as Byron did and some modern literary critics continue to do, to consider her husband, the poet Percy Shelley, the author of the novel, although, apparently, a certain spiritual and intellectual influence still took place. The philosophical layer of the novel is formed by ideas and concepts that go back to the views of Plato, J.-J. Rousseau, G. V. F. Hegel, K. F. Volney, W. Godwin, M. Waltonskraft. Apparently, some of the worldview attitudes of thinkers of the past and present were close to Mary Shelley herself.

Shelley talks about the transformation of a creature created by Dr. Frankenstein into an independent person. This being – in the full sense of this expression self-made man – is "a self-made man", if I may use this image here, first invented by Henry Clay on February 2, 1842, when speaking in the US Senate to describe people whose success in life was solely in themselves, and not in external conditions.  This creature, quite in the spirit of the educational traditions of the New Time, independently learns and consciously strives to be a Human Being.

Of course, from the point of view of common sense and the prose of life, the whole story of the spiritual formation of this creature is quite ridiculous. Hiding in a village barn, the poor creature learns to speak by eavesdropping on a young peasant Felix teaching his language to a runaway woman of Arab blood. The creature learns to read from the masterpieces of world literature, which are patiently waiting for him in a suitcase, which somehow turned out to be in a village ditch. The books are certainly beautiful, they are still part of the cultural baggage of an educated person: Milton's poem "Paradise Lost", Plutarch's "Comparative Biographies" and Goethe's "The Sufferings of Young Werther". However, the novel is fantastic and in no case should be evaluated according to the canons of realism. After all, its author was a young woman whose power of imagination could also fail.

And yet Mary Shelley, faithful to the Gothic traditions of Miss Anna Ratcliffe, very interestingly describes a variety of terrible events, although there are not as many cruelties in the novel itself as in numerous film adaptations of this masterpiece. In the novel, it is not the entertaining nature of the plot that comes to the fore for an adult and thoughtful reader, but its philosophical meaning. This often happens with literary masterpieces: if in childhood the reader of Swift follows with interest the extraordinary adventures of the ship's doctor Gulliver, then in mature years the same reader is amazed to discover on the pages of the great novel a biting satire, the whole set of the author's "mind of cold observations and heart of sorrowful notes" and, above all, philosophical reflections - bitter and fair - about human nature.

In our opinion, in philosophical and anthropological terms, the young Mary Shelley was best at those episodes of the novel where Victor Frankenstein and his creation, as if at a meeting of the scientific council, discuss all the "pros" and "cons" of a new potential experiment - the creation of a female individual, who should become a life friend for a male individual, a new Eve. 

The creature created by Mary Shelley's fantasy is a logical logical embodiment of the philosophical anthropology of Modern times, the quintessence of which is Descartes' great formula "Cogito ergo sum". If this creature is capable of thinking, then it is a human being, despite its terrible and repulsive appearance. The awe–inspiring form contains a worthy content - a rich inner world. The creature ponders before its creator about the reasons for the appearance of evil germs in its own soul: "I'm holding a grudge because I'm unhappy. Don't all people run away from me, don't they hate me? You yourself would gladly tear me to pieces; understand this and tell me why I should pity a person more than he pities me? You wouldn't consider yourself a murderer if you managed to throw me into one of these icy abysses and destroy my body–the creation of your own hands. Why should I spare people when they despise me? Let a person live with me in harmony and friendship; then, instead of evil, I would shower him with all the benefits and thank him only for accepting them" ^{[16, pp. 232-233]}. 

Shelley's novel made the thoughtful reader think about the most important question: does a being created by the arbitrariness of a scientist have a soul? How applicable are the traditional Christian ideas about human nature to the man-made Adam? If man is created in the image and likeness of God, is a man-made organism assembled from fragments of dead bodies a human being? Or is it worth taking a materialistic view, rejecting the very concept of the soul and recognizing consciousness exclusively as a property of highly organized matter? 

As the reader reads the novel, he realizes that he sympathizes not with Dr. Frankenstein, but with the unfortunate man-made monster. The child also cannot influence his birth and often appears in this world as a completely unwanted being. The monster, born in a fit of curiosity of the experimenter, also had no desire to be born. The sufferings that an artificial being undergoes embitter him. But the monster suffers much more than its creator. Apparently, the main positive hero of the novel is the nameless monster, who, in front of readers, turns from a piece of inanimate flesh, animated by electric discharges, into a thinking being whose consciousness was formed under the influence of masterpieces of world literature. And this creature became an "enemy of the human race" through no fault of its own. It was society, rejecting the creation of Frankenstein, that embittered him. And the first person to betray the nameless creature was precisely its creator.

Shelley convinces the reader that it is society, making an Aristotelian "social animal" out of a human individual, that simultaneously destroys the good principle that nature has put into it. After all, a creature created from dead pieces of flesh is capable of experiencing truly childish joy and amazement at the sight of the brilliant disk of the moon rising above the trees. The creature is amazed at the richness of the surrounding world. As Plato and Aristotle believed, the beginning of the path to knowledge is surprise. And the creature learns nature every day and strives to comprehend people, their lives and aspirations.

Like a kind spirit, the monster brings firewood to a peasant family at night. The blind old man cannot see the deformity of the creature and therefore is not afraid of it. Therefore, the creature communicates with a blind peasant, and the reader's heart is touched by his call "It's time! Save and protect me!.. Don't leave me in the hour of trials!" But the repulsive appearance of the creature prevents him from communicating with people. The creation of Frankenstein begins to feel all the injustice of a biased and hostile attitude towards himself – especially after, filled with love for people, he saves a little drowning girl, but people reward him with a charge of fractions. 

Shelley, like Rousseau, apparently was convinced that a person inherits everything good in his nature from the world of wildlife. After all, a lion, having satisfied his hunger, can condescendingly look at a whole herd of antelopes until he gets hungry again. A predator cannot be called evil. Only a person is capable of subtly mocking his victims, including his own kind. Kant, in his treatise "The Idea of universal History in the world-civil plan," wrote for good reason that a person is made of "such a crooked wood" that there is no way to make anything direct out of it ^{[10, p. 19]}. In the treatise "On the inherently evil in Human Nature," Kant comes to the disappointing conclusion that man is evil by nature.

Shelley was far from Kant's views expressed by the German thinker in the treatise "On the inherently evil in Human Nature", but she also wondered whether the numerous varieties of evil generated by society and carefully cultivated by it – including in the form of ridiculous and obsolete traditions - are not truly human? After all, even a creature created by a mad scientist is initially full of good intentions, and only when faced with the evil reigning in society, he begins to take revenge on his creator by killing people close to him.

Modern scientific achievements have long outstripped the most daring flight of the writer's imagination. The crazy dream of creating an artificial human - thanks to the amazing achievements of biology and nanotechnology - is being realized today. The Creator is challenged by truly regenerative audacity and reckless courage. And Shelley was one of the first after Goethe to ask the question of the expediency of such a challenge to wildlife by scientists obsessed with the "velocifer" thirst for knowledge. This question has been repeatedly repeated by other thinkers, writers and poets. Violence against nature is fraught with terrible shocks and irreversible changes in human nature itself. In our absurd era of globalization, political correctness and tolerance, ideas of this kind have been developed in the philosophical theory and practice of transhumanism, whose adherents believe that the qualitative improvement of the human body, in fact, will mark the beginning of the next stage of the evolution of "reasonable man". At a new qualitative level, mother nature has been challenged again, and the victory of scientists can lead to the disappearance of man as a physical being, not to mention the transformation of the soul-spiritual component. I recall the words of Katarina from Shakespeare's great comedy "The Taming of the Shrew": "Mother Nature is smart, but the son is brainless."

Apparently, it was Shelley who was one of the first in world literature to pose the problem of the responsibility of a scientist, which has become one of the most important moral conflicts in our time. Plato and Aristotle taught mankind that knowledge is good and virtue. A person who has joined knowledge and tasted the fruits of science, especially a scientist, is simply not able to do wrong. Francis Bacon coined the formula "Knowledge is power". But this force can be directed equally to good and evil. Let us recall Kant again, who warned of the danger to the fate of mankind of "evil wisdom", which could turn into "eternal peace" in the universal cemetery. If a person is inherently evil, then it is very doubtful that scientists will do good. All these thoughts are reflected in Mary Shelley's novel.

In fact, at all times, scientists have given little thought to the consequences that their discoveries will have. In science fiction literature, there were images of business scientists (P.P. Garin in A.N. Tolstoy, engineer Schultz in Jules Verne), but Dr. Frankenstein or Professor Preobrazhensky, who were motivated only by curiosity, still look more typical. Not only in fantasy novels, but also in life, the further fate of a fateful discovery was most often ordered by people who had nothing to do with it. P.A. Gorokhov writes: "Shelley foresaw that science would face difficult ethical problems, of which the main one was the justification of the boundaries that must be set to knowledge so that it would not turn around countless catastrophes – ecological, social, spiritual" ^{[5, p. 25]}. 

The problem of a scientist's responsibility for his own handiwork – including in terrible experiments on human nature - also comes to the fore in H. G. Wells' novel "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1896), which tells about the transformation of animals into humans by vivisection, fashionable at that time.

The talented Joseph Conrad, who considered himself a student of Wells, called his great contemporary "the historian of future centuries." Yuli Kagarlitsky adds: "Wells could be called a historian of future millennia. In the novel "The Island of Dr. Moreau", he again appears as a historian of millennia, but not of the future, but of the past. However, pressed to the limit. The whole history of civilization takes place in a month and a half in front of Edward Prendick. This young man, who attended the course of Professor Huxley (no other than a classmate of Wells), was shipwrecked, was picked up at sea by the schooner "Ipecuana" and thus accidentally witnessed extraordinary events" ^{[9, p. 186]}.            

This novel by Wells is rightfully recognized as one of the most terrible novels of world literature. We owe the appearance of the idea itself to the fact that the author was a biologist by education, and the topic of vivisection was at that time one of the most discussed among naturalists. No one - with the exception of a few bright minds on the scale of Wells - thought at that time about responsibility to wildlife. On the contrary, the experimenter boldly challenged the very laws of nature, seeking to change and edit them in an improved form. In his "velocifer" aspiration, the scientist recklessly tried on the functions of God himself, in blind naivety trying to improve His creations. It was such an experimenter that Wells made the main character of his novel.

Moreau is a talented doctor and biologist who was forced to leave the civilized world because of the harassment that his colleagues and the "enlightened public" announced against him. Wells writes about Moreau: "He published several striking facts about blood transfusion and, moreover, was known for his outstanding works on abnormal deviations in the general development of the body. But suddenly this brilliant career was interrupted. He had to leave England. Some journalist gained access to his laboratory under the guise of a laboratory assistant, but with the deliberate intention of exposing everything he saw to sensational publicity" ^{[15, p. 173]}.

Eduard Prendick, after a series of dangerous adventures he experienced on the island of Dr. Moreau, actually forces the scientist to tell him his secrets. And only then the brilliant experimenter tells the uninvited and persistent guest about the essence of his work – the creation of new people by surgical transformation of animal bodies. Moreau states: "The study of nature makes a person in the end as ruthless as nature itself" ^{[15, p. 173]}. And these words explain a lot about the character of a talented researcher.  

The novel not only tells about the creation of artificial people by combining parts of various animals, but also raises topical and complex philosophical questions about the essence of human nature, about the ratio of good and evil in it. Immanuel Kant once clearly indicated that a person is distinguished by cognitive ability among all other living beings. Kant's anthropology considers man as a being who is determined not by instinct, as is observed in animals, but by reason. Hence, the education of people should put obstacles to the very possibility of human degradation and its conversion into a wild, primitive state. Kant believed that education should lead to genuine enlightenment. The child needs not only to be taught "what is good and what is bad", but also to be taught to think. Education inevitably involves "curbing savagery", that is, teaching order and discipline, as well as teaching useful skills. Thus, the integration of the individual into the appropriate culture, his socialization takes place. Therefore, Moreau has developed his own pedagogical methodology, he strives to make real people out of his creations. To do this, he introduces peculiar "hypothetical imperatives" into their humanized heads:

"- Not walking on all fours is the Law. Aren't we human?

- It's the law not to lap up water with your tongue. Aren't we human?

- It is the law not to eat meat or fish. Aren't we human?

- It's the law not to hunt other people. Aren't we people?" ^{[15, p. 200]}

As is well known, Kant believed that hypothetical imperatives are valid only if a subjectively chosen goal is assumed. Such imperatives express only a conditioned obligation. For creepy and unhappy creatures, the "truly amazing Law" created by their creator acts as a kind of categorical imperative – formal and absolute. Moreau hammered the main idea into the humanized animal heads: "Terrible punishments await those who violate the Law. There is no salvation for them" ^{[15, p. 202]}. In fact, Moreau's law is a new religion synthesized from traditional world religions. The scientist appropriated divine functions for himself, because he undertook to execute and pardon at his own will.

Moreau discusses his method of instilling the necessary truths and desired rules of behavior: "The spiritual structure of a being has been studied by science even less than the physical one. In the science of hypnotism, which is developing nowadays, we find it possible to replace old hereditary instincts with new suggestions, as if by inoculating or moving on the basis of heredity. Much of what we call moral education is only such an artificial change and perversion of instinct; militancy is re-educated into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexual desire into religious ecstasy" ^{[15, p. 215]}.

These revelations of Moreau make you think to this day. Naturally, Wells, throughout his long life, followed with interest the activities of Sigmund Freud, who sought to identify the unconscious motives of mental life. But with this novel of his, the great Englishman was in many ways ahead of Freud, who developed his method of psychoanalysis from 1896 to 1902.

Today we are dealing with the "new suggestions" of the era of globalization. Manipulation of individual and public consciousness has reached its apogee. Modern humanity has been consciously turned into beastmen for several decades, devoid of a spiritual beginning and obsessed only with the satisfaction of vital and material needs. The policy of aggressively imposed tolerance, insane and thoughtless political correctness, the all—consuming absurdity of the "new ethics" - these are the main and disturbing symptoms of the transformation of the "reasonable man", which is in full swing.

In Wells' novel, Moreau–apparently obsessed with hating people–created parodies of human beings out of animals. And in the modern era of globalization, the mass production of spiritless and immoral individuals from the raw materials of the "mass man" is in full swing. Such creatures are not interested in the eternal mysteries of existence and the search for the meaning of life, they are not touched by the problems of faith and lack of faith – as once in Ancient Rome, the limit of their life requirements is the slogan "Bread and circuses!". On the streets of modern cities, we see individuals who are under deep suggestion, masterfully zombified, who do not want to part with gadgets that have become an existential necessity for them, at least for a while. They do not need freedom, they are not able to think independently, and the direction of thoughts and, if necessary, the image of another enemy guilty of life's problems and troubles is set by the official media. Such, if I may say so, people are almost identical to the Moro beastmen, who were unable to think and act intelligently without the readers of the Law and their creator.

Wells' researchers also note that the novel owes its philosophical basis largely to Thomas Huxley's teaching about eternal and dialectically opposite "cosmic" and "ethical" processes. The cosmic process is carried out without any human intervention, and therefore it does not and cannot have any moral component. In the end, in full accordance with the second principle of thermodynamics, the cosmic process will end with entropy, the complete death of all living things. Huxley was sure that the ethical process owes its origin to humanity's passion for survival, necessarily accompanied by a universal desire to save the world. People are able to create "zones of order" themselves that will resist entropy. After all, we have long been surrounded by the "second nature" that we created ourselves.

But the community of beastmen shown by Wells seems to be only a grotesque parody of human society. Of course, such an ugly community is inevitably doomed to perish. After all, being deprived of control by the creator, the beastmen on the island gradually lose the human traits artificially imposed on them and again assume an animal appearance. Wells follows the ideas of his teacher Huxley. Beastmen are not the product of an ethical, but of a cosmic process, and the brilliant surgeon himself personifies not only the cruelty of this process, but also its meaninglessness. Yu. Kagarlitsky writes: "Animals serve as the "source material" for Moro, but the "end product" of his laboratory is not people in the full meaning of the word. The human traits given to them in rough do not rid them of deeply rooted animal instincts. And these instincts are winning. Only a small external push is needed. Having accidentally tasted blood, {...} they return to their animal nature. The ugly likeness of human society created for these ugly human likenesses immediately collapses" ^{[9, p. 192]}.       

Only at the very end of the novel does Wells express a timid optimistic hope: "It seems to me that everything should find its solace and hope in these eternal comprehensive laws of the universe, and not in everyday everyday sorrows and sins" ^{[15, p. 282]}.    

Many of Wells' ideas were developed in his fantastic stories "The Heart of a Dog" and "Fatal Eggs" by the great Russian writer M.A. Bulgakov, a doctor by education, who was keenly interested in science and problems of natural science. In the "Heart of a Dog" you can find direct allusions to the images created by Goethe, Shelley and Wells. A student of Professor Preobrazhensky, Dr. Bormental, enthusiastically writes in his diary: "A new field is opening up in science: a homunculus has been created without any retort of Faust! The surgeon's scalpel has brought a new human unit to life!"

But Dr. Bormental's raptures are premature, because the scalpel of the brilliant Professor Preobrazhensky "brought to life" not a "new human unit", but a monster that soon begins to threaten the measured existence and even the life of its creator. The created being in no way resembles the creation of Dr. Frankenstein, who, following the pedagogical canons of Enlightenment and quite in the spirit of educational traditions, dreams of being a Human Being and independently learns this by observing people and assimilating the spiritual content of the masterpieces of the world literary classics. And if Dr. Frankenstein runs away from his creation and betrays him, then talented Russian vivisectors, whose heads are filled with the same educational ideals, are trying to apply Rousseau's pedagogical precepts to him and generally strive in every possible way to influence their creation with their own and, as they believe, a positive example.

So, Preobrazhensky thinks of making a real person out of Sharikov with the help of the great novel by Daniel Defoe, once so beloved by Rousseau: "It will be necessary to have Robinson ..." Alas, very soon all the futility of the caring dreams of these two typical Russian raznochinets, whose older brothers and fathers still "went to the people", dreaming of enlightening him, is revealed. And the people, as you know, often beat their educators. The ideal of the "good savage" could not be translated into reality. And scientists soon realize that the "proletarian origin" of the creature they created from the dog and the "material" left over from Klim Chugunkin is too strong. "After his tail fell off," Dr. Bormental chronicles, "he pronounced the word "pub" quite clearly" ^{[1, p. 271]}. The development of the being continues – in full accordance with the laws of heredity: "He utters ... all the swear words that only exist in the Russian lexicon" ^{[1, p. 271]}.

Apparently, the vivisection itself, to which the cute dog Sharik was subjected and turned him into a one hundred percent proletarian, can be allegorically understood as a warning about the possible destructive effects of equalizing communist ideas, which took root completely prematurely in the minds of the broad masses of the people. Indeed, the scientist, obsessed with the "cycling" passion, completely without thinking about the consequences of his experiment, created a terrible monster out of a friendly dog. Beautiful and caring, but completely utopian ideas also spoiled the Russian people, just like a vivisector scalpel, shredding the soul of the people alive. The realization of utopia became possible only through a sea of blood.

Something similar happened to our people in the 90s of the twentieth century, when a new scalpel - now Western vivisectors – began to deform national psychology in the vain hope of turning Soviet people into tolerant and politically correct beings devoid of love for the Motherland.

Bulgakov reflects on the creation of an artificial man in close connection with thoughts about the danger of social experiments, when the violent acceleration of the pace of historical development, all these furious appeals like "Let's drive the nag of history!" could lead to catastrophes on a global scale, as already evidenced by the sad experience of Russia.     New people like Sharikov have completely uncritically accepted ideas that were not created in Russia and not for Russia. In the famous scene, a homunculus of a new type talks about the "Correspondence of Engels with Kautsky" he read, taking out of the book the main idea of "Taking everything and dividing it up!"

And if Goethe's homunculus can only live in a test tube, then Polygraph Polygraphovich is able to exist only in the chaotic reality of post-revolutionary Russia. His speech is similar to the appeals and speeches of "ardent revolutionaries" like Shvonder, and therefore seems ridiculous and ridiculous to Russian intellectuals Preobrazhensky and Bormental. Although Sharikov himself claims intellectual significance and significant status in the new society. Bulgakov leads the reader to the idea that all the ideas expressed by Sharikov inevitably had to lead to the idea of a world revolution, to a grandiose universal conflagration, which the Bolsheviks dreamed of in the first years after the revolution.

Considering the historical process and trying to comprehend its laws, Bulgakov was a supporter of evolution, gradual improvement and improvement of the social system, and with it Man, on reasonable and good principles. It is impossible to artificially create a reasonable person through science or the suggestion of ideologues. Only a monster can turn out, which is shown in the talented and full of hidden meaning allegories that fill the story "The Heart of a Dog".

It is not for nothing that in his "Letter to the Government" dated March 28, 1930, M. A. Bulgakov wrote about his "deep skepticism about the revolutionary process," calling himself an adherent of the "beloved and Great Evolution." Here he completely repeats the fundamental thoughts of his idol – the great Goethe. The "Velocifer" aspirations to create heaven on earth by any means and "drive humanity into happiness with an iron hand" can turn this earth into hell.

In these views, Bulgakov was close to those domestic and foreign thinkers who considered any revolution, no matter how well-intentioned it was planned and carried out, as a social synonym for an earthquake or tsunami. Let us note once again that Goethe also opposed violent revolutionary processes in nature and society all his life, proving the perniciousness of thoughtless experiments on nature, including human nature.

Bulgakov, telling about the creation of an artificial man in the reality of post-revolutionary existence, conceptually justified the phenomenon of "sharikovism", revealing the common in the special. Nietzsche once slandered that mass is a factory commodity of nature. Here, a brilliant surgeon created a unique being who became a collective image of a thoughtless human mass, completely devoid of spiritual and cultural foundations and striving only for material benefits.

First of all, a new person manifests himself in new ethics and aesthetics – completely unusual for people of the old leaven. For Bulgakov, the features of the new style of behavior seem strange and even terrifying. If Philip Philipovich – once a real "Moscow student" - competently discusses with Bormental the advantages of various varieties of vodka, without neglecting the snacks suitable for them, then Sharikov simply "threw vodka down his throat, wrinkled up, brought a piece of bread to his nose, sniffed, and then swallowed, and his eyes filled with tears" ^{[1, p. 182]}.    

Sharikov and others like him do not bother to take off their headgear indoors, they prefer to walk in dirty shoes on marble stairs and on an expensive carpet. The "comrades" are used to throwing cigarette butts on the floor, and the spittoons are simply ignored. They generously sprinkle their poor and tongue-tied speech with curses. If Bulgakov, creating Sharikov, had before his eyes the leather-clad owners of the "new world", then readers of the 90s saw Sharikov as the embodiment of the "new Russians", and today's intellectuals, not without reason, see in Sharikov the features of illiterate, but claiming infallibility and a certain "special style" of glamorous and asexual TV presenters or bloggers.

The history of the creation of an artificial man by Bulgakov has an eschatological connotation, so close to us, the citizens of modern Russia. In his diary, Bormental writes: "What is happening in Moscow is incomprehensible to the human mind. Seven Sukharev merchants are already in prison for spreading rumors about the end of the world, which the Bolsheviks brought on. Darya Petrovna spoke and even accurately named the number: on November 28, 1925, on the day of the Holy Martyr Stephen, the earth will fly on the celestial axis... Some crooks are already lecturing. We made such a pub with this pituitary gland that you could run out of the apartment" ^{[1, p. 276]}.

Interestingly, similar to M.A. Bulgakov's views on "new people" were held by S.N. Bulgakov, who also did not accept the October Revolution. In his work "At the Feast of the Gods," S.N. Bulgakov writes: ""comrades" sometimes seem to me to be beings completely devoid of spirit and possessing only lower mental abilities, a special kind of Darwinian monkeys – homo socialisticus." This harsh assessment is in tune with the main idea of the great story "The Heart of a Dog".

A person cannot be assembled as a motor from spare parts. Preobrazhensky synthesized by no means the "noble savage" Rousseau. From the proletarian Klim Chugunkin and the "sweetest dog" Sharik, not a Divine creation appeared into the light of God, but a Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov, who became an integral part of the new being.     

So, let's summarize the results of our research. For the first time philosophical reflections on artificial man appear in world literature in the great drama "Faust". In fact, the very idea of creating an artificial man was a continuation of the God-fighting aspirations of the Renaissance and the embodiment of the ardent desire to become not only on a par with the Creator, but also to surpass Him. Goethe understood this and sought to reflect his own fears in his masterpiece. The homunculus created by Faust's disciple, the experimental scientist Wagner, aspires to become a man and has an outstanding intellect, but is able to exist only in artificial laboratory conditions - in a flask. Such homunculi are somewhat similar to modern "crystallized people" who cannot imagine their lives without gadgets and virtual reality. When creating the image of the homunculus, Goethe also meant the contrivance, artificiality and fruitlessness of many enlightenment ideas, because the enlighteners questioned the very existence of God, putting a scientist-creator in His place.

Goethe's idea of the futility and danger of experimenting on human nature was later developed by Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells and Mikhail Bulgakov. In general, after Goethe, dozens of writers turned to the plot of the creation of artificial man. For example, homunculus is found even among the Strugatsky brothers in the story "Monday begins on Saturday". In our crazy time, thanks to the success of cloning, the dream of creating an artificial human ceases to be a fairy tale, becoming a reality. But not all scientists think about the expediency of such experiments and their consequences.  

Wagner's homunculus and the creation of Dr. Frankenstein are the closest to the idea of man that prevailed in the philosophy of Modern times and educational pedagogy. Dr. Moreau's creations arouse more sympathy than Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov, created from a cute mongrel with the help of "material" left over from one hundred percent proletarian Klim Chugunkin. The creature from Shelley's novel, quite in the spirit of educational traditions, independently learns and strives to be Human, and therefore inevitably causes sympathy.

But it was in the novel "Frankenstein" that the danger of educational illusions was first shown, all these beautiful dreams in the spirit of Rousseau about the possibility of creating a new person – even if artificially, but free from the birthmarks of the terrible history of mankind. The Bolsheviks tried to realize such a dream as a result of a grandiose social experiment – and by no means always these attempts ended with the reproduction of only ball bearings. If I may say so, then Sharikov is the "marriage" of the socialist project to create a "new man". It should not be forgotten that Bulgakov's story itself has a pronounced satirical orientation and is full of undisguised grotesque. As a rule, Communists sought to follow Lenin's formula, according to which a "new man", that is, a man of the communist formation can arise only when he "enriches his memory with the knowledge of all the riches that humanity has developed." In any case, this task is nobler than the task of creating a "qualified consumer" instead of a human creator.

If the philosophy of Enlightenment proclaimed the goodness of conquering wildlife and various experiments on it conducted by numerous "insignificant worms of dry science", and was not inclined to heed the prophetic warnings of a few Faust, then literature turned out to be more prescient. All works of fantastic literature, which tell about the creation of an artificial man, warn – including by means of philosophical foresight - about the danger of such experiments on wildlife. No wonder the brilliant surgeon Preobrazhensky, after an epiphany that descended on him, says to his faithful disciple and colleague: "... why is it necessary to artificially fabricate Spinoza, when any woman can give birth to him anytime. After all, Madame Lomonosov gave birth to this famous one in Kholmogory. Doctor, humanity takes care of this itself and every year, in an evolutionary order, stubbornly, singling out all kinds of scum from the mass, creates dozens of outstanding geniuses adorning the globe" ^{[1, p. 208]}. And these Bulgakov's lines perfectly summarize those philosophical intentions that can be found on the pages of masterpieces of world literature devoted to the creation of an artificial person.