Abstract

The task of the research is to determine the main sources and views for the idea of calling in European culture. The article proves that the idea of calling has religious roots in Judaic-Christian tradition. Moreover, its contemporary mainly secularized understanding was formed not only in the process of social and economic transformations, in the course of rationalization of social and personal life, but also on the grounds of philosophical understanding of personal existence. The study examines the main worldview dimensions of the thought about calling starting from Antiquity to the New time. The author demonstrates that the search of meaning and purpose of personal existence appears in philosophic tradition from Socrates and Democrit having undergone further transformation in the texts of Plato and Aristotle. The analysis examines the universalization of Christian intuition of calling of a person in the Renaissance and in the New time. The process of secularization of the idea of calling in Europe is discovered as conditioned by the disintegration of the traditional social structure and hierarchy and due to appearance of the idea of individual identity of a person. The research traces the formation of the ideals of authentic existence and self-actualization of a personality on the basis of analysis of the works Ch. Taylor about secularization and ethics of authenticity, as well as of the ideas of the main representatives of the Enlightenment of 17-18th centuries such as Rousseau and Herder. The author determines that the phenomenon of calling appears to a person as the truth of his or her individual feeling and experience together with the understanding of the ideas about common good and of the purpose of human life. Сonsequently, the study proves that modern European idea of calling has humanistic and anthropocentric orientation linked with the value of freedom, selfactualization and responsibility of personality. The researcher considers the importance of the philosophical and ethical category of good for understanding of the essence of the phenomenon of calling and for the process of universalization of motives and values of a personal calling. The author proves that the calling reveals itself on the condition of unity of internal personal and external social, even transcendental, factors of human existence. Therefore and further to above mentioned, the author considers calling as a meaningful phenomenon that reveals itself in a personal experience via individual and general cultural narratives.