Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), an Indian thinker and humanist, was born into a wealthy Calcutta family of a prominent lawyer. The family was distinguished by education and freedom of thought. Vivekananda was exposed at an early age to the works of Spinoza, Descartes, Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Comte, Mill, Darwin, and others, whose works were discussed at meetings of the intelligentsia held in his father's house. Subsequently, he corresponded with Spencer (one of the "lords of doom" in Europe), who had a serious influence on Vivekananda. However, later, when his own religious, philosophical and social concept began to form, he abandoned Spenserianism. Vivekananda received an excellent education at the University of Calcutta, where he developed a wide range of interests, studying disciplines related to a wide variety of fields of knowledge: from physiology and medicine to music theory. He also gained fame as a poet. Vivekananda's meeting with Sri Ramakrishna, a prominent religious reformer of Hinduism, should be considered a turning point in his development as a thinker. Vivekananda devoted his entire life to popularizing his teachings (the collected works of Vivekananda in Russian library collections are presented in an eight-volume volume in English and a small volume of materials in Russian). One of the cornerstones of Sri Ramakrishna's teaching is the idea of the potential divinity of a person who should be worshipped in the specific form that is inherent in each of the individuals: "People are more valuable than all the riches of the world "(1, p. 37). This approach, which is akin to an anthropological twist in Kant's philosophy, is revolutionary for nineteenth-century India - the worship of a particular person in Hinduism was not observed until then. In the public life of India at the end of the last century, the contradictions between the indigenous population and the British colonialists became more acute. Vivekananda, who firsthand (when his family ... Read more