About the book: 2023 / In times of great upheaval, the question of two ways of interacting with the surrounding context - adaptation and resistance - is especially acute. In the new book by Professor I.P. Smirnov, adaptive and protest strategies of human behavior are considered as realizations of the possibilities inherent in our self-awareness. Along with adaptation and resistance, from the point of view of philosophical anthropology, the book also examines such closely related socio-cultural phenomena as violence, a consumer-hedonistic attitude to life, and continuity in conditions of variability in historical situations. The work ends with a section on the unconscious, which serves as the author’s prerequisite for discussing the issue of the formation of self-awareness. Igor Pavlovich Smirnov – philosopher and cultural scientist, theorist and literary historian.