The article presents a brief history of the phenomenon of extremality in the context of the philosophy of consciousness. The connection between extremality and civilizational dynamics is shown through the prism of ideas about human revolution and noospheric history. Selected discourses of extremality in the history of philosophy are considered. The special role of philosophy and science of the 20th century is recorded both in scaling the property of extremality to almost all hypostases of being, and in the formation of the phenomenon of extreme consciousness itself. Heuristically valuable positions for a comprehensive analysis of extreme consciousness are revealed, which can be expressed in the categories of naturalness, ambivalence, generativity and homeostaticity / autopoiesisity. Substantive and methodological prospects for studying extreme consciousness are defined.
For citation: Lebedev V.S., Smirnov D.G. Extreme consciousness: a brief history of an idea, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2025, iss. 1, pp. 165—171.