Existence is a philosophy with a human face

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Existence is a concept that is interpreted as a human "I" in terms of the existence of a person. This term was introduced by Soren Kierkegaard, who is one of the founders of existential philosophy.

Believing that existence is an innate property of the human essence, existentialists consider human existence to be divorced from society and its connections, referring to individual mental personal properties and elevating the understanding of the human personality as a separate individual to an absolute.

This philosophical movement has found a vivid reflection in the literature. It is believed that existentialism in literature has its origins in the work of the French writer Albert Camus.

Along with the work of Sartre, the works of Camus, in particular, the novel "The Outsider", became the embodiment of the search for the freedom of the human person from social shackles, introduced into the framework of stable postulates of generally accepted morality.

An existentialist personality is not a fighter on the barricades and not a theoretician of new revolutionary ideas. He is a rebel within himself. His struggle is a kind of protection from fear of a hostile society, instilling in him rejection, confusion and anxiety.

Representatives of this trend believed that existence is a kind of subjective anthropology, opposed to the Hegelian interpretation of the objective development of the human personality. Considering the experience of the situation within one's own ego, in addition to which a person has nothing to rely on, existentialism is involved in the aesthetic category, reflecting the attitude towards personal moral principles.

Emerged in the 20th century in the West, existentialism has its roots in the 19th century, in Russia, where the first representatives of existentialism lived and worked. Back in the 1830s, I. V. Kireevsky introduced the concept of "existence" and formulated some ideas of this trend (later adopted in the West in the Latin version: existentia).

Trends of existentialism can be found already in the early works of Pushkin.

Little people - the heroes of Belkin's Tales - are representatives of the middle classes, first of all they are valuable as individuals. Each of them is a person capable of deeply feeling, doubting, loving, suffering.

Undertaker Adrian Prokhorov ("The Undertaker") has a dream where his future customers come to him, who are actually still alive. And this shows his anguish about his profession, especially after he visited the shoemaker neighbor Schultz, a cheerful, good-natured fellow with an "open temper".

Samson Vyrin ("The Stationmaster") died of grief and longing for his beloved daughter, not believing that a rich hussar,a man of higher class can make a poor stationmaster's daughter happy. He views life through the prism of his own personality and subjective consciousness.

Burmin ("Snowstorm") suffered for four years because he could not offer his hand and heart to his beloved girl, being, by an absurd accident and frivolity of youth, married on a snowy winter night with a stranger.

The Philosophical Dictionary published in Germany (1961) states that existential thinking is essentially Slavic, since it took shape under the strong influence of the works of F. Dostoevsky.

The existence of Dostoevsky's heroes is an immersion in a dream, in their own philosophical reflections. This is how the hero of his early novel The Dreamer argues, who suffered a “shameful abuse” from his superiors. And Ivan Petrovich's altruism ("Humiliated and Insulted") helps him survive, maintain moral purity.

Existence, which originated on Russian soil, is a concept close to the ethical category of morality, to the concept of "conscience" (deeper than in the traditional Freudian interpretation).