DOI: 10.7256/2454-0625.2024.3.39307

Abstract: The aim of the work is to pose the problem of the relation of absurdism to faith, considered by the example of the text of S. Beckett's literary work "Waiting for Godot". Research objectives: to give a philosophical analysis of artistic images, to reveal the specifics of the attitude to God among existentialist authors. The object of the study is the text of the play "Waiting for Godot", the subject is the connection of absurdism with the theological and providentialist attitude. The philosophy of the absurd is considered as bringing existentialist thinking to its ultimate foundations. The absurd, as the antipode of the theory of providentialism, represents a pole in the thinking of a religious person who is desperate to find cause-and-effect relationships in the world. According to the author, absurdism as a philosophical trend is rooted precisely in the religious worldview. The author tries to revise the term "absurdism" and find an answer to the question of what place the search for God occupies in absurdism. Examining the work of S. Beckett "Waiting for Godot", the author seeks to prove that one of the sources of absurdism is the awareness of abandonment by God (in the variation "God died" or "God turned away"), which is necessarily associated with attributing to God the function of giving meaning to things, processes, phenomena. The author's main contribution to the research of the topic is to identify the theological attitude as the basis for philosophical trends that position themselves as atheistic.

DOI: 10.7256/2454-0757.2023.8.43769

Abstract: The subject of the study is the connection between the absurd and phenomenology.The texts of representatives of the absurdist trend in literature and philosophy (Camus, Kafka, Musil), as well as the works of academic philosophers of the phenomenological direction (Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Fink) are considered. The commonality of phenomenological interpretations of reality for some texts of the absurdist genre is proved. As a hypothesis, the existence of an epistemological dimension of meaning in the works of the absurd is put forward, interpreted by the author as a reception of the views of phenomenologists, problematized in the inconsistent reduction of phenomena. The methodological basis was the general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, as well as the critical analysis of the text.   The scientific novelty lies in the attempt to present phenomenology as a precursor of absurdism, connected with it through the sphere of axiology. The main contribution of the author is the actualization of the epistemological layer of such a multifaceted phenomenon as the absurd, namely, the elaboration of the hypothesis that in many works of absurdists, the metamorphoses of the characters' consciousness are in fact an inconsistent reduction consisting in explicit metamorphoses of the Ego, as well as violating subject-object relations but not actually bracketing the idea of the world. Many literary contemporaries of Husserl devote their thoughts to the problems of phenomenology to one degree or another, which makes the connection between absurd literature and the key theses of early phenomenology logical.