STOICISM AS PHILOSOPHY OF EXISTENTIAL RESILIENCE

Abstract

The article is devoted to the consideration of stoicism as a philosophy of life, which is able to develop existential resilience in crisis conditions for human existence. The author notes that in order to preserve one's own world, a person must create "existential resilience", and philosophy gives him or her the grounds for this. Today, stoicism is being reinterpreted. It is transformed into a philosophy of life, which is best suited to modern man as a tool that, if used properly, allows one to live a decent life. What is important, this can be achieved regardless of the conditions in which a person has fallen. The modern human being is faced with many challenges that threaten his or her existence or distort existence with illusory values, post-truth, ideological constructs, and consumerism. The author notes that stoicism is a holistic philosophy of life that allows the development of a general understanding of the world and a person's place in it. Resilience is at the very core of the Stoic worldview. Stoicism sets a person in every tragic situation to be guided by virtues that will help overcome the misfortunes of fate. In the conditions of war, a person finds himself in a situation of emergency and extremeness. To outline this situation, the author refers to the understanding of the "boundary situation" in the existentialism of Karl Jaspers. The boundary situation captures the crisis states of a person, which lead to the actualization of the personal principle, worldview transformations, rethinking of the meaning of life, and experiencing the loss of self-identity. They remove a person from the captivity of everyday consciousness and awaken him. In addition, the reality of war is full of horror and anxiety. Therefore, a person is in a state of permanent anxiety about existence. The boundary situation is built into the structure of everyday life. War gives rise to the experience of horror, which can become a permanent state of everyday experience. The author demonstrates that the philosophy of stoicism allows quite effectively to overcome this anxiety and sense of horror. For this, the stoic philosophy of life suggests developing a fatalistic attitude toward everything that happens to us and around us. The Stoics suggest surrendering to fate. In fact, stoicism helps to form existential resilience, because it teaches us to accept events as they are, and at the same time allows us to think about what we can change. In the conditions of war, a person often faces death. One of the dimensions of existential resilience is the elimination of the fear of death. In this aspect of the formation of existential stability, stoicism can also become a suitable basis for a philosophy of life.