About Two Existential and Moral Trends in Philosophy of 20th Century

Abstract

The article is devoted to two important existential and moral trends ‘Freudian’ and ‘Sartrian’ that, having emerged in the twentieth century, exist today. The authors distinguish the exis­tential and the moral: if the moral is a system of internal and external commands and prohi­bitions, the existential is an individual “life of the soul”, a set of experiences, moods and passions. The existential and moral coincide only partially, and there is a certain separation of the vital-existential from morality in the 20^th century: the desire to break out from any given behavioral framework. This was facilitated by secularization, which overthrew the transcendent, which to a large extent served as the foundation of morality. The opposition of the vital-existential principle to traditionally understood morality was expressed, in particu­lar, in the line of praising personal freedom (J.-P. Sartre) and in the desire to liberate per­son’s instinctive and emotionally passionate aspirations from moral pressure (S. Freud). Cer­tainly, Freud and Sartre express an objective cultural transition from tradition to innovation, from the sacred to the profane, from “rigorous morality” to free expression of the will, but at the same time they were intellectuals who, with their formulations and manifests facilitate “struggle against morality” and legitimize it, as a result the new moral concepts based on the idea of “overcoming any boundaries” become common. The existential-vital impulse crowds out the moral prohibitive-imperative system of regulation. The ideas of Freud and Sartre were initially understood by the cultural community as humanistic, but in low culture they were transformed into a protest against any moral and rational restrictions, and rela­tivized moral ideas.