Man is a “Lengthy Being”. Experience of Meta-existence

Abstract

The article gives an understanding of the metaexistential experience as a way to create and re-create a self-own history, “rewriting” it in an effort to understand the completeness of the collected self-existence, the existence in time. The con­cept of meta-existence denotes a mature level of existential consciousness, in which neither experience as a contact with the givens of existence nor reflec­tion closely related to the experience is brought to the fore. In contrast, metaexis­tential experience is another reading of its own unfinished history, filled with communicative acts, comprehension of works of art, scientific and philosophical concepts. It is a more distant way of self-discovery, a creative effort to insert re­cursively life-meaning network of one’s own existence into multiplying cultural configurations. The author refers to a number of works of dramatic literature (J.B. Priestley, M. Frisch, P. Ustinov, E. Albee), which are considered to be the examples of metaexistential formation. This formation unfolds in the interac­tion of the main character with the temporal images of himself at different stages of life, each of which highlights existential entities in a new way. In the metahis­tory of existence – the history of himself – a person reconstructs his path “from afar”, from different temporal perspectives (from the past, present and future). The literature of modernism interprets the life crises of its characters as the man­ifestations of the torn consciousness, diffuse identity. This can be explained by the fundamental incompleteness and complexity of existential choice, which re­veals itself in the reflexive transfer of personal situations into the space of cul­tural archetypes. The concept of meta-existential experience is intended to define the role of the individual as a theorist and historian of his own life, which rises to the fate in a series of successive reconstructions.