PHILOSOPHICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL BASIS OF BIOGRAPHICAL MYTH CREATION: LITERARY FICTION AS A PRACTICE OF SELF-REPRESENTATION

Abstract

The article is devoted to the identification of the philosophical and anthropological background and analysis of the available research methods of the phenomenon of self-knowledge. The article attempts to reveal the heuristic potential of literary fiction as an autobiographical falsification on the basis of a system-theoretical analysis involving the principle of anthropological reduction and to determine the expediency of philosophical reflection of the mentioned phenomenon in the post-industrial age. It has been proven that in recent years, interest in the creativity of a person’s life has revived, along with this, the writing of biographies and autobiographies as a person’s self-representation on the border of Self and Other is changing. This gives grounds for asserting that autobiographical falsifications are a significant component of every biography. The article proves that a person’s representation of the key events of his life contains a latent program of constructing a desired life path, the purpose of which is to rebuild the social or even ontological construction of his own personality. Contrary to the first impression, such rewriting of the biography is not always a fraud from the point of view of the laws of the society and is sometimes even accepted as desirable by the same society. In this research, we placed the main emphasis on the analysis of the phenomenon of extracted autobiographies and applications of autobiographies, which apparently did not correspond to the actual life material of the author. In addition to falsifications and hoaxes, the article pays attention to cases when unreliable biographies are a means or even a space for a literary game and in this way diversify the cultural and philosophical discourse.