The struggle for being in symbolic reality

The purpose of the article is to explicate the concept of «being» in symbolic reality, to trace the reasons for the significant growth of interest in language, communicative space in modern philosophy, to show that the symbol not only acts as a means of communication but is the basis of a person’s creative attitude to reality. The authenticity of presence in being does not follow from cognitive subject-object relations to things, but from the embodiment of a symbolic image formed in consciousness and discursively shared with others. In the philosophy of the 20th century, the symbolic system becomes the main field of knowledge about being, about things. Consciousness and the external world are increasingly viewed only as a result of description. The logic of language remains the only support in the search for an objective means of cognition. If we consider the symbolic system only as a means of communication, then its main function is missed - a living connection with being. Language is not only a description, an understanding but also construction, creative thinking. The definitions of things contain the idea of their potential, undisclosed properties, inaccessible to empirical perception, but cognizable through naming, definition. The paper gives three examples in which the feelings of authenticity of being and connection with it are derived not from rational and logical cognition, but through a creative attitude, the embodiment of the idea of the potential inherent in things: in the process of creating things according to their own project; in the collective reproduction of folk culture, tied to everyday life; in the education of the individual corresponding to the idea about the proper, ideal person. In these examples, the authenticity of being is revealed based on the response in consciousness from the discursively determined results of creativity.