Existential principles of heroes of the Elder Edda

The relevance of the new consideration of the textbook question of the relation of the “alienated” individual to the “organic” unity of good and evil (within the boundaries of the classical dichotomy of freedom and necessity) is determined by the significantly changed tasks of modern philosophical anthropology. The formulation of the problem implies that the empirical paradox is inherent in the object to be comprehended, since the “rationality” of reality is discredited by the “projection of the negative” onto the external “objective” world and the inability of the subject of cognition to make the necessary rational decisions. The ontological status and axiological ranking of “things” (including the phenomena of the transcendental) is realized in the highly subjective relation of the “I” to real and unreal opposites. This dilemma is not so much an epistemological problem of the “authenticity” of the perceived world and the “positivity” of the reflection of self-consciousness as an ontological problem of the contradictory nature of the “very content” of the diverse structures of being. The purpose of the study is to decode the cognitive semantic construct designated by the paradigm of modernity as “meeting with oneself.” The methodology of interdisciplinary analysis is determined by the specifics of the empirical material, i.e. the heroic plots of the Elder Edda, a famous literary monument. One of the results of the analysis is the reconstruction of the “suggestively charged” epic continuum (the “unconditional universality” of the world as a unity of the “contradictory extremes” of the universal). It is concluded that the decisive condition for the completeness of the humanized “image of the world” (the absolute unity of the “connecting multitude” of principles and substances) is the spiritual individuality, which is potentially able to say its weighty word in the “arrangement” of the universe and defend its autonomy in the context of the predetermination of existential choice. The grandeur of the heroic characters of the Edda should be seen as a suitable illustration, mythological in nature and artistic in form, to this situational model of “return to oneself.”