Site logo

The Loss of Individuality in War: Existentialist Approach

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

CC BY-NC 4.0 This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Abstract

The article explores the issue of loss of individuali-ty in the war according to theoretical perceptions of existen-tialist philosophers. The problem is observed and discussed, focusing mainly on the cases of two world warsthat emerged in the 20th century. These wars had a huge global impact not only on social and political life worldwide but also on the philosophical perceptions of human life valorization and ex-istence. Based on the comparative analysis of the philosophical views of different thinkers, the article reveals the loss of hu-man individuality both in social conditions and on the onto-logical level.It is concluded that if the philosophy of World War I ob-served death as a unifying factor, including an equalizationthat excludes the individual, then existentialism, as a condi-tion of the reality of widespread death, considers it as a phe-nomenon that opens the spiritual eye of a person to the reality of death. As the development of technology and wars are closely related, world wars represent a direct threat by primi-tive nations that assimilate and use technology to absorb na-tions endowed with a peace-loving and creative spirit. This is a big threat to humanity in terms of its dehumanization and destruction

Subscribe to TheGufo Newsletter​