An Existential Experience: Psychological and Philosophical Analysis

In this paper, I demonstrate the phenomenon of existential experience in its two modes: negative (existential anxiety) and positive (self-transcendence). I analyze certain aspects of existential anxiety: the absurd, the borderline situation of death, freedom, as well as the modes of existential experience: nausea, boredom, despair, abandonment and horror. I consider the phenomenon of "self-transcendence" in three waves of existentialism: religious (K. Yaspers), atheistic (J. p. Sartre, A. Camus) and neuroexistentialism (G. Caruso, O. Flanagan). I propose the reconstruction of existential experience in the concepts of early L. Wittgenstein's philosophy. I analyze possible ways to overcome the new existential crisis, which is expressed in the collapse of illusions about the essence of man in the light of discoveries in the field of neuroscience.