Aram G. Aleksanyan
Candidate of Philological Sciences
Keywords – Grigor Zohrap, pessimism, O. Comte, H. Spencer, J. J. Rousseau, A. Schopenhauer, conscience, paradox, philosophy of will, rationality of compassion.
Summary
Grigor Zohrap’s biophilosophy is combined especially with the study of pessimistic teachings. The monastic understandings in Zohrap’s views are, in fact, combined with J. J. Rousseau and A. to Schopenhauer’s philosophy of compassion, forming an original existential philosophy that is essentially pessimistic in nature. The problems of life, death, conscience, right, crime, law, forgiveness, moral, family, love, gender relationships are examined and formulated in the context of pessimistic logic, which considers “natural” and “biological” as the fundamental causes of human behavior. Moreover, Rousseau nature, and later Schopenhauer identify the will with the body. Zohrap’s recognition of the meaning of life, the advice of being, comes to the following generalization: a) life is suffering, b) life is futile, c) happiness is an illusion, deceptive and fleeting. Pessimism proposes several ways to overcome this situation, which are also present in the context of Zohrap’s novels. Manifestations of will are characterized by a certain gradation: a) blind, unconscious desire to live, b) self-awareness, c) self-denial. With the extinction of will, a person acquires a blissful state of being. If the will chooses self-denial in the terrible dilemma set before it, then, according to Schopenhauer, we enter, as the mystics say, the kingdom of bliss. According to them, it is the world of pure morality, where virtue begins with mercy and suffering and ends with asceticism, which leads to complete liberation, and the moral foundations that lead to it are sympathy, compassion, and mercy. The will in a person is the essence in itself, the grain and the root, and the intellect is secondary, conditional.
One of the means of liberation from suffering is considered by pessimists to be aesthetic discretion, which is observed in the desert of oasis life. Aesthetic enjoyment is essentially free will. The essence of things is revealed only in front of the aesthetic genius’s will free and unparticipated, that is, in front of a purely objective view. What is recognized in things is not the individual, but the eternal, not the temporal, but the idea of the thing. Art embodies that idea. It emerges not in relation to its body, not expressed in space, time and causality, but as the pure essence of things. Hence, to depict life means to consider it in relation to the deepest layer. Zohrap’s “life as it is” principle tends to the essence of things and phenomena, and that essence is the will itself.