HISTORY AS MAN'S SEARCH FOR SELF-IDENTITY

The article features the problem of the relationship of sense of history with the meaning of human life in general, with the life of every human being. It analyses the search for connection between the meaning of individual human existence and the sense of history, the fate of the individual and of human destiny in the Russian philosophical tradition. The meaning of history (phylogenesis) is associated with the search for self-identity. The determination occurs through realizing one’s self from the other: an animal, the dead, space, nature, God, an angel, a thing. The  stages  of  one’s  self-differentiation  are  the  stages  of  one’s  self-revealing. The historical deployment of self-identification process begins with reflection: man as a beast and not-beast at the same time. It forms a view of the man as a beasthuman, a human-beast, a man-not-beast. Later, one’s comparison to nature extends to infinity,  beyond  the  Earth.  The  person  begins  to  identify  with  outer  space and the whole universe. One gets the notion of the universal man and the human universe.  One  begins  to  associate  "oneself with  oneself".  The  deployment  of  selfreflection allows one to differentiate  "Me" from "not-Me". There develops a vision of the God-man, the man-God (the Superman). The meaning of ancestral human history is the actualization of the individual stories of each person. The purpose of world history is "my" birth.