Romain Gary’s love philosophy

Abstract

The paper attempts to highlight a philosophical line explaining the nature of love in the heritage of the French writer Romain Gary. Based on his novels, the article explores the way love unites and separates people, pushes the boundaries of personal freedom, helps people to better know themselves and one another, to overcome isolation and loneliness. When proposing his hermeneutics of love, the writer neither uses relevant terms of philosophical anthropology, ethics, ontology, epistemology, nor centers around its metaphysics or semiotics; however, it doesn’t prevent him from the implicit reasoning within the framework of the above mentioned categories. He explores the phenomenon of love by means of literature exclusively, but the resulting picture is not inferior to explications of love in philosophical thought. The author addresses differentiation of personal love, its role, place and value in human life, the impact on the autonomy of both loving and loved. With diligence and truly scientific interest in the phenomenon explores Romain Gary the mystery of love. In his interpretation love is a uniquely human, beautiful instinct. Picturesqueness, metaphoricity, polysemy of his novels are fully balanced with cold criticism of modern society having lost the sense of reality, constantly greedy for the mass culture. The main content of the article embraces the Romain Gary’s search for the axiological facet splitting power and weakness, person’s freedom and captivity in love and justifying emotional state dominant over the rational view of things. Specific examples in the article extracted from different works outline the way love opposes alienation and acts as an independent force and reaction to the risks and challenges of modern society.