Citation

Sosic AZ. Ars et Humanitas 2022; 16(2): 229-242.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022)

DOI

10.4312/ars.16.2.229-242

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Suicide is still a taboo topic in Slovenia, despite the high rate of suicide, so I focused on it in more detail in the review of philosophical positions and classifications of voluntary death. In the interpretative-Analytical research, I justified Kacur s death in Cankar s novel Martin Kacur as a suicide, which I considered from different perspectives. I took into account Schopenhauer s philosophical tolerance of suicide through the ethics of compassion, Nietzsche s justification of suicide as an expression of human freedom in the world, Freud s explanation of the link between the instinct of death and life, and three levels of philosophical belief or mood. These are idealism, nihilism and fatalism, arranged in a constant dialogic relationship, through which we pass from the story to the narrative level. Taking into account realistic (the gradual decline of Kacur) and symbolist poetics (the hallucinatory logic of symbols), I used different classifications to prove suicide, according to which Kacur s suicide is a subtle combination of egoistic or selfish and logical or nihilistic and meek and unconscious suicide. While the connection between the egoistic and the logical suicide philosophically justifies Kacur s decision, the combination of involuntary and meek suicide affects the reader s empathy. With her help, we try not to understand the tragic downfall of the altruistic Kacur, similar to most of Cankar s main characters, only through the thematization of the unfortunate idealist, but also through the special poetics of (Austrian) modernity, which paid special attention to death at the beginning of the 20th century. © 2022 Ljubljana University Press. All rights reserved.

Language: sk

Keywords

Kacur s suicide; Nietzsche s idea of free death; novel as a triptych; Schopenhauer s ethics of compassion; social empathy