Philosophies of life and the new beginning of the century. In Krytyka, No. 5 (127), 2008, pp. 19-20.

The article analyzes cultural and philosophical trends in society at the beginning of the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries. The author highlights a common feature of the beginnings of these centuries – the return of biological images and interest in the themes of life, birth, and death. In the 19^th century, this trait was represented by the wave of romanticism and the glorification of nature over man, and in the 20^th century – by the philosophies of Bergson and Nietzsche. At the beginning of the 21^st century the author also traces the return to the theme of vitality in the works of Michel Houellebecq and Peter Sloterdijk («Rage and Time»). The author pays particular attention to the analysis of contemporary culture, which is characterized by: a cult of youth, an interest in animal wildness, which has become exotic and attracts as something special and forbidden, a search for identification with the natural world, and the actualization of environmental issues. Ultimately, Yermolenko proposes viewing the functioning of human culture as the development of a living organism that has birth, maturity, and death, followed by a new birth.