Absurdism and its relation to faith in Beckett's play "Waiting for Godot"

Abstract

The aim of the work is to pose the problem of the relation of absurdism to faith, considered by the example of the text of S. Beckett's literary work "Waiting for Godot". Research objectives: to give a philosophical analysis of artistic images, to reveal the specifics of the attitude to God among existentialist authors. The object of the study is the text of the play "Waiting for Godot", the subject is the connection of absurdism with the theological and providentialist attitude. The philosophy of the absurd is considered as bringing existentialist thinking to its ultimate foundations. The absurd, as the antipode of the theory of providentialism, represents a pole in the thinking of a religious person who is desperate to find cause-and-effect relationships in the world. According to the author, absurdism as a philosophical trend is rooted precisely in the religious worldview. The author tries to revise the term "absurdism" and find an answer to the question of what place the search for God occupies in absurdism. Examining the work of S. Beckett "Waiting for Godot", the author seeks to prove that one of the sources of absurdism is the awareness of abandonment by God (in the variation "God died" or "God turned away"), which is necessarily associated with attributing to God the function of giving meaning to things, processes, phenomena. The author's main contribution to the research of the topic is to identify the theological attitude as the basis for philosophical trends that position themselves as atheistic.