Vitality and Vital Security: Socio-Philosophical Foundations of Resilience Formation in Critical Life Situations

Abstract

Abstract. The article offers an interdisciplinary socio-philosophical, psychological, and anthropological analysis of vitality as an integrative category that characterises the capacity of individuals and social communities to preserve life potential, value-based orientation, and subjectivity under conditions of critical life situations. The methodological relevance of introducing the authorial concept of the vital-crisis situation is substantiated as an analytical framework for describing states in which intensive threats are combined with a deficit of coping resources, thereby significantly increasing the risk of loss of viability, autonomy, and subjectivity.

It is demonstrated that vitality cannot be reduced to psychophysiological parameters of functioning, but rather constitutes a multidimensional anthropological phenomenon encompassing bodily, psycho-emotional, motivational, and moral-value components. Vitality is realised through the subject’s capacity to make responsible existential choices and to preserve dignity in boundary states characteristic of critical life situations. Boundary and vital-crisis states are interpreted as sensitive indicators of the level of vitality, since it is precisely under such conditions that the distinction between constructive and destructive modes of experiencing reality becomes most explicit, determining the preservation or erosion of subjectivity.

On the basis of a synthesis of philosophical, psychodynamic, stress-related, and psychometric approaches, the theoretical preconditions for the operationalisation of vitality are clarified, and its interrelation with the phenomena of resilience, adaptive energy, and moral autonomy is explicated. The antivital consequences of deliberately destructive social influences are outlined, manifesting themselves in decreased life tone, erosion of value-normative orientations, and growing existential and social vulnerability.

In conclusion, the conceptual integration of vitality with vital security is substantiated as a humanitarian and anthropocentric paradigm aimed at integrating individual life resources with legal, educational, psychosocial, and institutional mechanisms of support and prevention of degradation of the individual’s internal life potential.

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