Self-knowledge of the virtual persona: communicative practices of kinni culture in relation to Ludwig Feuerbach's anthropology.

The article focuses on the phenomenon of virtual self-discovery through the practices of kinning culture in the digital environment. To develop the terminology for analyzing communication in kinning culture, the authors refer to the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach's philosophical anthropology. The subject of analysis is the process of creating "kinlists" – individualized collections of characters from popular culture with whom young users emotionally and identification-wise connect themselves. An analogy is drawn between the formation of a psychological self-portrait and self-discovery in Feuerbach's "psychology of the heart." Central attention is given to how kinning serves as a communicative practice that links the internal subjective constructions of the individual with external mediations and texts. This allows for a view of virtual identity as a particular form of self-regulation and the construction of meaningful images of the "self" in culture and everyday life. The methodological foundation consists of hermeneutic and phenomenological approaches, including the reconstruction of Feuerbach's epistemology and psychology of the heart. Interpretive strategies borrowed from Marxist ideology critique, Hegelian dialectics, and psychoanalytic projection theory are utilized. The analysis is conducted in consideration of the philosophical context (Feuerbach, Stirner, Marx, Freud, Gramsci) and modern digital communicative practices. The novelty of the article lies in the application of ideas from classical philosophical anthropology to the analysis of contemporary internet practices of self-identification. The practice of kinning is described both documentarily and phenomenologically accurately. It is shown that the practice of kinning reproduces the mechanism of self-discovery described by Feuerbach: subjective qualities are projected onto the images of popular culture, forming a virtual persona as a matrix of self-reference. The conclusion is made regarding the relevance of Feuerbach's theory of projection for the philosophical understanding of identity in the digital age. The article describes the process of forming the subject of modern social practices – the virtual persona. The mode of being of the virtual persona is fundamentally non-individual, thus we have a non-individual personality resulting from collective social creativity. The necessity for further phenomenological, sociological, and anthropological research on the virtual persona is substantiated.

kinni-culture, virtual persona, Ludwig Feuerbach, projection, alienation, identity, digital practices, philosophy of religion, philosophical anthropology, self-knowledge