Philosophy of N.A. Cheat Sheet: Philosophical Views H

A. Berdyaev "New Middle Ages"

Berdyaev - main ideas

Berdyaev's thought belongs to the heights of Christian existentialism. It also reflects the influence of Jacob Boehme.

Berdyaev considers the fundamental principle of the world not being, but freedom. It is from this freedom that God creates man, a free being. Freedom, being irrational in nature, can therefore lead to both good and evil. According to Berdyaev, evil is freedom that turns against itself, it is the enslavement of man by the idols of art, science and religion. They give rise to the relations of slavery and submission from which human history has arisen.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948)

Berdyaev rebelled against the concepts rationalism, determinism and teleology that destroy the realm of freedom. The problem of human existence is its liberation. This idea of ​​Berdyaev formed the basis of the "philosophy of personality", which influenced the course personalism and, in particular, Emmanuel Munier, as well as the Uruguayan Jesuit Juan Luis Segundo, the theologian of liberation.

A person is defined primarily by his personality. Berdyaev contrasts the concept personalities- ethical and spiritual category - individual, sociological and natural categories. Personality does not belong to the realm of nature, but to the world of freedom. Unlike an individual (a part of the cosmos and society), a person does not belong to any integrity at all. It opposes false wholes: the natural world, society, state, nation, church, etc. These false wholes are the main sources of objectification that alienate the freedom of man in his creations – and he ends up deifying them, subjecting them to tyranny.

The means for liberation from all forms of alienating objectification, Berdyaev considers the creative act. Its essence is the struggle against external restrictions, knowledge, love are liberating forces that rise up against ossification, cold and everything inhumane.

Turning to Christian messianism (reminiscent of the teachings of Joachim Florsky), Berdyaev, who lived in the era of the establishment of totalitarian regimes, was one of the first to condemn the messianisms of the “chosen race” and “chosen class”.

Standing up against all forms of social, political and religious oppression, against depersonalization and dehumanization, Berdyaev's writings acted as a vaccine against all forms of bloody utopias of the past and future. Unlike the creators of these utopias, Berdyaev emphasized the real needs and real purpose of man. Man is a creation of supernatural freedom, which has emerged from the divine mystery and will end history with the proclamation of the Kingdom of God. The individual must prepare this Kingdom in freedom and love.

In general terms, Berdyaev's thought lies in the tradition of Russian messianism - purified and clarified by the radical criticism of the forces opposing him.

Nikolai Berdyaev in 1912

Berdyaev - quotes

Freedom in its deepest sense is not a right, but a duty, not what a person demands, but what is required of a person in order for him to become fully human.

Freedom does not at all mean an easy life, freedom is a difficult life requiring heroic efforts. (Berdyaev. "On the ambiguity of freedom")

The most unacceptable for me is the feeling of God as a force, as omnipotence and power. God has no power. He has less power than a policeman. (Berdyaev. "Self-knowledge")

The aristocratic idea requires the real domination of the best, democracy - the formal domination of all. Aristocracy, as the management and domination of the best, as a requirement for quality selection, remains forever and ever the highest principle of social life, the only utopia worthy of man. And all your democratic cries, with which you resound the squares and bazaars, will not eradicate from the noble human heart the dreams of domination and government of the best, the chosen ones, they will not drown out this from the depths of the going call for the best and the chosen to appear, so that the aristocracy enters into their eternal rights. (Berdyaev. "Philosophy of inequality")

Any system of life is hierarchical and has its own aristocracy, only a pile of rubbish is not hierarchical, and only in it no aristocratic qualities stand out. If the true hierarchy is broken and the true aristocracy is exterminated, then false hierarchies appear and a false aristocracy is formed. A bunch of swindlers and murderers from the dregs of society can form a new false aristocracy and present a hierarchical principle in the structure of society. (Berdyaev. "Philosophy of inequality")

The aristocracy was created by God and received its qualities from God. The overthrow of the historical aristocracy leads to the establishment of another aristocracy. The aristocracy claims to be the bourgeoisie, representatives of capital, and the proletariat, representatives of labor. The aristocratic pretensions of the proletariat even surpass those of all other classes. (Berdyaev. "Philosophy of inequality")

You take everything that is the worst from the workers, from the peasants, from the intelligent bohemia, and out of this worst you want to create the life to come. You appeal to the vindictive instincts of human nature. Out of evil your goodness is born, out of darkness your light shines. Your Marx taught that a new society must be born in evil and from evil, and he considered the revolt of the darkest and most ugly human feelings to be the way to it. He contrasted the spiritual type of the proletarian with the spiritual type of the aristocrat. The proletarian is the one who does not want to know his origin and does not honor his ancestors, for whom there is no family and homeland. The proletarian consciousness erects resentment, envy and revenge in the virtues of the new coming man. (Berdyaev. "Philosophy of inequality")

Democracy is indifferent to the direction and content of the people's will and does not have any criteria for determining the truth or falsity of the direction in which the people's will is expressed ... Democracy is pointless ... Democracy remains indifferent to good and evil. (Berdyaev. "The New Middle Ages")

The dignity of man presupposes the existence of God. This is the essence of the whole vital dialectic of humanism. A person is a person only if he is a free spirit reflecting the Higher Being philosophically. This point of view should be called personalism. This personalism must in no case be confused with the individualism that is destroying the European man. (Berdyaev. "The Ways of Humanism")

In order for a person to be a true reality, and not an accidental combination of elements of a lower nature, it is necessary that there be realities higher than a person (Berdyaev. “The Lie of Humanism”).

The natural world, "this world" and its massive environment, is not at all identical with what is called the cosmos and cosmic life filled with beings. The "world" is the enslavement, the fettering of beings, not only people, but also animals, plants, even minerals, stars. This “world” must be destroyed by the personality, freed from its enslaved and enslaving state. (Berdyaev. "On slavery and human freedom")

I would like to be with animals in eternal life, especially with loved ones. (Berdyaev. "Self-knowledge")

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According to Berdyaev, a person cannot be understood from what is “below him”, but can only be understood from what is “above him”. In other words, man cannot be understood from nature, but can only be understood from God. Third, besides God and nature.

In his anthropology, Berdyaev is based on the classification of types of anthropological teachings by his Berlin friend M. Scheler. These are: “1) Jewish-Christian, the creation of man by God and the fall into sin; 2) ancient Greek, man as a bearer of reason; 3) a natural-scientific person, as a product of the evolution of the animal world; 4) the theory of decadence, the emergence of consciousness, reason, spirit as a biological decline, the weakening of life. Berdyaev notes, however, that Scheler's classification is incomplete. “There is,” he writes, “the most widespread anthropological doctrine in modern Europe—the understanding of man as a social being, as a product of society, and also as an inventor of tools (homo faber). This doctrine is now more important than the doctrine of natural biology. We find it in Marx, in Durkheim.

This is the "third" in understanding the essence of man, which is given. This is the Marxist doctrine of the social essence of man. The essence of man, as Marx taught, is not an abstract that belongs to each individual, but in its reality it is an ensemble of all social relations. But Berdyaev cannot accept this teaching for two reasons. Firstly, this doctrine, with its vulgar sociological understanding, seems to be

excludes the human person. And this despite the fact that the individual is denied by the barracks form of collectivity, and in fact, the concept of personality, as well as the concept of society, is a purely historical concept. Secondly, if the essence of a person lies in another person, then, as Feuerbach showed, God is not needed. Then one person turns out to be God for another person. Naturally, Berdyaev cannot accept this either. As a result, he tries to find his own solution to the problem of the relationship between the individual and the collective in man.

Berdyaev belongs to that tradition in Russian philosophy that sharply opposed individualism, which, as a rule, was called Western or petty-bourgeois. But he also cannot accept socialist, let alone communist collectivism. The solution offered by Berdyaev is expressed by the concept of personalism. If Solovyov, according to Gaidenko, is an impersonalist and, following Schopenhauer and Comte, puts the general above the individual, then Berdyaev, who emerged from Solovyov's sophiology, is the creator of the philosophy of personalism. And this is their fundamental difference. “My philosophy,” says Berdyaev, “is sharply personalistic, and according to the terminology that has become fashionable now, it can be called. existential, although in a completely different sense than, for example, the philosophy of Heidegger. But what is "personalistic" philosophy and "personalism"?

Berdyaev proceeds from the essential difference between two things: individualism and personalism. The first is associated with the individual, the second - with the person, that is, the personality. And therefore, first of all, it is necessary to distinguish between the individual and the personality. “The individual,” writes Berdyaev, “is a naturalistic-biological category. Personality is a religious-spiritual category. The individual, as Berdyaev correctly notes, is appropriate to correlate with the genus. The individual is biologically born. “Personality is not born, it is created by God.”

God in this case appears in Berdyaev at the very place where society was located in Marxism. In Marxism, the individual is derived from society, in Berdyaev - from God. The primacy of society in relation to the individual Berdyaev resolutely rejects. The individual is at the center of everything. “The center of the moral life is in the individual, not in the communities,” he writes. - Personality is a value that is higher than the state, nation, human race, nature, and, in essence, it is not included in this series.

Personality, therefore, Berdyaev has something out of the ordinary. And it all sounds very humane: the individual is higher than the state, nation, society. After all, how many reproaches were made to Hegel and Marx for their "totalitarianism" when the individual was absorbed by society and the state. But it is one thing when we put the individual above society and the state, and quite another thing when the individual puts himself above society and the state.

In the latter case, no matter what we say about the dignity and uniqueness of the individual, this is still the real individualism. This is something Berdyaev does not notice. He does not notice that the cult of personality is turning into a cult of his own personality. A person can sacrifice himself, his personality for the sake of others, for the sake of society, for the sake of the nation, for the sake of the state, but can he sacrifice other personalities? After all, if a person puts other personalities above himself, then he cannot but put “community” above himself. The Slavophiles, with their "catholicity", believed that the community is a moral subject, and not an individual. Liberals do the opposite. Berdyaev, in fact, did not understand the dispute between the Slavophiles and the Westerners. And this is the weak point of his work “The Russian Idea. The main problems of Russian thought of the XIX century

and the beginning of the 20th century. Berdyaev, with his "personalism," wants to avoid extremes, but nevertheless slips into individualism.

Berdyaev's "personalism" is simply a euphemism for what is called individualism. And Zenkovsky understands this in his own way, specifying about Berdyaev that his "personalism separates, and does not unite people." Berdyaev does not save here and the concept of “community” introduced by him, replacing the more appropriate Russian words “sobornost” or “community”. Berdyaev here means only community and communion in mystical experience. Berdyaev avoids simple, everyday human communication. “Fear of everyday life,” as Zenkovsky rightly notes, “however, makes imaginary “creative” social communication, about which many pages have been written by Berdyaev.

Berdyaev's personalism thus becomes a self-conclusion, it is afraid of any contact with the world, so as not to lose the "ups of the spirit", that is, it actually turns into metaphysical pluralism and solipsism.

When Berdyaev speaks of "sociality", what he is essentially referring to is a form of sociality that is strongly associated with positivist sociology. Therefore, he often speaks of "community" as the antithesis of positivist sociality. “... Russians,” writes Berdyaev, “are communitarian, but not socialized in the Western sense, that is, they do not recognize the primacy of society over man.” But it is precisely the Russians who recognize the primacy of society over "man," but the primacy of "community," "the world," and not society in the sense of Gesellschaft, i.e., bourgeois or, what is the same, civil society. Berdyaev is far from a historical understanding of social forms. And the lessons of Marxism were practically for nothing for him here.

It is simply impossible to build on this ethics, not only Kantian, but also Christian. If the individual is “primary” and society is “secondary,” then I am prius in relation to You, and I am the end, and You are only a means.

Therefore, Berdyaev, as P. P. Gaidenko very correctly noted, “does not only write his own - no matter what he says, he writes about himself.”

Berdyaev is trying to substantiate individual morality, which is obvious nonsense, because morality is, first of all, a person's attitude to another person, and therefore to himself. “Ethics,” writes Berdyaev, “is not only connected with sociology, but is also suppressed by sociology.

N. A. Berdyaev

And this is not at all a product of the positivism of the 19th and 20th centuries, it is not at all in O. Kon-te and Durkheim. The relationship between ethics and sociology reflects the global oppression of life by sociality, social discipline and social norms. The terror of sociality, the power of society reign over man almost throughout his entire history and go back to primitive collectivism.

The sociality that compels a person, Berdyaev believes, is Heidegger's das Man. In this connection he makes a curious note: "If we take into account the distinction that Tennies makes between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, then I am talking about Gesellschaft all the time here." Not only Berdyaev himself, but also the publishers who give their note to this note by Berdyaev, do not stipulate that this distinction was first introduced not by Tennis at all, but by Marx, who by Gesellschaft means bourgeois, or civil, society in which individuals alienated from each other. Hegel characterizes this society in exactly the same way. The sociology of another society, in fact, does not know. With Berdyaev, this distinction between "community" and "society" remains without consequences. He, like sociologists, knows only one form of sociality - the alienated sociality of civil society. And he opposes spirituality to this form of sociality. But this only says that the sociality of civil society is deprived of this spirituality.

Rebelling against the public, seeing in it as such the suppression of human freedom and personality, Berdyaev uses the pretext that positivist sociology really abstracts from freedom, from spirituality, from individuality, and denies it. But positivist sociality is a special sociality. And this is not all sociality. This is only the sociality that is characteristic of Gesellschft, of modern civil society. This is only that logical section of social reality, where society determines and forces us. We define and freely create social reality in history, from which positivist sociology abstracts. What we attribute to ourselves as spiritual (moral) is social in us, as L.S. Vygotsky.

Any sociality, according to Berdyaev, denies the individual. Including the most perfect. “The perfect socialization of man,” he writes, “associated with the idea of ​​a perfect social order, and the perfect regulation of all human culture, can lead to a new and final enslavement of the human personality. And in the name of the individual and his original freedom, this perfect socialization will have to be fought.

In general, Berdyaev's logic is this: let the world perish, and let me drink tea. But then it would at least be clear. And this could be the point. However, he immediately stipulates: “It does not follow from this, of course, that there is no need to fight for the realization of social truth.” Why "shouldn't"? It just follows: if a perfect social system leads to the complete and final enslavement of man, then in the name of the highest human value - freedom - there is no need to fight for it in any case.

Is it necessary or not? And as soon as we have leaned towards what seems to be necessary, Berdyaev again confuses us with his dialectics. “But social truth,” he tells us, “is inconceivable without spiritual truth, without spiritual rebirth and rebirth. For moral consciousness, there is always an inescapable tragic conflict between the individual and society, between the individual and the family, between the individual and the state, between the individual and the individual. And there is always a tragic clash of personal morality and social morality. Religious value clashes with the value of the state and national... No smooth normative, rationalized conflict resolution is absolutely impossible here.

Good is realized through contradictions, through sacrifice, through suffering. Good is paradoxical. The moral life is tragic."

We have already said that Berdyaev seeks to dissociate himself from "bourgeois" individualism and it is for this that he introduces the concept of "personalism". “Psychological individualism,” he writes, “so characteristic of the 19th and 20th centuries, least of all means the triumph of the individual and personalism. The complete disintegration of the individual, that is, the unity and integrity of the "I", we see in the work of Proust. "I" is decomposed into elements, sensations and thoughts, the image and likeness of God perishes, everything is immersed in the spiritual web. The refinement of the soul, which ceases to carry in itself superpersonal values, the divine principle, leads to the dissociation of the soul, to decomposition into elements. The refined soul needs a harsh spirit to hold it in unity, integrity, and eternal value.

The inconsistency and inconsistency of Berdyaev has already been said more than once. So in connection with the personality, he gets inconsistency. Then his personality is completely self-sufficient and does not need any other personality. Then he objects to Scheler that he is wrong when he asserts that the person does not presuppose anything outside of himself. “Personality,” says Berdyaev, “essentially presupposes another and another, but not “not me,” which is a negative boundary, but another personality. Personality is impossible without love and sacrifice, without access to another, friend, beloved. The self-enclosed personality is destroyed. Personality is not absolute.

Berdyaev is contradictory, at least in the sense that, on the one hand, he is an extreme individualist and, in this sense, "a petty bourgeois biting the bit." But on the other hand, he is a liberal gentleman and an aristocrat with all the ensuing consequences. And these two components define his philosophy. An unambiguous assessment is not possible here. And in this respect, he shares the fate of F. Nietzsche, who had the most significant influence on Berdyaev.

In the Soviet years in the USSR there was an official negative assessment of Nietzsche's philosophy as a justification for the ideology and practice of fascism. When a two-volume edition of Nietzsche's works was published in the post-Soviet period, K. Svasyan's large introductory article proved the exact opposite, namely that Nietzsche had nothing to do with fascism at all. But the fact of the matter is that neither is true. And an adequate assessment of Nietzsche's philosophy was given for the first time, perhaps, by V. Solovyov. “One and the same word,” he wrote, “combines both the falsehood and the truth of this amazing doctrine.” And such a word is, first of all, the word "Superman". It is ambivalent, like all modern culture, which Nietzsche subjects to ruthless negation.

As for Berdyaev, he does not reject Nietzsche's immorality, but tries to justify it. And Nietzsche is more frank here, and therefore more cynical. But this does not mean that Berdyaev is not a cynic, he is a bashful cynic. And how much more sympathetic in his anti-democratism Nietzsche seems, who does not twist and play about the fact that Berdyaev furnishes with a bunch of all sorts of reservations and conditions.

“No rational concept,” says Berdyaev, “can be worked out about peacemaking. It's a myth, not a concept." And yet, the creation of the world, the fall into sin, etc. occupy an important, even central position in his philosophy. And as a result, his whole philosophy is practically based on mythology. At the same time, Berdyaev gives a completely non-orthodox interpretation of the fall, in comparison with that given by rational theology. "The myth of the fall," he writes, "is the myth of the greatness of man." Here Berdyaev develops a strange dialectic of good and evil in the spirit of the well-known proverb: if you don't sin, you won't repent, if you don't repent, you won't be saved. “The possibility of evil,” he notes, “is the condition of good.” And further: "Such is the paradox, the dialectic and the problem of good and evil."

We have already seen that Berdyaev puts personalism and existentialism on the same line. But if personalism, as it turns out according to Berdyaev, removes the extremes of individualism and collectivism, egoism and altruism, then existentialism in all its known historical forms, starting with Kierkegaard, is real individualism. Nevertheless, Berdyaev himself considers his philosophy to be existential. “Existential philosophy,” he writes, “is primarily determined by the existentiality of the cognizing subject himself. The philosopher of the existential type does not objectify in the process of cognition, does not oppose the object to the subject. His philosophy is the expressiveness of the subject itself, immersed in the mystery of existence.

One can argue about who has priority in formulating the basic principles of existentialism, Berdyaev or Heidegger. But one thing is indisputable - in Berdyaev we have real existentialism, which consists in the tragic rupture of the individual and society, I and You. Even the sobornost of the Slavophiles, he, in fact, does not accept, although he is trying to somehow make a reservation here. “Catholicity,” he writes, “is the immanent quality of a personal conscience standing before God. The soul stands before God in free union with other souls and with the soul of the world. But her attitude to other souls and to the soul of the world is determined by her free conscience. Freedom of conscience does not necessarily mean the isolation of the soul and individualism. Yes, that's just the point, which means. After all, a free union of souls, according to Berdyaev, is completely impossible. And catholicity is still a form of sociality, and any sociality in him “distorts” his conscience. “We must go from spirituality, as primary,” he writes, “to sociality, and not from sociality, as secondary, to spirituality.”

But where and in what is spirituality rooted? It is neither individual nor collective. It is therefore in God. But God is the common sun for all of us. And we are all brothers in Christ. And therefore they are obliged to love each other, help each other, etc., that is, to be collectivists and even altruists. That is why consistent existentialism is atheistic existentialism. And if J.-P. Sartre definitely states that others are hell, then for him there is no God. In this sense, but only in this sense, existentialism is humanism completely rejected by Berdyaev.

But on the other hand, existentialism is not at all humane, because humanism presupposes the recognition in another of an equal to me, and not a slave and not a master. Where there is no equality, there is no humanism. Therefore, Berdyaev, rejecting humanism, rejects equality, rejects democracy.

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Moscow Banking Economic College

ESSAY

by subject

FOUNDATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY

on the topic:

"PHILOSOPHY OF N.A. BERDYAEV'S CREATIVITY"

scientific adviser

Ter-Gukasova T.A.

The work was done by a student 2-BD-1

Abakumova Margarita

Moscow, 2009

Introduction

The main stages of the life and work of N.A. Berdyaev

Philosophy of creativity N.A. Berdyaev

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

It is difficult to find in the history of philosophy a thinker who would experience the last limiting questions of human existence so intensely and with such acuteness as N.A. Berdyaev. He was one of those about whom F.M. Dostoevsky wrote that they did not need a million, the main thing for them was to solve the idea. And, entering into a roll call with the great writer, Berdyaev admits: “I did not love “life” before and more than “thought”, I loved “meaning” more than life, “spirit” loved more than “world” ... “Man is a complex and intricate being . My "I" experiences itself as the intersection of two worlds. At the same time, “this world” is experienced as not authentic, not primary, and not final. There is another world, more real and authentic. The depth of "I" belongs to him "(Berdyaev N.A. Self-knowledge).

Berdyaev was not an academic philosopher. He was a principled opponent of universal worldview systems. As many researchers of Berdyaev’s work note, the idea of ​​personal freedom is colored by directly opposite moods: tragedy and determination to make a “revolution of the spirit”, feelings of loneliness and an impulse towards an all-conquering sobornost, a sense of the fall of being and history and faith in the transforming and saving power of human freedom. The philosophy of freedom was the subject of reflections of Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Sartre and Jaspers, Berdyaev and Solovyov. The range of understanding of this concept is extremely wide - from the complete denial of the very possibility of free choice (in the concepts of behaviorism) to the justification of "escape from freedom" (E. Fromm) in the conditions of a modern civilized society.

Today, in our modern society, we are trying to restore the value of individual freedom, which is formally perceived by us as one of the rights of man and citizen. The concept of "freedom of the individual" is increasingly used in the media, in the speeches of political leaders, and is declared by the Constitution of our state. However, the meaning invested in this concept by different people is different, often the most opposite ways of solving the problem of the freedom of the human person are offered. But at the same time, the category of freedom itself is not subjected to a sufficiently serious analysis.

The main stages of the life and work of N.A. Berdyaev

For a better understanding of the works of N.A. Berdyaev, acquaintance with his life path is of great interest.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev is a famous philosopher, writer, publicist, and public figure.

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev was born on March 6/19, 1874 in Kyiv. His paternal ancestors belonged to the highest military aristocracy. In 1894 he entered the Kyiv Cadet Corps. However, the atmosphere of a military educational institution turned out to be completely alien to him, and Berdyaev entered the natural faculty of the Kyiv University of St. Vladimir.

The student environment had a very significant impact on the character and life orientations of Berdyaev. The imperfection of the world now gives rise to a desire to change the world, to eradicate evil and injustice. The answer to the question of how to achieve this, Berdyaev is looking for in the theory of scientific socialism, which he began to study in 1894, in one of the Kyiv social democratic circles. At the same time, he continues his studies in philosophy, attending lectures and seminars of Professor G.I. Chelpanov. At the same time, he got involved in social democratic work, becoming a propagandist of Marxism, for which, when the Kyiv Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class was defeated in 1898, he was arrested, expelled from the university and sent into exile in Vologda (1901 - 1902). . By this time, Berdyaev was already known as a "critical Marxist", the author of the article "A.F. Lange and critical philosophy in their relation to socialism."

Ideological disagreements with Marxism began rather soon. Their essence was that, firstly, Marxism was focused only on the vicious circle of the earthly world, while in the worldview of N. A. Berdyaev a sense of the otherworldly, transcendent increased; secondly, in Marxism little attention was paid to the individual, his spiritual freedom and creativity, personal conscience and other existential problems that were at the center of the intellectual interests of the thinker; thirdly, the revolutionary nature of the view, which should be arranged not through a social revolution, but on the basis of Berdyaev himself, was ethical, not social: the new world, from its point of view of freedom and the creative act of man. The disengagement from Marxism was inevitable. There was a turn "from Marxism to idealism", coinciding in time with the Russian cultural renaissance, the spiritual search for a "new religious consciousness" that began among the Russian intelligentsia in the early twentieth century. According to the thinker himself, these spiritual quests combined the spirit of the Spirit (Christian tradition) with the spirit of Dionysus (pagan tradition). The interest of the intelligentsia (especially the St. Petersburg intelligentsia) in religion, mysticism, occultism, eroticism, and aesthetics became more acute. At the St. Petersburg Religious and Philosophical Meetings, where D. Merezhkovsky was the main figure, the posing of new problems before the orthodox Christian consciousness was discussed, among which the main problem was the problem of flesh, blood and sex.

Having enthusiastically accepted the plan to transform Orthodoxy into a religion of blood, flesh and sex, N. Berdyaev came to the conclusion towards the end of his life that this would mean a return to Judaism and paganism. "Sex" and "flesh", if they are not transformed by Christianity, not spiritualized, make a person a slave of the generic element, in which a person as a free spirit cannot be born.

By 1903, it finally strengthened on the path that the former "legal" Marxists P.B. Struve, S.N. Bulgakov, S.L. Frank had already taken. This ultimately led him in 1904 to the journal Novy Put, a platform for religious and philosophical meetings organized in St. Petersburg by D. S. Merezhkovsky. But idealism for Berdyaev turned out to be only a transitional philosophical form. The final point is the still unclear image of religious-Christian philosophy, called upon to express human experience in a holistic and universal way.

A trip in the winter of 1907-1908. to Paris and intensive communication with Merezhkovsky and his circle stimulated the conversion of Berdyaev to Orthodoxy. Upon his return to Russia, he settled in Moscow, became close to the circle of philosophers united around the publishing house "The Way" (G.A. Rachinsky, E.N. Trubetskoy, V.F. Ern, S.N. Bulgakov, P.A. Florensky ) and takes an active part in the organization of the religious and philosophical society in memory of Vl. Solovyov. The result of the creative search of this period is published in 1911 "Philosophy of Freedom".

In The Philosophy of Freedom, Berdyaev appears as the successor to the main traditions of Russian philosophy of the 19th century. Berdyaev's striving for universal catholicity, called upon to overcome ecclesiastical confessionalism, is in line with the universalism of Vl. Solovyov and his doctrine of "God-manhood."

In 1918, Berdyaev created the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture, under which several seminars began to work. He lectures on the philosophy of history, participates in a seminar on Dostoevsky, and also writes the book The Philosophy of Inequality (published in Berlin in 1923). In 1920, the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University elected him a professor. And in 1921 he was arrested in connection with the case of the so-called "tactical center". In the summer of 1922, another arrest followed, in the fall - expulsion from the country (see Vitaly Shentalinsky, "Philosophical steamboat").

From 1922 to 1924 Berdyaev lived in Berlin. Already in this era, he gains a reputation as the leading philosopher of post-war Europe. He makes acquaintances with O. Spengler, M. Scheler, G. von Kaiserling.

The beginning of World War II and the war between Nazi Germany and the USSR sharpened Berdyaev's patriotic feelings... The first post-war book was The Russian Idea (Paris, 1946), dedicated to understanding the history of Russian philosophy.

Being in forced emigration, Berdyaev continues to consider himself a Russian philosopher. He writes: “Despite the Western element in me, I feel like I belong to the Russian intelligentsia, who were looking for the truth. I inherit the traditions of Slavophiles and Westernizers, Chaadaev and Khomyakov, Herzen and Belinsky, even Bakunin and Chernyshevsky, despite the difference in worldviews, and most of all Dostoevsky and L. Tolstoy, Vl. Solovyov and N. Fedorov. I am a Russian thinker and writer.”

Philosophy of creativity N.A. Berdyaev

The philosophy of N.A. Berdyaev was a brilliant expression of the spiritual drama of a critical era, when the human spirit discovers that the old cultural forms have become cramped for its development and is looking for new forms and ways of incarnation. It is difficult to find a serious philosophical or culturological problem that would not have received its understanding in the works of Berdyaev in one way or another. They reveal the drama of cultural creativity, understood as the realization of the original and inalienable freedom inherent in man.

The problem of personality and freedom has always been at the center of the religious outlook and religious thinking of Berdyaev, who very early defined his religious metaphysics as personalism. Personality, within the framework of Berdyaev's personalism, is not identical to the individual. If an individual is determined by nature, society, constituting a particle of the Cosmos, then a person is a spiritual reality, to which no law, even morally reasonable, is applicable: a person is freedom itself.

The indifference of the representatives of the "new religious consciousness" to the problem of personality and freedom was one of the reasons for a new turn in the intellectual and spiritual biography of N. Berdyaev. Insisting on the religious meaning of freedom, he tried to reveal it by partaking of the mystery of the Orthodox Church. N. Berdyaev is looking for ways of rapprochement with the Orthodox environment, reading patristic literature and at the same time carefully working out the idea of ​​Vl. Solovyov about God-manhood, the thoughts of the Slavophil Khomyakov about freedom as the basis of Christianity and the Church. But if the idea of ​​God-manhood became close to N. Berdyaev and he considered it to be the main idea of ​​Russian religious thought, then the content of the patristic works did not inspire him, although he valued the Greek church fathers much more than the Western scholastics.

He had an antipathy towards the clergy, did not like the Church Slavonic language, aesthetically preferring Latin and the Catholic service. The religious drama of N. Berdyaev began, which he himself described as follows: “There has always been something painful in my attitude towards the Orthodox Church, there has never been wholeness.” Indeed, on the one hand, he was on the side of the Orthodox Church in its struggle against mysticism of the monistic type (Plotinus, Eckhardt), which destroyed the freedom of the individual, dissolving the unique human individuality in a faceless deity. On the other hand, in his religious life, the thinker proceeded from a personal experience of a sense of freedom that had no points of contact with Orthodox dogmas. As a result, he declared himself a representative of "free religious philosophy" (free, in this case, from Orthodox dogma).

In the book "Philosophy of Freedom" (1911), N. Berdyaev tried to substantiate the divine nature of freedom, based on the interpretation of Christianity as a religion of God-manhood. Consistently pursuing the idea of ​​personalism in his religious metaphysics, he came to the conclusion that freedom is not created, it is outside of God, it is primary. God himself acts in the order of freedom, that is, spiritually. God is not the creator of the world, because, otherwise, he is present in every world evil and suffering, in wars and torture, etc. But then unbelief and rebellion against God are justified.

Rejecting the traditional doctrine of Providence, the philosopher believed that the Providence of God can only be understood spiritually. Man is a god-like spiritual being, and therefore he is humiliated by the Christian doctrine of humility. Having freed his religious consciousness from the dogmas of the Orthodox religion, N. Berdyaev created a religious anthropology focused on the German mystics' doctrine of man. Therefore, he has a person located in three planes of being: divine, natural and diabolical. N. Berdyaev considers how these three planes of being are combined in a person in the book “On the Purpose of Man (Experience of Paradoxical Ethics)” (1931). In this work, his religious-existential type of philosophizing was most clearly manifested.

Continuing to develop the theme of freedom, not determined by being, not derived from it, Berdyaev simultaneously analyzes the problem of the crisis of European humanism. He saw the essence of this crisis in the fact that the affirmation of man's self-sufficiency, his non-participation in the mysterious historical ecclesiastical and historical continuity, would lead to the replacement of God-manhood by God-animalism. According to the thinker, there is only one way to get out of the crisis: to recognize that man, despite the obvious baseness of his empirical existence, is a metaphysical being, feeling “the mysticism of the origins of history”, “mystery of the forces acting in history for millennia”.

N. Berdyaev revealed more clearly and fully the idea of ​​the non-existent nature of freedom in the book “The Meaning of Creativity. The Experience of Man's Justification (1916). In understanding creativity, the philosopher proceeded from the conviction that it is not determined by external causes and needs of the world. There is real creativity, creativity from nothing, there is an emanation of freedom. Berdyaev did not deny that creative gifts were given to man by God, but he believed that in creative acts there is an element of freedom that is not even determined by God. Moreover, he ascribes to man the divine power to create "out of nothing."

Unlike patristic anthropology, N. Berdyaev denied the mysteries of redemption. From the experience of his personal spiritual and religious life, he came to the conclusion that the experience of sinfulness leads to depression of consciousness, which can be overcome only in a creative impulse, uplift. A person must justify himself before God not through constant repentance for his sins, but through the creative transformation of the world. Creativity is the way of human salvation, and in its religious-cosmic meaning it is "equivalent to redemption." Rejecting the distinction between the finite and the infinite creator, introduced in medieval Christian dogma, N. Berdyaev equates the creative ability of the human and divine spirits. Such an interpretation of creativity goes back to the mystics, and it is not by chance that N. Berdyaev took the statement of the German mystic Angelus of Silesia as an epigraph to his book The Meaning of Creativity: “I know that God cannot live a single moment without me, if I turn into nothing, he, having lost me, will give up his spirit.

Berdyaev did not connect creativity and freedom with the desires of a person, his rights. Creativity is man's obligation to God, God's demand for man to continue creating the world. Creativity is a divine-human matter, and therefore, he believed, a new, final revelation would be a revelation of human creativity, the beginning of the era of the Spirit. Not finding the relevant thoughts in the Holy Scriptures, the philosopher concluded; that God hid the religious meaning of creativity from man. And only in the spiritual experience of man, and not in theological speculation, can the mystery of God's need for man and his creativity, the mystery of God-manhood, be revealed.

Berdyaev himself claimed that he personally experienced the revelation of creativity, which is the revelation of man, not God. The content of this revelation became the main theme of his book The Meaning of Creativity. Creativity for him is a phenomenon of spiritual experience, "the shock and rise of the whole human being, directed to a different, higher life, to a new being." In his personal creative experience, Berdyaev discovered that the “I”, the subject of creativity, is higher, more primary than the object “not-I”. But such primacy has nothing to do with egocentrism, because in the act of creation a person forgets about himself, striving for that which is higher than him. Although creativity is a “flight to infinity”, transcending, it ultimately takes shape in a cultural product (poetry, music, painting, philosophical text, etc.), which is always finite, and therefore cannot contain all the richness of creative ecstasy .

The discrepancy between the creative idea and its implementation is, from the point of view of the Russian philosopher, the tragedy of creativity, an integral part of which is the loneliness of the creator. Creativity cannot be collectively universal, it is always individual. And only in personal spiritual experience is the fact of imperfection of the product of creativity experienced. But Berdyaev did not identify the individuality of the creator with the egocentrism of the new European humanism, which presupposes the absorption of the individual by himself. The creator is alone, but his work has a global, universal, social character, the philosopher argued.

Berdyaev's doctrine of the religious meaning of freedom and creativity became the basis for assessing the revolution of 1917 in Russia. Having survived the Russian revolution as a moment of his own destiny, he wrote a number of works already in exile (“The Meaning of History. An Experience in the Philosophy of Human Destiny” (1923); “The New Middle Ages. Reflection on the Fate of Russia and Europe” (1924); “The Origins and Meaning of the Russian Communism" (1937), etc.), in which he interprets it as an inevitable stage in the historical fate of Russia. The thinker was sure that the passage of Russia through the experience of Bolshevism is connected with the internal fate of the Russian people. He did not accept communism, but not for political, but for spiritual reasons: he accused communism of hostility to the spirit, freedom, creativity, personality. At the same time, the Russian revolution confirmed him in the idea that freedom is not democratic, but aristocratic: the rebellious masses are not interested in freedom, and therefore do not need it.

Berdyaev is another representative of Russian religious philosophy, who, however, lived in different historical conditions. Therefore, religious motives in his work were in close contact with social ones, so that the latter often came to the fore. This social context consisted of three Russian revolutions (1905-1907, February and October 1917), the First World War, the coming to power of the Bolsheviks and forced immigration.

The main opposition, from which the development of worldview problems begins, according to Berdyaev, is between the spirit and nature. Berdyaev attributed life, freedom, creative activity, God to the concept of spirit; to the concept of nature - a thing, the psyche, necessity. Freedom is not created by God, but exists before him, therefore God is not responsible for the free will of man.

Personality is, according to Berdyaev, a spiritual category. Its realization begins the ascent from the subconscious through the conscious to the superconscious. The creative activity of man is an addition to the divine life, it is "divine-human". Putting personality at the head of his philosophy and giving it divine attributes, Berdyaev called his philosophy personalistic (from "persona" - personality).

Man is a dual being living simultaneously in two worlds - phenomena and things in themselves. Between them there can be an interaction through love. Spiritual knowledge is a unity between subjects in a mystical experience, in which (here Berdyaev uses a line from Tyutchev's poem) "Everything is in me, and I am in everything."

The central theme of the philosophy of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev is man, a free, creative man, and he is such only in the light of the divine, or rather, the divine "nothing". God created the world from nothing, therefore, God is preceded by a primary principle that does not imply any differentiation, any event. This is nothing. God is free. And the man is free. God helps a person become good, but he is not able to control anything, the principle of freedom. In his true freedom man is divine. God and man are spirit. Being free, man creates, the justification of man in his freedom, his creativity, his revelation. For Berdyaev, the main thing is the justification of a person, his philosophy is brightly personalistic, romantic, colored with thousands of colors of human existence. It is clear that a philosopher with such a worldview could not be an opponent of totalitarian regimes, lies, evil, violence and terror. The universal resurrection is achieved not in technology, not in revolutions, but in divine spiritual life. Berdyaev believed that in this respect much can be expected from the Russian soul and the Russian idea.

When the works of Berdyaev began to appear in Russia in the 90s, one after another, and he wrote more than any other domestic philosopher, the Russians discovered a new, largely unknown world, they began to evaluate the purpose of a person, the meaning of history, fate differently. Russian socialism, the mission of Russia. Berdyaev's books are a storehouse of wisdom for his compatriots. Isn't that the purpose of a true philosopher?

The work of N. A. Berdyaev is just beginning to be mastered in our country. In 1990, the full text of his manuscript "Self-knowledge (the experience of a philosophical autobiography)" was published in Russia. This manuscript was kept in Russia in accordance with the will of N. Berdyaev. It contains words that convey not only the tragedy of the thinker's life, but also the tragedy of Russian culture. The philosopher writes that he is very famous in Europe, America, even in Asia and Australia. “There is only one country in which I am almost not known, this is my homeland. This is one of the indicators of a break in the tradition of Russian culture.”

Conclusion

A true thinker does not look for simplistic solutions and is always ready to refine his views, discovering new sides to an endless problem. His creative spirit consistently and inquisitively reveals this problem for us in all its complexity and depth, and this discovery remains forever in the history of science and culture, inspiring us to a new understanding of the world and ourselves. This is the immortality of the thought of N.A. Berdyaev.

Berdyaev is one of the most important representatives of Russian philosophy. The essence of Berdyaev's philosophy is “knowledge of the meaning of being through the subject”, i.e. person. The starting point of his philosophy is the superiority of freedom over being. Along with it are such concepts as creativity, personality, spirit, God. Being is revealed in man through man.

The main problem of Berdyaev's philosophy is the meaning of human existence and, in connection with it, the meaning of being in general.

The concept of "personality" is understood by Berdyaev as a unique, unique subjectivity. Through its inherent freedom and the possibility of free creativity, it is aimed at creating a new world. The history of mankind appears as a process of development of the personal beginning of a person, and he himself achieves the highest bliss in unity with God in his creative act, aimed at achieving the highest divine values: truth, beauty and goodness, at achieving a new being, a new, true world, a kingdom Spirit.

Bibliography

Berdyaev N.A. Self-knowledge (Russian idea. Self-knowledge). - Moscow; Folio, Kharkiv: Eksmo-press. - 2000 - 621 p.

Berdyaev N.A. Philosophy of freedom. The meaning of creativity. Moscow: Pravda, 1989.

Russian philosophy. Dictionary. Ed. Maslina M.A. M.: "Republic", 1995.

Modern Philosophy: Dictionary and Reader. Ed. Kokhanovsky V.P. Rostov-on-Don: "Phoenix", 1996.

Creativity Philosophy Berdyaev has an eschatological orientation (substantiates the "end ...

Existential-personalistic philosophy of N. A. Berdyaev

Berdyaev (1874-1948) found a vivid expression of the religious-anthropological and historiosophical problems characteristic of Russian philosophical thought, connected with the search for the deep foundations of human existence and the meaning of history. His views are in line with the aspiration to comprehend the inner spiritual experience of a person, which is clearly indicated in Western European philosophy, which is especially manifested in such philosophical directions as personalism, existentialism, etc. Berdyaev is characterized not by a dry and detached, but by a deeply personal, paradoxical manner of philosophizing, which gives the style of his works great emotionality and expressiveness.

Life path and stages of creativity

N. A. Berdyaev was born in Kyiv into a noble and aristocratic family. Studied in the cadet corps. In 1894 he entered the University of St. Vladimir at the Faculty of Natural Sciences, a year later he transferred to the Faculty of Law. He developed an early interest in philosophical problems. At fourteen he read the works of Schopenhauer, Kant and Hegel. Berdyaev believed that the features of his philosophical worldview are closely connected with the nature of his mental and spiritual structure, with his "nature". An acute experience of loneliness, longing for the transcendent as a different world, rejection of injustice and infringement of individual freedom gave rise in him to constant struggles of the spirit, rebellion, and conflict with the environment.

It is not surprising that already in his early youth, Berdyaev broke with the traditional patriarchal-aristocratic world, began to attend Marxist student circles, and then actively communicated with the revolutionary-minded intelligentsia, took part in the social democratic movement. In 1898, he was arrested along with the entire composition of the Kiev committee of the "Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class" and expelled from the university. During the "Marxist period" (1894-1900) he wrote his first book, Subjectivism and Individualism in Social Philosophy. Critical study of N. K. Mikhailovsky ”(published in 1901), with a preface by P. B. Struve. In it, Berdyaev tried to combine the ideas of Marxism, understood in a “critical” sense, with the philosophy of Kant and, to some extent, Fichte. Later, he noted that the source of his revolutionary nature has always been in the initial impossibility to accept the world order, to submit to anything in the world. “From here it is already clear,” he wrote, “that this is an individual revolution rather than a social one, this is an uprising of the individual, and not of the masses.”

Even before meeting with the Marxists, his sympathies for socialism were determined, but he gave him an ethical justification. In Marxism, he was "most of all captivated by the historiosophical scope, the breadth of world perspectives." Berdyaev remained especially sensitive to Marxism for the rest of his life: "I considered Marx a man of genius, and I still do."

In 1901, Berdyaev was sent to an administrative exile in Vologda for three years. On the eve of his exile, he began a spiritual crisis. The writings of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Nietzsche, communication with L. Shestov and other non-Marxist philosophers opened up new worlds for him, caused an internal upheaval. Already in the above-mentioned book, a tilt towards idealism was indicated. And the appearance of the articles “The Struggle for Idealism” and “The Ethical Problem in the Light of Philosophical Idealism” (the latter was published in the collection “Problems of Idealism”, 1902) meant Berdyaev’s decisive turn from “critical Marxism” to “new Russian idealism”, and he became one one of the main exponents of this movement.

Having moved to St. Petersburg in 1904; Berdyaev joined the editorial office of the Novy Put magazine, and in 1905, together with S. N. Bulgakov, he headed the Voprosy Zhizni magazine. During these years, there was a meeting of "idealists" who came from "legal Marxism", with representatives of the cultural and spiritual movement, called the "new religious consciousness" (D. S. Merezhkovsky, V. V. Rozanov, Ivanov, A. Bely, L Shestov and others). At the religious and philosophical meetings of figures of Russian culture and representatives of the Orthodox church hierarchy, issues of renewal of Christianity, culture, the inner life of the individual, the relationship between “spirit” and “flesh”, etc. were intensely discussed.

In 1908, Berdyaev moved to Moscow and became actively involved in the work of the Religious and Philosophical Society in Memory of Vl. Solovyov, his interest in Orthodox teaching, which he had shown even earlier, was developed during meetings with its most prominent representatives.

Being one of the active participants and theoreticians of the “new religious consciousness” movement, Berdyaev did not agree with other representatives of the movement on many fundamental worldview issues, he never completely merged with him. He considered himself a "believing free thinker."

In 1909, Berdyaev co-authored the book Milestones. Collection of Articles on the Russian Intelligentsia”, which caused a wide resonance in Russia (his article “Philosophical Truth and Intelligentsia Truth” was published here). In the atmosphere of impending global social cataclysms, his works The Philosophy of Freedom (1911) and The Meaning of Creativity. The Experience of the Justification of Man” (1916). He considered the latter the first expression of the independence of his philosophy, its basic ideas.

Berdyaev perceived the October Revolution as a national catastrophe, believing that not only the Kobolsheviks, but also the "reactionary forces of the old regime" were responsible for it. In the first post-revolutionary years, he took part in the publication “From the depths. Collection of Articles on the Russian Revolution" (1918, article "Spirits of the Russian Revolution"), created the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture (1919-1922). In 1920, he became a professor at Moscow University and freely criticized Marxism (“At that time,” Berdyaev notes, “it was still possible”). But soon these “liberties” ended. He was arrested twice and in 1922 was expelled from Soviet Russia along with a large group of writers and scientists.

During his stay in Berlin, Berdyaev founded the Religious and Philosophical Academy. He got acquainted with a number of German thinkers, first of all with M. Scheller, the founder of modern philosophical anthropology. During this period, Berdyaev's interest in the problems of the philosophy of history increased. The book “New Middle Ages. Reflection on the fate of Russia and Europe ”(1924) brought him European fame. In 1924, Berdyaev moved to Clamart (a suburb of Paris), where he lived until the end of his days. Here he founded and edited the religious and philosophical journal "The Way" (1925-1940), participated in the work of the publishing house "IMKA-Press". He actively communicated and discussed with famous French philosophers J. Maritain, G. Marcel and others.

In emigration, the most important works for understanding his own philosophical views were written: “Philosophy of a free spirit. Problems and apology of Christianity” (1927-1928), “On the appointment of a person. The experience of paradoxical ethics” (1931), “On slavery and human freedom. The Experience of Personalistic Philosophy” (1939), “The Experience of Eschatological Metaphysics. Creativity and objectification” (1947), “The Kingdom of the Spirit and the Kingdom of Caesar” (1949), etc.

In the foreign period, Berdyaev remained one of the prominent theoreticians of the Russian idea. While sharply criticizing the "Bolshevization" of Russia, the suppression of freedom in it, etc., he at the same time stood on patriotic positions, believed in a better future for his homeland. This was especially evident during the Second World War and after the victory over Nazi Germany. Already in his declining years, Berdyaev noted that, on the one hand, he was critical of much that was happening in Soviet Russia, and on the other hand, he always believed that “you need to experience the fate of the Russian people as your own fate”, felt the need to “protect .. ... motherland in front of a world hostile to it. This did not please many of the "irreconcilable" emigrants. Berdyaev's relations with the Russian emigration were difficult and contradictory. Realizing himself as a representative of the "left" wing of emigration, he was in conflict with the leaders of the "right" wing, rejected their calls to "return to the old." To some extent, he sympathized with the Eurasians, who had come to terms with the fact that a social upheaval had taken place in Russia and wanted to build a new Russia on a different social soil. But much in Eurasianism, especially its "ethical utopianism", was unacceptable for Berdyaev. Therefore, although the Eurasians saw him as their ideologist, he did not consider himself such.

Despite his active social and cultural activities and extensive connections, he felt lonely, as always. And yet, with all his creativity and social activities during the period of emigration, Berdyaev made an important contribution to the spread of Russian culture in the West, to the expansion of ties between Russian and Western European philosophical thought.

Ideas of "Neo-Christianity"

Berdyaev came to religious faith not as a result of an appropriate upbringing, which he was deprived of in childhood, but through inner experience, experiencing the crisis of European humanism and culture, and an intense search for the meaning of life. This revolution in worldview found expression already in The New Religious Consciousness and Society (1907). Later, Berdyaev's religious and philosophical ideas were developed in many of his other works, especially in The Meaning of Creativity (1916). Along with the figures of the "Russian religious and philosophical renaissance" of the early XX century. he was actively involved in the search for a "new religious consciousness". The closest thing to him was the idea of ​​God-manhood, which he considered the basic idea of ​​Russian religious thought (V. S. Solovyov, E. N. Trubetskoy, S. N. Bulgakov, and others). At the same time, Berdyaev's views differed from the prevailing current. According to him, he was not so much a theologian as (like Dostoevsky) an anthropologist, because the original idea for him was the idea of ​​personality as an “embodied divine spirit”, and not the problem of the relationship between “spirit” and “flesh”, the religious consecration of the flesh of the world (culture, publicity, sexual love and all sensuality), as was the case with other "neo-Christians".

The root cause of the modern loss of the meaning of life, Berdyaev believed, should be sought in the dualism of traditional religious consciousness, in the gap between religion and the earthly problems of mankind. The attitude of Christianity towards man, notes Berdyaev, has always been ambivalent. One side,

it seems to humiliate a person, considering him a sinful and fallen su-being, called to humility and obedience. On the other hand, it extraordinarily elevates a person, presenting him as the image and likeness of God, recognizing in him spiritual freedom, independent of the kingdom of Caesar. Berdyaev was convinced that only this second side of Christianity could serve as the basis for a reassessment of values ​​and the construction of a "neo-Christian" doctrine of the individual and God. He believed that God never created the so-called "world order", the "harmony" of the world whole, which turns a person into a means. God creates only concrete human beings as spiritual and creative personalities. It exists not as some special reality located above the person, but as an existential-spiritual meeting with him. God does not want a person who should glorify him, but a person as a person who responds to his call for freedom and creativity and with whom fellowship in love is possible.

The Divine is found not in the uni-universal-general "world order", but in the individual, in the rebellion of the suffering personality against this order. Berdyaev objected to those theologians who argued that only Jesus Christ was the God-man, and not man as a created being. Meanwhile, the freedom and ability to create inherent in the human personality testify precisely to the manifestation of God-humanity. Certainly not in the same sense as Christ, the only one of his kind. But in man, who is, as it were, the intersection of two worlds, there is a divine element. The divine is transcendent (otherworldly) to man and at the same time it is mysteriously united with the human, appearing in the divine-human image.

Berdyaev proceeded from the fact that "historical Christianity" is in crisis. He connected his hopes for a religious revival with a “new revelation”, with the creation of a revelation of man about man, which would mean, as it were, the completion of God’s plan and the advent of a new era in the world history of God-manhood, i.e. supernatural humanity. The "new culture" and "new society" will be established not on the old anti-personal principles of statehood, self-sufficient organization of social order and management system, but on new mystical-free foundations - the union of individuals in catholicity. According to Berdyaev, this task is quite real, since the mystical principle inherent in every person, becoming “peeping”, leads to the subordination of the natural to the divine, the connection of personal reason with the world, as a result of which the management of the world becomes divine-human.

Berdyaev's attempts to give Christianity a personalistic spiritual and personal character did not meet with understanding from the official clergy and Russian orthodox religious thinkers. V. V. Zetkovsky (following L. Shestov and others) noted that Berdyaev exalted man in his constructions, but did not consider it necessary to take into account the traditions of the church and moved towards weakening the reality of God. To others, these attempts were regarded as a rebellion against traditional theology. Berdyaev himself has repeatedly stated that he belongs to the believing philosophers, but his faith is "special" - not dogmatic, but prophetic, that is, prophetic, turned to the future.

Existential method of cognition and philosophizing

The philosophical views of Berdyaev are closely connected with the peculiarities of that trend in European philosophical thought, which was widely developed in the second half of the 19th century. Representatives of this trend, rejecting the principles of rationalism that dominated the history of "classical" philosophy (characteristic primarily of Hegel's philosophy), turned in their work to intuitive, emotional-volitional, etc. principles. ways of mastering the spiritual experience of a person, his concrete existence. A special role among them belongs to S. Kierkegaard, who had a strong influence on all the prominent heralds of a new, non-classical type of philosophizing. This line of development of philosophical thought is called existential. It includes such currents as the philosophy of life (A. Schopenhauer, E. Hartmann, F. Nietzsche, V. Dilthey, A. Bergson), existentialism (K. Jaspers, M. Heidegger, J. P. Sartre, A. Camus , G. Marcel), philosophical anthropology (M. Scheler), etc. It was in this series that the philosophical views of Berdyaev were formed, who also relied on the achievements of Russian writers and philosophers of the 19th - early 20th centuries. Of the writers, M. F. Dostoevsky and L. N. Tolstoy had a great influence on him, of the philosophers - A. S. Khomyakov, K. N. Leontiev, V. S. Solovyov, V. V. Rozanov and others. his social views, K. Marx, T. Carlyle, G. Ibsen and L. Blois played an important role in their formation.

The philosophical views of Berdyaev do not form any complete system with a developed conceptual apparatus. He did not aspire to this, since he was never an academic type of philosopher and did not set himself the task of creating a certain system of strictly logical justifications and proofs. The peculiarity of his method of philosophizing is that it is associated with inner experience, passed through personal feelings and experiences, and is often expressed in an aphoristic form.

Berdyaev unequivocally defines the subject and tasks of philosophy from an existential-anthropological position: philosophy is called upon to cognize being from a person and through a person, drawing its content from spiritual experience and spiritual life. Therefore, the main philosophical discipline should be philosophical anthropology (and not, say, ontology).

Kant's theory of knowledge had a great influence on the formation of Berdyaev's philosophical views. He was "shocked" by Kant's distinction between the world of appearances and the world of things and itself, the order of nature and the order of freedom. Having shown that the object is generated by the subject, Kant revealed the possibility of constructing metaphysics based on the subject, substantiating the philosophy of freedom, i.e., existential metaphysics. However, Berdyaev believes that, although he owes a lot to German idealist philosophy, he was never schooled in it and tried to overcome it, given that the development of German idealism after Kant and Fichte, Schelling and Hegel went in the direction of eliminating the “thing in itself” , the loss of freedom in the necessity of the triumphant world mind (Logos). With this approach, being is decomposed, replaced by a subject and an object opposing each other; it is not a living person who cognizes, but some abstract epistemological subject that is outside of being and cognizes not being, as a current, but an object mentally created (“supposed”) specially for cognition. As a result, true being also disappears from the object, and man turns into a function, an instrument of the “world spirit” (as, for example, in Hegel).

It follows from this that existential philosophy is called upon to be the knowledge of the meaning of being through the subject, and not through the object. The meaning of things is revealed not in the object entering into the thought, and not in the subject constructing his world, but in the third, neither objective nor subjective sphere - in the spiritual world. Spirit is freedom and free energy, breaking through into the natural and historical world. According to Berdyaev, spiritual power in a person initially has not only a proper human, but also a divine-human character, since its roots are in a higher spiritual being - God.

Although Berdyaev's understanding of the tasks of philosophy is largely in line with the ideas of the founders of the philosophy of existentialism, there are also significant differences. Thus, recognizing M. Heidegger as the most powerful of modern existential philosophers, Berdyaev at the same time criticizes his attempt to build another ontology, in fact, in the same way that rational academic philosophy builds it. Heidegger, in essence, develops not the philosophy of “existence” (genuine, deep being of a person), but only the philosophy of non-personal human existence, thrown into the world of everyday life, care, fear of abandonment and inevitable death. Berdyaev reproaches Heidegger for not leaving man the possibility of breaking through into infinity, into the sphere of the divine, as a result of which man finds himself in a position of "God-forsakenness." In contrast to this pessimism, he sees his task in developing the existential dialectic of the divine and the human, which takes place in the very depths of human being. At the same time, the method of creative intuition is used, the intuitive disclosure of the universal in the individual, personal nature of spiritual and religious experience.

Another difference between Berdyaev's philosophy and traditional ("classical") existentialism is that it does not use the concepts of "existentialism", "being-in-the-world" and other "existentials" inherent in existentialism. The most important category of his philosophizing is personality. Existentialist theorists, on the contrary, use this concept extremely rarely, because they believe that it is traditionally burdened with social, object-grounded characteristics that “obscure” the true, non-objective existence of a person and, as a result, interfere with the knowledge of his own dignity, his innermost essence.

It follows from the foregoing that Berdyaev should rather be called an existentially thinking philosopher, and not just a follower of the philosophy of existentialism as an established trend with its own terminology. “My final philosophy,” he wrote, “is a personal philosophy, connected with my personal experience. Here the subject of philosophical knowledge is existential." The concepts of "existential type of thinking" and "existentialism" are not the same thing. The first is broader in nature and denotes a method of philosophizing that is characteristic not only of existentialist theorists, but also of the philosophy of life, the work of Dostoevsky and others "existential" writers. And it is no coincidence that Berdyaev himself in various places defines his views not only as a philosophy of the "existential type", but also as personalism, philosophy of the spirit and eschatological metaphysics.

The objective world surrounding a person seems to Berdyaev not real. Behind the finished, the infinite is hidden, giving signs about itself, about entire worlds, about our destiny. Therefore, the goal of existential cognition, he believes, should not be a reflection of objectified reality, but finding its meaning. The mind tends to turn everything into an object, from which existentiality disappears. As a result of the initial defeat of a person by original sin (“fallen”), he submits to the conditions of space, time, causality, throwing a person outward, in other words, objectification. This concept is one of the most important in Berdyaev's philosophy. It forms, as it were, an antipode to other fundamental concepts - free spirit and creativity. Objectification is the result not only of thought, but also of a certain state of the subject, in which his alienation occurs. Objectification of mental formations begins to live an independent life and gives rise to pseudo-realities. Berdyaev establishes the following main signs of objectivation: 1) alienation of the object (the world of phenomena) from the subject of being (personality), 2) absorption of the uniquely individual impersonal, universal, 3) dominance of necessity and suppression of freedom, 4) adaptation to the world of phenomena, to the average person, human socialization, etc.

Berdyaev's understanding of objectification is to some extent akin to the concept of objectification in German philosophy of the 19th century. and the theory of alienation in existentialism. However, he believes that Heidegger’s criticism of the tendency towards averaging and leveling of the individual in the conditions of the dominance of everyday life and the massization of culture (“Man”) still remains in the power of objectification, since it does not indicate the possibility of overcoming it by a mystical breakthrough of the spirit to the secrets of cosmic life.

As forms of the objectified world, Berdyaev analyzes the dehumanizing effect on human spirituality of various economic systems, technology, the state, church organizations, etc. egocentrism, recognition of each person as the highest value. He did not identify the concept of spirit with either the soul or the psychic. As for consciousness, it is not only a psychological concept, since it contains a spiritual element that constructs it. Consciousness is connected with the spirit. This is the only reason why the transition from consciousness to superconsciousness is possible. Spirit is the action of superconsciousness in consciousness.

Philosophical anthropology and "paradoxical ethics"

At the center of Berdyaev's worldview is the problem of man. He defines man as a contradictory and paradoxical being, combining opposites in himself, for he belongs to two worlds - natural and supernatural. The spiritual basis of man does not depend on nature and society and is not determined by them. Man, according to Berdyaev, is a mystery not as an organism or social being, but precisely as a person. He distinguishes the concept of personality from the concept of the individual. The individual is a naturalistic category, it is a part of the genus, society, the cosmos, that is, in this hypostasis, he is associated with the material world. Personality means independence from nature and society, which

provide only matter for the formation of an active form of personality. Personality cannot be identified with the soul, it is not a biological or psychological category, but an ethical and spiritual one. The individual is not part of society or the universe. On the contrary, society is a part of the personality, its social side (quality), just as the cosmos is a part of the personality, its cosmic side. This explains that in every personality there is also something in common that belongs to the whole human race, to one or another professional type of people, etc., but this is not its essence. In other words, a person is a microcosm, a universe in an individually unique form, a combination of the universal and the individual. The secret of the existence of personality lies in its absolute indispensability, in its singleness and incomparability. A person is recognized to perform original, original creative acts.

According to Berdyaev, there are two opposite ways for a person to overcome his self-enclosed subjectivity. The first is to dissolve in the world of social everyday life and adapt to it. This leads to conformism, alienation and egocentrism. Another way is a way out of subjectivity through transcendence, which means spiritual insight, transition to life in freedom, liberation of a person from captivity in himself, an existential meeting with God. Often a person's personality splits. Berdyaev cites examples from the writings of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and other writers who drew attention to the double life of a person: an external conditional, full of lies, inauthentic life, adapted to society, the state, civilization, and an internal, genuine life in which a person appears before deep primary realities. “When Prince Andrei looks at the starry sky, this is a more authentic life than when he talks in a Petersburg salon.” In the spirit of Dostoevsky's famous statement about the moral value of a child's tears, Berdyaev exclaims! the whole world is nothing in comparison with the human person, with a single person, a man, with his only destiny.

Berdyaev assigns a central place in the knowledge of the spirit to ethics. He believes that two main types of ethics have developed in the history of mankind: the ethics of law (in pre-Christian and socially ordinary forms) and the ethics of redemption (Christian morality). The ethics of law organizes the life of the human masses, demonstrates the dominance of society over a specific person, over the inner individual life of a person. The paradox is that the law also has a positive meaning, since it not only cripples personal life, but also protects it. Ethics of Kant, according to Berdyaev, is a legalistic ethics, because it is interested in a universally binding moral law, the same “nature” of a person for everyone. With the problem of freedom, Berdyaev connected the solution to the problem of the emergence of the new and the process of creativity. Everything really new in the world arises only through creativity, that is, through the manifestation of the freedom of the spirit. Creativity is the transition of non-being into being through an act of freedom. In other words, it means growth, addition, creation of something that has not yet been in the world. Creativity presupposes non-existence, just as in Hegel's becoming presupposes non-existence. From being (which is secondary to freedom and subject to objectivation), only the outflow and redistribution of the elements of the given world is possible.

In the creative act, a person emerges from closed subjectivity in two ways: objectification and transcendence. On the paths of objectification, creativity adapts itself to the conditions of this world. On the paths of existential transcendence, it breaks through to the end of this world, to its transformation, i.e., into a potential, deeper reality.

Assessing the views of Berdyaev on the problem of creativity, VV Zenkovsky and some other historians of Russian philosophy noted their inconsistency. For creativity, on the one hand, inevitably leads to objectification, and on the other hand, it is called upon to destroy it. Thus, creativity seems to be deprived of any meaning and is reduced only to "messianic passion." However, Berdyaev, apparently, himself was aware of this "inconsistency", therefore he stipulates that it would be a mistake to conclude that creativity is objectified, the products of creativity in this world are devoid of meaning and meaning. Without them, man would not be able to maintain and improve the conditions of his existence in this world. He is called upon to work on matter, to subordinate it to the spirit. But, Berdyaev emphasizes, one must understand the limits of this path and not make it absolute. It should be borne in mind that an era will come, a new historical zone, when the eschatological (final) meaning of creativity will be fully revealed. The problem of creativity, therefore, rests on the problem of the meaning of history.

Historiosophy and the Russian Idea

In the analysis of historical and sociocultural processes, Berdyaev denies all forms of their linear interpretation, linear theories of progress. History is not an ascending line of progress and not a regression, but a tragic struggle of opposites, good and evil.

Every culture, according to Berdyaev, goes through periods of birth, flourishing and disappearance. But only temporary, transitory values ​​disappear, while the enduring ones continue to live as long as human history exists. Roman law, Greek art and philosophy, and so on, live on to this day.

Analyzing the historical destinies of “Western culture” as an integral phenomenon, Berdyaev (independently of O. Spengler) came to the conclusion that it had gone through two stages: the barbaric medieval Christian stage (which ended in the 13th century with the Renaissance) and the humanistically secular stage (which ended in the 19th century). in.). The 20th century is a transitional period from the humanistic phase to the "new Middle Ages".

The period of secular humanism is a non-Christian and sometimes anti-Christian phase of Western culture. Humanistic culture, although it rose to the idea of ​​man as a creator, full of joy and self-confidence, at the same time eventually led him to demoralization, as man relied more and more on himself and moved further and further away from the Christian, divine understanding of nature. personality characteristic of the medieval period. The invasion of machines and technology into human life dealt a mortal blow to humanism Humanistically oriented culture has exhausted its creative energy. Now it turns into a simple means of “practically organizing life”, “enjoying life”, etc. The creative spirit of culture disappears, it is replaced by a utilitarian civilization, devoid of the highest ups of artistic creativity. Spiritual genius is impoverished. Such is the "dialectic of history". bourgeois civilization is

the lingering transition from the old Middle Ages to the “new Middle Ages”, new barbarism, increased tension, drama and tragedy of history, when, despite all the achievements, the rays of Christian light often cannot break through to people. Non-religious humanism leads to dehumanization and bestialization (brutality) of a person. But Berdyaev did not rule out that the transitional culture of the West would choose a different path - the religious-Christian transformation of life, the assertion of enduring values ​​and the realization of true existence in creative life. As a philosophical justification for such a "transformation", Berdyaev developed eschatological metaphysics - a kind of doctrine about the end of the world and history. He is convinced that history should be seen in an eschatological perspective. But, in contrast to the passive and "vindictive-sadistic" eschatology of the Christian Apocalypse, which predicts "brutal reprisals against the evil and infidels", Berdyaev professes an active creative eschatologism.

The solution of this problem is connected with the analysis of the problem of time. Berdyaev distinguishes between cosmic, historical and existential time. The latter is not calculated mathematically, its course depends on the intensity of experiences, on suffering and joy, on creative upsurges. History also happens in its historical time, but it cannot remain in it. It comes out either during the cosmic time (and then the person turns out to be only a subordinate part of the world natural whole), or during the existential time, which means the exit from the world of objectification into the spiritual plane. Existential time indicates that time is in a person, and not a person in time, there is no difference between the future and the past, the end and the beginning. (The existential perception of time is also reflected in human experience when it is said that “happy hours are not observed.”) History must end, because within it the problem of personality is insoluble. History only makes sense because it will end. Its meaning cannot be contained within it, it lies outside the boundaries of history. An endless history would be meaningless, and if continuous progress were found in it, then it would be unacceptable, because it would mean the transformation of each living generation into a means for future generations. The meaning of the end of the world and history means the end of objective being, the overcoming of objectification. It is impossible to conceive the end of the world in historical time on this side of history. And at the same time, it cannot be thought of completely outside of history, as an exclusively otherworldly event. The end of the world is not an experience of smooth development, but an experience of shock, catastrophe in personal and historical existence. The “other” world is our entrance and another mode of existence. The end of the world is not a fate weighing on the sinful world and man, but freedom, a transformation in which man is called to actively participate. The contradictions of man in the world can be finally overcome only in this process. God needs the response of a person who is not only a sinner, but also a creator. The eschatological perspective is not only the perspective of the indefinable end of the world, but also the perspective of every moment of life. Throughout life, one must end the old world, begin a new world as the realm of the spirit. Therefore, the end, according to Berdyaev, should be understood as a transformation, the transition of mankind to a new dimension of its existence, to a new zone - the era of the spirit, where love, creative and transforming, will receive central importance. The painful contradictions of life and suffering, which will intensify in the end, will turn into joy and love as a result of the development of human activity and creativity.

According to Berdyaev, his thoughts are based on a keen sense of evil reigning in the world and the bitter fate of man in the world. They reflect the revolt of the individual against the oppressive objective "world harmony" and the objective social order. Therefore, he opposed not only communism and fascism, but also against liberalism associated with the capitalist system. Berdyaev condemned any form of social lies, totalitarianism, violence, both "right" and "left." The human masses, he said, have been and continue to be manipulated through myths, pompous religious rites and festivals, through hypnosis and propaganda, through bloody violence. Lies play a huge role in politics and truth occupies little space.

However, unlike the Western theorists of existentialism, Berdyaev emphasized that he did not stand on the positions of asocialism. On the contrary, he believed, it must be recognized that a person is a social, communicative being and that he can fully realize himself only in society. A breakthrough of spirituality into everyday social life is possible. But a better, more just and human society can only be created from the spiritual in man, and not from objectification. The most spiritually significant thing in a person does not grow out of the social environment that plunges him into an atmosphere of “useful lies” and conformism, but from within a person who is called to constantly perform creative acts in relation to himself, that is, to form himself as a personality. While sharply criticizing the traditional doctrine of socialism and its real implementation in life, Berdyaev nevertheless declared himself a supporter of "personalist socialism", which is based on the primacy of the individual over society and thus radically differs from socialism based on the primacy of society over the individual.

In the historiosophical constructions of Berdyaev, a special place is occupied by thoughts about the role and place of Russia in history, its fate and destiny in the world historical process, that is, the entire range of issues that is associated with the concept of the Russian idea. In the interpretation of the named theme, he, along with other figures of the Russian cultural renaissance at the beginning of the 20th century. V. S. Solovyov continued the religious and philosophical analysis of the Russian idea. He began to deal with this topic back in the years of the First World War, which sharply raised the question of Russian national self-consciousness (the essay "The Soul of Russia", 1915). Then Berdyaev's judgments were reflected in the works The Fate of Russia (1918), The Russian Idea (1946) and others. Middle Ages (the religious doctrine "Moscow - the Third Rome"), through the Slavophiles, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solovyov to the religious-philosophical and non-religious (including Marxist) currents of the 20th century.

The uniqueness and originality of the Russian idea lies, according to Berdyaev, primarily in religious messianism as the core idea of ​​the socio-cultural life of society. But the messianic consciousness should not be interpreted as a nationalistic consciousness. It is possible to approach the solution of the mystery of the “soul of Russia” if we recognize the antinomy (controversy) of the Russian national self-consciousness. The Russian soul is a combination of theses and antitheses: “On the one hand, humility, renunciation; on the other hand, a revolt caused by pity and demanding justice. On the one hand - compassion, pity; on the other hand, the possibility of cruelty; on the one hand - the love of freedom, on the other - the propensity for slavery. Berdyaev analyzes numerous factors that influenced the formation of the features of the national character of the Russian people. Here is the influence of the geographical factor (huge expanses of steppes and forests), the predominance of the feminine principle (passivity) over the masculine in the Russian soul, admiration for holiness as the highest state of life, etc. into the interaction of two streams of world history - East and West The Russian people are not a purely European and not a purely Asian people. Russia is a huge East-West, designed to connect two worlds. The eschatological idea characteristic of Russian religious consciousness takes the first form of striving for universal salvation - in contrast to Western Christianity, where it predominantly takes on the form of individual salvation. Therefore, the essence of Russian identity lies in "community" (community), which is a kind of metaphysical variety of collectivism. Russian people are more communitarian than Western people. They are looking not so much for an organized society as for community, communication. The Russian idea, concludes Berdyaev, is the idea of ​​community and brotherhood of people and peoples. He subjected to fundamental criticism various forms of Russophobia, as well as other manifestations of nationalism. Berdyaev's interpretation of the Russian idea is full of lively interest, contains a wealth of ideas that have not lost their cultural and educational significance even today.

Creativity Berdyaev and today is of great interest for its search for the meaning of life and the purpose of man, tireless substantiation of the values ​​of a free spirit. Despite some touch of utopianism, romanticism, not always justified radicalism, it captivates with its sincerity and inner excitement. Berdyaev looked deeper into the Russian soul than many others. He always remained a patriot of Russia and believed in its national revival.

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Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev was born in the Kyiv province. He studied at the Faculty of Law of Kyiv University. In 1898 he was arrested as a member of the socialist movement. In his youth he was a Marxist, but he soon became disillusioned with the teachings of Marx and became interested in the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov. In 1922 he was expelled from Soviet Russia along with other representatives of the Russian intelligentsia.abroad. Lived in Berlin, Paris. In 1926 he founded the journal Put' andabout 1939was its chief editor.

The most significant philosophical works of Berdyaev: "Subjectivism and idealism in social philosophy. A critical study of N.K. Mikhailovsky" (1900), "From the point of view of eternity" (1907), "Philosophy of freedom" (1911), "The meaning of creativity. Experience Justification of Man" (1916), "Philosophy of Inequality" (1923), "The Meaning of History" (1923), "Philosophy of the Free Spirit, Christian Problematics and Apologetics" (1929), "The Destiny of Man (An Experience of Paradoxical Ethics)" (1931), "Russian thought: the main problems of Russian thought in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century" (1946), "Experience of eschatological metaphysics" (1947). His works have been translated into many languages ​​of the world.

The main theme of Berdyaev's works is the spiritual being of man. In his opinion, human spirituality is closely related to divine spirituality. His teachings are opposed to the concepts of theism and pantheism, which are an expression of naturalistic religious philosophy.

At the heart of a certain worldview, according to Berdyaev, is the relationship between spirit and nature. Spirit is the name for such concepts as life, freedom, creative activity, nature is a thing, certainty, passive activity, immobility. The spirit is neither an objective nor a subjective reality, its knowledge is carried out with the help of experience. Nature is something objective, multiple and divisible in space. Therefore, not only matter, but also the psyche belongs to nature.

God acts as a spiritual principle. The divine is irrational and super-rational, it does not need rational proof of its existence. God is outside the natural world and is expressed symbolically. God created the world out of nothing. Nothing is not emptiness, but some primary principle that precedes God and the world and does not contain any differentiation, primary chaos (Ungrund). Berdyaev borrowed this concept from Jacob Boehme, identifying it with the divine nothingness. The creation of the world by Berdyaev is closely connected with his solution of the problem of freedom.

APHORISMS AND STATEMENTS OF NIKOLAY BERDYAEV

Creativity is the transition of non-being into being through an act of freedom.**

Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, but slavery is easy.

Utopias turned out to be much more feasible than previously thought. And now there is another painful question: how to avoid their final implementation.

A miracle must come from faith, not faith from a miracle.

The ancient tragedy is the tragedy of fate, the Christian tragedy is the tragedy of freedom.

Culture was born from cult.

True conservatism is the struggle of eternity with time, the resistance of incorruptibility to decay.

The most proud people are the people who don't love themselves.

The revolution is the decay of the old regime. And there is no salvation either in that which began to rot, or in that which completed corruption.

Revolutionaries worship the future but live in the past.

There is no science, there is only science.

The veneration of saints obscured communion with God. A saint is more than a man, while the worshiper of a saint is less than a man. Where is the man?

Freedom is the right to inequality.

Psychoanalysis is psychology without a soul.

There can be no class truth, but there can be a class lie.

God is denied either because the world is so bad or because the world is so good.

The basic thought of man is the thought of God, the basic thought of God is the thought of man.

The denial of Russia in the name of humanity is a robbery of humanity.

Christ was not the founder of religion, but religion.

The gospel is the doctrine of Christ, not the doctrine of Christ.

Dogmatism is the integrity of the spirit; the one who creates is always dogmatic, always boldly choosing and creating the chosen.

The New Testament does not cancel the Old Testament for the still old humanity.

Socialism is a sign that Christianity has not fulfilled its task in the world.

Militant atheism is a retribution for servile ideas about God.

Politeness is a symbolically conditional expression of respect for every person.

For Berdyaev, there are three types of freedom: primary irrational freedom (arbitrariness), rational freedom (fulfillment of a moral duty), freedom permeated with love for God. Irrational freedom is contained in the "nothing" out of which God created the world. God the creator arises from the divine nothingness, and only then God the creator creates the world. Therefore, freedom is not created by God, since it is already rooted in divine nothingness. God the creator is not responsible for the freedom that breeds evil. “God the Creator,” writes Berdyaev, “is omnipotent over being, over the created world, but he has no power over non-existence, over uncreated freedom.” In the power of freedom to create both good and evil. Therefore, according to Berdyaev, human actions are absolutely free, since they are not subject to God, who cannot even foresee them. God does not have any influence on the will of human beings, therefore, he does not have omnipotence and omniscience, but only helps a person so that his will becomes good. If this were not the case, then God would be responsible for the evil done on earth, and then theodicy would not be possible.

The religious philosophy of Berdyaev is closely connected with his social concepts, and the personality and its problems are the connecting link. Therefore, in his works, Berdyaev pays much attention to the consideration of the place of the individual in society and the theoretical analysis of everything that is connected with the individual. For Berdyaev, the individual is not part of society; on the contrary, society is part of the individual. Personality is such a creative act in which the whole precedes the parts. The basis of the human personality is the unconscious, ascending through the conscious to the superconscious.

The Divine always exists in man, and the human in the Divine. The creative activity of man is an addition to the divine life. Man is a "dual being living both in the world of phenomena and in the world of noumenons" [Experience of eschatological metaphysics. S. 79]. Therefore, the penetration of noumena into phenomena is possible, "the invisible world - into the visible world, the world of freedom - into the world of necessity" [S. 67]. This means the victory of the spirit over nature; Man's liberation from nature is his victory over slavery and death. Man is primarily a spiritual substance, which is not an object. A person has a greater value than society, state, nation. And if society and the state infringe on the freedom of the individual, then his right to protect his freedom from these encroachments.

Berdyaev considers the ethics existing in society as legalized moral rules that govern the daily life of a person. But this legalized ethics, the "ethics of the law," the ethics of legalized Christianity, is filled with conventions and hypocrisy. In ethics, he sees sadistic inclinations and impure subconscious motives for his demands. Therefore, without canceling or discarding this everyday ethics, Berdyaev proposes a higher stage of moral life, which is based on redemption and love for God. This ethics is connected with the appearance of the God-man in the world and the manifestation of love for sinners. There is an irrational freedom in the world which is rooted in the Ungrund and not in God. God enters into the world, into its tragedy and wants to help people with his love, seeks to achieve the unity of love and freedom, which should transform and deify the world. "God himself seeks to suffer in peace."

According to Berdyaev, the historical process of the development of society is a struggle between goodness and irrational freedom, it is "a drama of love and freedom unfolding between God and His other Self, which he loves and for which He longs for mutual love" [The meaning of history. S. 52]. "Three forces operate in world history: God, fate and human freedom. That is why history is so complex. Fate turns the human person into an arena of the irrational forces of history ... Christianity recognizes that fate can only be overcome through Christ" [Experience of eschatological metaphysics ]. The victory of irrational freedom leads to the disintegration of reality and a return to the original chaos.

An expression of the victory of irrational freedom - revolutions, which represent the extreme degree of manifestation of chaos. Revolutions do not create anything new, they only destroy what has already been created. Only after the revolution, during the period of reaction, does the process of creative transformation of life take place, but any projects based on coercion fail. In the modern era, striving for the liberation of the creative forces of man, nature is seen as a dead mechanism that should be subjugated. For this, all the achievements of science and technology are used.

Machine production is put at the service of man in order to fight nature, but this machine technique also destroys man himself, because he loses his individual image. Man, guided by non-religious humanism, begins to lose his humanity. If a person rejects a higher moral ideal and does not strive to realize the image of God in himself, then he becomes a slave to everything vile, turns into a slave of new forms of life based on the forced service of the individual to society to satisfy his material needs, which is achieved under socialism.

In principle, Berdyaev is not against socialism, but he is for such socialism, under which "the highest values ​​of the human personality and its right to achieve the fullness of life will be recognized." But this is just a socialist ideal, which differs from the real projects for building socialism, which, when implemented, give rise to new contradictions in public life. The real socialism that they seek to put into practice, according to Berdyaev, will never lead to the establishment of the equality he proclaims, on the contrary, it will give rise to new enmity between people and new forms of oppression. Under socialism, even if it eliminates hunger and poverty, the spiritual problem will never be solved. A person will still be "face to face, as before, with the secret of death, eternity, love, knowledge and creativity. Indeed, one can say that a more rationally arranged social life, the tragic element of life is a tragic conflict between personality and death, time and eternity - will increase in its intensity.

Berdyaev paid much attention to Russia in his works. He wrote that "God himself is destined for Russia to become a great integral unity of East and West, but in its actual empirical position it is an unfortunate mixture of East and West." For Berdyaev, the troubles of Russia are rooted in the wrong balance of male and female principles in it. If among Western peoples the masculine principle prevailed in the main forces of the people, which was facilitated by Catholicism, which brought up the discipline of the spirit, then "the Russian soul remained unliberated, it did not realize any limits and stretched limitlessly. It demands everything or nothing, its mood is either apocalyptic , or nihilistic, and therefore it is incapable of erecting a half-hearted “kingdom of culture.” In the book Russian Thought, Berdyaev describes these features of national Russian thought, which are aimed at the “eschatological problem of the end,” at the apocalyptic sense of impending catastrophe.

The philosophy of Berdyaev is the most vivid expression of Russian philosophy, in which another attempt is made to express the Christian worldview in its original form.

Berdyaev considers the fundamental principle of the world not being, but freedom. It is from this freedom that God creates man, a free being. Freedom, being irrational in nature, can therefore lead to both good and evil. According to Berdyaev, evil is freedom that turns against itself, it is the enslavement of man by the idols of art, science and religion. They give rise to the relations of slavery and submission from which human history has arisen.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948)

Berdyaev rebelled against the concepts rationalism, determinism and teleology that destroy the realm of freedom. The problem of human existence is its liberation. This idea of ​​Berdyaev formed the basis of the "philosophy of personality", which influenced the course personalism and, in particular, Emmanuel Munier, as well as the Uruguayan Jesuit Juan Luis Segundo, the theologian of liberation.

A person is defined primarily by his personality. Berdyaev contrasts the concept personalities- ethical and spiritual category - individual, sociological and natural categories. Personality does not belong to the realm of nature, but to the world of freedom. Unlike an individual (a part of the cosmos and society), a person does not belong to any integrity at all. It opposes false wholes: the natural world, society, state, nation, church, etc. These false wholes are the main sources of objectification that alienate the freedom of man in his creations – and he ends up deifying them, subjecting them to tyranny.

The means for liberation from all forms of alienating objectification, Berdyaev considers the creative act. Its essence is the struggle against external restrictions, knowledge, love are liberating forces that rise up against ossification, cold and everything inhumane.

Turning to Christian messianism (reminiscent of the teachings of Joachim Florsky), Berdyaev, who lived in the era of the establishment of totalitarian regimes, was one of the first to condemn the messianisms of the “chosen race” and “chosen class”.

Standing up against all forms of social, political and religious oppression, against depersonalization and dehumanization, Berdyaev's writings acted as a vaccine against all forms of bloody utopias of the past and future. Unlike the creators of these utopias, Berdyaev emphasized the real needs and real purpose of man. Man is a creation of supernatural freedom, which has emerged from the divine mystery and will end history with the proclamation of the Kingdom of God. The individual must prepare this Kingdom in freedom and love.

In general terms, Berdyaev's thought lies in the tradition of Russian messianism - purified and clarified by the radical criticism of the forces opposing him.

Nikolai Berdyaev in 1912

Berdyaev - quotes

Freedom in its deepest sense is not a right, but a duty, not what a person demands, but what is required of a person in order for him to become fully human. Freedom does not at all mean an easy life, freedom is a difficult life requiring heroic efforts. (Berdyaev. "On the ambiguity of freedom")

The most unacceptable for me is the feeling of God as a force, as omnipotence and power. God has no power. He has less power than a policeman. (Berdyaev. "Self-knowledge")

The aristocratic idea requires the real domination of the best, democracy - the formal domination of all. Aristocracy, as the management and domination of the best, as a requirement for quality selection, remains forever and ever the highest principle of social life, the only utopia worthy of man. And all your democratic cries, with which you resound the squares and bazaars, will not eradicate from the noble human heart the dreams of domination and government of the best, the chosen ones, they will not drown out this from the depths of the going call for the best and the chosen to appear, so that the aristocracy enters into their eternal rights. (Berdyaev. "Philosophy of inequality")

Any system of life is hierarchical and has its own aristocracy, only a pile of rubbish is not hierarchical, and only in it no aristocratic qualities stand out. If the true hierarchy is broken and the true aristocracy is exterminated, then false hierarchies appear and a false aristocracy is formed. A bunch of swindlers and murderers from the dregs of society can form a new false aristocracy and present a hierarchical principle in the structure of society. (Berdyaev. "Philosophy of inequality")

The aristocracy was created by God and received its qualities from God. The overthrow of the historical aristocracy leads to the establishment of another aristocracy. The aristocracy claims to be the bourgeoisie, representatives of capital, and the proletariat, representatives of labor. The aristocratic pretensions of the proletariat even surpass those of all other classes. (Berdyaev. "Philosophy of inequality")

You take everything that is the worst from the workers, from the peasants, from the intelligent bohemia, and out of this worst you want to create the life to come. You appeal to the vindictive instincts of human nature. Out of evil your goodness is born, out of darkness your light shines. Your Marx taught that a new society must be born in evil and from evil, and he considered the revolt of the darkest and most ugly human feelings to be the way to it. He contrasted the spiritual type of the proletarian with the spiritual type of the aristocrat. The proletarian is the one who does not want to know his origin and does not honor his ancestors, for whom there is no family and homeland. The proletarian consciousness erects resentment, envy and revenge in the virtues of the new coming man. (Berdyaev. "Philosophy of inequality")

Democracy is indifferent to the direction and content of the people's will and does not have any criteria for determining the truth or falsity of the direction in which the people's will is expressed ... Democracy is pointless ... Democracy remains indifferent to good and evil. (Berdyaev. "The New Middle Ages")

The dignity of man presupposes the existence of God. This is the essence of the whole vital dialectic of humanism. A person is a person only if he is a free spirit reflecting the Higher Being philosophically. This point of view should be called personalism. This personalism must in no case be confused with the individualism that is destroying the European man. (Berdyaev. "The Ways of Humanism")

In order for a person to be a true reality, and not an accidental combination of elements of a lower nature, it is necessary that there be realities higher than a person (Berdyaev. “The Lie of Humanism”).

The natural world, "this world" and its massive environment, is not at all identical with what is called the cosmos and cosmic life filled with beings. The "world" is the enslavement, the fettering of beings, not only people, but also animals, plants, even minerals, stars. This “world” must be destroyed by the personality, freed from its enslaved and enslaving state. (Berdyaev. "On slavery and human freedom")

I would like to be with animals in eternal life, especially with loved ones. (Berdyaev. "Self-knowledge")