Comment on Berdyaev's idea that a person. H
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.
Ancient tragedy is the tragedy of fate, 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. Creative activity 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 are trying 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 public life The tragic element of life - the tragic conflict between personality and death, time and eternity - will increase in 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, Russia's troubles are rooted in the wrong balance between male and female. feminine. If the Western peoples masculinity 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 it 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.
Vlasova Olga 103gr. (CO and R)
INTRODUCTION
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.
Freedom as one of the main philosophical categories characterizes the essence of man and his existence. In history philosophical thought this concept has undergone a long evolution - from a "negative" (freedom from) to a "positive" (freedom for) interpretation. 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.
The presentation of freedom as a "realized necessity", in my opinion, leads to the fact that a person is likened to physical objects that obey only the inexorable laws of nature. Only the understanding of freedom as a potential ability of a person to freely choose an alternative, as an opportunity to think and act in accordance with one’s ideas and desires, and not as a result of internal or external coercion, gives a person the opportunity to gain spiritual freedom, a person to find himself. For example, N.A. Berdyaev writes: "The idea of freedom for me is more primary than the idea of perfection, because one cannot accept forced, forcible perfection." Perhaps that is why we are interested today in his point of view as one of the outstanding Russian philosophers, who in the first half of our century singled out the topic of individual freedom as the central problem of philosophical thought and proposed ways to solve it.
As many researchers of Berdyaev’s work note, the idea of individual 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.
SECTION 1. Becoming philosophical views ON THE. Berdyaev
The spiritual evolution of Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev went from "legal Marxism", when he (along with other Marxists) opposed the ideology of populism, to a religious worldview.
Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev was born in Kyiv in 1874 into an aristocratic family. He studied at the Kiev Cadet Corps, in 1894 he entered the natural faculty of Kyiv University, then switched to law. Systematic studies of Berdyaev's philosophy began at the university under the guidance of G.I. Chelpanov. Then he joined the 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 and expelled from the university. In the work "Subjectivism and Individualism in Social Philosophy. A Critical Study on N.K. Mikhailovsky", published in 1901, there was a turn towards idealism, fixed by Berdyaev's participation in the collection "Problems of Idealism" in 1902. From 1901 to 1903, the writer was in administrative exile, where he moved away from the Social Democracy and joined the liberal Union of Liberation. The reason for the break with Marxism for Berdyaev was his rejection of the idea of dictatorship and revolutionary violence, disagreement with the fact that historical truth depends on class ideology, on anyone's interests. In contrast to these statements, he emphasizes that objective (absolute) truth exists independently of class (empirical) consciousness and can only be revealed to a person to one degree or another, depending on his life experience and value orientations. But, not accepting the Marxist philosophy of history, postulating an a priori system of logical conditions for cognition and moral norms, he did not deny the sociological significance of Marxism.
His departure from "legal Marxism" was quite painless: Berdyaev, according to the impressions of his contemporaries, was never at all a fanatic of any one idea, one cult. He was distinguished by the "insane extravagance" of his mind, which often caused the most serious criticism. Shestov, for example, is ironic about the rapid evolution of his views: “As soon as he leaves any system of ideas for the sake of a new one, he already does not find anything worthy of attention in his former ideological wealth. Everything is old, rags, useless. .. He became a Christian before he learned to clearly pronounce all the words of the creed." But even having stood on the position of Christianity, he was looking not for faith, but for knowledge, and in his religious life he wanted to preserve the freedom of search, the freedom of creativity.
In 1908, Berdyaev moved to Moscow, where he took part in various collections. The search for his own philosophical justification for "neo-Christianity" ended with the books "Philosophy of Freedom" (1911) and, in particular, "The Meaning of Creativity. The Experience of Justifying Man" (1916), which he valued as the first expression of the independence of his religious philosophy. 1st World War was perceived by Berdyaev as the end of the humanistic period of history with the dominance of Western European cultures and the beginning of the predominance of new historical forces, primarily Russia, fulfilling the mission of the Christian unification of mankind (which he wrote about in the collection The Fate of Russia, 1918). Berdyaev welcomed the popular character of the February Revolution and carried out a great propaganda work to prevent the "Bolshevization" of the revolutionary process in order to direct it into the "channel of socio-political evolution." The October Revolution was regarded as a national catastrophe. During the Soviet period of his life, Berdyaev created the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture in Moscow, where he lectured on philosophy, including on the problems of religious philosophy of history, which formed the basis of the book The Meaning of History.
In 1922, Berdyaev, along with other prominent figures of Russian culture, was forcibly expelled from the country. In 1922-1924 he lived in Berlin. The publication of his essay "The New Middle Ages. Reflections on the Fate of Russia and Europe" (1924) brought European fame to Berdyaev. In 1924, Berdyaev moved to Clamart near Paris, where he lived until the end of his days. In the conditions of emigration, the themes of ethics, religion, philosophy of history and philosophy of personality become the main ones in his work. The writer was active in creative, socio-cultural, editorial and publishing work, was involved in various socio-political and socio-ecclesiastical discussions among the emigrants, and in his work carried out the connection between Russian and Western European philosophical thought. He defends in his writings the primacy of the individual over society, "the primacy of freedom over being." Sharply criticizing - for anti-democratism and totalitarianism - the ideology and practice of Bolshevism, Berdyaev did not consider "Russian communism" an accidental phenomenon. He saw its origins and meaning in the depths of national history, in the elements and "freemen" of Russian life, and ultimately in the messianic fate of Russia, which is looking for the "Kingdom of God", which has not yet found the "Kingdom of God", called to great sacrifices in the name of the true unity of mankind.
During the 2nd World War, Berdyaev took a clearly expressed patriotic position, and after the victory over Germany he hoped for some democratization of spiritual life in the USSR, which caused a negative reaction from the irreconcilable emigration. In 1947, Berdyaev was awarded the title of Doctor of Cambridge University.
In Self-Knowledge, Berdyaev notes the connection of his work, philosophical views with life events, since, according to the writer, "creative thought can never be abstract; it is inextricably linked with life, it is determined by life." He writes: "I survived three wars, two of which can be called world wars, two revolutions in Russia ... I survived the spiritual renaissance of the beginning of the 20th century, then Russian communism, the crisis of world culture, the coup in Germany, the collapse of France ... I survived exile, and my exile is not over. I was painfully going through a terrible war against Russia. And I still don’t know how the world upheavals will end. There were too many events for a philosopher. ... And at the same time, I have never been a political person. To much I had a relationship... but belonged to nothing in depth... except for my creativity.I have always been an anarchist on spiritual grounds and an "individualist".
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 the Slavophiles and the Westerners, 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."
SECTION 2. Berdyaev's personalism. The central place of the problem of freedom of the human person in his philosophy
The main problem of Berdyaev's philosophy is the meaning of human existence and, in connection with it, the meaning of being in general. Its solution, according to the writer, can only be anthropocentric - philosophy "knows being from a person and through a person", the meaning of being is found in the meaning of one's own existence. A meaningful existence is an existence in truth, achievable by a person on the paths of salvation (escape from the world) or creativity (active reorganization of the world by culture, social policy).
According to the Russian philosopher G.P. Fedotova, "four concepts, mutually related, in essence, different aspects of one idea, determine religious theme Berdyaev: Personality, Spirit, Freedom and Creativity.
Berdyaev's philosophy is personalistic; he is a supporter of the values of individualism. "The true solution to the problem of reality, the problem of freedom, the problem of personality - this is the real test for any philosophy," he said. BUT. Lossky writes: "In particular, Berdyaev is interested in the problems of the individual ... it is not part of society, on the contrary, society is only a part or aspect of the personality. Personality is not part of the cosmos, on the contrary, the cosmos is part of the human personality." Berdyaev was absorbed by an existential interest in man, in "Self-Knowledge" he notes: "... existential philosophy ... understands philosophy as knowledge of human existence and knowledge of the world through human existence ..." However, unlike other existentialist philosophers, the writer is not satisfied with empathy, he is concerned not so much with the tragedy of human existence as with the freedom of the human person and human creativity. "Freedom for me is more primary than being. The originality of my philosophical type is primarily in the fact that I put not being, but freedom, as the basis of philosophy." "Freedom, personality, creativity are the basis of my worldview and outlook," writes Berdyaev. It ontologizes freedom, takes it beyond the usual problems of philosophy. Freedom, rooted in irrational and transcendent groundlessness, is for him the original and defining reality of human existence. Berdyaev writes: "Freedom cannot be deduced from anything; one can only abide in it from the very beginning."
Human irrational freedom is rooted in "nothing", but it is not emptiness, it is the primary principle that precedes God and the world. Berdyaev writes: "Somewhere incommensurably greater depth is Ungrund, groundlessness, to which not only the categories of good and evil are inapplicable, but also the categories of being and non-being are inapplicable." The term "Ungrund" Berdyaev borrowed from the German mystic of the late 16th - early 17th century J. Boehme from his teaching "about the dark beginning in God."
The philosopher is concerned with the problem of theodicy, that is, the reconciliation of the evil of the world (objectification) with the existence of God, which for him is also connected with the problem of freedom. Berdyaev believes that "it is difficult to reconcile the existence of an omnipotent and all-good God with the evil and suffering of the world." Thus, he comes "to the inevitability of admitting the existence of uncreated freedom." "Freedom is not created by God, but he himself is born ... from freedom and from the same freedom, from Nothing, which potentially contains Everything, creates the world." “There is some initial source, the key of being, from which an eternal stream beats ... the act of the Birth of God takes place in it.” "God is present only in freedom and acts only through freedom," is the writer's thought. This idea has a double service for Berdyaev: it explains the presence of evil in the world ("uncreated freedom explains ... the emergence of evil") and determines the freedom of man not only in relation to the world, but also to God. Such a conception of freedom is difficult to reconcile with the understanding of God as an Absolute being. Since freedom is not created by God, he has no power over freedom. Freedom is primary in relation to good and evil, it determines the possibility of both good and evil. Therefore, God the Creator is omnipotent over being, but has no power over non-existence, over uncreated freedom. This abyss of primary freedom, originally prior to God, is the source of evil. Berdyaev could not, like Solovyov, lay the responsibility for the evil in the world on God ("To lay the responsibility for the evil of creation on the Creator is the greatest of the temptations of the spirit of evil..."). But he equally did not accept the Christian scheme that rooted evil in man himself. He preferred to absolutize freedom, separate it from God and man, in order thereby ontologize evil, plunge it into pre-existential chaos. This opened the way to the harmonization of being, which was carried out with the help of creativity. But since creativity, according to the philosopher, also stems from freedom, it is precisely the confrontation between evil and creativity that constitutes the essence of a new religious era - the era of the "third revelation", the expectation of which is filled with most of Berdyaev's works.
BUT. Lossky believes that Berdyaev "rejects the omnipotence of God and claims that God does not create the will of the beings of the universe that arise from the Ungrund, but simply helps the will to become good. He came to this conclusion thanks to his conviction that freedom cannot be created and that if this were so, then God would be responsible for universal evil. Then ... theodicy would be impossible. Evil appears when irrational freedom leads to a violation of the divine hierarchy of being and to the falling away of God due to the pride of the spirit who wants to put himself in the place of God..."
According to the writer, the personality and the subjective are in conflict with the general and the objective, the personality rebels "against the power of the objectified" general ". Objectification is one of the basic concepts of Berdyaev's philosophy, it means the transformation of the spirit into being, eternity into the temporary, the subject into an object , the generation of an inauthentic world of phenomena, where the results of a person's spiritual activity acquire the forms of space and time, begin to obey cause-and-effect relationships and the laws of formal logic. The writer explains his idea in this way, he says that "objective reality does not exist, it is an illusion of consciousness, there is only objectification of reality, generated by a certain orientation of the spirit. The objectified world is not the real one. real world ... The object is a product of the subject. Only the subject is existential, only in the subject is reality known." In the book "The Kingdom of the Spirit and the Kingdom of Caesar" Berdyaev writes: "Objectivation is the ejection of a person outside, exteriorization, submission to the conditions of space, time, causality, rationalization. In the existential depth, a person is in communion with the spiritual world and with the entire cosmos. "Thus, objectification is not the disclosure, discovery of the spirit, but, on the contrary, its closing, impoverishment. As a result, a person finds himself in a dual position: as a personality, he remains in its depths, the bearer of the existential "I", the image and likeness of God, as an individual, he becomes involved in the world of natural and social necessity. The writer's thought here echoes the ideas of Western European existentialists about the tragic position of man in an indifferent, indifferent to his existence world. Berdyaev himself emphasizes the similarity of these ideas: "When existentialists ... talk about the ejection of a person into the world and the doom of a person to this world, they talk about objectification, which makes the fate of a person hopeless, fallen out of deep reality. " The writer sees natural evil not only in the cruelty of the struggle for existence , in suffering and death, but in the very fact of necessity, lack of freedom, which is the essence of matter. "A man with his possibilities of spiritual freedom is thrown into a blind mechanical world that enslaves and destroys him." Berdyaev notes that he "has an intense aspiration to the transcendent, to the transition beyond the boundaries of this world." "The reverse side," he writes, "of this orientation of my being is the consciousness of the inauthenticity, inconclusiveness, the fall of this empirical world." The philosopher affirms "the primacy of freedom over being." "Being is secondary, there is already determination, necessity, there is already an object," the author believes. In religious terms, objectification is identical with the act of the fall - the alienation of man from God, accompanied by the fall of the subject into dependence on the world of objects. “If the world,” wrote Berdyaev, “is in a fallen state, then this is not the result of methods of cognition (as Shestov thought). Guilt lies in the depths of world existence. This is best likened to the process of decomposition, separation and alienation that the noumenal world undergoes It would be a mistake to think that objectification occurs only in the sphere of knowledge, it occurs primarily in being itself, it is generated by the subject not only as a cognizer, but as a being. .. As a result, it seems to us real that which is actually secondary, objectified, and we doubt the reality of the primary, non-objectivable and non-rationalized. "Awareness of the primacy of the spirit as a creative reality is, according to the author, the task of philosophy, indicates the way to solve the problem of freedom human personality.
The "personalistic revolution", which the philosopher aspired to, "means the overthrow of the power of objectification, the destruction of natural necessity, the liberation of subjects-personalities, a breakthrough to another ... spiritual world." The overcoming of objectification is associated by Berdyaev not so much with salvation as with creativity as "discovering man's excessive love for God", his answer "to God's call, to God's expectation".
Berdyaev is convinced that freedom is tragic: if it is the essence of a person, then, consequently, it acts as a duty; man is enslaved by his freedom. She is a heavy burden that a person bears. He is responsible for his actions and what is happening in the world. "Freedom is my independence and the determination of my personality from within... not the choice between the good and evil set before me, but my creation of good and evil," the author believes. "The very state of choice can give a person a feeling of oppression... even lack of freedom. Liberation comes when the choice is made and when I go creatively." Berdyaev perceives freedom "not as an ease, but as a difficulty." According to the writer, even simple political freedom, freedom of choice of beliefs and actions is a heavy and responsible duty. He writes: "In this understanding of freedom as a duty, a burden, as a source of tragedy, Dostoevsky is especially close to me. It is the renunciation of freedom that creates lightness..." freedom in order to relieve oneself" - this idea of the philosopher, in my opinion, really echoes the views of Dostoevsky on this problem, for whom the problem of freedom of the spirit is also of central importance. For Dostoevsky, freedom is not a human right, but a duty, a duty; freedom is "not lightness, but heaviness." Man does not demand freedom from God, but vice versa, "and in this freedom he sees the dignity of man's likeness to God." It is for this reason that "freedom is aristocratic, not democratic." Berdyaev believes that "a huge mass of people do not like freedom at all and do not seek it." The Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky, "the enemy of freedom and the enemy of Christ", believes that "tens of thousands of millions of beings ... will not be able to neglect earthly bread for the sake of heaven", he reproaches Christ for putting the burden of freedom on people, he does not regret their.
Thus, Berdyaev's view of the problem of the freedom of the human person seems to me as follows. Personality is the noumenal center of the universe, revealed through the revelation of the infinity and comprehensiveness of the spirit of a particular person. Even the transcendent is revealed in the spirit and through the spirit of the personality. However, its inherent freedom is dual: it is given to man and from God as enlightened freedom to goodness, truth, beauty, eternity and from the Divine "nothingness", which contains the possibility of evil and falling away from God.
SECTION 3. The idea of the God-man in the concept of personal freedom
"The philosophy of freedom is the philosophy of God-manhood," - that is Berdyaev's idea. It contains "a transcendent breakthrough from the necessity of nature into the freedom of divine life." The idea of God-manhood, characteristic of Russian philosophical thought, goes back to the Christian teaching about the unity of the divine and human nature of Jesus Christ. At Vl. Solovyov, it was expressed in "a vision of the integrity, unity of the world, the divine cosmos, in which there is no separation of parts from the whole, there is no enmity and discord, there is nothing abstract and self-affirming." In "Readings on Godmanhood" he notes that Christianity is not only faith in God, but also faith in man, in the possibility of revealing the divine in man. For Berdyaev, this idea is inextricably linked with creativity, in which a person adopts himself to God. He writes: "The theme of creativity was for me inserted into the main Christian theme of God-manhood, it is justified by the thean-human character of Christianity. ... The idea of God is the greatest human idea. The idea of man is God's greatest idea. Man is waiting for the birth of God in him. God is waiting the birth of man in him... The thought that God needs man, man's response, man's creativity is extraordinarily bold. But without this boldness, the revelation of God-manhood loses its meaning." With the appearance of the God-man Christ "the autocracy of God ceases, for the son of God man is called to direct participation in the divine life. The governance of the world becomes divine-human." Thus, for Berdyaev, the world process becomes not a return to the original fullness, but a creative increment to it, the "eighth day of creation."
"Transformation and deification" are possible only through the attainment of freedom "permeated with love for God." Berdyaev believes that "they cannot be achieved by force; they presuppose the free love of man for God. Therefore, Christianity is a religion of freedom." According to him, faith in God is not worship church canons, but the desire for God's kingdom, the idea that by following the precepts of Christ, "with Christ in the heart" one can achieve spiritual freedom. To achieve the Kingdom of God, according to the writer, creativity is necessary. "The new, final revelation will be the revelation of human creativity. This will be the longed-for epoch of the Spirit." It is in it that "Christianity is realized as a religion of God-manhood," since "the perfect union of humanity with the Divine can appear only as a result of the penetration of the Holy Spirit into the path of history and culture."
For Berdyaev, "the problem of individual fate in eternity" is important. "The dissolution of personality, unique individuality in faceless divinity ... is the opposite of the Christian idea." "The mystery of Christianity is the mystery of God-humanity, the mystery of the meeting of two natures that unite but do not mix. Man does not disappear ... but inherits his humanity in eternal life."
“Only the path of God-manhood and the God-man leads to the affirmation of the human personality and freedom,” writes Berdyaev. Humanity, cut off from God, rejecting Christ, is reborn into inhumanity (an example of this is in Dostoevsky's "Demons", in his "legend of the Grand Inquisitor").
Berdyaev's Christianity is anthropological, it is based on the idea of the likeness of man to God and the humanization of God. If this is so, then man is called to participate in the Divine creation and, consequently, history becomes a continuation of the creation of the world. Moreover, "the end of history and the path to the end is not exclusively divine, but divine-human and in God-manhood lies the possibility of comprehending the divine plan of history without extinguishing the individual freedom of man.
SECTION 4. Creativity as the realization of freedom, the path to the harmonization of being
The essence of the "personalist revolution" announced by Berdyaev is revealed by him in the concept of creativity, the central core of which is the idea of creativity as a revelation of man, continuing creation together with God. The philosophy of Christian creative anthropologism of Berdyaev received its first detailed expression in the book "The Meaning of Creativity", the main theme of which is the idea of creativity as a religious task of man. Impressions of a contemporary of the writer E.K. Gertsyk about the book: "Hundreds of fiery, most paradoxical pages. The book is not written - it is shouted out. In places the style is maniacal: on another page some word is repeated fifty times, bearing the onslaught of his will: man, freedom, creativity. He beats furiously with a hammer on the reader, He does not think, he does not draw conclusions, he decrees.
In this book, Berdyaev raises the question of the relationship between creativity and sin, creativity and redemption, the justification of man in creativity and through creativity. He believes that "it justifies man, it is anthropodicy." Anthropodicea, according to Berdyaev, is "the third anthropological revelation" heralding the onset of a "creative religious era." It abolishes the revelation of the Old and New Testaments ("Christianity is just as dead and stagnant before the creative religious era, as the Old Testament was dead and stagnant before the appearance of Christ"). But the third revelation cannot be expected, it must be made by man himself; it will be a matter of his freedom and creativity. Creativity is not justified or allowed by religion, but is itself a religion. Its purpose is the search for meaning, which is always beyond the limits of the world given; creativity means "the possibility of a breakthrough to meaning through nonsense." Meaning is value, and therefore any creative striving is colored with value. Creativity creates a special world, it "continues the work of creation", likens a person to God the Creator. Berdyaev believes that "all the dignity of creation, all its perfection, according to the idea of the Creator, is in its inherent freedom. Freedom is the main internal sign of every creature created in the image and likeness of God; this sign contains the absolute perfection of the plan of creation." Man's ability to create is divine, and this is his god-likeness. From the side of God, the higher nature of man is shown by Jesus Christ, God, who took on human form; on the part of man - his creativity, the creation of "new, never-before".
For the author, "human creativity is not a demand of a person and his right, but is a demand of God from a person, a duty of a person." "God expects a creative act from a person as a response of a person to a creative act of God. The same is true about the creativity of a person as about the freedom of a person. The freedom of a person is a requirement of God from a person, a duty of a person in relation to God." Berdyaev writes: "Creativity is inseparable from freedom. Only the free one creates. Only evolution is born out of necessity; creativity is born out of freedom." The secret of creativity is also "bottomless and inexplicable", just like the secret of freedom.
"Creativity is the goal of a person's life on earth - what God created him for. If Christianity is a religion of salvation, then this is salvation through creativity, and not just through ascetic cleansing from sin," writes Berdyaev. In the book "On the Destiny of Man. An Experience of Paradoxical Ethics" (1931), he argues that not only the ethics of redemption, but also the ethics of creativity is the way to the kingdom of heaven.
"Darkness, nothingness, the abyss - this is what Berdyaev believes is the basis of being, this is the roots of both divine peacemaking and the bottomless freedom of the human spirit. But this same darkness, the abyss again overtakes the bright cosmos and man and threatens to devour them - hence the need for creativity in whatever happens... do it, otherwise you will perish," writes Gertsyk. “God is omnipotent in being and over being, but he is powerless in front of “nothing”, which is before being and outside being. He could only crucify himself over the abyss of this “nothing” and thereby bring light into it ... This is the secret of freedom. ..Hence the endless source of creativity." Berdyaev believes that "creativity is possible only with the assumption of freedom, not determined by being, not derived from being." Otherwise, "without 'nothing', without non-existence, creativity in the true sense of the word would be impossible."
In The Meaning of Creativity, Berdyaev expresses the idea that "creativity is creativity out of nothing, that is, out of freedom." In my opinion, it would be wrong to think that human creativity does not need any matter (material), since it takes place in reality. Berdyaev explains that "the creative act of a person cannot be entirely determined by the material that the world gives, there is novelty in it, not determined from the outside by the world. This is the element of freedom that enters into any genuine creative act." I think that it is in this sense that "creativity is creativity out of nothing." Berdyaev believes that creative gifts are given to man by God, but an element of freedom enters into the creative acts of man, which is not determined either by the world or by God.
Berdyaev speaks of the tragedy of human creativity. He sees it in the inconsistency of his results with the original plan, in the fact that "the creative act in its original purity is aimed at new life, a new being... for the transformation of the world. But in the conditions of a fallen world, it becomes heavier, drawn down ... it creates not a new life, but cultural products of greater or lesser perfection. "Culture, according to the writer, is one of the forms of objectification and only symbolically indicates spiritual world. Berdyaev sees confirmation of his thought in the fact that the great Russian writers felt the conflict between perfect culture and life and strove for a perfect, transformed life. In this regard, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky are very indicative. All Russian literature is imbued with pain about the suffering of the people and man. In the conditions of the "fallen" world, "the results of creativity are not realistic, but symbolic." Such creativity is "symbolic, giving only signs of a real transformation. Realistic creativity would be the transformation of the world, the end of this world, the emergence of a new heaven and a new earth," since the creative act "is an eschatological act, it is turned towards the end of the world," anticipates the beginning of a new world. , new era Spirit.
In the writer's works, one can trace the connection between Berdyaev's exceptional attitude towards creativity and his rather pessimistic attitude towards reality. He writes: "The creative act for me has always been a transcendence, going beyond the border of immanent reality, a breakthrough of freedom through necessity." "A creative act is the coming of the end of this world, the beginning of another world." The author warns that an illusion may arise that "the results of a creative act can be perfect in this world, they can leave us and not attract us to another world." Berdyaev writes that the perfect products of creativity "always speak of a world other than this world reality, and forestall the transformation of the world." It is obvious that the writer has a special attitude to creativity. “Creativity,” he writes, “was for me an immersion in a special, different world, a world free from gravity, from the power of the hated routine. The creative act takes place outside of time. In time, only products of creativity, only objectification. Products of creativity cannot satisfy the creator But the creative upsurge experienced, the ecstasy that overcomes the distinction between subject and object, passes into eternity. "Creativity for me is not so much a design in the final, in a creative product, but the disclosure of the infinite, a flight to infinity." Berdyaev understands creativity as "the shock and rise of the whole human being, directed towards a different, higher life, towards a new being." It is in creative experience that "it is revealed that the 'I', the subject, is more primary and higher than the 'not-I', the object."
"Creativity is not always true and genuine, it can be false and illusory. False creativity is also characteristic of a person. A person can respond not to the calls of God, but to the call of Satan." “Authentic human creativity must, in a heroic effort, break through the enslaving realm of objectification... and go free, to a transfigured world, to the world of existential subjectivity and spirituality, that is, to authenticity, to the realm of humanity, which can only be the realm of God-humanity.”
It can be concluded that, on the one hand, creativity is the highest manifestation of freedom, creating true and valuable out of "nothing", on the other hand, the process of deobjectivation of being, nature and history hardened in forms. "Creativity is always liberation and overcoming. There is an experience of power in it. ... Horror, pain, relaxation, death must be conquered by creativity. In essence, there is a way out, an outcome, a victory." Creativity is the revelation of the "I" to God and the world, in it is the justification of man, as if a reciprocal step on his path to the transcendent.
CONCLUSION
Thanks to the humanism of his philosophical position and such distinctive features as "the revolt against any form of totalitarianism, the tireless defense of freedom, upholding the primacy of spiritual values, an anthropocentric approach to problems, personalism, the search for the meaning of life and history" (F. Copleston), Berdyaev managed to rise to genuine originality, to open new "horizons of thought" before Russian spirituality.
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.
Adherence to the "philosophy of the organic spirit" allowed Berdyaev to solve the problems posed by him of "reality, freedom, personality." Spirit is present in man as infinite freedom and unlimited creativity, man is "God's idea". Each person, according to Berdyaev, must guess "God's idea of himself", self-actualize and "help God in the implementation of God's plan in the world." The philosopher believes that God acts in the realm of freedom, and not in the realm of necessity, namely in the spirit, and not in a deterministic nature.
Berdyaev always defended the irreducibility of freedom to necessity, its inviolability in the face of the expansion of determinism. Perhaps that is why, attributed in historical chronology to the first half of the 20th century, N.A. Berdyaev remains in many respects our contemporary, calling upon the solution of all philosophical problems to put in the center of man and his creativity.
LITERATURE
- 1. Berdyaev N.A. Philosophy of freedom. The meaning of creativity. Moscow: Pravda, 1989.
- 2. Berdyaev N.A. Self-knowledge (the experience of philosophical autobiography). M.: "Book", 1991.
- 3. Berdyaev N.A. Russian idea. "Questions of Philosophy", 1990, No. 1-2.
- 4. Berdyaev N.A. The meaning of history. M.: "Thought", 1990.
- 5. Dostoevsky F.M. Collected works in 12 volumes. Moscow: Pravda, 1982.
- 6. Lossky N.O. History of Russian Philosophy. M.: "High School", 1991.
- 7. Russian philosophy. Dictionary. Ed. Maslina M.A. M.: "Republic", 1995.
- 8. Modern Philosophy: dictionary and reader. Ed. Kokhanovsky V.P. Rostov-on-Don: "Phoenix", 1996.
- 9. Zamaleev A.F. Lectures on the history of Russian philosophy. S.-P.: St. Petersburg University Publishing House, 1995.
- 10. Schreider Yu.A. Freedom as a creative orientation in the world. "Questions of Philosophy", 1994, No. 1.
- 11. Kissel M.A. Roads of freedom J.-P. Sartre. "Questions of Philosophy", 1994, No. 11.
… The problem of man is the main problem of philosophy. Even the Greeks realized that a person can begin to philosophize only from the knowledge of himself. The solution to being for a person is a very special reality, not standing among other realities.
Man is not a fractional part of the world, he contains an integral riddle and solution to the world. The fact that man, as an object of knowledge, is at the same time a cognizer, has not only epistemological, but also anthropological significance ... Man is a being dissatisfied with himself and capable of outgrowing himself. The very fact of human existence is a gap in the natural world and testifies that nature cannot be self-sufficient and rests on supernatural being. As a being belonging to two worlds and capable of overcoming himself, man is a contradictory and paradoxical being, combining polar opposites in himself ... Man is not only a product of the natural world and natural processes, and at the same time he lives in the natural world and participates in natural processes . It depends on the natural Environment, and at the same time it humanizes this environment, introduces a fundamentally new beginning into it. The creative act of man in nature has a cosmogonic meaning and signifies a new stage of cosmic life. Man is a fundamental novelty in nature...
The definition of man as the creator of tools (homo faber) is most scientifically strongest. A tool that continues the human hand singled out man from nature. Idealism defines a person as a bearer of reason and logical, ethical and aesthetic values. But in this kind of teaching about man, it remains unclear how the natural man is connected with reason and ideal values. Reason and ideal values turn out to be superhuman principles in man. But how does the superhuman descend in man? Man is here defined by a principle which is not a human principle. And it remains unclear what is specifically human. Let man be a rational animal. But neither the mind in it nor the animal is specifically human. The problem of man is replaced by some (234) other problem. Even more insistent is naturalism, for which man is a product of the evolution of the animal world. If man is a product of cosmic evolution, then man does not exist as an excellent being, which cannot be derived from anything non-human and cannot be reduced to anything non-human. Man is a transient phenomenon of nature, a perfected animal. The evolutionary doctrine of man shares all contradictions, all weaknesses and all surface evolutionary doctrine at all. It remains true that human nature is not evolution at all. This dynamism is associated with freedom, not necessity. The sociological doctrine of man is no more valid, although man is indisputably a special animal. Sociology claims that man is an animal subjected to training, discipline and development by society. Everything valuable in a person is not inherent in him, but received by him from society, which he is forced to revere as a deity. Finally, modern psychopathology comes up with a new anthropological doctrine, according to which a person is, first of all, a sick creature, the instincts of his nature are weakened in him, the instinct of sexuality and the instinct of power are suppressed and forced out by civilization, which has created a painful conflict of consciousness with the unconscious.
In the anthropology of idealism, naturalistic evolutionism, sociologism and psychopathology, certain essential features are captured - a person is a being who carries reason and values in himself, is a developing being, is a social being and a being sick from the conflict of consciousness and the unconscious. But none of these directions captures the essence of human nature, its integrity. Only biblical-Christian anthropology is the doctrine of the integral man, of his origin and his destination. But biblical anthropology in itself is insufficient and incomplete, it is Old Testament and is built on Christology. And from it both the exaltation and humiliation of a person can be equally deduced ...
Berdyaev N. On the appointment of a person. - Paris, 1931. - S. 50 - 60.
We had to retrain. In everything we have become more modest. We no longer take man out of "spirit" out of "deity." We pushed him into the ranks of the animals. We consider him the strongest animal, because he is the most cunning of all - the consequence of this is his spirituality. On the other hand, we remove from ourselves the conceited feeling, which could also manifest itself here; that man is the great hidden goal of the development of the animal world. He is not at all the crown of creation, every being next to him stands on an equal level of perfection ... In affirming this, we affirm even more: man, (235) taken relatively, is the most unfortunate animal, the most sickly, deviating from his instincts in the most dangerous way for himself - but of course, he is all this and the most interesting! - With regard to animals, with respectable courage, Descartes for the first time ventured the idea that an animal can be understood as machina - our whole physiology is trying to prove this position. Developing this idea logically, we do not exclude man, as Descartes did: modern concepts of man develop precisely in a mechanical direction. Previously, they gave a person a quality of a higher order - “free will”, now we have taken away from him even will in the sense that by will it is no longer possible to mean force. The old word “will” serves only to designate a certain result, a certain kind of individual reaction, which necessarily follows a certain number of partly contradictory, partly concordant stimuli: the will no longer “acts”, no longer “moves” ... Previously, we saw in consciousness man, in the "spirit" proof of his higher origin, his public; he was advised, if he wanted to be perfect, to draw his feelings into himself, like a turtle, to stop communicating with the earthly, to throw off the earthly shell: then the main thing should have remained from him - “pure spirit”. On account of this, we now understand better: it is precisely consciousness, “spirit”, that we consider to be a symptom of the relative imperfection of the organism, as if by an attempt, probing, slipping, as if by an effort in which a lot of nervous force is wasted, we deny that anything anything could be perfect, since it is done consciously. Pure spirit is pure stupidity: if we discount the nervous system and feelings, the "mortal shell", then we will miscalculate - that's all.
Nietzsche F. Works: in 2 vols. T. 2. - S. 640, 641.
If you ask an educated European what he thinks about when he hears the word “man”, then almost always three incompatible circles of ideas will collide in his mind. Firstly, this is the circle of ideas of the Judeo-Christian tradition about Adam and Eve, about creation, paradise and the fall. Secondly, this is the Greek-antique circle of ideas, in which the self-knowledge of a person for the first time in the world rose to the concept of his special position, as evidenced by the thesis that a person is a person due to the fact that he has a mind, logos, phronesis [reasonableness ( Greek)], mens, ratio [thinking, mind (lap.)], etc. (logos here means both speech and the ability to comprehend the “whatness” of all things). Closely connected with this view is the doctrine that at the basis of the entire universe there is a suprahuman mind, to which man also participates (236), and he alone is one of all beings. The third circle of ideas is also the circle of ideas of modern natural science and genetic psychology that has long become traditional, according to which a person is a rather late result of the development of the Earth, a creature that differs from the forms that preceded it in the animal world only in the degree of complexity of combining energies and abilities that themselves already found in nature inferior to human nature. There is no unity between these three circles of ideas. Thus, there are natural-science, philosophical and theological anthropology, which are not interested in each other, but we do not have a single idea of man. The special sciences that deal with man and are growing in number hide the essence of man rather than reveal it. And if we take into account that these three traditional circles of ideas are now undermined everywhere, especially the Darwinian solution to the problem of the origin of man, it can be said that never before in history has man become so problematic for himself as at the present time.
Therefore, I undertook to give a new experience on the broadest basis philosophical anthropology. Only a few points concerning the essence of man in comparison with animal and plant, and the special metaphysical position of man, are set forth below, and a small part of the results that I have arrived at is reported.
Even the word and the concept of "man" contains an insidious ambiguity, without understanding which it is even impossible to approach the question of the special position of man. This word should, firstly, indicate the special morphological features that a person possesses as a subgroup of the genus of vertebrates and mammals. It goes without saying that, no matter how the result of such a formation of a concept looks, Living being, named by man, will not only remain subordinate to the concept of the animal, but also constitutes a comparatively small area of the animal kingdom. This state of affairs persists even when, together with Linnaeus, a person is called “the top of the series of vertebrates and mammals” - which, however, is very controversial from the point of view of reality, and from the point of view of the concept, - because this peak, like any peak of some that of the thing still refers to the thing itself, the apex of which it is. But quite apart from such a concept, which fixes upright posture as a unity of man, the transformation of the spine, the balance of the skull, the powerful development of the human brain and the transformation of organs as a result of upright walking (for example, a hand with an opposed thumb, a decrease in the jaw and teeth, etc.), the same word "man" signifies, in the common language of all civilized (237) peoples, something so completely different that there is scarcely another word in human language that has an analogous ambiguity. Namely, the word “man” should mean a set of things that is extremely opposite to the concept of “an animal in general”, including all mammals and vertebrates, and opposite to them in the same sense as, for example, stentor ciliates, although one can hardly argue that the living being called man is morphologically, physiologically and psychologically incomparably more like a chimpanzee than man and chimpanzee are like ciliates.
It is clear that this question of the concept of man must have a completely different meaning, a completely different origin than the first concept, which means only a small area of the genus of vertebrate animals. I want to call this second concept the essential concept of man, in contrast to the first concept, which belongs to natural systematics.
... A question arises that is decisive for our whole problem: if intelligence is inherent in an animal, then does a person differ from an animal in general in more than just degree? Is there still an essential difference then? Or, besides the essential degrees that have been considered so far, is there something else in man that is completely different, specifically inherent in him, which is not at all affected and is not exhausted by choice and intellect?
I maintain that the essence of man, and what may be called his special position, rises above what is called intellect and the faculty of choice, and cannot be reached, even supposing that the intellect and the faculty of choice have arbitrarily increased to infinity. But it would also be wrong to think of that new thing that makes a man a man only as a new essential level of mental functions and abilities, added to the previous mental levels - a sensual impulse, instinct, associative memory, intellect and choice, so that the knowledge of these mental functions and faculties belonging to the vital sphere would still be within the competence of psychology. The new principle that makes man a man lies beyond all that in the broadest sense, from the inner-psychic or outer-vital side, we can call life. What makes a man a man is a principle opposed to all life in general, it, as such, is generally not reducible to the “natural evolution of life”, and if it can be raised to something, then only to the highest basis of things themselves - to that basis, of which “life” is also a particular manifestation. The Greeks already defended such a principle and called it “reason”. To designate this X, we would like to use a broader word, a word that includes the concept of reason, but along with thinking in ideas, also embraces a certain kind (238) of contemplation, the contemplation of primary phenomena or essential contents, then a certain class of emotional and volitional acts that have yet to be characterized, for example, kindness, love, repentance, reverence, etc. - the word spirit. The active center, in which the spirit is inside the finite spheres of being, we will call a personality, in contrast to all functional “life” centers, which, when considered from the inside, are also called “spiritual” centers.
But what is also this "spirit", this new and so decisive principle? Rarely has a word been treated so ugly, and only a few understand something definite by this word. If the main thing in the concept of spirit is to make a special cognitive function, a kind of knowledge that only it can give, then the main definition of the “spiritual” being will become its – or its existential center – existential independence from the organic, freedom, detachment from coercion and pressure, from "life" and everything that relates to "life", that is, including his own, connected with the intellect. Such a "spiritual" being is no longer attached to drives and the surrounding world, but is "free from the surrounding world" and, as we shall call it, "open to the world." Such a being has a "world". Initially given to him and the centers of “resistance” and reaction of the surrounding world, in which the animal ecstatically dissolves, it is able to elevate to “objects”, is capable in principle of comprehending the very so-being of these “objects”, without the restrictions that this objective world experiences or its givenness due to the vital drive system and its sensory functions and sense organs.
Therefore, spirit is objectivity, determinability by the so-being of things themselves. And the bearer of the spirit is such a being, in which the fundamental treatment of reality outside of him is downright inverted in comparison with the animal.
... An animal, unlike a plant, has, perhaps, consciousness, but, as Leibniz already noted, it does not have self-consciousness. It does not control itself, and therefore is not conscious of itself. Concentration, self-consciousness, and the ability and possibility of objectifying the primordial resistance to attraction thus form a single, inseparable structure, which, as such, is unique to man. Together with this self-consciousness, this new deflection and centering of human existence, made possible by the spirit, immediately comes the second essential sign of man: man is able not only to spread the world into the dimension of “worldly” being and make the resistances objective, but also, and this is the most remarkable thing, re-objectify one's own physiological and mental state and even each individual mental experience. Only therefore can he also freely reject life. (239)
The animal both hears and sees - not knowing what it hears and sees, in order to partially immerse itself in the normal state of the animal, one must remember the very rare ecstatic states of a person - we meet with them during subsiding hypnosis, when taking certain drugs, then with known technology activation of the spirit, for example, in all kinds of orgiastic cults. The animal experiences the impulses of its instincts not as its own instincts, but as dynamic attraction and repulsion emanating from the very things of the surrounding world. Even primitive man, who in a number of traits is still close to an animal, does not say: “I” am disgusted by this thing, but says: this thing is “taboo”. The animal does not have a will that would exist independently of the impulses of changing drives, preserving continuity with changes in psychophysical states. The animal, so to speak, always ends up in some other place than it originally “wanted”. Nietzsche says profoundly and correctly: “Man is an animal capable of promising”…
Only a person, since he is a personality, can rise above himself as a living being and, proceeding from one center, as it were, on the other side of the space-time world, make everything, including himself, the subject of his knowledge.
But this center of human acts of objectification of the world, of one’s own become and one’s Psyche [soul, life (Greek)]] cannot itself be a “part” of precisely this world, that is, it cannot have any definite “where” or “when” - it can only be found in the highest ground of being itself. Thus, man is a being that transcends himself and the world. As such, it is capable of irony and humor, which always involve rising above one's own existence. In his profound teaching on transcendental apperception, I. Kant already clarified in essential terms this new unity of cogitare [thinking (lat…)] – “the condition of all possible experience and therefore also of all objects of experience” – not only external, but also that internal experience, through which our own inner life becomes available to us...
... The ability to separate existence and essence compares, the main feature of the human spirit, which alone substantiates all other features. What is essential for man is not that he possesses knowledge, as Leibniz already said, but that he possesses essence a priori or is capable of mastering it. At the same time, there is no “permanent” organization of the mind, as Kant supposed; on the contrary, it is fundamentally subject to historical change. Only the mind itself is constant as the ability to form and form - through the functionalization of such essential insights - all new forms of thinking and contemplation, love and evaluation. (240)
If we want to penetrate deeper into the essence of man from here, then we need to imagine the structure of the acts leading to the act of idealization. Consciously and unconsciously, a person uses a technique that can be called a trial elimination of the nature of reality. The animal lives entirely in the concrete and in reality. Each time, every reality is associated with a place in space and a position in time, “now” and “here”, and secondly, an accidental so-be (So-sein), given in some aspect by sensory perception. Being human means throwing a powerful "no" to this kind of reality. The Buddha knew this, saying: it is beautiful to contemplate any thing, but it is terrible to be it. Plato knew this, linking the cognition of ideas with "phenomenological reduction", i.e. "crossing out" or "bracketing" the (random) coefficient of the existence of things in the world in order to achieve their "essentia". True, in particular I cannot agree with Husserl's theory of this reduction, but I must admit that it refers to the very act that, in fact, determines the human spirit ...
Thus, a person is that living being who can (by suppressing and displacing the impulses of his own inclinations, refusing to feed them with images of perception and ideas) treat his life fundamentally ascetically, instilling horror in him. Compared to the animal, which always says “yes” to real being, even if it gets scared and runs away, a person is “one who can say no”, an “ascetic of life”, an eternal protestant against all reality alone. At the same time, in comparison with the animal, whose existence is embodied philistinism, man is the eternal “Faust”, bestia cupidissima rerum novarum [a beast hungry for the new (lat.)], never calming down on the surrounding reality, always striving to break through the limits of his own here- and-now-so-being and “the surrounding world, including the actual reality of one’s own self. In this sense, Freud in the book “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” sees in a person a “repressor of instincts”. And just because he is such, a person can build an ideal realm of thoughts over the world of his perception, and on the other hand, precisely because of this, to an ever greater extent deliver to the spirit living in him the energy dormant in the repressed inclinations, i.e., can sublimate the energy of his attraction to spiritual activity.
Kyiv National University named after T.G. Shevchenko
Institute of Philology
Related message:
Nikolai Berdyaev "On the Appointment of Man"
Performed:
2nd year student,
Taranenko Sofia
Kyiv 2012
The vocation of every person in spiritual activity is in the constant search for truth and the meaning of life. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
It is not in vain that I begin my short message with the words of the great Russian writer, a man of a kind soul, who during his lifetime was known as a humanist and love of life. It seems to me that the ideas of a no less interesting figure of the late 19th - early 20th century, Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, a well-known religious and political philosopher, to some extent converge with the opinion of the Russian genius Chekhov.
When I first got acquainted with the works of N. Berdyaev, I had the feeling that there are many contradictions in his sayings, and unexplained, unsubstantiated thoughts, however, with a more detailed study of his philosophical treatises, you understand that this is not so.
1)About death and immortality In his work “On the Appointment of Man,” the author discusses “eternal” questions that disturb the minds of more than one generation. From the first lines, you notice that at the center of Berdyaev's worldview is a person, his essence, thoughts and problems, from which he cannot and should not get rid of. Speaking about death, the author emphasizes the ambiguity of the opinions of great people about "the one that walks with a scythe" starting ancient Greek philosophers and ending with Russian classics. There is also a constant parallel with the Christian point of view on this or that expressed thought, so Berdyaev claims that Christians perceive death ambivalently, its paradox lies in the fact that death is perceived as something terrible and bad, although Christ, in order to achieve a “new” life , should have died. The author also gives an interesting, in my opinion, version of the two types of religions recalled by V. Rozanov and N. Fedorov. This theory divides religions into those that put birth as an ideal, and others - resurrection. The former include Judaism and paganism, which glorify birth and even death for them is a transitional stage to a new life. The second can be attributed to Christianity, which strives for resurrection. Nikolai Alexandrovich is not on the side of any of them. He emphasizes that both of them sought to conquer death with their utopian ideas, but were never able to do so. A significant part of the author's thoughts is devoted to the theme of "immortality". The philosopher believes that the person who denies immortality (that is, the unbeliever) is much happier than the one who accepts and believes in eternal life. All due to the fact that a "believer" has a great responsibility, a burden that he must bear all his life, knowing all the troubles and misfortunes. From the very realization of such a stone behind one’s back, it becomes difficult: “Eternity in time not only attracts, but also causes horror and longing. Anguish and horror are caused not only by the fact that something dear to us, to which we are attached, ends and dies, but to a greater extent and even deeper by the fact that the abyss opens between time and eternity. Berdyaev assigns one of the central places in the knowledge of man to ethics. He says that the principle of ethics could be formulated very simply, one must act in such a way that everywhere, in everything, and in relation to everything, one affirms not eternal life, but love that conquers death. The author tells us that ethics should be rather eschatological in nature, which means that we encounter another paradox - it turns out that ethics should initially raise the question of death and immortality as the main one, because "such an act is inherent in every phenomenon of life." An ethics that is insensitive to death has no price, because it puts transitory, perishable goods and values at its head. The correct ethics should be built taking into account the inevitable death and victory over it, the prospect of resurrection and eternal life. Thus, ethics forms eternal, enduring, immortal benefits and values that contribute to this victory. 2)About suicide Another part of Berdyaev's work concerns the problem of suicide in Russian society. The author considers this problem broadly, focusing his attention on Russian emigrants who found themselves in a difficult situation, and not finding a way out of it, who decided to take a desperate act - suicide. human ethics knowledge being Nikolai Alexandrovich speaks more about suicide as a social phenomenon than a personal one. He explains this by the formula of egocentrism of a person who is about to commit suicide. A person possessed by such an idea is narcissistic, but this narcissism does not at all express that positive quality, which we can speak of using the term egoism, because in this case this love is also directed to others. Otherwise, we are talking about the weakness and cowardice of a person. He is concentrated only on his own "I", his problems, failures, not thinking about others, such an individual does not care that his life belongs only to himself, and he has the right to do with it whatever he wants: “A suicide is a person who has lost his faith. God ceased to be for him a real, benevolent power that governs life. He is also a man who has lost hope, who has fallen into the sin of despondency and despair, and this is more than anything. Finally, he is also a person who does not have love, he thinks about himself and does not think about others, about his neighbors. Gradually, the author begins to turn to Christian dogma. A completely new picture is opened to our imagination. It turns out that a person who is about to commit suicide tries on the mask of God, that is, the Creator, but the Creator with a negative connotation. If an individual is sure that his life belongs only to him alone, God automatically ceases to exist for him, which means that he commits a double sin. The philosopher Berdyaev presents his readers with a completely new concept of suicide. It consists in the fact that suicide, in other words, depriving oneself of life, is humiliating both in relation to life and death. Remembering the above point of view regarding death as an integral component of life, it is not difficult to guess why suicide is a kind of neglect of death. conclusions Summing up, I consider it important to say that the author's ideas cannot be taken separately, without taking into account the situation in the country, especially in such a hot spot as Russia. At times, these ideas may seem utopian or even romantic to us, but it seemed to me that behind all this lies a conscientious desire to help people and save them from suffering. Of course, N. Berdyaev did not recognize the theory of N. Fedorov, who clearly underestimated the forces of evil and believed to the end that humanity could unite to fight evil and hell together, but among his heavy and sometimes completely unoptimistic speeches, a ray of hope slips through, for good and light. The author shares with us one of the main and effective methods to fight death and evil. It consists in creativity and constant activity, you should not run away from life, you should not avoid problems and evil either. Berdyaev calls to constantly keep human activity and creativity in suspense. It is necessary to actively fight against the deadly forces of evil and creatively prepare oneself for the end, and passively waiting for the end and death of the human person and the world, in anguish, horror and fear, will not lead to the desired result. As for suicide, N. Berdyaev does not dare to judge a person who has embarked on the wrong path, but he actively promotes his protest against the "fashion" for suicide (after the noisy deaths of Blok and Yesenin). The author believes that in this way a person does not deprive himself of problems, on the contrary, he shows himself in a worse light, as a cowardly, weak and spiritually fallen person, a person who has forgotten about the cross, about God and about those around him. Such an individual, getting rid of his own life, rejoices that he has conquered eternity, but this is only an imaginary victory that lasts a moment. "Only the memory of God as the greatest reality, from which there is nowhere to go, as the source of life and the source of meaning, can stop one from committing suicide." Thus, Nikolai Alexandrovich once again reminds us that there is no way to avoid God and God’s judgment, you can’t go anywhere, you can’t hide behind even death, because only God gives the meaning of life.
