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Russia was not famous for strong philosophers, but the Silver Age gave us Lev Shestov, Semyon Frank, and Sergei Bulgakov all at once. But even among these thinkers, Berdyaev stood out for his brilliance. An unsurpassed debater, he was very good-looking too – a pale-faced aristocrat with shoulder-length black curls.
In the West, he was called the forerunner of existentialism, but Berdyaev spoke of the existentialists themselves with disdain: they do not experience the problem of existence, but only talk about it. He himself declared that he did not like logical thinking: Berdyaev did not reason and did not even philosophize – he prophesied. He always felt himself a prisoner of reality and sought to escape from its captivity. In his youth it seemed to him that this captivity was social, and he became a Marxist. Then I realized that the fetters that bind a person hide deeper, and turned to religion. Later he realized that religion does not give him the joy of liberation and that true freedom can only be gained by exerting all creative forces. Therefore, his main prophecies are about creativity and freedom.
Read more:
- Free will – what is it?
He could work only while in the thick of life – he wrote best in post-revolutionary Russia, where he could be shot, and under German bombs in France. Shortly before his death, Berdyaev wrote: “I am not a teacher of life, not a father of the fatherland, not a shepherd. I continue to perceive myself as a youth, almost a boy. This is my eternal age.” And this is his lesson to us, who lose their idealism from an early age and easily fall into the fetters of everyday life. Berdyaev spent his whole life learning to break these fetters, and today his example is more important to us than ever.
His dates
- March 19, 1874: born in Kiev into an aristocratic family.
- 1894: sent to the Kiev cadet corps, but refuses a military career and enters the natural faculty of Kiev University.
- 1905-1906: together with S.N. Bulgakov edits the journal “Questions of Life”, where liberal politics and religious searches coexist.
- 1907-1908: settled in Moscow, where he became close to Orthodox philosophers.
- 1916: publication of the book “The Meaning of Creativity”, which the philosopher considered one of the main works of his life.
- 1918: creates the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture, where he gives lectures on the philosophy of history, participates in a seminar on Dostoevsky.
- 1920: elected professor of the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University.
- 1922: The Cheka is arrested in the summer, deported to Germany in the autumn.
- 1922-1924: lives in Berlin, where he begins to gain European fame.
- 1924: moves to Paris.
- 1947: Received a doctorate in divinity from the University of Cambridge.
- March 23, 1948: Dies at his desk in his home in the Paris suburb of Clamart.
Five keys to understanding
Freedom is primary
Berdyaev understood freedom differently than most philosophers. For him, it is not just freedom of choice, but something much more. He called it “uncreated freedom” because it precedes everything – even God. Thanks to this freedom, God creates the world and man, that is, he breaks the circle of his loneliness. But because of her, he cannot control what he has created – and this opens the way for evil. However, freedom lives in the depths of a person and is the highest good that a person is fully able to achieve.
Release through creativity
Creativity is the only way to freedom. For Berdyaev, this is a very broad, but quite specific concept. Creativity is going beyond the limits of one’s “I” towards God. God freely created man so that he would also freely step towards him. God became man in the form of Christ so that man could be deified. But ecstatic states are transient: having touched eternity for a moment, a person is doomed to return back to the time where the hateful routine of existence awaits him. The period of rise is followed by decline, but this will not always be the case.
Strive for transformation
Berdyaev believed that the current state of the world is finite. It will be replaced by the true reality – the very realm of freedom, the taste of which a person learns in a creative act. How exactly this will happen is an unfathomable mystery. Berdyaev was close to the Christian doctrine of the Second Coming, but he believed that it was distorted by human misunderstanding. Hell exists – it is a meeting of a person with his own sinful nature – but he is not eternal. Everything will end not with the Last Judgment and eternal torment, but with the spiritual and moral transformation of the world and man.
Personality above all
Berdyaev emphasized the uniqueness of each person. Read in his youth, Dostoevsky strongly influenced him, and following the writer, he contrasted the value of the human person with the realm of the universal. Personality is above any interests: religious, ideological, public, state. For Berdyaev, any form of coercion was equally unacceptable: he countered the pressure of the collective with a voluntary union of free individuals. Such a community is the result of human freedom and the place where it can be fully realized.
Imperfection is overcome
Berdyaev did not turn a blind eye to the imperfection of human nature. He saw its manifestations both in himself and in others, noting with bitterness that the worst thing he had to face in life was inconstancy, betrayal, lies. But under this layer of “human, too human” he always saw through true humanity and was sure of its higher origin. He argued that moral effort, which allows the spirit to overcome nature, is one of the most important and noble forms of creativity.