FBerdyaev's philosophy

Berdyaev's main works: "Subjectivism and idealism in social philosophy"; "Critical study about N.K. Mikhailovsky" 1907; “Philosophy of Freedom” 1911; “The World Outlook of Dostoevsky” 1923; “The Meaning of History” 1923 etc.

Like Florensky, Berdyaev argues that truth has an actinomic character, i.e. necessarily expressed in pairs of judgments that contradict each other. The main opposition from which one should proceed when constructing a worldview is spirit and nature. Spirit is life, freedom, creative activity; nature is a thing, necessity, determinism, passive endurance. Everything objectively objective and substantial belongs to the realm of nature (by substance Berdyaev understands complete, closed being); not only matter, also mental being belongs to the realm of nature. The realm of the spirit has a different character: in it, division is overcome by love. God is spirit. He is really present in the lives of holy people, people of the highest spiritual life. In its depths, the Divine is irrational and superrational. The Divinity does not fit into natural existence and can only be revealed symbolically. Therefore, the birth of the God-man from the Virgin Mary, His life in Palestine and death on the cross on Golgotha ​​are essentially genuine historical facts and at the same time symbols.

Berdyaev distinguishes three types of freedom: primary irrational freedom, i.e. arbitrariness; reasonable freedom; freedom imbued with love for God. The irrational freedom of man is rooted in the “nothing” from which God created the world. This “nothing” is groundless; it is a potency not created by God; it precedes both God and the world. According to Berdyaev, “from the Divine Nothing” the Holy Trinity is born, God the Creator is born. From this point of view, it is clear that freedom was not created by God the Creator, therefore, responsibility for freedom, which gave rise to evil, is removed. Berdyaev comes to the conviction that God would be the culprit of world evil if we allow Him to create human freedom; and then theodicy would be impossible. Evil arises in the case when irrational freedom leads to a violation of the Divine hierarchy of being, to a falling away from the Primary Source of being due to the pride of the spirit. From here arises decay, material and natural existence in general, and slavery instead of freedom. The second freedom, rational freedom, taken without the first, leads to forced virtue, i.e. back to slavery.

During his exile for revolutionary activities, Berdyaev moved from Marxism (“I considered Marx a man of genius and still do,” he later wrote in “Self-Knowledge”) to the philosophy of personality and freedom in the spirit of religious existentialism and personalism. In his works, Berdyaev covers and compares world philosophical and religious teachings and movements: Greek, Buddhist and Indian philosophy, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, mysticism, Freemasonry, cosmism, anthroposophy, theosophy, Kabbalah, etc. For Berdyaev, the key role belonged to freedom and creativity (“ philosophy of freedom" and "The meaning of creativity"): the only mechanism of creativity is freedom. Subsequently, Berdyaev introduced and developed concepts that were important to him: the kingdom of spirit, the kingdom of nature, objectification - the impossibility of overcoming the slavish shackles of the kingdom of nature, transcendence - a creative breakthrough, overcoming the slavish shackles of natural-historical existence. But in any case, the internal basis of Berdyaev’s philosophy is freedom and creativity. Freedom defines the kingdom of the spirit. Dualism in his metaphysics is God and freedom. Freedom pleases God, but at the same time it is not from God. There is a “primary”, “uncreated” freedom over which God has no power. This same freedom, violating the “divine hierarchy of existence,” gives rise to evil. The theme of freedom, according to Berdyaev, is the most important in Christianity - “the religion of freedom.” Irrational, “dark” freedom is transformed by Divine love, the sacrifice of Christ “from within,” “without violence against it,” “without rejecting the world of freedom.” Divine-human relations are inextricably linked with the problem of freedom: human freedom has absolute significance, the fate of freedom in history is not only a human, but also a divine tragedy. The fate of a “free man” in time and history is tragic.

According to Berdyaev, the individual is not a part of any whole, it is not part of society; on the contrary, society is a part of the individual. Personality, as a spirit, is not self-sufficient, not egocentric, it goes out into something else and realizes universal content, which is something concrete. The human body, as the eternal side of personality, is a form; it must be subordinated to the spirit. Corporal death is necessary for the fulfillment of life; this completeness presupposes resurrection in a perfect body. As a result of the falling away from God, human nature is distorted: individuals separated from God and from each other do not see the spiritual existentiality of other individuals and do not have direct experience of spiritual life; they suffer from the disease of solitude. Another consequence of the corruption of sin is life in time leading to death. Instead of direct experience that reveals the life of the existential self, the subject, the distorted mind develops knowledge about the world in the form of objectification. The world of objects is nature, as the opposite of spirit: in nature, objects are subject to causality, there is no freedom in it. The revival of a person distorted by sin is his liberation from nature, developed by the process of objectification, the overcoming of slavery and death, the realization of personality as spirit, as existence. Therefore, Berdyaev calls his system existential or personalistic philosophy.

Society, nation, state are not, according to Berdyaev, individuals. A person’s personality is a value higher than society, a nation, or a state. In social life, a person’s conscience is distorted by the process of objectification and conventional rules. Only in and through the individual can a pure, original conscience manifest itself, and everything must be subject to the judgment of this conscience, which has not been distorted by subjectivization. This conscience is existential.

Berdyaev's ethics is dedicated to the struggle against imperfect good, developed in social life on the basis of subjectivization. He outlined it in the book “On the Purpose of Man” and called his teaching “The Experience of Paradoxical Ethics.” The main paradox of Berdyaev's ethics is that, according to his teaching, the very difference between good and evil and the emergence of assessments are already a consequence of the fall. The experience of good and evil arises when irrational freedom leads to falling away from God: after this the world goes from the initial non-discrimination of good and evil through the sharp distinction of good and evil to the final non-discrimination of good and evil, enriched by all the experience of discrimination. Berdyaev calls ethics, which sees only the middle part of this path, the ethics of law. Exploring legalistic ethics and legalistic Christianity, the philosopher shows that they adapt to the requirements of social everyday life; therefore they contain conventions and lead to tyranny and hypocrisy. But Berdyaev does not at all propose to abolish the ethics of law or the legal forms of social life. It only requires tolerance in the fight against evil and points to a higher level of moral consciousness. This high level is expressed in the ethics of atonement. Transformation is possible only through elevation to the third level of freedom; this freedom is imbued with love for God. It is clear that transformation cannot be carried out by force: it presupposes a person’s free love for God. Therefore Christianity is a religion of freedom. Social life, says Berdyaev, is an organization based more on lies than on truth. Pure truth is often unsafe, destructive, it leads to an explosion, to judgment of the world and to the end of the world. Pure truth is existential, and in social life we ​​use cognition through objectification, which produces truth that has lost its existentiality, but is adapted to the needs of millions of people. In the state and the Church, as a social institution, we often encounter not existential spiritual reality, but conventional symbols. The Kingdom of Supergood is love for all beings. Therefore, genuine moral consciousness cannot rest as long as evil people exist. Berdyaev is convinced that it is possible to find ways to transform evil and defeat hell. In close connection with his religious philosophy, Berdyaev develops his social teachings. Many of his works are devoted partly to the philosophy of history, partly to philosophical journalism. The historical process, according to Berdyaev, is a drama of the struggle between good and the irrational freedom of evil. Where irrational freedom wins, there begins the disintegration of existence, its return to primary chaos. Revolutions are preceded by a process of decomposition, a decline in faith, and the loss of a unifying spiritual center of life in society and the people. Therefore, revolution can only destroy; it is never a creative process. Creativity begins only in the era of reaction after the revolution, when the implementation of that new thing for which the people are prepared by their past begins. However, even the creative eras of history never achieve the goals set by it. But these failures lead to genuine achievements: failures awaken the field to a religious transformation of life, to transfer the center of gravity from the torn time of earthly existence to the eternal time of Divine life. Berdyaev wrote often and a lot about Russia, he said that it is a great and integral East-West according to God’s plan, and it is a failed and mixed East-West in its actual state. He finds the source of Russia’s illnesses in the false relationship between the masculine and feminine principles in it: “The Russian soul remained vast, it did not feel the edges and blurred,” it demands everything or nothing, is apocalyptic or nihilistic and therefore is not capable of building a middle kingdom of culture.

Berdyaev's philosophy ethics

Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (1874 - 1948)- the most prominent representative of Russian idealistic philosophy of the twentieth century.

Berdyaev himself defined his philosophy as “the philosophy of the subject, the philosophy of the spirit, the philosophy of freedom, the dualistic-pluralistic philosophy, the creative-dynamic philosophy...”. The opposition between spirit and nature, according to Berdyaev, is the main one. Spirit is the subject, creativity, nature is immobility and passive duration, the object. The main element in this opposition is the subject, to the point that, according to Berdyaev, the objective world does not exist on its own, but depends on the will of the subject, is the result of the exteriorization of his personal state: “I do not believe in the strength of the so-called “objective” world, the world of nature and history... there is only an objectification of reality generated by a certain orientation of the spirit.” This does not mean that Berdyaev was a solipsist; he argued that the world around us is only a complex of elements created by the imagination of the subject. Nature, in which necessity reigns and freedom is suppressed, where the personal, the particular is absorbed by the universal, was generated by evil, sin. Some researchers believe that Berdyaev is “one of the founders of the philosophy of existentialism. In his opinion, being is not primary, it is only a characteristic of “existence” - the process of creative individual life of the spirit.

One of the most important in Berdyaev’s philosophy is category of freedom. Freedom, in his opinion, was not created by God. Following the German mystic philosopher of the 17th century. Jacob Boehme, Berdyaev believes that its source is primary chaos, nothingness. Therefore, God has no power over freedom, ruling only over the created world, being. Berdyaev accepts the principle of theodicy, asserts that, as a result, God is not responsible for evil in the world, he cannot foresee the actions of people who have free will and only contributes to the will becoming good.

Berdyaev distinguishes two types of freedom: primary irrational freedom, potential freedom, which determines the pride of the spirit and, as a result, its falling away from God, which as a result leads to the slavery of the individual in the world of nature, objective reality, in society, where a person, in order to successfully coexist with its other members, must follow the moral standards constructed by society, thereby there is no real freedom; and “the second freedom, rational freedom, freedom in truth and goodness... freedom in God and received from God.” The spirit conquers nature, regaining unity with God, and the spiritual integrity of the individual is restored.

The concept of personality is also important for Berdyaev; he shares the concepts “personality” and “person”, “individual”. Man is God's creation, the image and likeness of God, the intersection point of two worlds - the spiritual and the natural. Personality is a “religious-spiritual”, spiritualistic category; it is a person’s creative ability, the implementation of which means movement towards God. The personality maintains communication “with the spiritual world” and can penetrate into the “world of freedom” in direct spiritual experience, which by its nature is intuition.

Man, according to Berdyaev, by his nature, is a social being, history is his way of life, therefore Berdyaev pays great attention to the philosophy of history. In its development, humanity has gone through several stages of understanding history. An early understanding of history was characteristic of Greek philosophy, which recognized itself as inextricably linked with society and nature and viewed the movement of history as a cycle. Then, with the emergence of the principle of historicism in Western European philosophy of the Renaissance and especially the Enlightenment, a new interpretation of history as progressive development appears. Its highest expression is Marx’s “economic materialism.” In fact, according to Berdyaev, there is a special spiritual existence of history, and in order to understand it, it is necessary to “comprehend this historical, as... to the depths of my history, as to the depths of my destiny. I must place myself in historical destiny and historical destiny in my own human depth.”

History is determined by three forces: God, fate and human freedom. The meaning of the historical process is the struggle of good against irrational freedom: during the period of the latter’s dominance, reality begins to return to the original chaos, the process of decay begins, the fall of faith, the loss of people’s unifying spiritual center of life and the era of revolutions begins. Creative periods of history come after revolutions that bring destruction.

Berdyaev wrote his well-known book “The Meaning of History” in 1936. In it he emphasizes that although the creative period of history begins again after an era of upheavals, his slogan is the liberation of human creative powers, i.e. the emphasis is placed not on the divine, but on the purely human creativity. However, a person, rejecting the high principle of the divine, is exposed to the danger of new slavery, this time in the face of “economic socialism,” which affirms the forced service of the individual to society in the name of satisfying material needs. The only kind of socialism that Berdyaev can accept is “personalistic socialism,” which recognizes the highest values ​​of the human person and his right to achieve the fullness of life.

Berdyaev outlined his thoughts on the fate of Russia and its place in the historical process in the book “The Origins and Meaning of Russian Communism,” published in 1937. Russia, in its geographical and spiritual position, is located between East and West, and the Russian mentality is characterized by a combination of opposite principles: despotism and anarchy, nationalism and a universal spirit inclined towards “all-humanity”, compassion and a tendency to cause suffering. But its most characteristic feature is the idea of ​​messianism, the search for the true kingdom of God, conditioned by belonging to Orthodoxy. Berdyaev identifies five periods in the history of Russia, or “five Russias”: “Russia of Kyiv, Russia of the Tatar period, Moscow Russia, Russia of Peter the Great, Imperial Russia and, finally, the new Soviet Russia, where specific, Russian communism, determined by the peculiarities, won.

Among the philosophers of the Russian diaspora, Berdyaev’s work was the most significant; he made the most significant contribution to the development of ontology and epistemology, philosophical anthropology and ethics.

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev is one of the representatives of idealistic philosophy of the 20th century. According to the scientist’s own comments, his philosophy was focused on studying the object of freedom and spirit, as well as the dualistic-pluralistic current of these views.

What did Berdyaev represent as a spirit? The spirit, as Nikolai Berdyaev considered, is presented as an object, nature, and one that has a creative beginning. No matter how it sounds, this object has passive duration, that is, it is lingering, in other words, it simply exists.

The subject is opposed to him. Berdyaev views his philosophy in a way where the subject does not contradict the object, but is its source. As the philosopher himself notes, an object can completely depend on the subject in its criteria. The strength of the objective world, according to Berdyaev, is completely and precisely destroyed. It turns out, based on the scientist’s philosophy, that the world of history and nature, which have always been on the side of objectification, simply does not exist. So does objective reality exist? The answer to this question, based on Berdyaev’s philosophy, is yes. But it exists in inextricable connection with the subject. That is, there can be many objective realities that are generated by the action of the subjective spirit - that creative principle mentioned above.

Emerging from these reflections, the concept of existence is defined as existence within the creative movement generated by the spirit. Berdyaev is considered one of the ideological founders of the philosophy of existentialism, which can be easily seen in his views.

One of the most important categories, which is also worth highlighting from the entire volume of Nikolai Berdyaev’s philosophical views, is the category of freedom. Freedom for existential experience is as important as water for fish - it is practically its basis. Being close to religious views, Berdyaev notes that freedom was given to man directly by God. The source of primary freedom is chaos or complete nothingness. In these views, Nikolai Berdyaev refers to the famous philosopher Jacob Boehme, and then develops them. Freedom according to Berdyaev has two manifestations: irrational freedom, which is freedom of the primary order, which manifests itself as potency. It is this potency that serves to separate a person from God and get him stuck in the objective world, that is, in a society where a person cannot fully open up. There is also a second freedom - this is reasonable freedom (its positive meaning is already hidden in the name given by Berdyaev), and it is responsible for truth and goodness. Man received it directly from God, namely, by finding freedom in God. Thanks to this freedom, as Berdyaev answers, man was able to overcome nature, which pulled him into the whirlpool of the objective, thanks to which he regains his lost unity with God, restoring the integrity of his spiritual personality.

The philosophy of Nikolai Berdyaev is permeated not only with idealistic ideas about the structure of the world, the characteristics of the human soul, the place of man in society, etc., but also with existential motives with a good dose of religious admixtures.

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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, associated with the search for the deep foundations of human existence and the meaning of history. His views are in line with the aspiration clearly defined in Western European philosophy to comprehend the inner spiritual experience of man, which was especially manifested in such philosophical directions as personalism, existentialism, etc. Berdyaev is not characterized by a dry and detached, but a deeply personal manner of philosophizing, marked by paradox, which gives the style of his works greater emotionality and expressiveness.

Life path and stages of creativity

N. A. Berdyaev was born in Kyiv into a noble-aristocratic family. He studied in the cadet corps. In 1894 he entered the University of St. Vladimir at the Faculty of Science, and a year later he transferred to the Faculty of Law. His interest in philosophical problems arose early. At the age of 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.” The acute experience of loneliness, longing for the transcendental as another world, rejection of injustice and infringement of personal freedom gave rise to constant struggles of the spirit, rebellion, and conflict with the environment in him.

It is not surprising that already in his early youth Berdyaev broke with the traditional patriarchal-aristocratic world, began attending Marxist student circles, and then actively communicated with the revolutionary-minded intelligentsia and 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 Liberation 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. A critical study about 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 partly Fichte. Later, he noted that the source of his revolutionary spirit always lay in the initial impossibility of accepting the world order, of submitting to anything in the world. “From here it is already clear,” he wrote, “that this revolutionism is more individual than social, it is an uprising of the individual, and not of the masses.”

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

In 1901, Berdyaev was sent into administrative exile in Vologda for three years. On the eve of his exile, he began to have a spiritual crisis. The works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Nietzsche, communication with L. Shestov and other non-Marxist philosophers opened new worlds for him and caused an internal revolution. Already in the above-mentioned book there was a tendency towards idealism. 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 trend.

Having moved to St. Petersburg in 1904; Berdyaev joined the editorial board of the magazine “New Way”, and in 1905, together with S. N. Bulgakov, he directed the magazine “Questions of Life”. 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, etc.). At 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 was actively involved in the work of the Religious and Philosophical Society in Memory of Vl. Soloviev, his interest in Orthodox teaching, which had already emerged 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 ideological issues and never completely merged with it. He considered himself a “believing free Duma member.”

In 1909, Berdyaev co-authored the book “Milestones. A collection of articles about 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 world social cataclysms, his works “Philosophy of Freedom” (1911) and “The Meaning of Creativity” were published. The experience of human justification" (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 Bolsheviks, 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, freely criticized Marxism (“At that time,” Berdyaev notes, “it was still possible”) I 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.

While in Berlin, Berdyaev founded the Religious and Philosophical Academy. He became acquainted with a number of German thinkers, primarily with the founder of modern philosophical anthropology, M. Scheller. During this period, Berdyaev’s interest in the problems of the philosophy of history increased. The book “The New Middle Ages. Reflections 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 magazine “The Path” (1925-1940), and participated in the work of the YMCA-Press publishing house. He actively communicated and debated with famous French philosophers J. Maritain, G. Marcel and others.

In emigration, the most important works for understanding his philosophical views were written: “The Philosophy of the Free Spirit. Problems and apology for Christianity" (1927-1928), "On the purpose of man. The experience of paradoxical ethics" (1931), "On slavery and human freedom. Experience of personalistic philosophy" (1939), "Experience of eschatological metaphysics. Creativity and objectification" (1947), "The Kingdom of the Spirit and the Kingdom of Caesar" (1949), etc.

During the foreign period, Berdyaev remained one of the prominent theorists of the Russian idea. While sharply criticizing the “Bolshevisation” of Russia, the suppression of freedom in it, etc., he at the same time took a patriotic position and 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 many things that happened in Soviet Russia, and on the other, he always believed that “you need to experience the fate of the Russian people as your own fate,” felt the need to “defend... ... homeland 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 the emigration, he conflicted with figures of the “right” wing and rejected their calls to “return to the old ways.” To some extent, he sympathized with the Eurasians, who had come to terms with the fact that a social revolution had taken place in Russia and wanted to build a new Russia on a new social basis. But much in Eurasianism, especially its “ethical utopianism,” was unacceptable to Berdyaev. Therefore, although the Eurasians saw him as their ideologist, he did not consider himself one.

Despite 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 internal 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 work “New Religious Consciousness and Public” (1907). Subsequently, Berdyaev’s religious and philosophical ideas were developed in many of his other works, especially in the work “The Meaning of Creativity” (1916). Along with the figures of the “Russian religious and philosophical renaissance” of the early 20th century. he actively became involved in the search for a “new religious consciousness.” Closest to him was the idea of ​​God-manhood, which he considered the main idea of ​​Russian religious thought (V.S. Solovyov, E.N. Trubetskoy, S.N. Bulgakov, etc.). At the same time, Berdyaev's views differed from the prevailing trend. According to him, he was not so much a theologian as (like Dostoevsky) an anthropologist, because his starting point was the idea of ​​personality as an “embodied divine spirit”, and not the problem of the relationship between “spirit” and “flesh”, the religious sanctification of the flesh of the world (culture, public, sexual love and all sensuality), as was the case with other “neo-Christians”.

it seems to humiliate a person, considering him a sinful and fallen being, called to humility and obedience. On the other hand, it unusually elevates man, 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 revaluation of values ​​and the construction of a “neo-Christian” doctrine of personality and God. He believed that God never created the so-called “world order”, the “harmony” of the world whole, which turns the individual into a means. God creates only specific human beings as spiritual and creative individuals. It exists not as some special reality located above a 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 communication in love is possible.

The Divine is revealed not in the universal-general “world order,” but in the individual, in the rebellion of the suffering individual 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 creativity inherent in the human personality testify precisely to the manifestation of God-manhood. Of course, 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 transcendental (otherworldly) to man and at the same time it is mysteriously united with the human, appearing in the divine-human form.

Berdyaev proceeded from the fact that “historical Christianity” is in crisis. He connected his hopes for 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 onset of a new era in the world history of God-mankind, that is, supernatural humanity. The “new culture” and “new society” will be established not on the old anti-personal principles of statehood, a self-sufficient organization of public order and management system, but on new mystical-free foundations - the union of individuals in unity. According to Berdyaev, this task is quite real, since the mystical principle inherent in every person, becoming “seeing”, leads to the subordination of the natural to the divine, the union of the personal mind 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 church and Russian orthodox religious thinkers. V.V. Zetkovsky (following L. Shestov and others) noted that Berdyaev in his constructions elevated man, but did not consider it necessary to take into account the traditions of the church and moved towards weakening the reality of God. By some, 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, directed towards the future.

Existential method of cognition and philosophizing

Berdyaev's philosophical views are closely connected with the peculiarities of that direction in European philosophical thought that received widespread development 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. ways of mastering the spiritual experience of man, 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 movements 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. Among writers, M. F. Dostoevsky and L. N. Tolstoy had a great influence on him, among philosophers - A. S. Khomyakov, K. N. Leontiev, V. S. Solovyov, V. V. Rozanov and others. As for his social views, then K. Marx, T. Carleil, G. Ibsen and L. Blois played an important role in their formation.

Berdyaev's philosophical views do not form any complete system with a developed conceptual apparatus. He did not strive for this, since he was never an academic philosopher and did not set himself the task of creating some kind of system of strictly logical justifications and evidence. The peculiarity of his way of philosophizing is that it is associated with internal experience, passed through personal feelings and experiences, and is often expressed in aphoristic form.

Berdyaev unambiguously defines the subject and tasks of philosophy from an existential-anthropological position: philosophy is called upon to cognize existence from and through man, 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 phenomena and the world of things and themselves, the order of nature and the order of freedom. Having shown that an object is generated by a 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 idealistic philosophy, he was never committed to it in school and sought 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” , loss of freedom in the need for a triumphant world mind (Logos). With this approach, being decomposes, is replaced by a subject opposing each other, and the object is cognized not by a living person, but by some abstract epistemological subject located outside of being and cognizing not being as current, but a mentally created (“posited”) object specifically for cognition. As a result, true being 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 intended to be knowledge of the meaning of existence through the subject, and not through the object. The meaning of things is revealed not in the object entering into thought, and not in the subject constructing his world, but in a third, neither objective nor subjective sphere - in the spiritual world. Spirit is freedom and free energy breaking through into the natural and historical world. Spiritual power in man, according to Berdyaev, initially has not only a strictly human, but also a divine-human character, since its roots lie in the highest 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, essentially in the same way as rational academic philosophy builds it. Heidegger, in essence, does not develop a philosophy of “existence” (the true, deep existence of a person), but only a 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 opportunity to break into infinity, into the sphere of the divine, as a result of which man finds himself in a position of “forsakenness by God.” In contrast to this pessimism, he sees his task as developing the existential dialectic of the divine and the human, taking place in the very depths of human existence. In this case, the method of creative intuition, intuitive disclosure of the universal in the individual, personal nature of spiritual and religious experience is used.

Another difference between Berdyaev’s philosophy and traditional (“classical”) existentialism is that it does not use the concepts of “existence,” “being-in-the-world,” and other “existentials” inherent in existentialism. The most important category of his philosophizing is personality. Theorists of existentialism, on the contrary, use this concept extremely rarely, because they believe that it is traditionally burdened with social, objective-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.

From the above it follows that Berdyaev should rather be called an existentially thinking philosopher, and not just a follower of the philosophy of existentialism as an established movement with its characteristic terminology. “My final philosophy,” he wrote, “is a personal philosophy, associated with my personal experience. Here the subject of philosophical knowledge is existential." "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 spirit and eschatological metaphysics.

The objective world surrounding a person does not seem real to Berdyaev. Behind the finite is hidden the infinite, giving signs about itself, about entire worlds, about our destiny. Therefore, the goal of existential knowledge, he believes, should not be the reflection of objectified reality, but the finding of its meaning. The mind tends to turn everything into an object from which existentiality disappears. Due to the initial defeat of a person by original sin (“fallen”), he is subjected to the conditions of space, time, causality, thrown out of a person, 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 objectification: 1) alienation of the object (the world of phenomena) from the subject of being (personality), 2) absorption of the uniquely individual by the impersonal, universal, 3) the dominance of necessity and the 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 related 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 toward averaging and leveling the individual under conditions of the dominance of everyday life and the massification of culture (“Man”) still remains at the mercy of objectification, since it does not indicate the possibility of overcoming it through a mystical breakthrough of the spirit to the secrets of cosmic life.

As forms of the objectified world, Berdyaev analyzes the dehumanizing impact on human spirituality of various economic systems, technology, state, church organizations, etc. He contrasts the process of objectification, leading to alienation and disunity, with the possibility of spiritual rebellion, communication in love, creativity, overcoming egocentrism, recognition of each individual as the highest value. He did not identify the concept of spirit with either the soul or the psyche. As for consciousness, it is not just a psychological concept, since it contains a spiritual element that constructs it. Consciousness is connected with spirit. Only for this reason is the transition from consciousness to superconsciousness possible. Spirit is the action of the superconscious 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 creature, combining opposites, because he belongs to two worlds - the natural and the 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 a social being, but precisely as a personality. He distinguishes the concept of personality from the concept of the individual. The individual is a naturalistic category, it is part of the race, society, the cosmos, that is, in this hypostasis he is connected with the material world. Personality means independence from nature and society, which

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

Berdyaev assigns a central place to the knowledge of the spirit to ethics. He believes that in the history of mankind two main types of ethics have developed: the ethics of law (in pre-Christian and socially everyday forms) and the ethics of redemption (Christian morality). Ethics in law organizes the life of the human masses, demonstrates the dominance of society over a specific person, over the internal 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. Kant's ethics, according to Berdyaev, is legalistic ethics, because it is interested in the generally binding moral law, the same “nature” of man for all. Berdyaev connected the solution to the problem of the emergence of something new and the process of creativity with the problem of freedom. Anything truly new in the world arises only through creativity, that is, through the manifestation of freedom of spirit. Creativity is the transition of non-existence into being through an act of freedom. In other words, it means growth, addition, creation of something that has not yet existed in the world. Creativity presupposes non-being, just as in Hegel, becoming presupposes non-being. From being (which is secondary to freedom and subject to objectification), only the outflow and redistribution of the elements of a given world is possible.

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

Assessing Berdyaev's views on the problem of creativity, V.V. 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, it is designed to destroy it. Thus, creativity seems to be deprived of all 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 objectified creativity, the products of creativity in this world are devoid of meaning and meaning. Without them, a person 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 spirit. But, Berdyaev emphasizes, we need to understand the boundaries 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 (ultimate) 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 neither upward progress nor regression, but a tragic struggle of opposites, good and evil.

Each culture, according to Berdyaev, experiences periods of birth, prosperity and disappearance. But only temporary, transitory values ​​disappear, while the enduring ones continue to live as long as human history exists. Roman legislation, Greek art and philosophy, etc. live 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 went through two stages: the barbaric medieval Christian stage (which ended in the 13th century with the Renaissance) and the humanistic secularist stage (which ended in the 19th century). V.). 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, filled with joy and self-confidence, at the same time ultimately led him to demoralization, since man relied more and more on himself and moved further and further from the Christian, divine understanding of nature personality characteristic of the Middle Ages. 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 “practical organization of life,” “enjoying life,” etc. The creative spirit of culture disappears, and is replaced by a utilitarian civilization, devoid of the highest peaks of artistic creativity. Spiritual genius is becoming impoverished. This is the “dialectic of history.” Bourgeois civilization represents

the drawn-out 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. Irreligious humanism leads to dehumanization and bestialization (brutality) of a person. But Berdyaev did not exclude the possibility that the transitional culture of the West would choose a different path - the religious-Christian transformation of life, the affirmation 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 from an eschatological perspective. But, in contrast to the passive and “vindictively sadistic” eschatology of the Christian Apocalypse, which predicts “cruel reprisals against the evil and infidel,” Berdyaev professes an active and creative eschatologism.

The solution to this problem is related to the analysis of the time problem. Berdyaev distinguishes between cosmic, historical and existential time. The latter cannot be calculated mathematically; its course depends on the intensity of experiences, on suffering and joy, on creative uplifts. History takes place in its own historical time, but it cannot remain in it. It emerges either in cosmic time (and then man turns out to be only a subordinate part of the world’s natural whole), or in existential time, meaning an exit from the world of objectification into the spiritual plane. Existential time indicates that time is in man, and not man in time; in it 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 they say that “happy people do not watch hours.”) History must end, because within its limits the problem of personality is insoluble. History only makes sense because it ends. Its meaning cannot be contained within it; it lies outside the boundaries of history. An endless history would be meaningless, and if it showed continuous progress, it would be unacceptable, because it would mean turning each living generation into a means for future generations. The meaning of the end of the world and history means the end of objective existence, the overcoming of objectification. It is impossible to imagine 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 entry and a different mode of existence. The end of the world is not a fate weighing down 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 man, who is not only a sinner, but also a creator. The eschatological perspective is not only the perspective of the indeterminable end of the world, but also the perspective of every moment of life. Throughout your life you need to end the old world and begin a new world as the kingdom of the spirit. Therefore, the end, according to Berdyaev, should be understood as a transformation, a transition of humanity to a new dimension of its existence, to a new zone - the era of the spirit, where love - creative and transformative - will receive central significance. 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 the evil reigning in the world and the bitter fate of man in the world. They reflect the rebellion of the individual against the oppressive objective “world harmony” and objective social order. Therefore, he opposed not only communism and fascism, but also liberalism associated with the capitalist system. Berdyaev condemned any form of social lies, totalitarianism, violence, both “on the right” and “on the left.” The human mass, he said, was and continues to be controlled through myths, magnificent religious rites and holidays, through hypnosis and propaganda, through bloody violence. In politics, lies play a huge role and the truth takes little place.

However, unlike Western theorists of existentialism, Berdyaev emphasized that he does not take the position of asociality. On the contrary, he believed, it is necessary to recognize that man 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 humane society can only be created from the spiritual in man, and not from objectification. The most spiritually significant thing in a person grows not from a social environment that plunges him into an atmosphere of “useful lies” and conformism, but from within a person called upon to constantly perform creative acts in relation to himself, that is, to form himself as a person. While sharply criticizing the traditional teaching of socialism and its actual implementation in life, Berdyaev nevertheless declared himself a supporter of “personalistic 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 Berdyaev’s historiosophical constructions, a special place is occupied by thoughts about the role and place of Russia in history, its destinies and purpose in the world historical process, that is, the whole range of issues that are associated with the concept of the Russian idea. In interpreting this topic, he, along with other figures of the Russian cultural renaissance of the early 20th century. acted as a continuator of the religious and philosophical analysis of the Russian idea by V. S. Solovyov. He began to study this topic during the First World War, which acutely raised the question of Russian national identity (essay “The Soul of Russia”, 1915). Then Berdyaev’s judgments were reflected in the works “The Fate of Russia” (1918), “The Russian Idea” (1946), etc. The origins, meaning, collisions and prospects of the Russian idea are traced by him on rich historical, literary and historical and philosophical material, starting from the time the Middle Ages (the religious teaching “Moscow - the Third Rome”), through the Slavophiles, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solovyov to the religious-philosophical and non-religious (including Marxist) movements 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 sociocultural life of society. But messianic consciousness should not be interpreted as nationalistic consciousness. It is possible to approach the solution to the mystery of the “soul of Russia” if we recognize the antinomy (inconsistency) of Russian national self-consciousness. The Russian soul is a combination of theses and antitheses: “On the one hand - humility, renunciation; on the other hand, there is a rebellion caused by pity and demanding justice. On the one hand - compassion, pity; on the other hand, the possibility of cruelty; on the one hand there is a love of freedom, on the other there is a tendency towards slavery.” Berdyaev analyzes numerous factors that influenced the formation of the characteristics 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. The inconsistency of the Russian soul may be due to the fact that in Russia they collide and come 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 the desire for universal salvation - in contrast to Western Christianity, where it primarily takes the form of individual salvation. Therefore, the essence of Russian originality lies in “community” (community), which is a kind of metaphysical version of collectivism. Russian people are more communitarian than Western people. They are looking not so much for an organized society as for community and communication. The Russian idea, Berdyaev concludes, is the idea of ​​communitarianism and brotherhood of people and peoples. He subjected to principled criticism various forms of Russophobia, as well as other manifestations of nationalism. Berdyaev's interpretation of the Russian idea is full of lively interest and contains a wealth of ideas that have not lost their cultural and educational significance even today.

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

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Institute of Management and Business

Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences

discipline: "Philosophy"

Philosophical ideas of N.A. Berdyaev

Completed:

1st year student, stream 58u, FMM

Cherepanov Nikita Aleksandrovich

Checked:

Art. Ave. Tumanov S.V.

Nizhny Novgorod

Introduction

1. Creative biography of N.A. Berdyaev

2. The idea of ​​personality

3. The idea of ​​freedom

4. Idea of ​​creativity

Conclusion

List of used literature

Introduction

A significant role and influence in the development of world philosophy at the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries was played by the works of the outstanding Russian philosopher Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev, which contributed enormously to the moral and spiritual development of Russian philosophy.

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev is an unusually original thinker and writer. He had a significant influence on Russian philosophy, science and literature.

This work is devoted to the study of the philosophical thought of N.A. Berdyaev, his worldview, his ideals, his problems of existence, his problems of personality, creativity, freedom, problems of the human soul, forms.

The relevance of consideration of this topic is determined by the following concepts:

The superiority of freedom over being;

Problems of evil and theodicy;

The human personality as the secret of the world, as a “microcosm”;

The spiritual element in man is a supernatural element;

Immortality of the human personality;

The problem of gender and love in the philosophy of N. Berdyaev;

Freedom is the main theme of Berdyaev’s life and the main word of his work;

The idea of ​​“freedom” as the basis of a religious attitude and worldview;

- “creativity” is a fundamental characteristic of a person;

Eschatology is the last word of creativity and history;

ON THE. Berdyaev is a philosopher, thinker and writer.

The purpose of this essay is to study the philosophical ideas of N. A. Berdyaev.

1) Consider the creative biography of N.A. Berdyaev;

2) Consider the idea of ​​personality;

3) Consider the idea of ​​freedom;

4) Consider the idea of ​​creativity.

Berdyaev philosophical being worldview

1. Creative biography of N.A. Berdyaev

ON THE. Berdyaev was born in 1874 in Kyiv into an aristocratic family. His mother was from the family of princes Kudashev, and his father was a hereditary military man. At the age of 10, his parents sent him to the cadet corps, but when it became clear that a military career was alien to him, they did not insist on its continuation and N. Berdyaev entered the natural sciences department of the Kiev University of St. Vladimir and at the same time attended seminars and lectures on philosophy. During his student years, he became interested in Marxism and participated in one of the secret Social Democratic circles - this ended with a month's imprisonment in 1898 and exile to Vologda in 1901-02. Here he met prominent Marxists of his time A.A. Bogdanov (later expelled by V.I. Lenin from the Bolshevik Party), A.V. Lunacharsky, future Minister of Education of the Lenin government), B.V. Savinkov (the future “great terrorist” of the Socialist Revolutionaries). Already in exile, N. Berdyaev becomes disillusioned with Marxism and begins to look for a way to modernize it, in this he finds allies in the person of “legal Marxists”: P.B. Struve, S.N. Bulgakov and others, with whom he has collaborated since 1904 in the newspaper “New Way”. After the defeat of the first Russian revolution of 1907-08, N. Berdyaev goes to Paris, where a change in his views occurs and he abandons materialistic views and returns to Orthodoxy, takes part in the organization of the religious and philosophical society named after. V. Solovyov, collaborates with the publishing house “Put”. A clear expression of his views was the book “The Philosophy of Freedom,” published in 1911. In this book, he argues that all philosophy is generated by religion, therefore, to abandon belief in God as the basis of any worldview means to limit your view of the world. “Renunciation of the reason of this world - madness in God is the highest feat of freedom, and not slavery and obscurantism: by renouncing small reason, overcoming the limitations of logic, great reason is acquired...”

However, he does not recognize the right of the official Orthodox Church to dictate its understanding of the world and God to anyone. You cannot understand God through logical reasoning. God himself chooses the one who can testify about him and gives him the great miracle of Revelation. God himself talks about himself through the mouths of evangelists and prophets.

Man is a great miracle of creation, he is created “in the image and likeness of God,” and, therefore, created free, the whole world is reflected in him, like in a mirror, or rather, he himself is the whole world, a small model of everything that has been created “from time immemorial.” " “Man is a microcosm, in him is given the solution to the mystery of existence - the macrocosm.” Therefore, anyone who wants to understand the world must understand man; he sees this as one of the main tasks of philosophy. Man, being the “image and likeness of God,” is not only free, he is the only living creature endowed with the ability to create, i.e. create something new, something that has not existed before.

Nikolai Berdyaev explored the problems of freedom and the crisis of culture, reflected on the paths of Russian and world history of the twentieth century, and carried out research of a historiosophical nature. The evolution of Berdyaev's philosophical ideas can be divided into four periods, each of which is defined by the emphasis that characterizes it. In the first period, Berdyaev highlights ethical issues. The second period was marked by a religious and mystical turning point in Berdyaev’s worldview. The third period is defined by an emphasis on historiosophical issues. The fourth period is associated with his personalistic ideas. Berdyaev's philosophical views were based on a number of autonomous ideological and value complexes that reflected his individual preferences and priorities: a unique interpretation of personality, an original concept of freedom, the idea of ​​a metahistorical eschatological “meaning” of the historical process.

The existential-personalistic philosophy of N. A. Berdyaev found a vivid expression of the religious, anthropological and historiosophical problems characteristic of Russian philosophical thought, associated with the search for the deep foundations of human existence and the meaning of history. His views are in line with the aspiration clearly defined in Western European philosophy to comprehend the inner spiritual experience of man, which was especially manifested in such philosophical directions as personalism, existentialism, etc. Berdyaev is not characterized by a dry and detached, but a deeply personal manner of philosophizing, marked by paradox, which gives the style of his works greater emotionality and expressiveness.

As the main source of his philosophical constructions, Berdyaev uses Christian mythology about the creation of the world, seeing in it a symbolic expression of the true theogony of the world, the mystery of which he seeks to unravel and present in his version of the philosophy of Christian existentialism. He considered the latter as the basis of socially oriented personalism.

2. The idea of ​​personality

The main problem of philosophy is the problem of man. Being is revealed in man and through man. Man is a microcosm and a microtheos. He was created in the image and likeness of God. But at the same time, man is a natural, limited being. There is duality in man: man is the point of intersection of two worlds, he reflects in himself the higher world and the lower world. As the image and likeness of God, man is a person.

A person must be distinguished from an individual. Personality is a spiritual-religious category, while the individual is a naturalistic-biological category. The individual is part of nature and society. A personality cannot be part of something: it is a single whole, it is correlated with society, nature and God.

The individual is also a sociological category, and in this capacity he is subordinate to society, he is part of society. The individual defends his relative independence, but is forced to consider himself as a part (“one of”), he cannot oppose himself to the whole, as a whole in himself.

Personality is a category of spirit, not nature, and is not subordinate to either nature or society; cannot be thought of as a part in relation to the whole. Personality is the whole, this is the basic definition of personality. Personality is the opposite of the world of objects; it is an active subject, an existential center. It has an axiological, evaluative character. Becoming a person is a person’s task. Personality is not born from parents, as an individual, it is created by God and self-created, and it is God’s idea of ​​every person. Personality is immutability in change. Personality is the unity of fate. At the same time, personality is unity in plurality. Personality presupposes the existence of the superpersonal, that which surpasses it and to which it rises in its realization. Personality has the ability to contain universal content. Personality can only be understood as an act; a creative act is always connected with the depth of personality; personality is creativity.

Personality is resistance, resistance to determination by society and nature, a heroic struggle for self-determination from within. Personality has a volitional core, in which every movement is determined from within, and not from without. Being a person is not an easy thing, but a difficulty, a burden that a person must bear. No person can consider himself a complete person. Personality is not self-sufficient; it always presupposes the existence of other personalities, the emergence of oneself into another. The relationship of an individual to other individuals is the qualitative content of human life. Personality presupposes sacrifice, but you cannot sacrifice personality, you can sacrifice your life. But no one has the right to renounce his personality; everyone must remain an individual in sacrifice and through sacrifice. Personality presupposes a calling, the one and only calling of everyone. Personality is forged in its creative self-determination. Realization of personality presupposes asceticism as a means, exercise, concentration of internal strength necessary for the implementation of human creativity. Berdyaev points out that the personality has an unconscious basis - elemental, associated with space and earth, which is the material from which the greatest virtues of the individual are created; there is consciousness and there is access to the superconscious, with the latter all the highest virtues of man are associated, holiness and genius, contemplation and creativity are associated with it. The path to the realization of the human personality lies from the unconscious through consciousness to the superconscious.

The knowledge of man rests on the assumption that man is cosmic by nature, that he is the center of being. Man, as a closed individual being, would have no way to understand the universe.

Man is a small universe, a microcosm - this is the basic truth of human knowledge and the basic truth presupposed by the very possibility of knowledge. The Universe can enter into a person, be assimilated by him, be known and comprehended by him only because in a person there is the entire composition of the universe, all its powers and qualities, that a person is not a fractional part of the universe, but an integral small universe.

Man cognitively penetrates into the meaning of the universe as a big man, as a macro-anthropos. The Universe enters into a person and succumbs to his creative efforts as a small universe, as a microcosm. Man and the cosmos measure their strengths as equals. Knowledge is a struggle between equals in strength, and not a struggle between a dwarf and a giant. And I repeat: this exclusive self-consciousness of man is not one of the truths obtained as a result of philosophizing, it is the truth that precedes any creative act of philosophical knowledge. This premise and assumption of any philosophy is often unconscious, but must become conscious. Man is only able to cognize the world because he is not only in the world as one of the parts of the world, but also outside the world and above the world, exceeding all the things of the world as a being equal in quality to the world.

Man is the point of intersection of two worlds. This is evidenced by the duality of human self-consciousness that runs through its entire history. Man recognizes himself as belonging to two worlds, his nature is twofold, and in his consciousness first one nature, then the other, wins. And man justifies with equal force the most opposite self-consciousnesses, equally justifies them with the facts of his nature. Man is aware of his greatness and power and his insignificance and weakness, his royal freedom and his slavish dependence, he recognizes himself as the image and likeness of God and a drop in the ocean of natural necessity. With almost equal right one can speak about the divine origin of man and about his origin from the lower forms of organic life in nature.

Man is a spiritual, physical and carnal being. As a carnal being, he is connected with the entire cycle of world life; as a spiritual being, he is connected with the spiritual world and with God. The spiritual basis in man does not depend on nature and society and is not determined by them.

A person cannot define himself only before life, he must define himself before death, he must live knowing that he will die. “Death is the most important fact of human life, and a person cannot live with dignity without defining his attitude towards death.”

The realization of the fullness of personal life presupposes the existence of death. Death is not only the decomposition and destruction of a person, but also his ennobling, tearing him out of the power of everyday life. Man is not an immortal being due to his natural state. Immortality is achieved due to the spiritual principle in man and his connection with God. It is the personality that is immortal, and not the soul, as a natural substance. In a certain sense, we can say that immortality is the conquest of spiritual creativity, the victory of the spiritual personality, who has mastered the soul and body, over the natural individual.

A person cannot realize the fullness of his life if he is closed in on himself. Man is not only a social being and cannot entirely belong to society, but he is also a social being. But society, a nation, a state are not individuals; a person as an individual has greater value than them. That is why the human person has the right and his duty to defend his originality, independence, spiritual freedom, and to fulfill his calling in society.

Freedom is inherent in man, although this freedom is not absolute. The principle of freedom is determined neither from below nor from above. The freedom inherent in man is uncreated freedom. We are talking about irrational freedom: not about freedom in truth, but about freedom to accept or reject the truth. Another freedom is the freedom that flows from truth and from God, a freedom imbued with grace. Only the recognition of uncreated freedom, freedom not rooted in being, makes it possible to explain the source of evil, while at the same time freedom explains the possibility of a creative act and novelty in the world.

3 . The idea of ​​freedom

Berdyaev's entire philosophy of freedom is contained in the book of the same name. The title of this book, “Philosophy of Freedom,” according to Berdyaev himself, requires clarification. The philosophy of freedom here does not mean the study of the problem of freedom as one of the problems of philosophy, freedom does not mean an object here, but the philosophy of freedom here means the philosophy of the free, a philosophy proceeding from freedom, as opposed to the philosophy of slaves, a philosophy proceeding from necessity, freedom means a state philosophizing subject. Free philosophy is religious philosophy, intuitive philosophy, the philosophy of sons, not stepchildren. The path of this book starts with freedom at the very beginning, rather than leading to freedom only at the end. Freedom cannot be derived from anything; one can only abide in it initially.

Freedom is the main theme of Berdyaev's life and the main word of his work.

“The originality of my philosophical type lies, first of all, in the fact that I laid the foundation of philosophy not on being, but on freedom... In such a radical form, it seems, no philosopher has done this. The secret of peace is hidden in freedom. God wanted freedom and this is where the tragedy of the world came from. Freedom at the beginning and freedom at the end. I have a basic conviction that God is present only in freedom and acts only through freedom. Only freedom must be curtailed,” Berdyaev believes.

The philosopher is convinced of the self-evidence of human freedom. Berdyaev's freedom is the freedom of a person's spirit, his consciousness and self-awareness. He finds it impossible to explain it causally; one can only “abide initially” in it. “There are two freedoms: the first and the last; freedom to choose good and evil and freedom in good; or irrational freedom and freedom in reason; freedom in choosing truth and freedom in truth.” Between these two freedoms lies the path of man, full of torment and suffering, the path of bifurcation.

Berdyaev speaks of freedom as “an original, baseless, inexpressible abyss, absolute, irrational, incommensurable with any of our categories.” He affirms it as the original source in which the Birth of God takes place and from which God creates the world and man. The first freedom is something that exists before being and therefore cannot be characterized by a rational concept. It can be accepted as a fact of mystical experience. Everything is potentially contained in this groundless basis of being, which Berdyaev calls Ungrund, borrowing this idea from a 16th century German mystic. J. Boehme. In its content, Ungrund represents the unconditioned primary power to create, to create something out of nothing. She is neither good nor evil, but potentially carries both. It is the possibility of novelty and novelty as such, beyond any uncertainty. It is not deducible from anything, does not lead to anything definite, being the basis of any being.

Freedom is the exclusive dignity of the individual. As Berdyaev himself writes: “Freedom is my independence and the determination of my personality from the inside, and freedom is my creative power, not a choice between the good and evil put before me, but my creation of good and evil. Such freedom is only my freedom and even God has no power over it.” Everything in human life must go through freedom, through the test of freedom, through the rejection of the temptations of freedom. Free choice balances good and evil and, therefore, makes a person weak before the possible penetration of evil into his soul, before the power of evil as a metaphysical principle. Freedom cannot be identified with good, with truth, with perfection. Freedom has its own unique nature, freedom is freedom, not good. Compulsory good is no longer good, it is degenerated into evil. Free good, which is the only good, presupposes the freedom of evil. This is the tragedy of freedom.

Freedom was thought of as freedom of choice, as the ability to turn right or left. The choice between good and evil presupposes that a person is placed before a norm that distinguishes between good and evil.

Berdyaev is close to Dostoevsky’s idea that evil does not need to be absolutized, it must be “balanced” with goodness and love. This corresponds to Berdyaev’s own concept, according to which a person is able to move from the “first freedom,” “freedom for nothing,” to the “second freedom,” rational, manifesting itself in goodness, in God.

“The idea of ​​freedom has always been the basis of my religious worldview and worldview, and in this primary intuition of freedom I met Dostoevsky as my spiritual homeland,” writes Berdyaev. Berdyaev called Dostoevsky's novels “tragedies of human freedom.” Dostoevsky did not condemn a person to a predetermined good, did not remove the burden of freedom from him; he depicted a free person and, therefore, open to evil, but at the same time placed on him “an enormous responsibility corresponding to the dignity of the free.”

A person’s path to freedom begins with extreme individualism, with solitude, with rebellion against the external world order. Excessive pride develops, the underground opens up; the underground man appears. He is characterized by an ineradicable need for the irrational, for insane freedom, for suffering. A person does not strive for profit. In his self-will, man prefers suffering. Freedom is higher than well-being. But freedom is not the domination of reason over the element of soul, freedom itself is irrational and insane, it leads to a transition beyond the boundaries set for a person. This immeasurable freedom torments a person and leads him to death; but man treasures this torment and this death. Man's painful journey begins on the paths of self-willed freedom. Freedom, like arbitrariness and violence, godless freedom, cannot but give rise to “limitless despotism.” Such freedom contains the greatest violence; such freedom does not carry within itself the guarantees of freedom. This is always the path of revolutionary freedom; it involves the renunciation of the freedom of the human spirit in the name of the forced organization of social happiness. Freedom, which has turned into self-will, leads to evil, evil - to crime, crime with internal inevitability to punishment. Evil is the child of freedom; evil lies in the depths of human nature, in its irrational freedom; evil is associated with the individual, only the individual can do evil and be responsible for evil. Evil is not externally punished, but has inevitable internal consequences.

The path of freedom leads either to man-deity, and on this path man finds his end and his death, or to God-manhood, on this path he finds his salvation and the final affirmation of his image. A person only exists if he is the image and likeness of God, if there is a God. In God-manhood human freedom is united with divine freedom, the human image with the divine image.

“The philosophy of freedom is the philosophy of God-manhood,” this is Berdyaev’s idea. It contains “a transcendental 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.

For Berdyaev, this idea is inextricably linked with creativity, in which a person adopts himself to God. He writes: “For me, the theme of creativity was inserted into the main Christian theme of Divine-Humanity; it is justified by the Divine-Human character of Christianity. ...The idea of ​​God is the greatest human idea. The idea of ​​man is God's greatest idea. Man awaits the birth of God in him. God is waiting for the birth of man in him. ...The idea that God needs man, man’s response, man’s creativity is unusually daring. But without this boldness, the revelation of God-manhood becomes meaningless.” With the appearance of the God-man Christ, “the autocracy of God ceases, for man, filial to God, is called to direct participation in divine life. The governance of the world becomes divine-human.” Thus, Berdyaev’s world process becomes not a return to the original completeness, but a creative increment to it, the “eighth day of creation.”

Transformation and deification are possible only through the achievement of freedom imbued with love for God. Berdyaev believes that they cannot be achieved by force; they presuppose man's free love for God. Therefore Christianity is the religion of freedom.” In his opinion, faith in God is not reverence for church canons, but a desire for God’s kingdom, the idea that following the commandments 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 desired era 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.”

4. Idea of ​​creativity

Berdyaev wrote that the theme of creativity, the creative vocation of man, is the main theme of his science. Moreover, the formulation of this topic was not the result of philosophical reflection, it was an internal experience, “insight”. Berdyaev, as a deeply religious person following a spiritual path, experienced an acute period of consciousness of oppression by sin, but did not withdraw into himself from the consciousness of this, but overcame it, feeling a strong creative uplift. So what did he feel? What is “creativity” according to Berdyaev? On the one hand, creativity is a requirement of God for man, it is “man’s response to the creative act of God.” Berdyaev wrote that it would be impudent to assume God’s need for man, but nevertheless, “The loving (God) cannot exist without the beloved (man).” Berdyaev also defined creativity as a “flight to infinity,” a breakthrough into another existence. He wrote that the final products of creative activity are only “symbolic creativity,” and “real creativity” is the desire for the transformation of the world, leading to the emergence of “a new heaven and a new earth.” According to Berdyaev, the creative act is an eschatological act, directed towards the end of the world.

That's what creativity is. which most of all resembles the calling of man before the Fall, which in a certain sense stands “beyond good and evil.” But since human nature is sinful, creativity is distorted and perverted by sin, and evil creativity is possible. Only creativity speaks about the vocation and purpose of a person in the world.

He closely intertwined the problem of creativity with the problem of freedom.

“Creativity is inseparable from freedom. Only the free one creates. Only evolution is born from necessity; creativity is born from freedom. When we talk in our imperfect human language about creativity out of nothing, we are talking about creativity out of freedom. From the point of view of determinism, freedom is “nothing”, it comes out of a deterministic series, it is not conditioned by anything, what is born from it does not follow from previous causes, from “something”. Human creativity from “nothing” does not mean the absence of resisting material, but only absolute profit that is not determined by anything.

Only evolution is determined; creativity does not follow from anything that precedes it. Creativity is inexplicable. Creativity is a mystery. The secret of creativity is the secret of freedom. The mystery of freedom is bottomless and inexplicable, it is an abyss. The mystery of creativity is also bottomless and inexplicable. Those who deny the possibility of creativity out of nothing must inevitably place creativity in a deterministic series and thereby reject the freedom of creativity. In creative freedom there is an inexplicable and mysterious power to create from nothing, indeterministically, adding energy to the world's energy cycle. The act of creative freedom is transcendental in relation to the world given, to the vicious circle of world energy. Creativity is something that comes from within, from a bottomless and inexplicable depth, and not from the outside, not from world necessity.” , - this is how Berdyaev described creativity in his book “Philosophy of Freedom. The meaning of creativity"

“The theme of creativity, of a person’s creative vocation, is the main theme of my life,” Berdyaev wrote. In the dominant forms of Christian consciousness, man was recognized exclusively as a saving being, and not as a creative one; it was the anthropology of sin and saving grace; in scholastic anthropology, man is not a creator, he is a second-class intellect, insignificant. . Berdyaev considers creativity to be a fundamental characteristic of a person, only creativity speaks about the vocation and purpose of a person in the world; creativity, a creative attitude towards all life is not a human right, but a duty and obligation. “God expects a creative act from man as man’s response to God’s creative act.” The idea that God needs man, man’s response, man’s creativity is extraordinarily daring. “Creativity is the fulfillment of the will of God, obedience to God’s call, participation in the work of God in the world. Whether I am a carpenter or a philosopher, I am called by God to creative construction.”

Berdyaev defines creativity as “always an increase, an addition, the creation of something new, unprecedented in the world... Nothing has become something, non-existence has become being.”

He talks about three elements of creativity. The first is freedom, that which exists before God, freedom as the potential for novelty, but not defined as novelty. The second element is gift, genius. It is “given to a person for no reason; it is not associated with a person’s religious or moral effort to achieve perfection and transform himself.” The creator has no control over himself in creativity. The Creator may turn out to be an “idle reveler,” the most insignificant among mortals. But he receives his gift from God and therefore he is “an instrument of God’s work in the world.” The third element is the world already created by God, in which creativity takes place and from which it draws material. In creativity, Berdyaev distinguishes two different acts; there is an initial creative act, a primary creative intuition, in which a person stands, as it were, in the face of God, and there is a secondary creative act, in which he, as it were, stands in the face of people and the world, the latter is connected with the fact that man is a social being; creativity is realized. For Berdyaev, creativity is not so much a development in the final, in a creative product, as the revelation of the infinite, a flight into infinity; not objectification, but transcendence, going beyond the boundaries of immanent reality, breaking through freedom through necessity. Creativity is associated with imagination, it is genius in nature, there is asceticism in creativity, but this is not an ascetic feat of self-improvement, but the creative tension of original freedom. Creativity presupposes oblivion of personal perfection and sacrifice of personality. “We should not justify creativity, but, on the contrary, we should justify life with creativity.” False creativity is also characteristic of man; man can respond not to the call of God, but to the call of Satan. The creator is alone, and creativity is not of a collective, general nature, but of an individual, personal nature.

The problem of the meaning of creativity in Berdyaev is connected with the problem of time and is resolved eschatologically. Eschatology is the last word of creativity and history.

Berdyaev's philosophy of Christian creative anthropologism 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.

In this book, Berdyaev raises the question of the relationship between creativity and sin, creativity and redemption, and the justification of man in creativity and through creativity. He believes that “it justifies man, it is anthropodicy.” Anthropodycey, according to Berdyaev, is the “third anthropological revelation”, heralding the advent of a “creative religious era”. It abolishes the revelation of the Old and New Testaments. But the third revelation cannot be expected; it must be accomplished by man himself; it will be a matter of his freedom and creativity. Creativity is not justified or permitted by religion, but is itself a religion. Its goal is the search for meaning, which is always beyond the boundaries of the world given; creativity means “the possibility of a breakthrough to meaning through nonsense.” Meaning is value, and therefore every creative aspiration is colored by value.

For the author, “man’s creativity is not a requirement of man and his right, but is a requirement of God from man, a duty of man.” “God expects a creative act from man as man’s response to the creative act of God. The same is true about human creativity as is true about human freedom. Human freedom is God’s requirement from man, man’s duty towards God.”

Berdyaev writes: “Creativity is inseparable from freedom. Only the free one creates. Only evolution is born from necessity; creativity is born from freedom.” The mystery of creativity is also “bottomless and inexplicable,” like the mystery of freedom.

“Creativity is the purpose of human life on earth - that for which God created him. If Christianity is a religion of salvation, then this salvation is through creativity, and not only through ascetic cleansing from sin,” writes Berdyaev.

“Creativity stands,” writes Berdyaev, “as if outside the ethics of law and outside the ethics of redemption and presupposes a different ethics. The creator is justified by his creativity... the creator and creativity are not interested in salvation and destruction”... “creativity means the transition of the soul to another plane of existence”: “fear of punishment and fear of eternal torment cannot play any role in the ethics of creativity.”

Berdyaev denies such a concept as the “evolution of creativity.” The idea of ​​direct, continuous, continuous development is alien to him. In the world and historical process there is no need for a natural development or program. Periods of reaction and darkness are possible just as creative breakthroughs and the opening of “new worlds” are possible.

The problem of the relationship between contemplation and creativity in Berdyaev’s concept is interesting. It would seem that these concepts are opposite, since creativity is an activity that requires the activity of the spirit, and contemplation is a passive perception of reality... But Berdyaev proves the opposite. He says that contemplating the beauty of the world around us presupposes an active desire for another world. “In contemplation of the highest beauty, harmonious, the contemplator experiences a moment of creative ecstasy... But the moments of contemplation themselves do not know struggle, conflict, painful resistance and difficulty, these states are overcome. This distinguishes contemplation from other forms of activity of the spirit. And a person must periodically come to moments of contemplation, experience the blessed rest of contemplation.”

Creativity is not the transition of the power of the creator to another state and thereby the weakening of the previous state - creativity is the creation of new power from something that has not existed, which did not exist before. And every creative act is essentially creativity out of nothing, i.e. the creation of new power, rather than the change and redistribution of the old. In every creative act there is absolute profit, growth.

Creativity in the world is possible only because we create the world, i.e. created A world that was not created, that did not know the creative act of profit and the increase in existential power, would not know anything about creativity and would not be capable of creativity.

In true creativity, nothing decreases, but everything only increases, just as in God’s creativity of the world, Divine power does not decrease from its transition into the world, but a new, not former power arrives.

Berdyaev realized and noted with bitterness that his contemporaries did not understand him. They don’t understand his thoughts, ideas that “were in deep conflict with time and were directed toward the distant future.” “I tried to preach humanity in the most inhumane era,” wrote N.A. Berdyaev. And this was the essence of his work.

Conclusion

From this work we can conclude that Berdyaev is one of the most important representatives of Russian philosophy. The essence of Berdyaev’s philosophy is “knowledge of the meaning of existence 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 existence as a whole.

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 principle of man, 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, genuine world, kingdom Spirit.

Freedom as one of the main philosophical categories characterizes the essence of man and his existence. In Berdyaev, the idea of ​​personal freedom is colored by tragedy and determination to carry out a “revolution of the spirit”, experiences of loneliness and an impulse towards all-conquering conciliarity, a sense of the fallenness of existence and history and faith in the transformative and saving power of human freedom.

Berdyaev’s creativity is not the transition of the power of the creator to another state and thereby the weakening of the previous state - creativity is the creation of new power from something that has never existed, which did not exist before. And every creative act is essentially creativity out of nothing, i.e. the creation of new power, rather than the change and redistribution of the old. In every creative act there is absolute profit, growth.

It is difficult to write about Berdyaev - a number of circumstances prevent this... The specificity of Berdyaev’s own work is an unusually wide range of problems addressed, a sharply expressed individuality of style, in which philosopher and publicist, thinker and artist compete with each other. Berdyaev's prose - bright, nervous, at times almost paragraph-free, with many repetitions, with a return to what was said - is capable of exciting and irritating. We must also take into account Berdyaev’s extraordinary fertility; according to N. Poltoratsky, “for Berdyaev, writing was like a physical need.” This explains why assessments of Berdyaev’s work in historical and philosophical studies are far from ambiguous. Recognition of his services to Russian and world philosophy is coupled with a reproach for the fact that he was a prisoner of his various “passions” and “irrational movements.”

Berdyaev was constantly under the power of his quests. The deepest thing about him was connected with his ethical searches, with his journalistic themes; all his metaphysical talent manifested itself with enormous power. In this area, Berdyaev rightfully had global significance; his voice was listened to all over the world. Berdyaev's most significant contribution to the dialectics of Russian and world thought was determined by his philosophical constructs in the sphere of morality. Berdyaev's ideas had a significant influence on the development of French existentialism and personalism.

The first chapter provides information about the creative biography of N. A. Berdyaev and his worldview. The second chapter explores the idea of ​​personality. Berdyaev believed that man is a microcosm and microtheos, he was created in the image and likeness of God. The third chapter is devoted to the idea of ​​freedom. Freedom is the main theme of Berdyaev's life and the main word of his work. Chapter four covers the idea of ​​creativity. The theme of creativity is the main theme of Nikolai Berdyaev’s science.

List of used literature

1. Berdyaev N.A. On the appointment of a person - M: Respublika, 2010. - 388 p.

2. Berdyaev N.A. About Russian classics. Dostoevsky's worldview. - M.: Higher. school, 2008. pp. 108-152.

3. Berdyaev N.A. About Russian philosophy / comp., introductory article. and note. B.V. Emelyanova, A.I. Novikova. - Part 1. - Sverdlovsk: Uralsk publishing house. Univ., 2009. - 288 p.

4. Berdyaev N.A. Self-knowledge (experience of philosophical autobiography). M: “Book”, 2012. - 449 p.

5. Berdyaev N.A. Self-knowledge. The human problem. Towards the construction of Christian anthropology. - L. 2011. P. 341-366.

6. Berdyaev N.A. Philosophy of freedom: The meaning of creativity. M.: “Pravda”, 2010. - 610 p.

7. Ermichev A.A. Three freedoms of Nikolai Berdyaev. M.: Knowledge, 2008. - 64 p.

8. Ermishin O.T. Existential interpretation of Russian thought (L. Shestov, N.A. Berdyaev) // Philosophical Sciences, 2012, No. 5, pp. 103-112

9. Novikova M.V. ON THE. Berdyaev about Orthodox personalism // Man, 2011, No. 4, pp. 123-127

10. Newest Philosophical Dictionary: 3rd ed., isra. - Mn.: Book House, 2010. - 1280 p.

11. Reader on philosophy. - Tutorial. - M.: Prospekt, 2009. - 415 p.

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