8. German classical philosophy and its main problems. Philosophy of Kant: the concept of "thing in itself" and transcendental knowledge. The Antinomies of Pure Reason German classical philosophy is regarded as an independent stage in the development of philosophy, because

15. Analytical philosophy of the twentieth century. The philosophical program of neopositivism and its crisis. "Postpositivism" and the philosophy of science Analytical philosophy (Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein) was formed in the 20th century and saw the task of philosophy not in the synthesis of

GREEK CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY, HELLENISTIC

PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEW TIME AND ENLIGHTENMENT, GERMAN CLASSICAL

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

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

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

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

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

APHORISMS AND STATEMENTS OF NIKOLAY BERDYAEV

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

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

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

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

Ancient tragedy is the tragedy of fate, Christian tragedy is the tragedy of freedom.

Culture was born from cult.

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

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

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

Revolutionaries worship the future but live in the past.

There is no science, there is only science.

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

Freedom is the right to inequality.

Psychoanalysis is psychology without a soul.

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

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

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

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

Christ was not the founder of religion, but religion.

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

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

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

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

Militant atheism is a retribution for servile ideas about God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Berdyaev, Nikolai Alexandrovich(1874–1948), Russian philosopher and publicist. Born on March 6 (18), 1874 in Kyiv. He studied at the Kiev Cadet Corps. In 1894 he entered the natural faculty of St. Vladimir University (Kyiv), a year later he transferred to the law faculty. Passion for Marxism, participation in the social democratic movement led to the arrest of Berdyaev and expulsion from the university (1898). The Marxist period in his biography turned out to be relatively short. Already in work Subjectivism and individualism in social philosophy. Critical study about N.K.Mikhailovsky(1901) the recognition of Marxist historicism is adjacent to a critical assessment of "materialism". Berdyaev's participation in the collection Problems of Idealism(1902) marked the final transition of the thinker to the positions of metaphysics and religious philosophy. In 1904–1905, he edited the religious and philosophical journals Novy Put and Voprosy Zhizni. There is his rapprochement with D.S. Merezhkovsky, however, which turned out to be short-lived. In the ideas of the latter, he will eventually see the manifestation of "decadence" and "religious sectarianism." In autobiography self-knowledge, written at the end of his life, he will say about the spiritual atmosphere that reigned in the circle of the ideologists of the "Silver Age", that it was "excitement", devoid of "real joy". Berdyaev's quite consistent religious and metaphysical orientation is reflected in his works. Sub specie aeternitatis. Philosophical, social, literary experiences and New religious consciousness and public(both - 1907), as well as in a well-known article in the collection "Milestones".

In the years after the first Russian revolution, Berdyaev constantly criticized various versions of Russian radicalism, both "left" and "right" (collection Spiritual crisis of the intelligentsia, articles Black anarchy, Execution and murder and etc.). Epochal, from the point of view of defining his own philosophical position, were for Berdyaev his books: Philosophy of freedom(1911) and The meaning of creativity(1916). During the First World War, Berdyaev, not sharing the views that seemed to him to be "extremes" of patriotism (he argued about this, in particular, with V.V. Rozanov, S.N. Bulgakov, V.F. Ern), was far from and from anti-state and especially anti-Russian sentiments. The result of his reflections of these years was the book The fate of Russia(1918, republished - M., 1990). From the very beginning, his attitude towards the February Revolution was ambivalent: he considered the fall of the monarchy inevitable and necessary, but the “entry into the great unknown” of the post-revolutionary future was perceived as fraught with chaos, falling into the “abyss of violence”. The latter moods soon prevailed: the theme of the fatal danger of revolution, leading to the destruction of the organic hierarchy of social life, "the overthrow of the race of the best", the destruction of cultural tradition, comes to the fore in Berdyaev's thoughts (article Democracy and hierarchy, book Philosophy of inequality and etc.). Consistent rejection of Bolshevism did not prevent Berdyaev from being exceptionally active in the post-revolutionary years: he gave public lectures, taught at the university, was one of the leaders of the All-Russian Union of Writers, organized the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture, and conducted a seminar on the work of Dostoevsky. All this activity was interrupted in 1922, when Berdyaev was exiled abroad.

European fame was brought to the philosopher by his book New Middle Ages. Reflection on the fate of Russia and Europe(Berlin, 1924). Comprehending the tragic experience of the Russian revolutions and the tendencies of European development, Berdyaev proclaims in this work the end of the “non-religious”, “humanistic era” and the entry of mankind into the “sacred” era of the “new Middle Ages”, characterized by a religious revival and religious conflicts, a clash of Christian and anti-Christian ideas. In the ideological struggle of the 20th century, according to Berdyaev, non-religious positions no longer play a significant role. Any meaningful idea inevitably takes on a religious meaning. This also applies to communist ideology: "the communist international is already a phenomenon of the new Middle Ages." From 1925 to 1940, Berdyaev was the editor of the journal The Way, the leading publication of the religious and philosophical thought of the Russian diaspora. Prominent representatives of European religious philosophy (J. Maritain, P. Tillich and others) also published their works in The Way. In emigration, Berdyaev was an active participant in the European philosophical process, constantly maintaining relations with many Western thinkers: E. Munier, G. Marseille, C. Barth, and others. Among the most significant works of Berdyaev of the emigrant period are About the appointment of a person. The experience of paradoxical ethics (1931), About slavery and human freedom. The experience of personalistic philosophy (1939), Experience of eschatological metaphysics. Creativity and objectification(1947). Already after the death of the philosopher, his books were published: Self-knowledge. The experience of philosophical autobiography, The Kingdom of the Spirit and the Kingdom of Caesar, Existential Dialectics of the Divine and the Human and others. In 1947, Berdyaev was awarded a doctorate in theology from the University of Cambridge. Berdyaev died in Clamart near Paris on March 23, 1948.

The peculiarity of philosophy, according to Berdyaev, lies in the fact that it is not reduced to a system of concepts, it is not so much "knowledge-discourse" as "knowledge-contemplation" that speaks the language of symbols and myths. In the world of symbols of his own philosophy, the key role belonged to freedom and creativity, with which all other ideas-symbols are ultimately connected: the spirit, whose "kingdom" is radically, ontologically opposed to the "kingdom of nature"; objectification - Berdyaev's intuition of the drama of the fate of a person who is not capable (culture - "great failure") to go beyond the "kingdom of nature"; transcending - a creative breakthrough, overcoming, at least for a moment, the "slave" shackles of natural-historical existence; existential time is a spiritual and creative experience of personal and historical life, which has a metahistorical, absolute meaning and preserves it even in an eschatological perspective. At the same time, it is freedom that determines the content of the “kingdom of the spirit”, the meaning of its opposition to the “kingdom of nature”. Creativity, on the other hand, which always has freedom as its basis and goal, actually exhausts the positive aspect of human existence in Berdyaev’s metaphysics and in this respect knows no boundaries: it is possible not only in artistic and philosophical experience, but also in religious and moral experience (“paradoxical ethics"), in the spiritual experience of the individual, in his historical and social activity.

Berdyaev gave freedom an ontological status, recognizing its primacy in relation to natural and human existence and independence from divine existence. Freedom is pleasing to God, but at the same time it is not from God. There is a “primary”, “uncreated” freedom, over which God has no power, which is “rooted in Nothing from eternity”. The same freedom, violating the "divine hierarchy of being", 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". The divine-human relationship is 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.

In the inability to perceive the deepest and universal tragedy of Christianity, Berdyaev was inclined to see the fundamental shortcoming of traditional theological systems, constantly pointing out their excessive rationalism and optimism. He considered Eckhart, Baader, the late Schelling and especially Boehme to be the closest religious thinkers of the past. The main direction of European metaphysics, which goes back to Plato, is, according to Berdyaev, in line with ontological monism, affirms the fundamental primacy of being (in its various forms) and is therefore hostile to the idea of ​​human freedom and, accordingly, to personalism. “You have to choose between two philosophies – a philosophy that recognizes the primacy of being over freedom, and a philosophy that recognizes the primacy of freedom over being... Personalism must recognize the primacy of freedom over being. The philosophy of the primacy of being is the philosophy of impersonality" ( About slavery and human freedom, 1939). Berdyaev's critical attitude to modern philosophical "ontologism" and, in particular, to the fundamental ontology of M. Heidegger, was connected with this position.

Works by N.A. Berdyaev not mentioned in the article: Compositions, tt. 1–4. Paris, 1983–1991; Free Spirit Philosophy. M., 1994; Truth and Revelation. St. Petersburg, 1996 .