AbstractsPhilosophy & Theology

Berdyaev lived his turbulent life intensely involved in his immediate political and intellectual environment. Many of his writings are "tracts for the times," addressed to the problems of this environment, often hastily written with great emotion. Even in the more systematic works such as The Destiny of Man, Slavery and Freedom, and The Beginning and the End, there is an element of urgency and directness often not present in philosophical writings. Berdyaev is a personalistic existentialist, and calls his philosophy subjective, spiritually based, concerned with freedom, dualistically pluralist, creatively dynamic and eschatological. It is not an objective, naturalistic, deterministic,monistic, statically ontological or evolutionary philosophy. As an existentialist, he distinguishes between factual scientific truths and Truth, the dynamic principle which is actual only as it is perceived by the creative subject. Though he is concerned that man seek and recognize "universal Truth," he interprets Truth as having significance only as it is known, i.e. "subjectively." "Knowing" for Berdyaev is not a mere reflection of given data; it depends on man's creative application of his faculties to each situation. Inasmuch as he has an "ontology," his philosophy is based on Freedom rather than on Being. As a personalist, he believes that man, the "meeting point of the natural and spiritual," is a primary reality and value. Created in the image of God, man participates in Freedom as does God. In his freedom, man is to create spiritual values and to make a creative response to God. Man best works in his freedom not as an isolated individual, but in sobornost (altogetherness) or community, i.e., in relationship to God or in fellowship with other men. Berdyaev's primary concern, social and philosophical, is freedom. Freedom for him is not the abstract freedom from all restraints, nor is it a mere psychological state; it is an attribute, goal, and responsibility of man as personality. Though he recognizes the existence and importance of freedom in the traditional senses of freedom given man by God and rational freedom within limits (e.g. as defined by Kant and Hagel), Berdyaev emphasizes freedom as uncreated, non-rational, prior to being, and containing all conceivable possibilities of both good and evil. In this concept he acknowledges his indebtedness to Boehme's concept of the Ungrund. Both God and man must contend with this uncreated freedom, working with it where they can, and accepting its limitations where they must. Berdyaev does not expound his social philosophy systematically, but references to it and elements of it permeate nearly all of his writings, inasmuch as they reflect his concerned response to his social and political surroundings. His social philosophy is derived from his existentialism, personalism, and creative ethics. He treats his ethical system largely in one book, The Destiny of Man. In this outline of his ethics, he goes beyond the ethics of law and ethics of redemption to the ethics of…