Abstract
In Nikolai Berdyaev’s oeuvre two books, The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916) and The New Middle Ages (1924), frame the experience of the Russian Revolution. Between these two books, both marking watershed moments in the philosopher’s own development, Berdyaev experienced the First World War, the February and October revolutions of 1917, the Civil War, and his own forced exile from Russia (1922). The turbulent historical background makes it evident that Berdyaev’s philosophy of creativity presented in these books should be understood as a rebellion against the modern worldview. It needs to be viewed in the context of the main currents of philosophical thought of the first decades of the twentieth century. The chief factor in the evolution of philosophical ideas in that period was yet another collision between modern immanentist infinitism and traditional mysticism. Berdyaev advances his doctrine of creativity on behalf of the latter and in the process creates yet another version of modern mystical philosophy. His revolt against the modern outlook pushes him to the extremes of the opposite way of thinking: he openly adopts a mythical-dogmatic method for constructing the key tenets of his position. However, he cannot simply reproduce a medieval worldview and his version of its revival becomes suffused with modern ideas, among which the idea of progress and the Romantic aesthetic sensibility loom large. As a criticism of Berdyaev’s doctrine, one can remark that mythical-dogmatic antinomism cannot serve as an adequate response to modern progressivism and immanentist infinitism, the two basic characteristics of the modern outlook that underlay, among other things, both the war and the revolution. To the extent that it is a reversal of modern abstractions, such antinomism falls victim to the same pitfalls as its medieval predecessor, and is equally haunted by abstractions. Berdyaev’s approach lacked the crucial dialectical component that alone could help him articulate a genuine alternative to the modern outlook. In this sense Berdyaev’s philosophical approach suffers from a shortcoming that is typical of much Russian religious-philosophical thought of his time. The chapter will close with a sketch of solutions to the key problems that prevented Berdyaev from articulating a philosophically compelling doctrine of creativity that is capable of accommodating the modern experience in a genuinely dialectical fashion. These solutions cast a particularly vivid life on what is of lasting value in Berdyaev’s philosophy of creativity and what stems in it from erroneous premises.
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Notes
- 1.
Smysl tvorchestva. Opyt opravdaniia cheloveka [The Meaning of Creativity: An Essay on Anthropodicy]. The Russian tvorchestvo can mean “creativity,” “creative work,” “oeuvre,” or “creation” (Russian-English Dictionary). For the early history of this term in Russian thought see Mjør (2018). Quotations in this chapter are from the 1994 two-volume Russian edition (further referred to as FTK, followed by the Roman volume number and Arabic page number) and from the English translation by Donald A. Lowrie (referred to as MCA). Translation from Russian sources is mine unless indicated otherwise.
- 2.
According to L. V. Poliakov, the author of the introduction to the 1989 Pravda edition of the Smysl tvorchestva, Berdyaev developed the design and wrote the first pages of Smysl tvorchestva in Italy in the winter of 1912–1913 and finished the manuscript by February 1914 (“Filosofiia tvorchestva Nikolaia Berdiaeva [Nikolai Berdyaev’s Philosophy of Creativity],” in Berdiaev 1989, 4). Lowrie likewise mentions 1914 as the year of the completion of the manuscript (MCA 7). However, in the preface, dated March 1926, to the 1927 German edition Berdyaev states that the book was written “fifteen years ago” (FTK 1: 533 and MCA 9).
- 3.
Berdyaev has long had the reputation of a rebel. Lowrie titled his 1960 biography of Berdyaev Rebellious Prophet, and Part One of Matthew Spinka’s Nicolas Berdyaev: Captive of Freedom is titled “The World Berdyaev Revolted Against.”
- 4.
Svet nevechernii [The Light That Does Not Fade], 279; quoted from Berdyaev 1989, 590 (editor’s commentary).
- 5.
Zenkovsky, “Problema tvorchestva [The Problem of Creativity],” in Ermichev (1994, 304). See also his verdict against The Meaning of the Creative Act as “a flaming apotheosis and an apology for genius” in which Berdyaev’s “sincere and profound moral passion degenerated into an ‘ethics of creativity’, indifferent to reality” (Zenkovsky 2003, 2: 778, 780).
- 6.
R. Harré, “Laplace, Pierre Simon de,” in Borchert (2006).
- 7.
By pre-modern subjects, I refer to the dominant conceptions of the human person in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. By non-modern subjects I mean the types of personhood in cultures that existed, both in the West and in other parts of the world, chronologically alongside modernity but were typologically distinct.
- 8.
“Intuitive-aesthetic insight—this is the foundation of our national philosophizing, and Berdyaev was well aware of it from his own personal experience” (RTA 632). Igor Evlampiev similarly finds that the primacy of intuitive-mystical insight is “the most typical feature of almost all theories in the Russian philosophy of the early twentieth century” (Evlampiev 2017, 282).
- 9.
Berdyaev’s notes are not included in MCA.
- 10.
FTK 1: 68; MCA 46. Lowrie renders the Russian plokhaia, “bad,” as “evil” in his translation. “Spurious” (along with “bad” sometimes) has become the accepted translation of Hegel’sschlechte Unendlichkeit (cf. Hegel 1991, 149). In Russian since Berdyaev’s time, Hegel’s phrase has come to be rendered as durnaia beskonechnost’, a wording Berdyaev himself occasionally used, too (cf. “Beskonechnoe [the Infinite],” Filosofskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ [Philosophical Encyclopaedic Dictionary]; FTK 1: 94).
- 11.
Berdyaev’s younger contemporary, Aleksei Losev, took up and enlarged this theme in his Dialectics of Myth (1930), where he devoted many pages to the pre-modern subject’s reaction to the new cosmology.
- 12.
In a note, Berdyaev quotes Edmund Husserl’s seminal 1911 essay “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” where the founder of the phenomenological school asserts that, once science has pronounced its verdict, “wisdom must learn from it” (FTK 1: 312).
- 13.
- 14.
Aristotle, De Anima, Bk. III, ch. 10; Aristotle (1941, 598). The language that follows this passage somewhat muddies the waters by ambiguating between the mind and appetite as sources of motion (433a22–433b5). But the inextricable conjunction between the two is not affected by it.
- 15.
The role of the object of appetite in De Anima is clearly analogous to the role of the final cause in the Metaphysicswhich sets everything in motion by being loved (Bk. XII, ch. 7, 1072b; Aristotle 1941, 879).
- 16.
This was rather sharply noted by Vasily Rozanov (Ermichev 1994, 262).
- 17.
Solovyov’s most important essays on aesthetics were “Beauty in Nature” (1889), “The Universal Meaning of Art” (1890), and “A First Step toward a Positive Aesthetic” (Solovyov 2003, 29–82, 135–144).
- 18.
The sense of liturgy as fully realized artistic perfection is evident in Florensky’s essay on “The Church Ritual as the Synthesis of the Arts” (Beyond Vision, 105–110). For an excellent summary of Florensky’s views see the chapter on Florensky and especially the section on “Ikona kak vershina iskusstva [The Icon as the Pinnacle of Art],” in Bychkov’s RTA, 242–262.
- 19.
Zenkovsky, “Problema tvorchestva,” in Ermichev (1994, 293–294).
- 20.
Ivanov, “Staraia ili novaia vera?,” in Ivanov (1994, 354). In his 1918 article “Krizis iskusstva,” Berdyaev responded to Ivanov’s criticism, saying, “New art will no longer create in the form of images made of physical flesh, but those of another, finer flesh; it will pass from material bodies to psychic [dushevnym] ones” (FTK 1: 413–414).
- 21.
While criticizing rationalism in The Meaning of the Creative Act, Berdyaev remarks that “we need to revise our attitude toward Hegel.” The remark was made apropos of Hegel’s tenet that categories of thought are not mere tools used by reason, but stages in a complex process which, taken in its entirety, isreason (FTK 1: 315–316n15). Apparently, Berdyaev never got around to such a revision or at least, if he did, it did not change his mind regarding the limits of rational cognition. He remained convinced that in Kant’s philosophy, “reason passed judgment upon reason and recognized its limits” (Berdyaev 1953, 7).
- 22.
Losev’s coinage, a centrepiece among his categories, edinorazdel’noe (literally “unified-divided”) comes close to “universal” (see Losev2014; Marchenkov 2013, especially 83n29). My translation builds on the Latin articulāre, “to divide into distinct parts” (see etymology for “articulate” in the Oxford English Dictionary).
- 23.
This is the theme of Giorgio Agamben’s short but pregnant book Profanations (Agamben 2007; see especially the chapter on “Parody,” 37–51).
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Marchenkov, V.L. (2021). Nikolai Berdyaev’s Philosophy of Creativity as a Revolt Against the Modern Worldview. In: Bykova, M.F., Forster, M.N., Steiner, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62982-3_11
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