Distracted by Nikolai Berdyaev

 I get a newsletter from Public Orthodoxy. This week, the newsletter led me to Fadi Abu-Deeb's Liberating Berdyaev’s New Middle Ages from Duginism, and that led me to Abu-Deeb's Was Berdyaev’s Philosophical Humanism Inhumane?. These essays made me curious.

I know of Alexander Dugin and find him reprehensible.

Berdyaev seemed like a familiar name, but I knew not why or why I should care. Reading the original essays left me curious.

I decided to unleash Google. Here are the results.

Nicolas Berdyaev: An Intellectual Journey; a thesis from Marianna Westbrook Byman

There was one great passion in Berdyaev's life. He called it the “the mystery” of individual freedom. Even though Berdyaev said that his thoughts had no consistency, there was a link holding all his ideas together. The link was the theory of “opposition and resistance.” This theory holds that freedom creates, allows, even demands, a struggle between opposing forces. Freedom is a state of resistance to any form of determinism or autocracy. Thus throughout his life Berdyaev rebelled against all forms of authoritarianism, universal systems or utopian ideologies either from the “right” or the “left.” He opposed any authority, including nationalistic movements, which claimed primacy over the freedom of the spirit.

Michael Martin posted Nikolai Berdyaev on Freedom with this and more:

Considering such a biography, it should not come as a surprise that freedom plays such a central role in this thought—but there is more to it than that. Berdyaev, much like Rudolf Steiner, sees the freedom of the human individual as not a mere political construct, but as a spiritual principle tincturing all of Creation, and the human person in particular. In what follows, I offer just a taste of Berdyaev’s thoughts on freedom from a variety of his written work. He is certainly a philosopher for our time; indeed, for all time.

“The freedom implicit in the exercise of knowledge receives its illumination from the Logos. But it is also related to Eros. To pursue knowledge without any consciousness of love, merely to seek power, is a form of demonism. It may therefore be affirmed that knowledge is essentially cosmogonic. It should consider reality carefully and examine it conscientiously; for moral pathos is the true inspiration and urge for our quest for truth. The subjective freedom thus generated by the Logos transfigures reality. The nature of knowledge is conjugal; it is both male and female, it is the conjunction of these two principles, the impregnation of the feminine element by virile meaning.” ~ Solitude and Society

“The theological doctrine that God created man for His own glory and praise is degrading to man, and degrading to God also…. God as personality does not desire a man over whom He can rule, and who ought to praise Him, but man as personality who answers His call and with whom communion of love is possible.” ~ Slavery and Freedom

Although this quote seems even more attuned to this age of social media and siloed knowledge:

"Man can be a slave to public opinion, a slave to custom, to morals, to judgments and opinions which are imposed by society. It is difficult to overestimate the violence which is perpetrated by the press in our time. The average man of our day holds the opinions and forms the judgments of the newspaper which he reads every morning: it exercises psychological compulsion upon him. And in view of the falsehood and venality of the press, the effects are very terrible as seen in the enslavement of man and his deprivation of freedom of conscience and judgment.” ~ Slavery and Freedom 

The Hoover Digest has The “Russian Idea” of Nikolai Berdyaev by David Satter.

Berdyaev’s writings illustrate the problem of Russian messianism, which is central to Russian political culture. The contradictions that ensnared Berdyaev confound many Russians today who, despite all that has happened, still find it hard it renounce communism completely owing to their belief in Russia’s “special role.”

Okay, that may explain why I have little about him. 

Then there is a Wikipedia page that has links to his works online.

Consider me even more curious. I am thinking of him compared to Nietzsche.

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