Background
Berdyaev, etc. was born on March 6, 1874 in Kiev.
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Etc. Berdyaev
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Education
Military Corps of Cadets, then studied Law at the University of Kiev without graduating: studied under Windelband at University of Heidelberg in 1903.
Career
1920-1922, Professor of Philosophy, University of Moscow.
Views
was consequently expelled from the University of Kiev and exiled to Vologda. In company with other ‘legal’ Marxists of the 1890s, notably Bulgakov, S. L. Frank and Struve, he underwent an ideological and metaphysical crisis around the turn of the century. He embraced idealism and renounced socialism, at least in its existing secular forms; this change of mind and heart found expression in contributions to the collections Problemy idealizma [Problems of Idealism] (1902) and Vekhi [Landmarks] (1909). He was at this time a leading representative, along with D. S. Merezhkovsky (1865-1941), of the ‘ new religious consciousness'. Following the October Revolution, he was able to organize a ‘Free Academy of Spiritual Culture’ and teach at Moscow University; but he was expelled from Russia in 1922 along with many other non-Marxist scholars. He established a Religio-Philosophic Academy in Berlin, and in 1924 moved it to Paris, where he also founded the journal Put' [The Way] and directed the YMCA Press. Despite its variety and approach, there are certain philosophical constants in Berdyaev’s mature work, the most fundamental of which is a Kantian distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal. Unlike Kant, Berdyaev held that noumenal reality, or the realm of the spirit, was knowable, through mystical experience, albeit inexpressible in the categories of human reason. This basic distinction between an evil, fallen world of nature and human society and a spiritual world of eternal values informs all Berdyaev’s forays into concrete issues. It underpins his elevation of ethical creativity over passive obedience to society's moral laws as it also underpins his rejection of collectivist socialism, with its preoccupation with economics and disregard for individual freedom, in favour of a ‘personalist’ socialism or ‘aristocracy of freedom’ in which each individual ego is able to transcend society and achieve personality. It is only by reference to the meta-historical realm of spiritual values that Berdyaev can assign any meaning to human history; that is to say, the realization outside historical time of the kingdom of God. One of the labels Berdyaev attached to his metaphysics was ‘personalist’. What existed was spirit, the fallen, phenomenal world being an enslaving ‘objectification’ of spirit; but he rejected absolute idealism, regarding the highest form of reality as universal, self-creating personality. The assertion of freedom was the central concern of his writings. Freedom is given logical priority over existence, and, according to Berdyaev, cannot be God’s creation since it gives rise to evil; it is uncreated, and arises from the Ungrund, a mysterious potentiality for existence which is the necessary condition of God’s creative act, the Nothing from which the world was created. In his later writings Berdyaev applied the terms ‘existential’ and ‘existentialist’ to his philosophy, although he regarded as pessimistic and degrading the accounts of human freedom in the works of Heidegger and Sartre. Berdyaev has been the most widely read of the Russian religious philosophers, partly because of the intensely personal nature of his writings, and also because of their broad religious, ethical, social, political and historiosophical canvas. His unsystematic and inspirational approach and his aphoristic and avowedly paradoxical style have engendered disagreement about his philosophical credentials.
