WAS N. A. BERDIAEV A “RUSSIAN HEGEL”?

Annotation

The article was prompted by an obituary of N. A. Berdyaev in The Times. The working hypothesis is that Berdyaev was more of a “Russian Hegel” than not. However, he was also an alternative Hegel. The article compares the system- forming intuitions of Berdyaev’s and Hegel’s concepts: Spirit, Development, and Creation. Special attention is given to dialectics, both as a worldview intuition and as a method. The understanding of spirit in Berdyaev and Hegel is compared in the context of the fact that both philosophers placed the concept of spirit at the center of their doctrines. The transition from development to creativity as paradigms for the formation of worldviews is traced in the movement of philosophical and theological thought towards emergent evolutionism that was characteristic of the early 20th century. Berdyaev’s and Hegel’s concepts are also compared in terms of the structuring components of metaphysics: ontology, epistemology, and axiology. The structural view complements and specifies the initial understanding of basic intuitions. The comparison ends with an overview of Berdyaev’s and Hegel’s historiosophical predictions: although Hegel did not make specific historical predictions, and his philosophy was generally focused on the past, the intuition of the direction of world history “from East to West” was ontologically “longer” than Berdyaev’s mystical and esoteric predictions. However, Berdyaev’s prediction about the “internal overcoming of Bolshevism”, which he saw as a spiritual illness of the Russian people, came true, leading to the collapse of the USSR. The depopularization of both Hegel and Berdyaev among the “philosophizing masses” is not due to the “progress of reason”, but rather to the postmodern degradation of culture.

Keywords

Spirit, development, creativity, freedom, culture and history, meaning and the end of history, Russia and Europe

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The study was supported by the Russian Science Foundation № 24–28–00748, https://rscf.ru/en/
project/24–28–00748/; Russian Christian Academy for Humanities named after Fyodor Dostoevsky