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Nicolas Berdyaev Biography

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“Germany at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries offers an example of the high efflorescence of culture; it then became famed as the land of ‘poets and philosophers’. Few epochs have displayed as much will to genius. In the course of several decades the world was enriched by such geniuses as Lessing and Herder, Goethe and Schiller, Kant and Fichte, Hegel and Schelling, Schleiermacher and Schopenhauer, Novalis and all the romantics. Succeeding ages will look back with envy at this great age. Windelband, the philosopher of its decline, remembers this time of spiritual integrity and spiritual genius as a lost paradise. But had the age of Goethe and Kant, Hegel and Novalis, attained to the authentic higher ‘life’? All evidence tends to show that everyday life in Germany was then poor, middle class and oppressed. Germany was weak, wretched and split up into minute states; the power of ‘life’ had nowhere been realized; and the cultural efflorescence affected only the highest strata of the people whose general condition was lamentable enough.”

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Book:The Meaning of History
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“A little consideration will reveal the absurdity of supposing that the present generation (if one can call ‘present’ that which is in the act of disappearing) or the generations of fifty or a hundred years hence can make a more real and valuable contribution to the human consciousness than those which existed fifty, a hundred or five thousand years ago. Our habit of breaking up time into the past, present and future does not entitle us to endow the last with more reality than the first. From the standpoint of the present, the future is no richer in reality than the past, and our efforts should be with reference, not to the future, but to that eternal present of which both future and past are one. The past has no existence except in our memory; the future is not yet, nor is it certain that it will be.”

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Book:The Meaning of History
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“Thus the Utopia of terrestrial paradise implies an absolute humanity within the transitory relations of terrestrial history. But there is no room in terrestrial reality, by its nature strictly confined and limited, for an absolute life. Yet the Utopia theory asserts that what has been impossible until now will not be so always, that an absolute and conclusive state will sooner or later crown historical relations. It affirms, not a transition from limited historical relations to some other plane of being, to some fourth dimension commensurable with the closed three dimensional world, but a fourth dimension of absolute life within the very framework of three-dimensional space. In this lie its fundamental metaphysical antithesis and essential instability, instead of seeing absolute life as the transition from terrestrial to, celestial history, it presupposes an ultimate solution of human destiny within the framework of terrestrial relations, a final integration of the three-dimensional world. It desires to humanize that absolute perfection and beatitude which can only be attained in the celestial reality and only contained in the fourth dimension.”

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Book:The Meaning of History
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