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Nikolai Berdyaev

Nikolai Berdyaev Books

Philosopher

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“It is a prejudice to believe that knowledge is always rational, that there is no such thing as irrational knowledge. Actually, we apprehend a great deal more through feeling than by intellection; and it is a matter of some note, that not only love and sympathy, but also hostility and hate, may help to further our knowledge. The heart is the centre of the entire man. That is above all a Christian truth. The whole appreciative aspect of knowledge is affective, for it expresses the ‘reasons of the heart’.”

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Book:العزلة والمجتمع
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“Reason is independent of all external authority, is outwardly autonomous; it is not, however, inwardly independent in relation to the whole life of the philosopher engaged in the pursuit of knowledge. It will not allow itself to be stripped of its feelings and volition, of its loves and hates, of its criteria of value. It discovers its ontological foundation in the depths of its own Being, in the intimacy of its own existence; it adapts itself to the philosopher’s belief or scepticism; it varies with his belief as the consciousness expands or contracts. But revelation transforms it.”

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Book:العزلة والمجتمع
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“No man can live without any basis of philosophy, however primitive, naive, childish or unconscious. Every man thinks and speaks, makes use of notions, categories, symbols, myths, and gives vent to appreciations. There is always a childish philosophy at the foundation of a childish faith. Thus the uncritical acceptance of Biblical science, that of primitive mankind, involves the use of certain categories of thought such as ‘Creation’, for example, envisaged as a moment in time.”

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Book:العزلة والمجتمع
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“Technology is the supreme result of knowledge thus objectified. At the same time, the fact of objectification contradicts the idea that the subject is passively penetrated by the object. Therefore the objectified world cannot be, as is often affirmed, a purely objective world. It is a real world, one possessed of a certain degree of reality, of a certain state of Being; but, above all, it is a world which manifests the activity of the creative subject and the reciprocal action of the knowing subject and the object known. Secondly, the subject can orientate himself by means of Existential philosophy, which dispenses with objectification: the human subject does not apprehend the object, but the revelation of human existence and, through it, that of the divine world. Thus in the fight of Existential philosophy, knowledge is both active and creative, though in a somewhat different way. It can illuminate the objective world wherein meaning is revealed, the meaning of human existence and of the universe as part of the Divine Being. But all revelation of meaning is the result of spiritual activity, of the integral rather than the partial reason. To apprehend existence is to illuminate it and to make it significant, to illuminate Being, and consequently to regenerate and to enrich it with hitherto undiscerned elements.”

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Book:العزلة والمجتمع
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“In order to see the world in a true light and everything in its proper shape, in order to contemplate the wide horizon, we must climb out of the pit of self-centeredness and rise to a height. We must see the center of being not in ourselves but in God, where it truly is, and then everything will fall into the right place. Humility in its ontological meaning is the heroic conquest of selfhood and ascent to the heights of theocentrism.”

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Author:Nikolai Berdyaev
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“There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism. [...] The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy.”

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Author:Nikolai Berdyaev
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“The uniting of Orthodoxy with state absolutism came about on the soil of a non-belief in the Divineness of the earth, in the earthly future of mankind; Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world. Orthodoxy does not believe in the religious ordering of human life upon the earth, and it compensates for its own hopeless pessimism by a call for the forceful ordering of it by state authority.”

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Author:Nikolai Berdyaev
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“Ethics occupies a central place in philosophy because it is concerned with sin, with the origin of good and evil and with moral valuations. And since these problems have a universal significance, the sphere of ethics is wider than is generally supposed. It deals with meaning and value and its province is the world in which the distinction between good and evil is drawn, evaluations are made and meaning is sought.”

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Author:Nikolai Berdyaev
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“There is no objective reality. But there is only an illusion of consciousness, there is only an objectivication of reality, which was created by the spirit. The origin of life is creativity, freedom; and the personality, subject, and spirit are the representatives of that origin, but not the nature, not the object.”

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Author:Nikolai Berdyaev
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“There is something servile in the interpretation of sin as crime which infringes the will of God and calls for legal proceedings on the part of God. Sin is dividedness, a state of deficiency, incompleteness, dissociation, enslavement, hatred, but it is not disobedience and not formal violation of the will of God.”

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Author:Nikolai Berdyaev
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“The essential in artistic creativity is victory over the burden of necessity. In art, man lives outside himself, outside his burdens, the burdens of life. Every creative artistic act is a partial transfiguration of life. In the artistic concept man breaks out through the heaviness of the world. In the creative-artistic attitude towards this world we catch a glimpse of another world.”

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Author:Nikolai Berdyaev
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