Abstract

In Nikolai Berdyaev’s oeuvre two books, The Meaning of the Creative Act and The New Middle Ages, frame the experience of the Russian Revolution. Between these two books, both marking watershed moments in the philosopher’s own development, Berdyaev experienced the First World War, the February and October revolutions of 1917, the Civil War, and his own forced exile from Russia. The turbulent historical background makes it evident that Berdyaev’s philosophy of creativity presented in these books should be understood as a rebellion against the modern worldview. It needs to be viewed in the context of the main currents of philosophical thought of the first decades of the twentieth century. The chief factor in the evolution of philosophical ideas in that period was yet another collision between modern immanentist infinitism and traditional mysticism. Berdyaev advances his doctrine of creativity on behalf of the latter and in the process creates yet another version of modern mystical philosophy. His revolt against the modern outlook pushes him to the extremes of the opposite way of thinking: he openly adopts a mythical-dogmatic method for constructing the key tenets of his position. However, he cannot simply reproduce a medieval worldview and his version of its revival becomes suffused with modern ideas, among which the idea of progress and the Romantic aesthetic sensibility loom large. As a criticism of Berdyaev’s doctrine, one can remark that mythical-dogmatic antinomism cannot serve as an adequate response to modern progressivism and immanentist infinitism, the two basic characteristics of the modern outlook that underlay, among other things, both the war and the revolution. To the extent that it is a reversal of modern abstractions, such antinomism falls victim to the same pitfalls as its medieval predecessor, and is equally haunted by abstractions. Berdyaev’s approach lacked the crucial dialectical component that alone could help him articulate a genuine alternative to the modern outlook. In this sense Berdyaev’s philosophical approach suffers from a shortcoming that is typical of much Russian religious-philosophical thought of his time. The chapter will close with a sketch of solutions to the key problems that prevented Berdyaev from articulating a philosophically compelling doctrine of creativity that is capable of accommodating the modern experience in a genuinely dialectical fashion. These solutions cast a particularly vivid life on what is of lasting value in Berdyaev’s philosophy of creativity and what stems in it from erroneous premises.