Philosophy of Tragedy by N.A. Berdyaev

Abstract

The choice of the subject in the article on the philosophy of Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (1874–1948), especially on his “philosophy of tragedy”, must inevitably address a number of related topics, such as philosophical and religious revival in Russia, freedom of will, personality, self-transcendence, coercion and necessity; philosophical currents: Slavophilism, Westernism; certain names: A.S. Khomyakov, V.S. Solovyev, F.M. Dostoevsky; national character, fate of Russia; certain categories: spirituality, tri-unity as the beginning, integrity, principle of antinomic monodualism, fragmentation of consciousness, relativism, and so on.
Many terms and concepts here contain not just ambiguity, contradictions, difficulties, but problems (which are usually understood only as “themes”), and even not just tasks that need to be solved, but real problems that do not have solutions (due to the immaturity of the current philosophy, underdevelopment of the conditions of our era), and are fundamentally insoluble, requiring reflection and seeming even pointless for rational thinking. Such insoluble problems include tragedy, antinomic monodualism, and theodicy.
A person who had not overcome himself did not leave his past behind, that is, continues to live in the past. Only when we detach ourselves from our past, we turn it into something already experienced, which continues to lie at the base of the present, which we do not throw away, but overcome. In the study devoted to A.S. Khomyakov, the most significant of the early Slavophiles, Berdyaev stated that in the immediate circle of them they “did not yet recognize” the “real tragedy” and Khomiakov himself had “insensitivity” to it.
Therefore, the understandable side of this feeling Berdyaev found philosophically understood and overcome in the works of Dostoevsky and V. Solovyov. He also saw an ascent to their own intimate idea of “antinomical monodualism”, developed in his time by representatives of the philosophical and religious direction, who persistently strove to rise above the tragedy in world-feeling and to overcome the aforementioned life affliction in the meantime so escalated in the Russian world-feeling that Berdyaev declared it to be a fundamental feature of all philosophy and even of all human history.

The analysis of the present, past and future allowed Berdyaev to bring together the categories of historical time, to connect them with eternity and to develop a view on the inseparable integrity of being. You cannot return to the too temporary and perishable in the past, but it is possible and necessary to revive what in the past, now forgotten, was eternal. The thought of inner rebirth, of the overcoming and transformation of something and of oneself plays an important role in the dynamic worldview of Berdyaev. In fact, the problem is not to stand back from suffering or dutifully endure misfortunes and reconcile with the terrors of earthly existence, but to overcome them in oneself and to rise above them inwardly.