Original text/ Dong Yuanben (Suqian, Jiangsu)
(Portrait of the soviet philosopher Berdyaev)
Berdyaev (1871-1948) was an internationally renowned philosopher of the former Soviet Union who has been dubbed by the Western world as "one of the greatest philosophers and prophets of our time." Berdyaev's popularity with Westerners is inseparable from his academic achievements, but it cannot be separated from his origins, because to improve the value of Berdyaev's ideas is to degrade the mainstream thinking of the Soviet Union at that time.
Although Berdyaev's thoughts are complex, the core problem is to think about people, to think about why people fall, and how to save fallen people. He believes that the fundamental reason for man's depravity is that all the material components of man are tied to the materiality of nature, so to save the fallen man, he must strip the material component of man from the materiality of nature and make man above nature. Such a person is a free person.
Berdyaev's doctrine of freedom, in which subjective freedom takes precedence over the order of objects, has two major wounds.
First, since Berdyaev spoke of freedom out of society and ignored the universal phenomenon of the collision of freedom between different people, such freedom is necessarily unworkable and therefore utopian. Marxism is dismissive of this view of freedom.
Second, although Berdyaev talks about freedom in connection with nature, he believes that freedom is a detachment from nature, and therefore essentially talks about freedom from nature. Talking about freedom apart from nature is bound to cause people to disregard the laws of nature for the sake of so-called freedom, and will inevitably destroy the natural world for the sake of so-called freedom. Destroying the natural world is equivalent to destroying the material sources on which human beings depend. This philosophical thinking has found a basis for the crazy destruction of the natural world by human beings in the pursuit of wealth in the past two centuries, but it is incompatible with the contemporary concept of harmony between man and nature.
In the final analysis, the freedom that Berdyaev speaks of is absolute freedom. This absolute freedom not only uses the destruction of the freedom of others as a means, that is, the promotion of aggression; it also uses the destruction of the natural world as a means, that is, the frenzied exploitation of nature. This view of freedom was more common in the West in the last century and beyond. Because Berdyaev's philosophical ideas deviated from the mainstream ideas of the Soviet Union at that time, he was expelled from the Soviet government in 1922, and he has lived in Europe ever since, and his great academic prestige in Europe is probably related to the soviet union's reluctance to see him.
(Editors: Dong Yao, Shuang Chan)
【About author】Dong Yuanben, born in 1971 in Jiangsu, is a traditional culture scholar and a well-known tutor in Chinese language and literature for higher education self-study examinations. At the beginning of the century, he participated in the writing of some manuscripts of the "Jiangsu Education Yearbook", but studied classical literature, and also involved in classical philosophy and history.