Understanding Meaning: Our Key to Living Free
Notes from Berdyaev’s “The Beginning and the End”
OK, I participate in a Life Philosophy group, as I’ve mentioned before, that’s been meeting at a local retired professor’s house for the past 30+ years. We get together weekly and compare notes on our lives, especially as they relate to the book we’re reading at the time. It’s a bit of a reading group. But we try to take reading in a different sense. More like “my read on this is such’n’such,” or “I read what happened as meaning we need to get out of here, fast!” We try to read the books for ourselves. And try to find things in them that we can use in our lives. We do it as a team effort. We don’t really care what the author means or what other people think. We don’t read intros.
I publish a bunch of books that our host has written over the years. And I’ve explained in a few other places about this reading effort. We call it the Fifth Way. It’s also called the MIEM, Michigan Institute of Existential Metapsychology, somewhat tongue in cheek.
So we read a couple intense works in philosophy, religion or literature every year. I suppose I’m learning things from these books that I should briefly summarize and share with others who might in turn be inspired in some way, maybe even to check out this stuff—probably one has to “be there” to get it, but who knows. Often the books are hard enough that it really does help a ton to read them with others, and to read them steadily but not too much at a time, to avoid burnout. But really someone ought to be able to read them on their own. And hopefully “read” them to help their own lives.
B’s book was the subject of the 15th Annual MIEM Summer Seminar at Side Lake, Minnesota, where our host Ron Puhek has a tiny cottage. We spent our days reading, eating, drinking wine, discussing, reflecting, and enjoying nature—trying to figure out how to use this book in our lives. It’s an amazing book and we got a LOT out of it. We call our get-away a “get to.” It’s not a “retreat” by any means. We also tongue-in-cheek started calling it Soul Camp (Sole Kamp?) for the Life Support System.
So here’s an overview of B’s book. It’s not a review but a jotting-down of ideas in it that I considered to be highlights and ones which I can hopefully somehow use in my life. I have no idea if this approach is helpful at all to others. The notes are consecutive from our printout. Noted page #’s only matter to me—sorry! The book is also out of print : ) but it’s available free online: www.krotov.info/engl/berdyaev/00_berd.html.
I’m also not sure yet how to apply these ideas to my life. They just stood out as juicy notions that might be helpful.
B is a Russian who wrote this after WW2, I think. He was disillusioned with the dead-end that western civ had found itself in on all sides and wanted to see if he could find a better way to go. B was a student of Soloviev, who we read last summer. (S’s work showed us the necessary development in history of social and religious truth, step by step, with no next step disproving a prior step but building on it, with the truth getting bigger and fuller and more inclusive, to keep reaching to a maximum of inclusion and richness, lacking nothing. He also showed how the idea of the Trinity can be seen not just as a doctrine in someone’s religion—which might not be our own—but as a way to show how an integrated experience of reality functions. All we see and do can be seen as having a “father” source, a “son” expression in the world that has a meaningful truth to it—the “Logos”—and a “spirit” motivation or energy. The helpful thing is in being brave enough to see what is functioning as what and to try to avoid panic at our experience of these aspects and to try to not get things mixed up. A big error of modernism is its avoidance of meaning and its refusal to see meaning as comprising truth and determiner of healthy function. We moderns often cover up what things really mean to us, but when we do this we mess with the fabric of reality. Also, we often don’t care about the roots of what we do or why we’re energized to do things in the first place. We don’t see the Trinity of our lives and we have a messed-up functioning of same.)
Now, B’s book is a hard one to read but it has amazing ideas that can help us live better. Like many great writings, it’s best if read several times. Or at least twice. The first time one can just try to get through it. Well, the middle quarter is actually the main snag. The first quarter isn’t so easy either. The second half comes together in a big way and flows much easier and has such amazing ideas. It also unlocks the first half, in a rearguard way. One sees how it all makes sense in light of the second half. So reading it all a second time is much easier and more directly understandable.
The mid portion of the book is complicated largely because B. was a professional philosopher. I’m not sure if he was an academic. But the difficult second quarter was written to situate his ideas in relation to a dozen other philosophers who’ve shaped our society’s way of seeing. Since these are the main players in philosophy it’s good to have this insight into their work even if it makes the reading tough. These are mainly: Kant, Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Kierkegaard, Schopenauer, Dostoyevsky, Rousseau.
These are just my quick notes of ideas in the book that caught my eye. Of course they’ll be out of context. Who knows if they’ll have any spark for anyone. They’re not intended to present B’s ideas or to represent them exactly. They’re how I read and saw them. I just use them as touchstones.
NOTES
*Supercool lead-off quote, p. 36:
“The object world is manifold, but personality is lost in it. It is infinite, but eternity is lost to sight in it; in it the commonplace is triumphant, but there is no unity; it is rationalized, but it is full of evil irrationality, which is the antithesis of meaning. It is such a world as that in which we live, and we are aware of it. But it is not a world which has perished beyond hope. The sun shines on it, albeit from without and not from within as it ought to have been. There is vigorous and growing life in it, although death brings that to an end. Flowers bloom in it, although they fade. The creative acts of man break through into it. The human face is there, and at times with a wonderful expression in the eyes.”
*Passion, feeling, emotion, intuition and reason create our world. Appearances come from us and are projected onto the world (and are due to our alienation). We do not see things as they are in themselves.
*Noumenon: things-in-themselves. Phenomenon: the appearance of things. Subjective: my experience. Objectification: the process of me projecting my ideas onto things so that I can treat them as objects and use them in ways that I’m capable of imagining.
*Knowledge has an emotional, volitional aspect. It’s not even mostly intellectual. It’s conditioned and relative.
*Kant’s main idea is that we can only know appearances, not things-in-themselves. However, we can have a metaphysical sense of things-in-themselves. There are just no facts about them. A big snag is that appearances aren’t objective reality. So we can’t know reality. Reality is socially conditioned. My impression is that B says that Kant is popularly viewed as having shown that spirit is separate from life, that we know life by way of science and religion by way of opinion and the two never meet, but that’s not really what Kant says. The popular view of K’s ideas, however, has influenced our whole civilization.
*Thought and religion have had necessary dialectical development. Nature was the first God for primitives: this was fear of the Other, of mysterious powers “out there.” Then (I think this is the order, not sure) there was Buddhism: the worship of Non-Being, the exploration of nothingness. Being is seen as part of Becoming: both die. The Greeks had their Ideals and concepts. But they had no history, no beginning or end, no reason for the Ideals. Then came the Hebrews with their sense of story, drama and history…and Messiah. Then came Christianity with its universal breakout of salvation. Then Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and company (French Revolution, socialism, communism). Where to next? To the fulfillment of them all in salvation for all–freedom, fraternity, equality, liberty—in the true sense. Liberated from slavery to objectification and phenomena due to primacy and leadership of freedom, spirit, personality, subjectivity: one’s own experience, experiential reality. I guess.
*The Beginning is creativity. The End is the death of all created things, all relative values, all objectified concepts.
*Personality, however, isn’t objective, it’s subjective. (Not ego personality but one with a Big P.) It’s not due to a genetic process. It’s a child of meaning and truth. It’s qualitative, not quantitative. It endures, participates in the eternal. It lives as part of a dynamic and disappears when identified with objectification. It can use objects in the world, of course, but needs to see them and value them as relative, not absolute. Keep eye and orientation on eternal values, appreciate their meanings and forms but don’t objectify them.
*The dynamic of Personality is to create then let our work go into the world, not cling to it, notice how our interest in things fades, how all things come to an end, let the End help us uplift and refine our ideas and ways so we can create again. Keep asking ourselves, What does this MEAN to me? Truth is in meaning not fact. Freedom is the path of uplifting and orienting ourselves to MEANING. It’s an endless cycle which involves less confusion at each step if we go with it. That is, it’s a dialectic. (Like Hegel’s and Marx’s only not fixed on artifacts.) The more we cling to ideas and things the more pain we feel and cause. The ideas and things die anyway and we become depressed if we think our objectified attachments to them were more important than their meanings to us. Without a right relation we have to use drugs and tricks to pretend the cycle doesn’t exist or to live with faked creativity and various enslaving attachments.
*People can truly share and connect through meaning—exploring meaning, creating it together. Things divide. Between things we can only communicate, which isn’t the same as sharing. We then need the wires which rust, break, separate.
*This work is about the differences between Essence and Existence. B says that Existential aspects are prior to Essential ones. Essence relates to Being. Existence relates to meaning. They’re all important but our roots and the roots of reality are in Existence, the value of which is Freedom, the medium of which is Spirit. Whoa! From all this comes everything else, such as time, space, being, essence, object, fact.
*Meaning is different from intention. We all intend good things, but our motives might even be evil and certainly might be not even known to us. What does what we do mean to us? That’s the key question.
*Pragmatism and success are signs of falsity and fakery. They get the job done regardless of value. In a similar way, evolution can select for evil. “Survival of the fittest” can select for the most twisted, diseased: something that isn’t healthy in the long run. Something crude, hyper-competitive, ruthless, self-destructive. Competition and its good results are only good in a relative way. But we often mistake results for reality. They’re part of objectified “reality”, not the free real reality.
*Development and growth in the objectified world leads to division and specialization. It brings strengths and usefulness. The Spirit of the Subject must pass through objectification. At its summit apprehension may become union and cooperation.
*Subjectivity, Personality, Spirit, Freedom, Noumenon, Eternity, Form, Reality on the one side. Objectivity, Phenomenon, Time, Space, Society, Facts on the other.
*Objectivity destroys personality, replacing Personality with the universal, average and common. Objectivity vs. Subjectivity/Personality is like quantity vs quality, adaptation vs creativity, necessity vs freedom and self-determination (internal determination). At its highest point Personality is experienced with others. Spirit is antithesis of enslaved nature, which is disintegrated inwardly, fettered outwardly.
*Material things are signs of spiritual substances. Nature can be transformed into spirit and vice versa.
*The Noumenon breaks into the Phenomenon. Prophet and creative genius are evidence. The breakthrus aren’t continuous, no steady evolution—risk, drama, tragedy, surprise, shock. The new.
*Necessity is helpful but it becomes established and sanctified and then trouble starts! Idolatry. It doesn’t deserve worship. Our needs and what is Ne changes all the time.
*At a point in history science becomes fearless and shows that God isn’t in things. This is a good service, part of dialectic of history. Man must then find God where He really is: in spirit.
*Spirit is not principle but Personality. It’s the highest form of existence.
*God is not a being but existence and value.
*The material world is due to the fall and alienation of spirit.
*Seeing that Freedom is prior to being thwarts the trap of determinism.
*Freedom brings drama, tragedy.
*Will is Freedom.
*The cooling of the fire of Creativity and Spirit is Objectification. Fire is the symbol of Spirit. Coagulation of Freedom. (Dostoyevski is the great artist who shows this.) The personal is unrepeatable, irreplaceable, unique. Logical realism is suggestion, hypnosis. Our enemy is collective Objectivity which today pretends to be Spirit. So today we have worse slavery than ever. We have the socialization and nationalization of slavery. Personality is empty unless full of suprapersonal values and qualities. Creativity moves forward, outward, upward beyond own confines, triumph over self and thus realizes itself.
*p59. Man has unconquerable urge to idolatry and servitude.
*Each is responsible for all. no one can exclude himself from the whole world. Yet we’re not part of a whole.
*Church is a spirit inside us, not outside or above as Object. Supreme value of the Personal, of the individual (Ind) over the common. Universals not open to intellectual or rational solution. Solution is based on values, morals, volition, will. Secret mystery of the Personal is revealed thru creative life of Spirit as a whole. False objective universals and collective realities must be overthrown in combat of Spirit.
*p61. The individual isn’t the personal. The individual is naturalistic and sociological. The Personal isn’t nature, it’s freedom and spirit. Claims of nature, state, society, nation, can’t be total. Collectives aren’t real. The soul consolidates and brings to unity and reality these collective ideas which then subject the soul to necessity and servitude.
*Person needs to fight Objectivity which enslaves.
*Existence of Personal with infinite aspiration and unique destiny is paradox of Objective nature.
*Freedom over being is victory of ethics over ontology. Apprehension of the Personal is apprehension of an exception.
*Chance argues against teleology (the idea that History has a goal, purpose). Science finds more and more chance involved in the Objective world.
*Conflict b/w Person and world harmony/cycle is a shock that reveals History must have an end because there’s a terrible, tragic breach b/w ends and means. People are just means to History. Means and manure.
*p.68. Authority is relative, not sacred, no Noumenal.
*Nothing sacred in politics and much criminal!
*To deprive politics of sacredness is to set men free.
*Stop making the relative absolute!
*We need/have the Paraclete, the abiding Spirit.
*God reveals Himself in the world but does not govern it. Is not in it. He’s in its task and its freedom. Is present and acts only in freedom. Our ideas of authority, power, causality are inapplicable to God.
*Atheism is dialectical cleansing of our O ideas of God.
*Creative newness is causeless (p72). Is achieved in existential time, in vertical plane, then projected onto horizontal plane of History (75)
*Progress isn’t a general rule but a task.
*Creation fixes gaze on Eternity, outside time, but in time it’s Objectified.
*Time: existential/eternal (point) > historic (linear) > cosmic (circle/cycle).
*Determinist science explains all newness causally—so nothing is really new.
*Relation b/w real and imagination (Imag) is complex. Imag makes reality. Reality is stabilized result of imagination. Petrified result of ancient imagination.
*Evil is result of vicious Imagination. Lying Imagination = nightmare reality. Reality is not in things primarily but in Imagination.
*An image is an act not a thing.
*Kant says objects regarded thru concepts kill beauty.
*Will to power chills spirit.
*Bestowal of form isn’t Objectification.
*Creative has 2 sides: 1, revolutionary end of this world, beg of new. 2, Evolutionary strengthen and perfect this world.
*Creative success means failure as achievement cools, objectifies.
*Principle content of history is war.
*Eternal/existential time is evidence that time is in man. Time depends on changes in man. Eternity develops and enriches History, returns to sources. Illusion created in which revelation of Eternity is transferred to distant past. Time is Eternity collapsed in ruin. Objective time has no beg/end, only nightmare endless middle. Eternity only exists when time ends. Pre-existence = memory of existential time.
*Man works in History, but History ignores Man, uses him. Hate is the power of History. Wounds Personality and causes suffering. History is a crime. p96.
*Historical pessimism is true: there is no historic growth.
*I have moments of communion with Eternity. Then I lapse back into time. It’s not the moment that passes, though. It’s always there. It’s my ability to be in Eternity that restricts me.
*Personality as a whole enters Eternity, not parts of it. p96
*Fate overcome. In Christ fate is overcome. Outside Christ we’re subject to Fate. (Christ means the meaning of what we do, the truth, the Logos of anything. Thus meaning is the key. Knowing and uplifting the meaning of our lives is the process of a free life.)
*Naturalistic, historic, organic = all easily regresses. Freedom may evolve but so may servitude. Freedom and develop are only possibility in Noumenal world. Memory doesn’t restore past, it transforms it. C lets beauty out of Phenomenal past.
*Man is social. It’s in man, an aspect of him. He’s not a determined part of society, tho. It’s in him, not he in it.
*God is freedom, love, mystery. The Fall is slavery, determinism, enmity, hatred, violence.
*Solitude is a new possibility for man. True sharing comes from above not below.
*Communication is outside, compulsory—not same as sharing. Individualism turns into socialized—not sharing. Process of knowledge of things is socialized—not real. Facts are social.
*People love slavery and authority.
*Freedom isn’t a right, it’s an obligation, duty. Man doesn’t demand Freedom of God. God requires it of man. It’s a difficulty and burden which we morally ought to assume. It’s aristocratic not democratic.
*Bourgeois freedom (content and capricious) is a perverse insult. Freedom issues from the Noumenon and overthrows the settled world of Phenomenon.
*Anarchy should fight against power—which is force exercised from without.
*today, capitalism which began with an idea of harmony has become “all against all.” Nature is enslaving. Freedom is S. Materialism isn’t emancipation. Evil isn’t in the elements of nature, but in the sanctions about it in realm of ideas, which are social. False understanding of Spirit.
*Technology makes man more exteriorized, loses Spirit center and integration. Ceases to be organic, becomes organized. Machine is creation of man but at same time “takes a line against him.” Return to organic is impossible! Wealth and contentment of the bourgeois bring war. We destroy far easier than we build and lose what we gained.
*Evil not due to wicked people but to bad, cloudy ideas that take hold, fixate as our attempts to realize goodness in Objective world.
*Goodness of family isn’t in power, rank, authority. Sacrifice of Personality for sake of family, race, state, class, etc. But there is a Subjective hierarchy of gifts. People are indeed different. Everyone is special and has something to offer. A parent isn’t a cop.
*Material world requires compulsion, depending on amount of crude matter. Can’t give Freedom to crude matter.
*Sobornost = community of saints of all religions and ethnicities.
*Life is restless, on the dialectic of finite/infinite, temporal/eternal.
*Unavoidable judgment by voice of God in man—given Objectified state of world and sinful fallen man. The judgment brings the end which brings the coming of the Kingdom of God. Judgment happens when/if we finally see the truth, the meaning, of what we do. The extent to which the meaning is different than what we thought it was brings a deflation, a death, and an end to our ability to identify with what we were doing. Well, we don’t have to see or know it. A contradiction causes deflation by itself. We can be left mystified, depressed. Some part of our soul senses it, awakens to the contradiction. The judgment just happens. It’s not a future event. It’s in eternity. And every thing is imperfect. It brings a judgment from life and has an end. If we live in the light we can use a kingdom dynamic and move up in creativity to new, better, improved meanings, which in turn end. An eternal cycle. Judgment isn’t bad, but if we don’t understand it, it can be devastating.
*Existential relations may be expressed in laws, but aren’t subject to law. Dominant forces don’t hold mastery. Change is possible. Objectification can be ended—a victory of power of necessity.
*Religion is not consciousness of dependence but sense of independence of man in relation to world.
*The concrete life of fallen Objective world has noumenal core which is not found on abstract commonness. p108.
*My failure, the failure of any creature, is world failure.
*Sad = religions of salvation also welcome idea of hell.
*Noumenal can’t be applied to Phenomenal world. Wrong religious ideas attribute to Eternity what only can be found in Time. Illusions of consciousness from Objective world give hell on earth which is projected to Eternity. Wrong. (But maybe helpful for kids?) Free ourselves from nightmare of Objectified minds—light shines thru in our experience of paradox of time. Hell is real but it relates to magic, not mysticism.
*Salvation is a corporate experience. p110. Can’t be everlasting hell for any single creature in history ever. One can’t be saved in isolation. One saved is all saved.
*Hebrews were a saved people. Christ revealed universal salvation.
*Everlasting hell is victory of vengeance over love. [What about justice? Can we separate ourselves from God by choice? Mentions that hell is God separated from us, but what about us from God?]
*God not power in this world’s sense, nor authority. He’s Spirit, Freedom, love, Eternity, Creativity.
*Endless heaven also intolerable. Narrow social categories in heaven: ugh!
*The artist’s attitude to future is divided painfully.
*Art and poetry have the memory of paradise.
*Spirit is victory over space and time.
*Endless reincarnation “a terrorist idea.” Reincarnation on different levels is true.
*Man’s existence in this world is but a moment of his spiritual journey.
*Quality of body depends on spirit/soul state. Creates its own body. Eternal form, countenance, impression.
*Sex = generic, generate, generation, genus. New shoulders out the old.
*The personal is not connected with the ego, even opposes it.
*Sex turns man into object among objects. Seeks to establish wholeness but fails in terms of existential, primary reality. Objective world throws love aside because it’s interested in race not personality.
*Eros love at its high point overcomes Objectified sex. p113.
*History in which fate, determinism reign supreme is full of inner dialectic of Freedom.
*A pitiless attitude to evil is evil.
*God is powerless to conquer evil by power.
*Man as Noumenon is center of world, as Phenomenon he’s a speck of dust.
*Coming of Christ has way prepared by man. God needs man. End is spirit event that takes place in time.
*World process and History are absorbed in Eternity. Eternity embraces Time.
*The established Church believes God has no power, no kingdom, they think he needs power, authority, violence in this world. Even though in every way this opposes God. Religions sanction and sanctify violence
