“THE MEANING OF CREATIVITY” BY NIKOLAI BERDYAEV AND “BEING AND NOTHINGNESS” BY JEAN-PAUL SARTRE: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
“THE MEANING OF CREATIVITY” BY NIKOLAI BERDYAEV AND “BEING AND NOTHINGNESS” BY JEAN-PAUL SARTRE: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
Anna Masliakova
Ph.D. in Art History, Doctoral Researcher, Kyrgyz National University named after Jusup Balasagyn,
Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek
First of all, it should be noted that, despite the fact that the books in question belong to existentialism, they were written at different times, which undoubtedly leaves a certain imprint on them. N. Berdyaev’s book “The Meaning of Creativity” was published in 1916, while the work “Being and Nothingness” by J.-P. Sartre, who spent a long time in a POW camp, was written in 1943. Perhaps that is why Berdyaev’s style is much more lyrical and poetic than the style of Sartre, who prefers logical reasoning to the search for God, who, in his opinion, does not exist.
According to Berdyaev, the human spirit is trapped in the world of necessity, and the true path is the path of spiritual liberation from the “world”. In this case, the trajectory of movement does not go to the right or left but up or in depth along the world line. At the same time, Berdyaev criticizes the religious doctrine of sin, emphasizing the wickedness of a person who, due to his or her sinful nature, must bear the burden of obedience and not try to transcend the mundane. On the contrary, Berdyaev calls for breaking out of this vicious circle, and it is creativity that becomes the key to the transition to a new reality. That is to say, a creative act is liberation and conquest: man was created by the Creator as an ingenious (not necessarily a genius), and his genius must be revealed by creative activity, the philosopher proclaims.
Berdyaev argues that scientific knowledge ascending the “dark staircase”, illuminates only one step after another, but it does not guarantee that it will be possible to achieve “sunlight”, “meaning”, or “Logos”, illuminating the path from above. The modern soul suffering from “photophobia” has not yet come to “solar consciousness”, but is on the threshold of “sunrise”. We are, as it were, on the verge of the past and the future and have a unique opportunity to understand what has already happened in light of what is ahead of us.
Thus, the pathos of Berdyaev’s book lies in the freedom of man from the outdated “world” dominated by determinism. Man as a microcosm in his or her creativity is identical to God as a macrocosm. There is no dualism of “divine” and “undivine nature”; that is to say, world is divine in its nature; man is divine by nature; the world and man are immanent to God, and everything that happens to man happens to God. Berdyaev argues that a large number of experiments on the justification of God, or theodicy, have been written, and the time has come to write a justification of man, or anthropodicy. In other words, the center of gravity shifts from the external world to the internal one; everything external must be comprehended as the “mystery of the spirit”, and everything objective, material—as a symbol of the spirit that is happening in the depths, in man.
Furthermore, according to Berdyaev, the world passes through three epochs of divine revelation: revelation of the law (Father), revelation of redemption (Son), and revelation of creativity (Spirit). The first epoch is characterized by the exposure of man’s sinfulness and the revelation of divine power; the second is marked by the awareness of the way out of the situation; and the third is the final discovery of divinity. Therefore, the revelation about man is the final divine revelation about the Trinity. The last mystery is hidden in the fact that the divine mystery and the human mystery are one, that in God the mystery about man is kept and, vice versa, in man—the mystery about God.
In addition, Berdyaev’s position regarding culture is also rather original and deserves consideration. In his opinion, culture is a failure of creativity since it is only a symbol of divine revelation [1]. However, the philosopher calls this “failure” sacred because through it lies the path to “higher being”. At the end of his book, Berdyaev notes that humanity is “on the pass of life”, and we can become witnesses of how this vertical movement of man towards God is intensifying, how “the rose of world life is resurrecting” [1].
Sartre also calls for freedom from dualism. However, if Berdyaev eliminates the gap between God and man, Sartre, on the other hand, annihilates the duality of the subject and the object of knowledge. He writes that “the appearances which manifest the existent are neither interior nor exterior”; “they all refer to other appearances, and none of them is privileged” [2]. Therefore, for example, the genius of Marcel Proust is not his work considered in isolation or Proust’s subjective ability to produce it, but the work considered as “the totality of the manifestations of the person” [2].
One of the central concepts in Berdyaev’s book is “God”, while Sartre pays great attention to the category of “Nothingness” in his work: “we are encompassed with nothingness. The permanent possibility of non-being, outside us and within, conditions our questions about being” [2]. According to Sartre, more often than not, “absence” could manifest itself more explicitly than “presence”. Suffice it to recall the famous scene in the cafe, where the main character comes in search of Pierre, but Pierre is not there, and all the fullness of being, all the people and objects present in the cafe, indicate his absence. By the way, we should note that Berdyaev also uses the category of “nothingness” in his research, and yet he interprets it in a slightly different way. The philosopher writes about “creativity from nothing”: in creative freedom, there is an inexplicable and mysterious power to create from nothing, in a non-deterministic way, adding energy to the world’s energy cycle [1].
According to Sartre, it is important to avoid self-deception that arises from the duality of human existence, meaning “facticity” and “transcendence” [2]. In other words, substitution occurs when a person begins to affirm “facticity as being transcendence” and “transcendence as being facticity”, which, without any doubt, is not quite right. Just like, for example, a person’s occupation does not determine his or her essence, and behind appearances there might be a completely different side of his or her personality. People are constantly evolving, and “being”, which is “released to the intuition of human reality”, is “always that to which something is lacking” [2]. For example, in order to grasp the essence of the crescent moon as the moon that is “not full”, lacking one quarter, we need to “surpass the given toward the project of the realized totality”, the disk of the full moon, and then “return toward the given to constitute it as the crescent moon” [2]. “Human reality is a perpetual surpassing toward a coincidence with itself which is never given”, states Sartre [2]. At the same time, there is no God in his concept, and “the being toward which human reality surpasses itself is not a transcendent God; it is at the heart of human reality; it is only human reality itself as totality” [2].
Both works underline the defining role of man in the world, but if Berdyaev is optimistic in his expectation of the third era of divine revelation, the era of the Spirit, there is a fair share of pessimism in Sartre’s book. On the one hand, a person is free, but this freedom has a certain shade of doom since a person, being condemned to freedom, is responsible not only for himself or herself but also for the world he or she lives in and carries the burden of humanity on his or her shoulders. Anguish is an integral part of our being, for “it is in anguish that man gets the consciousness of his freedom, or if you prefer, anguish is the mode of being of freedom as consciousness of being; it is in anguish that freedom is, in its being, in question for itself” [2]. And if we go further and remember another work by Sartre, the drama “No Exit”, in which “others” become “hell” for the characters who find themselves in one room after death, it turns out that, unlike Berdyaev’s “Trinity”, Sartre’s triad—“being-in-itself”, “being-for-itself”, “being-for-other”—does not lead to such a positive result [3].
Summarizing the above, it should be noted that, despite all the differences between the books mentioned above, both of them represent an attempt to give answers to those pressing questions that were posed to mankind at one of the most trying transitional moments in history that took place in the first half of the 20th century. Nowadays we are also entering the so-called transitional historical period, and it seems to me that the ideas expressed by the two philosophers—pointing out that there is something hidden behind the ordinariness of everyday life (“God” or “Nothingness”) and that man is not a cog in the machine of the world, but, on the contrary, the future of the universe may depend on him—can help us come closer to understanding the essence of the complexity of the present-day situation.
References:
- Berdyaev N, “The Meaning of Creativity”, https://librebook.me/smysl_tvorchestva (accessed June 19, 2023).
- Sartre J.-P., “Being and Nothingness”, https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.69160/2015.69160.Jean-paul-Sartre-Being-And-Nothingness_djvu.txt (accessed June 19, 2023).
- Sartre J.-P., “No Exit”, https://ia800700.us.archive.org/11/items/NoExit/NoExit.pdf (accessed June 19, 2023).