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| The True Humanism |
The "historical" cannot be regarded, as the various philosophical schools have tended to regard it, as a mere phenomenon, as a manifestation of the outer world offered to our experience; and it cannot be opposed, as Kant opposed it, to the noumenal reality, the very essence of the inner occult reality. I believe that history and the "historical" are not merely phenomenal, that they are--and this is the most radical hypothesis of the philosophy of history--neumena.
The historical in the real sense of the word brings with it the revelation of essential being, of the inner spiritual nature of the world and of the inner spiritual essence of man, and not merely of the external phenomena. The "historical" is by its nature not phenomenal but deeply ontological. It has its roots in some deep primal foundation of being which it makes available for our communion and understanding. The "historical" is a sort of revelation of the deepest essence of universal reality, of the destiny of the world focused in that of man. It is a revelation of neumenal reality. The noumenal "historical" can be approached only through the most intimate concrete tie between man and history, between the destiny of the former and the metaphysics of historical forces.
In order to grasp the mystery of the "historical," I must have a sense of it and history as something that is deeply mine, that is deeply my history, that is deeply my destiny.
The Meaning of History, Nicholas Berdyaev, Cleveland: Meridian, 1962, 26.
The above is the solution to what Ratzinger calls the fundamental crisis of our age.
More quotes by Berdyaev
- Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history.
- Every moral act of love, of mercy, and of sacrifice brings to pass the end of the world where hatred, cruelty, and selfishness reign supreme.
- The enslaving of the other is also the enslaving of the self.
- In sex we have the source of man's true connection with the cosmos and of his servile dependence. The categories of sex, male and female, are cosmic categories, not merely anthropological categories.
- Conscience is the spiritual, supernatural principle in man, and it is not of social origin at all. It is rather the perversion and confusion of conscience that is of social origin.
- Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.
- The meaning of conservatism is not that it impedes movement forward and upward, but that it impedes movement backwards and downwards—to chaotic darkness and the return to a primitive state.
- Self-realization is a process of permanent auto-creation, an elaboration of the new man at the expense of the old.
- The physical union of the sexes ... only intensifies man's sense of solitude.
- The overwhelming majority of people, including Christians, are materialists. They do not believe in the power of spirit. They believe only in material power.
- I do not think discursively. It is not so much that I arrive at truth as that I take my start from it.
- Philosophy... is the creative perception by the spirit of the meaning of human existence.
N.B. Saint Augustine was the founder of the philosophy of history. Dawson, "Augustine and His Age." in Enquiries into Religion and Culture, 1933, 223.
