Description
Book SynopsisIn her brilliant new opening essay, Banerjee says of Berdyaev he was never more than a curious but unwelcome guest in history. He fearlessly engaged it on the level of ideas while remaining alien to its means and ends, gifted with an incurable longing for transcendence. Witness to two world wars, Berdyaev observed the destruction of established cultures in the traumatic birth of new systems. Arrested on political suspicion-by Czarist and then by Bolshevik policehe died in exile in France in 1948, carrying forth his intellectual work until the end.
Berdyaev considered the philosophy of history as a field that laid the foundations of the Russian national consciousness. Its disputes were centered on distinctions between Slavophiles and Westerners, East and West. The Meaning of History was an early effort, following World War I, that attempted to revive this perspective. With the removal of Communism as a ruling system in Russia, that nation returned to an elaboration of
Table of Contents
I: On The Essence of the Historical: The Meaning of Tradition; II: On The Nature of The Historical: The Metaphysical and The Historical; III: Of Celestial History: God and Man; IV: Of Celestial History: Time and Eternity; V: The Destiny of The Jews; VI: Christianity and History; VII: The Renaissance and Humanism; VIII: The End of The Renaissance and The Crisis of Humanism: The Advent of The Machine; IX: The End of The Renaissance and The Crisis of Humanism: The Disintegration of The Human Image; X: The Doctrine of Progress and The Goal of History; Epilogue
