Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета: Серия I. Богословие, философия (Dec 2024)
Ideal-realism as religious ontology in B. P. Vysheslavtsev’s philosophy of religion
Abstract
The article considers the type of philosophical constructions of B. P. Vysheslavtsev from the point of view of the correlation between the categories of ideal and real. Agreeing with Plotinus and putting forward the three-stage ontological model as a universal and the most complete one (in contrast to the transcendentalist and positivist ones), he unites all forms of human activity into the cultural activity-creative cosmos, within which, in his opinion, the synthesis of the ideal and the real takes place, as well as the realisation of the highest spiritual goal - cognition and experience of the transcendent Absolute. In the context of foreign and domestic philosophical discussions of the first half of the 20th century, Fichte-s practical philosophy becomes relevant, which lays down a new type of idealism centred on the real as the realm of empirical experience in its concrete unitary forms. Spiritual being (the totality of embodied meanings, goals and values), which is based not on abstract principles, but on the dynamics of absolute-like self, its continuous transcendence, is a harmonious conjugation of opposite beginnings, and thanks to this philosophy goes beyond the limits of philosophical discourse proper and becomes the philosophy of life, existentialism. The article proposes the division of ideal-realist philosophy into two types. Religious-philosophical realism (ideal-realism with a three-stage ontological model), to which B. P. Vysheslavtsev adheres, forms a new idea of reality as «belonging to the Absolute». The theme of the «middle» is one of the ideal-realistic motifs. This is the theme of combining two original, i.e. ontologically different and different quality (and, therefore, antinomic) principles - the ideal and the real, and the philosophical systems associated with these principles (dogmatic idealism and dogmatic idealism) into a kind of dualistic unity pointing to the Absolute, its transcendental-immanent position and special meta-manifestation in the world. Accessible to rational knowledge and formal-logical speculative analysis in the form of the law of the unity of opposites, B. P. Vysheslavtsev insists that the very source of this law has neither unity nor opposites, but is the center of divine secrets, the living harmonious self, which «holds» this unity.
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