Nicolas Berdyaev

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I have, since I began my literary and philosophical journey, been drawn to something essential in Russian thinking. Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Lev Shestov are some of the writers I have felt closest to. Now I have discovered Nicolas Berdyaev, a Russian philosopher.

This is the beginning of The Destiny Of Man, published in 1937.

“I do not intend to begin, in accordance with the German tradition, with an epistemological justification. I want to begin with an epistemological accusation, or, rather, with an accusation against epistemology. Epistemology is an expression of doubt in the power and the validity of philosophical knowledge. Thinkers who devote themselves to epistemology seldom arrive at ontology. The path they follow is not one which leads to reality… Man has lost the power of knowing real being, has lost access to reality and been reduced to studying knowledge. And so in his pursuit of knowledge he is faced throughout with knowledge and not with being. But one cannot arrive at being- one can only start with it.”

Derrida’s Alterity

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I feel a lot of sympathy with Derrida’s idea of the “messianic structure of existence.” He describes this as the general idea of an approaching future alterity, a future which, as it is not yet invented, is so different from what we are accustomed to that it cannot even be conceptualized. I have had a sense of something similar for some time, and bring this into much of my work, though I have never had any idea where this sense of a future containing something so radically different comes from, other than the general sense of the Western rationalist outlook being unsustainable. Like Derrida, I believe all we can do is try to break down the current paradigm in order to allow this impossible future to appear.

Here’s what Derrida says:


“I am careful to say ‘let it come’ because if the other is precisely what is not invented, the initiative or deconstructive inventiveness can consist only in opening, in uncloseting, in destabilising foreclusionary structures, so as to allow for the passage toward the other”: