Tragedy of God the Savior

“A man is not born a woman, a man (becomes) a woman” (4: 156)

The separation of religion from the subject manifests itself in the emergence of an actual will. In the will I am an actual and free being, and I present myself against the subject as another, in order to represent it with myself by removing it from that state of separation.

The thesis of the book is that modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realisation of his individual self.

Freedom, though it has brought him his independence and rationality, has isolated him, and made him anxious and powerless.

This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realisation of positive freedom which is based on the uniqueness and individuality of man.

Hegel's lectures have had as great a historical impact as the works he himself published. Important elements of his system are elaborated only in the lectures, especially those given in Berlin during the last decade of his life.

Berdyev's life was nothing but a triangular struggle against the aristocratic environment in which his family belonged and lived in it, against the revolutionary Marxist environment in which he lived during his first youth and against the orthodox environment in which he lived a mature period in a certain sense.