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Essay on the Phenomenon of Indifference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Liubava Moreva
Liubava Moreva*
Affiliation:
UNESCO Moscow Office
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Abstract

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The human race is defined in relation to the search for the meaning of life, but it is human beings’ search itself that constructs this meaning. As against the definition of the individual as a product of society (20th-century determinism) an integral being is sought in the intuition of Russian spirituality. Ethics is the foundation stone of everything: thought brings together within itself moral, artistic and ontological principles that help one to understand life at the level of personal participation. Between prosaic illuminism (which is the logical source of modern consumerism) and romantic poetry (which attempts to understand the ineffable nature of life), it can be argued that personal development and historical events are complementary. Life is tragic. Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche, when trying to understand the tragedy of human life (its meaninglessness), applied three form of ‘distancing’, and so bypassed suffering. Thus the meaning of life lies in the battles fought on behalf of great hopes in a world of suffering.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , May 2005 , pp. 37 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2005

References

Notes

1. L. N. Tolstoy (1985), Confession, Moscow, p. 59.

2. Leo Shestov (1951), Athens and Jerusalem, Paris, YMKA Press, p. 253.

3. The reader is referred to J. Burckhardt’s Reflections on History (1905), translated into English by M.D.H. and published by Allen & Unwin (1943); reprinted (1979) by Liberty Classics, Indianapolis.

4. F. M. Dostoyevsky (1983), Writer’s Diary, in Complete Works, in 30 vols, vol. 25, Leningrad, p. 201.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., vol. 23, Leningrad, 1981, pp. 144-!5.

7. F. M. Dostoyevsky (1973), Notes from Underground, in Complete Works, in 30 vols, vol. 5, p. 113.

8. V. G. Belinsky, Complete Works, in 13 vols, vol. 11, Moscow, pp. 556, 539.

9. F. M. Dostoyevsky (1975), The Adolescent, in Complete Works, in 30 vols, vol. 13, Leningrad, p. 46.

10. F. M. Dostoyevsky (1980), Writer’s Diary, op. cit., vol. 21, p. 10.

11. Apollo Grigoriev (1986), Art and Ethics, Moscow, pp. 54, 57.

12. F. M. Dostoyevsky (1980), Writer’s Diary, op. cit., vol. 21, p. 10.

13. Immanuel Kant (1964), An Essay Introducing the Philosophy of Negative Values, in Œuvres, vol. 2, Moscow, p. 99.

14. Andrei Bely (1922), On the Sense of Cognition, St Petersburg, pp. 14, 15.

15. Paul Valéry (1976), An Evening with Mr Teste, in On Art, Moscow, p. 95.

16. F. Nietzsche (1911), Ecce Homo, St Petersburg, p. 84.