Abstract
The paper argues that Nikolai Berdyaev’s doctrine of theurgy has remained relevant in today’s cultural-historical context because it highlights a continuing problem in the philosophy of art. The problem is the misunderstanding of the ludic nature of art, its role in the evolution of consciousness and transformation of reality. The author questions the idea that artistic play is deficient compared with religious expression. As a result of this critique, he proposes that the theurgic quest for a radically new form of creativity was misguided and that the true meaning of the aspiration behind it is the need to comprehend culture as a dialectically articulated integral system of the cultural forms that constitute it.
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Notes
Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment, see “Appendix”.
Solovyov’s aesthetic essays of the 1890s on “The General Meaning of Art” and “The First Step towards a Positive Aesthetic” (cf. Solovyov 1991, 73–89).
Danto spoke of the two belonging to distinct “logical orders” (Danto 1981, 84).
Bakhtin developed the theory of the fully independent voices of Dostoevsky’s characters in his 1929 essay Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin 1984), where he advanced his interpretation of the writer as the creator of the polyphonic novel.
Hegel discusses Schiller in his Aesthetics (Hegel 1975, 1: 61–62), without any reference to play.
Danto argued that the great accomplishment of the late twentieth-century avant-garde consisted in bringing to light the fact that art’s essence was purely philosophical, i.e., unrelated to what Hegel called “the realization of the Idea in a sensuous medium” (cf. “The Art World Revisited,” in Danto 1992, 33–53).
For an analysis of Losev’s doctrine in the Problema simvola see Marchenkov (2018), 77–92.
References
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Appendix
Appendix
Ilya Kabakov, The Man who Flew into Space from his Apartment, mixed media installation, 1981–1988 (Paris, Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne). The installation was originally shown at the 1989 exhibition with an appropriate name, “Les magiciens du monde (Magicians of the World)” (Oxford Art Online, Benezit Dictionary of Artists, https://doi-org.proxy.library.ohio.edu/10.1093/benz/9780199773787.article.B00096624)
