Freedom: Understanding and Experiences

Abstract

Modern observers often interpreted the idea of freedom as it is represented in the Russian intellectual history and social practice in the terms, proposed by Russian philosopher Georgy Fedotov, who elaborated the lexical concept of svoboda (‘freedom’), which had been given by Russian lexicographer Vladimir Dal. They epitomized the Russian sense and understanding of liberty reducing it to volja (will/wish) as aspiration towards personal independence, relaxedness, unaccountability, and ultimately to self-will and arbitrariness, mostly in their extreme manifestations. There is no enough attention to a fact, that Fedotov points to the Russian understanding of freedom as volja as may be a dominant, but not a single tendency in the Russian tradition and that he rooted this tendency in the heritage of the 16th century Moscow kingdom (with tsar’s tyranny, rightlessness of nobility, serfhood of peasants). Besides this tendency Fedotov recognizes European cultural influence as well; at the time of Russian Empire it had some impact on the Russian sense of freedom, though he does not give a clear explanation of this aspect of the Russian cultural-historical experience. However, Fedotov shows the difference between freedom in private and public life. Boris Vysheslavtsev’s analysis of freedom is worth attention comparatively with Fedotov. Reexamining the traditional philosophical dilemma of negative and positive freedom Vysheslavtsev emphasized potential positive implication of negative freedom, which thus cannot be reduced completely to that what Fedotov discovered in the Russian idea of volja. Taking into account the sociocultural experience related to negative and positive freedom, one should recognize that no community could survive without communicative and public practices assumed by positive freedom. In particular social-cultural systems such practices are not necessarily associated with the idea of freedom; still they are expressed in various ideas, which in this or that way are related in philosophy with the idea of freedom. The relation of this idea to other basic ethical and, broader, cultural concepts is reflected in various forms in the Russian philosophical thought, what one can discover for instance in Vladimir Soloviev, Ivan Ilyin, and Nicolai Berdyaev.