Свободомудрие vs свободомыслие

Abstract

The article deals with the issues of correlation of external and internal freedom, freedom of thought and wisdom, and their participation in creative choice and action as unintentional thoughts caused by the self-isolation regime. The authors show that the concept of freethinking is closely related to the understanding of freedom in this era. In the free-thinking as its incarnation lay two essential features: negative — “freedom from” and positive — “freedom for”. The historical retrospective of their balance appears as a certain regularity, which the authors conventionally call the “swing of free thought”: the birth of a new branch of spiritual culture is due to the growing criticism of the previous one and the appearance of a galaxy of thinkers who form it. Thus, in the freethinking of Antiquity, with its tendency to reject the pressure of fate, at first “freedom from” prevailed, to which later, as a result of the positive work of numerous philosophical schools, “freedom for” was added. The formation of Christianity as a branch of spiritual culture was accompanied by criticism of previous philosophy (for example, by Neoplatonists) and the creative work of the apostles and Christian thinkers of the patristic era. In the medieval acquisition of freedom as a gift of God, “freedom for” was asserted, which, under the influence of late dogmatism, turned into negative freedom by the Renaissance. Anti-clericalism and anti-dogmatism were overcome by modern thinkers who, creating the methodology of science (English empiricism and continental rationalism), established new goals and meanings of knowledge, and freedom became necessary “for” the knowledge of the laws of nature. The birth of ideology as a branch of culture in the late XIX-early XX centuries, although it did not occur against the background of criticism of science, still produced a new field of freedom — political freedoms marked by bourgeois-liberal ideas. Global humanity, which now has a common destiny, is approaching a new “axial time”, which will probably require a new freethinking — both negative, which is already embedded in the ideas of Western postmodern philosophy, and positive, for example, in the framework of the philosophical-religious-scientific synthesis prepared by Russian religious philosophers.