Višeslavcev Boris: Etika preobraženog erosa

Boris Višeslavcev: The Ethics of Transfigured Eros

This book addresses believers and non-believers equally, provided that both are capable of philosophizing. A disbelieving psychoanalyst can follow with interest how the dazzling dialectic of ap. Pavla poses all the problems of the new ethics with its prevalence of "moralism", with its idea of ​​sublimation. On the other hand, a believing Christian can be convinced that the criticism of the Law and the idea of ​​Grace in Ap. Paul deepens and confirms it in contemporary discoveries concerning the subconscious, especially in the discovery of the law of irrational resistance - loi de l'effort converti (literally: "law of converted effort" cf. trans.). Ethical ideas of St. Pavla are deeply paradoxical and focused on the distant future. Kant's morality, the morality of duty, the morality of the imperative - all the usual normative ethics - fall far behind them. Scheller's predominance of the ethics of duty and law is not enough: it does not show the main defect of the Law, a defect that was known to the apostle Paul and that is clarified by contemporary analytical psychology. He does not show what it should be replaced with because he does not give a theory of sublimation. The ethics of sublimation, the "ethics of transfigured Eros", combines Christian Platonism and the discoveries of modern psychoanalysis. Every true philosophy is Platonism, and only through this philosophy can we master the richness of the soul life that Freud discovered, but with which he himself is unable to cope. The ethics of transformed Eros is the ethics of fantasy, "birth in beauty", in other words - the ethics of creativity. This is much closer to the ethics of N. Berdjaev (The Determination of Man), which follows the same direction of Russian religious philosophy. However, while Berdjaev starts directly from the idea of ​​Deity, we, on the other hand, provide a certain "proof of the existence of God" (which amounts to setting up a true ontological argument) and all the time we consider the dialectic of non-religious ethics. The second difference concerns the last mystical intuitions of the Absolute, the Divine and the Nothing. But it refers to the second volume of our research on Law Problems and Blogodata. This first volume represents a fully completed investigation of a certain circle of problems that are grouped around the central questions: 1) why the Law as a principle of ethics must be rejected? in what is the imperfection of the morality of duty? why is "moralism" irritating? and 2) what is the principle of a more perfect ethics, the ethics of Grace, the ethics of sublimation, the "ethics of transfigured Eros"?