N.A. Berdyaev’s concept of “individual freedom” and J. Bataille’s concept of “sovereign man” in the context of twentieth-century French thought

Abstract

This article argues for the influence of Nikolai  Ber­dyaev’s religious and philosophical ideas on French personalism, twentieth-century French Catholic philosophy, and the development of the concept of transgression in the works of Georges Bataille. It is demonstrated that the reception of Berdyaev’s philosophy, on the one hand, contributed to the development of Catholic thought (as evidenced by Berdyaev’s fruit­ful interactions with Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, and Jean-Louis Fumet), and on the other hand, stimulated discussions on the problems of mysticism, phenomenology, and existential philosophy, during which a wide variety of viewpoints, including opposing ones, were advanced. A comparative analysis is provided of Berdyaev’s concepts of “individual freedom” and Bataille’s “sovereign man”. The authors demonstrate that the central themes of Berdyaev’s philosophical anthropology, such as the idea of ​​the spiritual personality, anthropodicy, and the philosophy of freedom, are quite comparable with Bataille’s existential experience of transgression. Bataille’s interpretation of the sovereign individual is a free individual, connected to the sacred world and capable of trans­gression. It is concluded that the Russian and French philosophers, despite their differences in perspective, agree that the individual is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon that requires understanding through the prism of freedom, uniqueness, and constant development. The philosophical concepts of Berdyaev and Bataille can be considered two poles of the philosophy of freedom: existential and transgressive.