In Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography (Macmillan, 1950) Nikolai Berdayev writes:
It has been said that ‘green is the tree of life and grey the theory of life.’ Paradoxical though it may seem, I am inclined to think that the reverse is true: ‘grey is the tree of life and green the theory thereof.’…What is known as ‘life,’ however, is as often as not an embodiment of the commonplace and consists of nothing but the cares of workaday existence. ‘Theory’ on the other hand, may be understood as creative vision, as the Greek theoria, which raises us above the habits of daily life. Philosophy, ‘the green theory of life,’ is free of anguish and boredom. I became a philosopher and a servant of ‘theory’ that I might renounce and be relieved of this unspeakable anguish. Philosophical thinking had always freed me from life’s ugliness and corruption. To ‘being’ I have always opposed ‘creativity,’ that is to say, not ‘life,’ but the breaking through and flight from ‘life’ into ‘existence,’ from the finite into the infinite and transcendent.
In making note here of Adorno and Horkheimer’s commentary on the ideological convergence of art and science, I had pointed out how a realistic art serves a conservative and reactionary function: it merely faithfully reproduces ‘workaday existence.’ So do the injunctions that bid us concentrate on life and praxis and disdain theory: they confine our attention to the here and now, they bid us not look away at alternative possibilities and fantasies and imagined reconfigurations of the existent–all of which might have political import. The suggestion or claim that life is colorful while theory is pallid now stands exposed as an ideological maneuver too, one that makes us disdain the pleasurable indulgences of theoretical speculation, daydreams about how what is may morph into the what may be.
Berdayev makes note of the therapeutic function of philosophy in this context: it relieves us from the ‘anguish’ of ‘workaday existence’: ‘the longing for another world, for what which is beyond the boundaries of this finite world of ours.’ (We should hear echoes of Tolstoy‘s complaint in A Confession that his perplexity–which ended in his choosing faith–arose from his attempts to reconcile ‘the finite with the infinite.’) Theory and philosophy accomplish this function because they embody ‘creativity,’ a departure from the here and now. It is this movement that for Berdayev has true vitality, the kind that can promise deliverance and exhilaration. Perhaps akin to the kind I made note of here in another post on the inspirational effect of two paragraphs by J. D. Mabbott--which introduced me to the work of the philosopher in terms of the exalted view it provided of the everyday world. In making these observations we should keep in mind, of course, Nietzsche’s contempt for philosophical speculation that breeds contempt for this life, this now, in favor of an afterlife and a hereafter. Keeping these two views in a creative tension of sorts may be the most fruitful, if not the most difficult, intellectual maneuver of all. We shouldn’t expect any less.
Samir Chopra 