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Nicholas Berdyaev: The Creative Act is always Liberation and Conquest

By: Erik Rittenberry

We have a special treat for readers today. The following article was written by Erik Rittenberry, the man and the mind behind the publication Poetic Outlaws.

Poetic Outlaws seeks to revive the Promethean fire of the dead poets and artists in an attempt, however futile, to elevate the modern soul out of the sludge of the status quo.

In the words of the greatest writer of the 20th century, Henry Miller: “Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized ‘hero of our time’ - and of all time.”

We urge you to subscribe to Erik’s insight packed newsletter filled with the wisdom of poets, philosophers, writers and great thinkers by clicking the button below:

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This article originally appeared on Poetic Outlawshere. I’m sharing it with The BoldBrush Letter because in it, Erik has explored an important topic, perhaps the most important topic for creative people.
Editor’s Note: In two days, this post will be locked and is available only to paid members because we don’t want this duplicate content on the open web in a way that might draw traffic away from Erik’s original post. If you are not a BoldBrush paid subscriber, you can still read the entire post here.

Nicholas Berdyaev: The Creative Act is always Liberation and Conquest

Every creative act strives towards the transcendent, towards passing beyond the borders of the given world. The creative act is always liberation and conquest. It is an experience of power. In essence, creativity is a way out, an exodus; it is victory.

—Nicholas Berdyaev

It is only in the creative act that we prevail over the oppression and enslavement of extraneous influences.

The creative act reveals the absolute priority of the “self,” the subject, over the “non-self,” the object; but at the same time, it strikes at the root of the egocentric, for it is eminently a movement of self-transcendence, reaching out to that which is higher than oneself…

The link between creativity and a pessimistic attitude towards life as it is given, with all its necessities, compulsions and conventions, made me attach a great importance to imagination, since without imagination there can be no creative activity.

A creative act always rises above reality; it means imagining something other and better than the reality around us.

When I begin to write I am sometimes carried away to the point of dizziness. My thought flows so fast that I hardly have time to write it down.

Often I am forced to leave words unfinished so as to keep up with the rapid course of my thinking. I never think much about the form it takes: it seems to pour forth of its own accord, having, as it were, a word beyond or prior to the ordinary written or spoken words.

When I write I do not ordinarily read other books dealing with the subject with which I am concerned at the moment…. To do so would, so it seems to me, constrain the freedom of my thought and weaken my creative powers.

I write in response to an inner voice which commands me to transmit my mental experience. Writing is no luxury for me, but a means of survival, an almost physiological necessity.

I write in order to testify to and free my mind from an overwhelming impression. In the white heat of creative ecstasy… none of the divisions and differentiations into subject and object (arise).

Creative works are within time, with its objectifications, discords and divisions. But the creative act is beyond time: it is wholly within, subjective, prior to all objectification.

Contemplation must not be understood as a state of sheer passivity or receptiveness: it comprises a distinctly active and creative element.

The aesthetic contemplation of natural beauty is more than a state: it is an act, a breaking through to another world. Beauty is indeed that other world revealing itself in our own.

And in contemplating beauty, we go out to meet its call.

You can find this passage in Nicholas Berdyaev’s remarkable book — Creativity Will Save the World: Toward a Spiritual Humanism

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By Erik Rittenberry

A place for the outlaws of poetry and the written word. One of the aims of Poetic Outlaws is to revive the Promethean fire of the dead poets and artists in an attempt, however futile, to elevate the modern soul out of the sludge of the status quo.

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