The Union of Philosophy and Literature As an Essence Constant of Russian Spiritual Culture

The article examines the union of Russian philosophy with artistic creativity as the genetic code of Russian spiritual culture, which determined its national characteristics and semantic vector of development. The author shows that following in spiritual creativity both the arguments of reason, which operates with concepts, and the arguments of creative contemplation, which perceives the world in artistic images, created a common semantic space for thinking about the divine and human, righteous and sinful, life and death, freedom and necessity, good and evil. The result was the “harmony of mind and heart” that defined the metaphysics of philosophical concepts and literary classics. In this context, the author turns to the historically formed forms of interrelation between philosophical and artistic creativity, focusing on those dimensions of each that confirm their complementary unity and indicate that, when separated from each other, they do not provide an adequate picture of the world and a person’s understanding of their relationship to it. In the article, the aspirations of Russian culture to combine philosophy with an imaginative and artistic perception of reality are considered as an expression of a person’s natural ability to perceive it in harmony with all types of creativity, which insures the life of society from the harsh dictates of “rationality”. These ideas determined the key issues of the author’s research: 1) complementarity of artistic, figurative and philosophical perception of the world as a problem of Russian philosophy; 2) union of philosophical reflection and literature as a genotype of Russian spiritual culture; 3) “impressionism of thought” in philosophical poetry. Addressing these issues allowed the author to reveal the historiosophical meaning of the problem he stated.

spiritual culture, humanism, philosophical reflection, “emotional thinking”, artistic contemplation, “impressionism of thought”, cultural code, union of philosophy and literature, philosophy of poetry, “harmony of mind and heart”