On the Boundary: An Autobiographical Sketch

Berdyev's life was nothing but a triangular struggle against the aristocratic environment in which his family belonged and lived in it, against the revolutionary Marxist environment in which he lived during his first youth and against the orthodox environment in which he lived a mature period in a certain sense.

The world houses people equally with natural things. When the world is thus treated as a gathering or even a gathering of natural things, it is not conceived as nature, and we do not understand that it is something that is in itself a holistic system, a system of regulations and arrangements, especially laws.

This is the first of two volumes of the only English edition of Hegel's Aesthetics, the work in which he gives full expression to his seminal 

 John Gerassi had just this opportunity as a child, his mother and father were very close friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and the couple became for him like surrogate parents. Authorized by Sartre to write his biography.

Through the interviews with both their informalities and their tensions, Sartre’s greater complexities emerge. In particular we see Sartre wrestling with the apparent contradiction between his views on freedom and the influence of social conditions on our choices and actions. We also gain insight into his perspectives on the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the disintegration of colonialism.

The thesis of the book is that modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realisation of his individual self.

Freedom, though it has brought him his independence and rationality, has isolated him, and made him anxious and powerless.

This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realisation of positive freedom which is based on the uniqueness and individuality of man.

Repetition means getting our cognitive and moral bearings not through prompted remembering, but quite unexpectedly as a gift from the unknown, as a revelation from the future. Repetition is epiphany that sometimes grants the old again, as new, and sometimes grants something radically new.

Hegel's lectures have had as great a historical impact as the works he himself published. Important elements of his system are elaborated only in the lectures, especially those given in Berlin during the last decade of his life.