Metaphysical aspects of the “religion of spiritual individuality” (absolute substantiality and the thinking spirit)

The relevance of the topic is determined by the second wave of the religious “renaissance” (after “returning to the path leading to church” in the 1990s). Russian and European intellectuals express their undiminished interest in the spiritual practices of philosophizing, now in the communicative environment of the Internet. The article discusses the problem of metaphysical understanding of “content different from being” in connection with the fundamental question of the German philosophical thought - the question of the spiritual self-determination of an individual, which basically means the transformation of the “positive” religious philosophy into the “religion of revelation”. The aim of the work is to clarify the nature, content and form of philosophical and theological constructs and philosophical and religious systems that explain the interaction of the “uncreated Spirit” and “spiritual individuality”. These constructs are drawn on the philosophizing practices of the German romantic school of thought. In this sense, there is no particular distinction between Fichteanism, Schellingianism and Hegelianism. The methods of the study are defined by the methodology of the sources themselves (adjusted for the difference between the research paradigms of the past and the present), with special focus on dialectics. Some of the hermeneutic methods were also used for interpreting religion as the “revelations” of an individual spirit. The study resulted in revealing the continuity between the “positive” philosophy of the 1820s and the 1830s and the romantic philosophy of the 1790s and the 1800s, which predetermined the epistema of the philosophy of religion, characteristic of classical German philosophy. The author comes to the conclusion that “positive” religion, ontologically significant for the “self-determination” of an individual (and correlating with the individual’s relationships with the world), in the gnoseological terms is close to philosophical cognition, which makes it a specific form of socialization.