ABSTRACT
Building upon the "noetics of nature" as "eastern" (Byzantine) spiritual grounding, this chapter focuses on a cultural and spiritual approach to economics that emerged from Russia in the early part of last century. Sergey Bulgakov's search for a new social philosophy was part of a broader European movement, a prominent member of which was the founder of phenomenology Edmund Husserl. Economic life, in the concrete and personalised world conceived as household, can ultimately be connected, according to Bulgakov, with a metabolic process of a human being, that is as a circulation or an alternation of inhaling and exhaling. Consumption involves nourishment. By such nourishment in the broadest sense, Bulgakov means the most generic metabolic exchange between the living organism and its environment, including not just food but respiration and the effects of the atmosphere, light, electricity, chemistry and other forces on our organism, insofar as they support life, in the context of the world household.
