The Russian philosopher and exile Nikolai Berdyaev in his 1944 Slavery and Freedom set forth his mature position on the human person, the political state, and freedom. He contrasted the triumphant existential subjectivity of God and of the human with the enslaving objectification brought by nature, by the collective, and by false views of religion. One caveat: Berdyaev especially prized the subjective and contingent nature of philosophy, so trying to describe his position is a bit like trying to track a moving target. He defended his pursuit of truth as necessarily contradictory in places because that is how humans think.
He did set out in Slavery and Freedom, however, his chief categories of thought: "the primacy of freedom over existence, of spirit over nature, subject over object, personality over the universal, creativeness over evolution, dualism over monism, love over law. The acknowledgement of supremacy of personality involves metaphysical inequality, distinction, dissent from fusion, the affirmation of quality against the power of quantity" (10). But these can perhaps be best summed up as the "principle of personality and freedom and the principle of compassion, sympathy, and justice" (11). Any system that seeks to crush human creativity does so because it denies the infinite creativity of each person. At the same time, without some measure of compassion and sympathy persons can turn inward and wither up, losing their freedom yet again.
Berdyaev, a former Marxist, was suspicious of the language of the common good, the collective, or even at times that of society or community. He feared any system that claimed to absorb the individual person into a collective whole, and thus, he also rejected any claims that the person's good came from society or that of the community as a unity. He also rejected any sense of social hierarchy except that of the natural hierarchy that arose from differences in talents and abilities, and even this he warned against encoding into a social or political hierarchy. Nonetheless, Berdyaev was an advocate of personalism, holding that personality could enslave itself in egoism and that individualism was not true personality unless it discovers itself in turning outward towards others.
For the Russian philosopher, each personality is truly unique, "unrepeatable," one of a kind, yet each personality must grow into itself, becoming a Gestalt of its parts. Like Martin Buber and the German phenomenologists, Berdyaev feared the self, the Thou, being enslaved by any force that objectified it. He saw this potential in the natural world and in human egoism, but he especially warned of it in political forces that sought to conform each person to a utopian vision. He did understand and value the language of communion, the turn outward 0f persons in relationships of compassion and love. Freedom is found in being subject to the truth, he insisted, but that truth is to discovered for each person. Obedience to the truth does not call for obedience to the claims of tyrants, and truth is not given but found.
Bedyaev has been charged with testing the boundaries of orthodox Christianity, and I think rightly so up to a point, for he held the nature of Christ as divine-human to be emblematic of all persons. We all have "theandric existence" he insisted (45). At its best, this approach does recognize that the image of God in all persons includes a spiritual element of supreme worth. At its worst, though, this approach can exalt too quickly the human person while excluding the communal nature of our personhoods. Berdyaev was quick to isolate anything like truth from its community of origins:
"To freedom belongs supremacy over tradition, but the possibility of free living lies in the fact that there has been truth in the tradition. . . . Not for a moment does personality become a part of any organism whatever or of any hierarchical whole. . . . The source of human freedom cannot be in society; the source of human freedom is in the spirit. Everything which proceeds from society is enslaving; everything which issues from the spirit is liberating" (106).
There are immense problems with this, not the least of which is a lack of any real rationale for the social form of communion other than separate persons reaching outward in their isolation. Much of this begins with his over dependence upon a Kantian view of the universe as broken into a subjective moral law within and an objective deterministic world of nature without. Berdyaev doesn't consider a truly Trinitarian interpersonal world where individuals are made up in part by each other and, therefore, are truly dependent upon each other, not in an oppressive uniform anthill, but in a pattern of relations that only draws out the vocation of each more fully and yes, unrepeatably.
His position lead him also to treat the authority of God as limited to a kind of existential offer of relationship while distrusting the Creator's role as King and Lord. He held that God was not the provident master of the natural, physical world, but only ruled in the realm of spirit. Of course, this then, creates a dilemma as to why Christ needed to come to earth at all. The world, for Berdyaev is finally not the home of persons but a place of temporary suffering that offers some measure of personal growth. He comes close to being a Christian Gnostic, his persons trapped in and warring against an oppressive physical world of ilusion. Thus, his position shows us a danger of personalism without any metaphysical sense of community's value as more than just a meeting place of sovereign selves.
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