Freedom

(Philosopy III)

Submitted by: Lungay, Angielle Hillary F. BSMT-2H

Submitted to: Sir Jon Neil Perfecio

Nikolai Berdyaev
Truly there is nothing more torturing and unbearable for man, than freedom.
I. Biography. Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev was born on March 6, 1874 in Kiev1. By birth and upbringing he was an aristocrat. His father, Alexander Mikhailovich Berdyaev, came from a long line of nobility from Kiev and Kharkov. Almost all of his ancestors were high-ranking military officers, but he himself resigned from the army quite early and became active in the social life of Kiev aristocracy. Nikolai's mother, Alina Sergeevna Berdyaeva, was half French, also coming from top levels of French and Russian nobility. Berdyaev's father was an educated man, greatly influenced b y Voltaire. He considered himself a free thinker and was very skeptical toward religion. Nikolai's mother, orthodox by birth, was in her views on religion more catholic, than orthodox. This could be one of the reasons why Berdyaev, a very religious man and a religious philosopher, despised the official Orthodox Church. II. Freedom. Freedom is the major theme of Berdyaev's philosophy. He has often been called the philosopher of freedom, and once, as paradoxically as it may sound, even "the prisoner of freedom" Berdyaev never in his life experienced any kind of authority, not in his family, not in school, not even in religious life. He always fought for his independence, which to him meant independence of the spirit and thought. Berdyaev dedicated all his life to creating and perfecting the philosophy of freedom. His fundamental idea is that freedom precedes existence, which puts the concept of freedom on the highest metaphysical level. Berdyaev's freedom is tied very closely with his religious beliefs. He states that God is present only in freedom and acts only through freedom. Berdyaev makes a clear distinction between his concept of freedom and the traditional philosophical and theological idea of free will. His freedom has a much more general meaning. "Freedom is my independence and the defining of myself from the inside, and freedom is my creative force, not the choice between the good and evil that I am faced with, but my creation of good and evil. The situation of choice itself can cause the feeling of oppression, indecisiveness, or even the feeling of absence of freedom. The liberation comes, when the choice is made, and I move along my creative path." From this passage we see that Berdyaev talks about something greater than the freedom of choice. The fixed options to choose from and the actual idea of being faced with a choice still impose certain limitations on the individual, and, therefore, the free will is not the absolute freedom of Berdyaev's philosophy.

Also, in this quote freedom is related to creativity, another major concept in Berdyaev's world. Once again the idea of creativity has a much broader meaning for him. It is an attempt to reach something higher than our material everyday reality, to exceed the limitations that the material world imposes on us. Berdyaev's creativity means creating something completely new, something that has not existed before. It is a way to express the freedom, a way to make the material world more like the spiritual world within us. Because of this obsession with personal freedom Berdyaev was often called an individualist. He, on the other hand, called himself a personalist. "Freedom is not individualism. That is a superstition. Freedom is outside the idea of individualism. Freedom is not turning inward and isolation; freedom is turning outward and creativity, a way to discover the universe inside oneself." Berdyaev did not say that an individual was more important than the universe, but rather that an individual was the universe. Very interesting is Berdyaev's view on Truth, in terms of freedom. He radically rejected the truth that is imposed on him as an object, or as "reality". He only accepted truth that is known through freedom. In this case he talks about two freedoms, the freedom through which the truth is known, and the freedom which is brought by the truth. Knowing the truth through freedom means that it is not accepted as something that exists separately from the mind, but rather freely absorbing it and making it a part of the mind. This absorbed truth, in turn, expands the horizons of the mind or, in other words, brings new freedom. In this notion Berdyaev fought against any kind of dogma or orthodoxy, whether political, or religious, or any other. He saw orthodoxy as an authority of an organized society over a free individual, over the free spirit of a person, something that he could never accept. This idea of freedom was the reason for the fact that Berdyaev moved away from Marxism, and was opposed to communism. He understood that there were tendencies to reject freedom among the revolutionary intelligentsia. Berdyaev saw that socialism could develop into different forms. It could bring liberation, but it could also create a totalitarian society. These tendencies were actually a logical development. Revolutionaries wanted to overthrow the existing regime, and take control of the country. This was impossible without an organization with strong leadership, every member of which would fight for the common goal. Complete freedom, advocated by Berdyaev, would definitely weaken such an organization. In every period of his life Berdyaev felt the lack of freedom in society. He felt it in the aristocratic world of his youth, in the world of revolutionaries, in the world of the church, and in world of Russian emigres after the revolution. All those groups of people of which Berdyaev was a part at some point in time rejected individual freedom in the name of their beliefs. He generalized that by saying that "every society that had been organized in the past or is being organized now is hostile toward freedom and tends to reject human individuality. ... The democratic age is an age of the petty bourgeois, and it is not likely to produce strong individuals."