SOURCE: "Freedom and Necessity (The Paradox)," in Berdyaev's Philosophy: The Existential Paradox of Freedom and Necessity, Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1967, pp. 47-97.

FREEDOM AND NECESSITY

(The Paradox)

1 A CONCEPTION OF MAN

Berdyaev's entire thinking is anthropocentric. The structure of his existential philosophy is erected on the foundation of his philosophical anthropology. His preoccupation with the problem of freedom arises out of his deep interest and personal involvement in man's predicament and destiny. Man is the chief object of his concern. At the heart of his thought lies a persistent attempt to understand what it means to be a person. Berdyaev's philosophy of freedom begins and ends with man.

The essential and fundamental problem is the problem of man—of his knowledge, his freedom, his creativeness. Man is the key to the mystery of knowledge.

Berdyaev's philosophical anthropology is thoroughly existential. It deals with man not as a concept but as a living person. The stress on man as an existing entity often leads Berdyaev to switch suddenly to the first person singular as in the following passage:

Man cannot be left out of knowledge … I, a man, want to know reality, and the knowledge which may be attained in non-human realms is nothing to me. I, the knower, abide in reality … I know reality in and through myself, as man. Only an existent can know existence.

What Berdyaev had come to know about existent man, chiefly through firsthand experience, constitutes both the sounding board and the springboard of his existential thinking. The very problem of freedom, the pivot of his philosophical thought, issues out of his conception of man, man's nature and man's destiny. For this reason, the first question that must be answered is: What is man according to Berdyaev?

For Berdyaev, man is a complex being with a dual nature. Man belongs at one and the same time to, and is the meeting place of, two worlds. He is both divine and human, heavenly and earthly, the child of God and the product of nature. Man is the point where two spheres intersect, the place at which they meet. He belongs to two different orders. "There is a spiritual man and there is a natural man, and yet the same individual is both spiritual and natural." Man is conscious of the duality of his nature. He is aware of both his greatness and his worthlessness. "He knows himself as the image of God and as a drop in the ocean of the necessities of nature."

The two natures in man are constantly in a state of war, both hot and cold, and man himself is the battleground. Now one of these natures, now the other seems to prevail.

Berdyaev does not claim originality in what he asserts about the duality of man's nature. "All deep thinkers have felt this," he says. He is especially cognizant, in this respect, of his affinity to Pascal, who "understood that the whole of Christianity is related to this duality of man's nature." Berdyaev echoes the familiar words of Pascal:

What a chimera is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe … know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself!

When he writes:

What a strange being—divided and of double meaning, having the form of a king and that of a slave, a being at once free and in chains, powerful and weak, uniting in one being glory and worthlessness, the eternal with the corruptible.

The duality of man's nature is for Berdyaev the microscope through which he diagnoses man's predicament, and the telescope through which he attempts to discern man's destiny. Obviously, this dualism in man can be traced back to the Platonic doctrine of the two worlds, the world of phenomena and the world of ideas, which Berdyaev adopted in its Kantian revised version where the world of phenomena is equated with the world of necessity and the world of ideas or things-in-themselves is identified as the world of freedom.

In Berdyaev's view of man, we also find a Neo-Platonic flavor tempered with Boehme's mysticism. Despite his dualism, man is nevertheless a microcosm. He is himself a small universe and not a fractional part of it. Man and the cosmos measure their forces against each other, as equals.

But man is not merely a microcosm. He is also a microtheos. This is so because "man is not only of this world but of another world; not only of necessity, but of freedom." Belonging to two worlds, man is, therefore, "a self-contradictory and paradoxical being, combining opposite poles within himself."

The thorny paradox of freedom and necessity grows out of Berdyaev's dualistic anthropology. Because of his dual nature, there are two intentions in man's "conscious mind, one which leads to the enslaving world of objects and to the realm of necessity, the other which is directed towards the truly existent world, the realm of freedom."

Berdyaev's diagnosis of man's condition reveals that man has followed the first of the two intentions, namely, that which leads to the enslaving world of necessity. "The human spirit," he writes, "is in prison. Prison is what I call this world, the given world of necessity."

This is the fundamental problem which confronts Berdyaev, demanding a positive solution. Man is a prisoner of necessity and he desperately needs to see the light and breathe the air of freedom. Berdyaev approached this dilemma with concern and enthusiasm. He made it his lifework to help bring about the liberation of man from the chains of necessity. And it is man as a living person, man as an existent being, who needs to be set free. In the task which Berdyaev sets for himself, he himself is existentially involved. "My sense of uprootedness and disestablishment in the world … is at the heart of my whole world outlook."

What is the nature of the prison in which the human spirit is held captive, the prison which Berdyaev calls "this world, this given world of necessity"? The answer to this question may be discerned by discussing the four realms in which the paradoxical antithesis of freedom and necessity operates: nature, society, civilization, and history.

2 THE DETERMINISM OF NATURE

Necessity rules relentlessly in the realm of nature. Man is a natural being and is bound by many ties to the cosmos. He finds himself under the rule of natural necessity. His body is governed by natural processes, and is dependent on the soil, water, air, and sunshine for its very existence. Man is both nourished and destroyed by nature. He dies and his physical body is dissolved. Natural forces kill man, if not suddenly, then slowly. Nature is an order of determinism. Its laws demand obedience and submission. Man experiences natural necessity within himself and outside himself. He has to wrestle constantly with natural necessity and the power of his mind is his chief weapon.

Berdyaev distinguishes four periods in man's relationship to nature and the cosmos. The first is that of man's submersion in cosmic life, when he was completely dependent on nature. In this primitive period, man's relation to nature was dominated by myth and magic. The second stage is characterized by man's partial liberation from the power of cosmic forces through the development of a primitive economy. Here also, he is freed from the superstitions concerning the demons in nature. In the third period, the mechanization of nature and its scientific and technical control take place. Industry is also developed and with it appears the complex problem of labor and management. Finally, there is the disruption of cosmic order in the discovery of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the tremendous power of man over nature, and his enslavement by his own discoveries. Berdyaev foresaw a fifth period in the relation-ship between man and nature, when man's still greater control of nature's forces will be realized, and when man will also have control over his own technics and mechanization.

It is true, says Berdyaev, that the Renaissance witnessed a truce between man and nature. Nature was discovered, and man sought its many blessings. He became learner in its school, felt the enchantment of the outward appearance of nature, and was attracted by the joys of the natural life. It is quite true that man gave up the struggle against nature which medieval man had waged. The Renaissance was concerned with a scientific as well as with an artistic discovery of nature. But that was not all. This early truce with nature was short-lived. In order to harness and utilize nature's forces, man was forced into war with nature itself which modern man has continued to carry on through his technology. Nature is still man's enemy. It still rules with its laws of necessity. "Nature, in its fallen state," says Berdyaev, "is wholly subject to causal determination and, as such, is the figure of necessity."

It should be pointed out here that what Berdyaev means by nature is not limited to the physical universe. For him, nature has a much wider and deeper connotation. He explicitly states that by nature he does not mean "animals, plants, minerals nor stars, forests and seas." Berdyaev does not use the term nature exclusively as an antithesis to civilization or even to the supernatural, nor as the cosmos or the creation, nor even as the world of matter and space. "To me," he explains, "nature is above all the contradiction of freedom; the order of nature is to be distinguished from the order of freedom."

If nature means the antithesis of freedom, then, by the same token, it is also the antithesis of personality and spirit. "Nature, in this sense, is the world of objectification, that is to say, of alienation, determinability, impersonality." The slavery of man to nature is a slavery to that objectification, to that alienation, to that determinability. Often Berdyaev seems to use the term nature as equivalent to the world of the New Testament which is to be considered as hostile, as sinful. "This natural world is but the child of hatred and division, which in its turn engenders bondage and servitude." "The natural world, 'this world, '" he also writes, "is the servitude, the enchainment of existence."

Man's slavery to the world of things, to material necessity, is a crude form of slavery which can easily be detected. But there are other forms of man's slavery to nature, says Berdyaev, which are "more refined and less noticed." He mentions, for instance, what he calls "the lure of the cosmos." Berdyaev believes that there is in man a deep-seated desire to return to mother earth. This desire is often awakened and intensified by the overwhelming pressures of civilization and the heartaches and headaches of personal existence. Man seeks temporary relief by responding to "the lure of the cosmos." He turns to nature as a refuge from the demands of reason and the enslaving standards of civilization. Berdyaev does not mean here the occasional and recreational enjoyment of the beauty of nature. What he is referring to is the attempt to experience a fusion with cosmic life with the underlying assumption that nature itself is sacred. There are periods in history which are characterized by a return to nature as a guide and as a lost paradise. This is what the romantics of all time try to do. The outstanding figure of the French Enlightenment, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) deified nature and thought that man came from it good and pure and that he had been alienated by civilization from his true nature. This "degeneration," according to Rousseau, could be stopped and eventually overcome and man would reach a state of perfection if he were given full freedom to develop according to his natural necessity. The tendency to return to nature or to do things "according to nature" as well as the belief in the existence of a world-soul with which man may seek union may be observed in people seeking release from the demands and tensions of civilized life through exaltation of, and reliance on, such ties as those to race, soil, blood and sex.

Berdyaev rejects a ideological, a mechanical, as well as a naturalistic interpretation of the world process on the ground that they all lead to an "ideal spiritual determinism." This results in the loss of man's freedom and the enslavement of his personality. All attempts to realize freedom through fusion with cosmic life, such as those of all orgiastic cults, are founded on the belief in the possibility of "an ecstatic emergence beyond the boundaries of personal existence into the cosmic element," and on "the hope of entering into communion with this primary element." Such attempts are based on illusions and deprive man of his personality and dignity. "Fusion with cosmic life does not emancipate personality, it brings about dissolution and annihilation."

3 THE RULE OF SOCIETY

Man is not only a natural being. He is also a social being. He must, therefore, find self-realization in social life. He finds it necessary to live within a society. On society he must depend in his struggle for life against nature. Berdyaev thinks that man feels his relatedness to society even more keenly than his relation to nature.

The paradox of freedom and necessity operates in every social environment. Society both enriches and enslaves the life of man. It enriches when it seeks to establish unity among people and when the common struggle for survival and well-being is carried out by cooperative efforts. Society is a blessing to man when it is conceived as a free union of men in the spirit of brotherhood. Society contributes to man's spiritual health and promotes his freedom when it takes the form of a religious togetherness, a sobornost, and when it is guided by the conviction that "the final goals of man's life are not social, but spiritual."

Unfortunately, the influence of society's necessity upon man is much greater than that of its freedom. In his social relations, man often submits to the voice of necessity in society, which addresses him:

You are my creation; everything that is best in you has been put there by me, and therefore you belong to me and you ought to give your whole self back to me.

Even in its noble objective to induce and introduce co-operation and unity, society often uses coercive and unjust means. Having within himself not merely the need for bread, the symbol of the means of human existence, but also the longing for world-wide unity, for fraternal association, man follows those who promise prosperity and security. The paradox of freedom and necessity persists in the kind of world we have, with its evil, strife, and war. "How can one combine the solution of the problem of bread for everyone," Berdyaev asks, "a problem on which human life depends, with the problem of freedom, on which human dignity depends?"

We understand the paradox of freedom and necessity in society more clearly, and begin to see our way to its solution more distinctly, when we remember that there are two ways of conceiving society and two paths that society follows. Society, according to Berdyaev, may be interpreted either as nature or as spirit. As nature, society is ordered in accordance with the laws of nature, with the rule of necessity as the guiding principle, and the struggle for eventual predominance and mastery as the primary motives, and force and compulsion as the executive means. As spirit, society rests on the principle of personality with a quest for freedom as its motivating goal and a passion for love and mercy as its basic means. In actual experience, society is both nature and spirit. Both principles, that of necessity and that of freedom, are at work in it. But we cannot deny the obvious fact that the natural in society predominates over the spiritual, necessity over freedom, coercive objectivity over free personality, the will to power and mastery over love and mercy. The tragedy of man's predicament is partly due to this fact.

The conception of society as nature has been expressed in what might be termed organic theories and organic interpretations. The organic interpretation of society is invariably hierarchical. Society is thought of in terms of a higher personality that stands over and above the personality of the individual man, a larger personality that engulfs the individual one. Thus the primacy of society over the human personality is asserted, and man finds himself enslaved. The criterion of value is sought in the organism of society, which supposedly stands on a higher level than the human personality.

Berdyaev vehemently objects to the organic interpretation of society. He denies the existence of an organic principle for the organization of society. To claim the existence of such a principle is to give a false character of sacredness to things that are only relative. The organic in society is nothing but an illusion. As nature is partial, so is society partial. Not society, but man, is an organism. Society is an organization based on cooperation and coordination. As Berdyaev puts it, "man is the organism and society is his organ … The organic theory of society is a mere game in biological analogy."

It is true, Berdyaev reminds us, that within society itself there are organic formations, such as the family, the tribe, as there are mechanical formations, like the club, the labor union. Both the organic and mechanical types of formations enslave man, the former more than the latter because it often claims sacredness. Berdyaev mentions a third kind of human association within society which is spiritual in nature, namely, the church. "Only a spiritual community liberates man." Unfortunately, because "some of the aspects of this spiritual life may be expressed in social forms … religion tends to become a social phenomenon and the Kingdom of God a social institution."

The conflict of freedom and necessity in society arises out of the fact that man must live in a social environment, where law, order and authority are necessary, and yet his personality "can never be a part of society, because it can never be a part of anything." On the one hand, "society is an infinitely more powerful thing than the personality"; and on the other hand, "personality affirms its supreme value even in the sphere of social life." In this paradoxical situation man finds himself and it causes him much pain and suffering.

4 THE DOMINATION OF CIVILIZATION

The battle between freedom and necessity is also fought in the world made by man, the very civilization he creates for the purpose of liberating himself from natural necessity. In this man-made domain, the paradox of freedom and necessity appears in a more frightening form.

What Berdyaev means by civilization and the distinction he makes between it and culture must be borne in mind. This is important because civilization is commonly taken to mean culture as well. He stresses the fact, first of all, that "in a certain sense civilization is older and more primitive than culture, culture takes shape later. The invention of technical equipment, even of the most elementary tools by primitive man is civilization, just as civilization is the whole socializing process." According to Berdyaev, civilization is concerned with man's physical survival, while culture aims at his intellectual and spiritual development. Civilization is closer to nature and necessity, and culture is nearer to spirit and freedom.

By civilization must be meant a process which is more social and collective, by culture, a process which is more individual and which goes deeper.

Civilization indicates a higher degree of objectification and socialization, whereas culture is more closely linked with personality and spirit. Culture indicates … the victory of form over matter.

Man creates a civilization in order to set himself free from the forces of nature and their enslaving necessity. Civilization was initiated by the invention of primitive tools which man continued to improve and increase. The conquest of nature stimulated the cooperative effort of men and called for organization of their lives.

The most revolutionary event in the history of civilization is the emergence of a technological knowledge with the triumphant advance of the machine. The whole structure of civilization was remolded by the technological progress. Through his technical skill, man has been able to harness the forces of nature and subordinate them to his own purposes. The splitting of the atom and man's initial thrust into outer space are only the beginning of a cosmic revolution which is the fruit of modern civilization.

It would seem rather banal and quite unnecessary, says Berdyaev, to enumerate the blessings of civilization in all its various provinces. He has no quarrel with the positive aspect of our technological civilization. But he does stubbornly take issue with its negative results.

Civilization promises to emancipate man and there can be no dispute that it provides the equipment for emancipation; but it is also the objedification of human existence and, therefore, it brings enslavement with it. Man is made the slave of civilization.

Civilization is the theme of man's struggle with, and triumph over, the tyranny of natural necessity. But periodically, as it has already been noted, man has returned to nature seeking liberation from civilization which, after freeing him from the chains of nature, shackled him with glittering fetters of its own. Civilization arose as a means, but soon it was turned into an end. It has become a tremendous power which controls man. Man himself has become a means for the realization of the technical and industrial process of civilization. The continuous growth of the multiplicity of things in daily life crushes man. Who has not felt the powerful grip of things!

Technical progress testifies not only to man's strength and power over nature; it not only liberates man but also weakens and enslaves him; it mechanizes human life and gives man the image and semblance of a machine.

Like most existentialists, Berdyaev deplores the mechanization of life and the enslavement of man by the very machine he created. It is the machine that replaced man and thus plagued him with unemployment. "The machine has a crushing effect on the human soul, it damages emotional life first of all, thus shattering the integrity of the human personality."

Machinery has destroyed the unity of human life. Modern technology has placed in man's hands a fearful instrument of destruction and has, therefore, surrounded his existence with an atmosphere of fear and anxiety. Our overorganized civilization demands of man an evergrowing activity, but by this demand it enslaves him and turns him into a mechanism. This is partly due to the change in man's relation to time.

Through the conquest of time by the machine, time itself has undergone an acceleration to which the rhythm of human life must respond. Our civilization is entirely oriented toward the future. Each moment is but a means to the succeeding moment. Our world is a world of mathematical time measured by the calendar and the clock.

Swept away by the torrent of time, man does not have adequate time to assert himself as the free creator of his future. Applied to economic life, the new conception of time gives rise to a utilitarian estimate of man. Man's value is dependent upon his productivity within a given time. This leads slowly but surely to the destruction of man's personality.

One of the most unfortunate results of modern technological and industrial civilization is the appearance of vast impersonal masses of people. It is the negative effects of civilization that produce the mass man, to whatever class he may belong. The main characteristics that distinguish the man who belongs to the masses are

a lack of expressed personality, the absence of personal originality, a disposition to swim with the current of the quantitative force of any given moment, an extraordinary susceptibility to mental contagion, imitativeness, repeatability.

The mass man, in Berdyaev's view, appropriates the technical side of civilization, but is able to assimilate spiritual culture only with difficulty and reluctance, if at all. "The masses in the present transitional period," says Berdyaev, "are devoid of all spiritual culture." This is another way of saying that the masses of today are chained by modern technology and are enslaved by its necessity. They have surrendered their freedom as a price for materialistic satisfactions; and without freedom there can be no spiritual culture.

What adds intensity to the seriousness of man's predicament is the fact that culture itself, which is meant to be an agent of freedom, is gravely endangered by a "process of democratization and leveling-down, by the domination of the mass." The crisis of culture in our times lies in the stress on quantity at the expense of quality. It is increasingly demanded of culture that it be watered down to correspond to the needs and desires of the masses. "The mass determines what shall be the accepted culture, art, literature, philosophy, science, even religion." Culture is undergoing such drastic changes, says Berdyaev, that it needs a new name. Besides this process of "democratization" of culture and its resultant mass production, there is also the danger arising out of the tendency in man to idolize his own cultural creations and to become a slave to his own cultural values. And whenever and wherever that happens, man finds himself behind the bars of necessity. Thus in the sphere of civilization and despite the cultural creativeness of man, the paradox of freedom and necessity remains unresolved. Its tension continues to plague man.

5 THE GRIP OF HISTORY

A head-on collision between freedom and necessity takes place in history. In the realm of the historical, Berdyaev discerns the most paradoxical form of man's predicament. This is so because "without freedom there is no history but only the realm of nature. Yet at the same time history suppresses the freedom of man; it subordinates him to its own necessities."

We shall address ourselves first to the first part of this paradox, namely, that "history presupposes freedom," which receives in Berdyaev's books generous reiteration but inadequate interpretation. Perhaps the key that might unlock Berdyaev's meaning is found in his statement: "History postulates the freedom of man. The determinism of nature cannot be transferred to history." Nature does not presuppose freedom, as far as man is concerned, because it existed before man and man is not the maker of nature. Man's relation to history with respect to freedom, however, is different. History presupposes man's existence and, therefore, his freedom. It is the result of the creative or destructive activity of his freedom. It is true that man is a historical being, born into a historical epoch and must realize himself in history, but it is also true that "it is man that makes history … and that it is to be supposed that he makes history for his own sake." "History is also my history. I have indeed had a share in its happening." Again, Berdyaev states, "I accept history not because I am part of history but because history is part of me. That means that I accept it not as an obedient slave but as a free man."

It is one of the fundamental tenets of Berdyaev's philosophy of history that the freedom of the spirit belongs to him who does not conceive of history "as an exterior imposition" but rather "as an interior event of spiritual significance, that is, the expression of freedom." "Only in such a free and emancipating view," Berdyaev goes on to say, "can history be understood as the expression of man's inner freedom."

It might add more light to what Berdyaev means by the words "history postulates the freedom of man" to mention also that, in his opinion, there are two major elements in history: the conservative and the creative. The first refers to the tie with the past through its heritage, the second is identified with man's dynamic and creative drive toward self-fulfillment. No historical process is possible without the union of these two elements. "The absence of either of these two elements invalidates the postulate of history." Man's debt to the past must be translated into a duty toward the future, a duty which expresses itself in free creative activity that becomes a part of history.

As a historical being, man must live in time which, according to Berdyaev, has three dimensions: cosmic time, historical time, and existential time. Cosmic time may be symbolized by the circle. It is the time which is related to the movement of the earth, and is divided into years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. This is, so to speak, nature's time, and as a natural being, man lives in cosmic time.

Man lives also in historical time. History is also subject to cosmic time. It is measured by centuries and years, but it has its own historical time which is the result of the movement and change of man and society. Historical time may be symbolized by the straight line reaching into the past and into the future. Its direction is toward the future. It is true that in historical time there is also return and repetition as is the case in cosmic time. There are strong resemblances between certain periods of history. But, nevertheless, the novel element dominates. Every event in historical time is in a sense unique; and every year, decade, and century introduces a new life and new happenings. Historical time has a closer connection with human activity than cosmic time.

There is also existential time. This should not be thought of in complete isolation from cosmic and historical time. The symbol of existential time is the point. This kind of time is not computed mathematically. It is not summed up nor divided into parts. Existential time, writes Berdyaev, is "the irruption of eternity into time … It is the time of the world of subjectivity … A moment of existential time is an emergence into eternity." Man's creative activity, for instance, is performed in existential time and is merely projected into historical time. It is this projection, this objectification, which results in the tragic conflict between man and history.

History, whether it studies the universe or man, is an interpretation of what has been but is no more. As such, it is primarily an objective process insofar as it investigates the past as an object. It is, consequently, relegated, like nature, to the objective world. By virtue of its objective nature, history is indifferent to man and his personality. This indifference is potentially capable of turning man into a tool for the actualization of history. When this happens, he becomes a statistical unit in historical events and records.

Never before has man been more at the mercy of the processes at work in history than he is in our times. No person escapes the effect of the historical event of today. The fatality of history tends to reduce all men to a common level. History does not give man any promises or guarantees. "History needed man as its material, but has not recognized him as her purpose."

What adds to man's misery in and through history is the fact that often he himself deifies history and regards its processes as sacred. Not infrequently, he is willing to bow his head and knee to historical necessity, which thus itself becomes a criterion of values; and obedience to this necessity is regarded as the only freedom he possesses.

Berdyaev allocates a substantial amount of blame for man's predicament in history to Hegel who considered all history as sacred. Hegel also thought of history as the victorious march of the Spirit toward freedom. The concept of freedom occupies a prominent place in Hegel's philosophy, but it is a freedom within the frame of necessity. For Hegel, necessity, Notwendigkeit, has two different meanings: the one is identical with external motivation, and the other is equated with internal self-regulation. The latter kind of necessity Hegel calls freedom.

Necessity … in the ordinary acceptation of the term in popular philosophy means determination from without only—as in finite mechanics, where a body moves only when it is struck by another body, and moves in the direction communicated to it by the impact. This, however, is a merely external necessity, not the real inward necessity which is identical with freedom.

Like Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky before him, Berdyaev protested against Hegel's idea of a universal Spirit revealing itself in history. Hegel wanted to sacrifice man and his human existence on the altar of his philosophy of history. To history, Hegel subordinated not only man but also God, who, in his view, is the creation of history itself. The implications of Hegelian philosophy would be the unconditional surrender and obedience to the conquerors in history and the acknowledgment of them as instruments for the realization of the Spirit which, according to Hegel, is freedom. Hegel's freedom is the freedom of the universal and not of the individual. Hegel's philosophy of freedom actually denied freedom by acknowledging it as the product of necessity and, at times, necessity itself.

There is something in man, says Berdyaev, which makes him rebel against being converted into a means employed by a pitiless and inhuman historical process.

On the one hand I accept history as my path, the path of man, and on the other hand I indignantly tear the mask from it and rebel against i t … History has set its ineffaceable stamp upon me. Yet at the same time I am a free spirit, a person who bears the image and likeness of God, not only the image of the world … One must preserve one's freedom in the realm of necessity.

History is then an arena of the unresolved conflict between freedom and necessity. Man himself makes history, but history takes no account of him and often uses him as fuel in the struggle between classes, nations, faiths, and ideas. The clash between history and human personality is never resolved within historical time because man cannot cease to be a historical being. Men try to escape this paradox through historical pessimism. They surrender to irrational fate, but find that the chains of their slavery have become heavier. More often, the escape takes the direction of historical optimism. Men are lured by the mirage of progress and are moved by dreams of Utopia but sooner or later find themselves stranded in the scourging desert of disillusionment. For Berdyaev, the solution of the paradox of freedom and necessity does not lie within history. He cannot rest his faith on the uncertain facts of historical time. "Many a soul has lost its faith on the shifting sand of these historical facts."

FREEDOM AND PERSONALITY

(The Implications)

1 THE DYNAMICS OF PERSONALITY

Berdyaev's anthropology is strictly personalistic, and so is his philosophy, which he sometimes describes as a philosophy of personalism. His summum bonum is the human personality, its self-realization, its development and progress in the attainment of truth and beauty. Everything is seen from the viewpoint of personality. Everything is evaluated by the nature of its effect on the human personality.

But man's personality, Berdyaev immediately insists, can exist only in the spiritual climate of freedom. Its self-fulfillment is realized in and through freedom. Freedom is, as it were, the diet on which personality feeds and the oxygen it breathes. In the words of Berdyaev,

The personality is not only related to freedom but cannot exist without it. To realize the personality is therefore to achieve inner freedom, to liberate man from all external determination.

This vital relationship between freedom and personality makes a study of Berdyaev's concept of personality a prerequisite to the understanding of his philosophy of freedom.

What is personality according to Berdyaev? Personality is not a biological or a psychological, but rather an ethical entity. It is not a natural but a spiritual category. By nature, man is an individual; by spirit, he is a personality. We may say of a man that he lacks personality, but we cannot deny him individuality. Personality is not the soul as distinct from the body. Berdyaev rejects the dualism of soul and body and advocates a "vital unity of soul and body in man." Soul and body mutually permeate each other. The dualism for him exists not between soul and body, but between spirit and nature, between freedom and necessity; and personality is a certain condition which exists between the opposites of this dualism, namely, "the victory of the spirit over nature, of freedom over necessity."

Personality, therefore, belongs to an entirely different order than that of soul and body. It is "not born of a father and mother … Personality in man is not determined by heredity, biological and social." Personality is rather and "above all an 'axiological' category: it is the manifestation of an existential purpose." It should not be conceived in substantial terms but should be understood as "the absolute existential centre" which determines itself from within.

The definition of personality by Max Scheler as the union of our acts and their potentialities seems to appeal to Berdyaev. Yet, personality is more than that. Berdyaev writes:

When confronted with the personality, I am in the presence of a Thou. It is not an object, a thing, or a substance; nor is it an objectified form of psychic life—the object of psychology.

Here Berdyaev echoes Martin Buber's I-Thou relationship. But in his contrast of personality with thing, he reflects the influence of William Stern, a contemporary psychologist and philosopher, whose personalist philosophy rests on the assumption that the person is a psychological unity, characterized by purposiveness and individuality. Berdyaev refers to Stern's contribution and finds in this thinker's antithetical terms Person und Sache, person and thing, a distinction which replaces the traditional one between spirit and matter.

Stern defines personality as that existential entity which, despite its multiplicity, is capable of constituting "a unity possessed of originality and value," and of forming, despite the multiplicity of its functions, "a unity endowed with independence and finality."

The essential quality of personality is its unitas multiplex. As such, it is an integral whole, not a sum of parts. It is an end in itself, unlike the thing, which is a means to an end. A fundamental characteristic of the personality is its capacity to be a free agent.

Berdyaev goes along with Stern up to this point. He disagrees with him as soon as Stern begins to elaborate a whole hierarchy of overlapping personalities into which he admits collectives such as the nation. For Berdyaev, this elaboration is anathema and unforgivable. In his view, it makes Stern's supposedly personalistic philosophy too rationalistic and, therefore, it "cannot claim to be strictly existential. '"

Berdyaev goes beyond Stern to state "another most important property" in which the personality radically differs from the thing, namely, "being able to experience joy and suffering" and being endowed with "the sense of a unique and indivisible destiny." "Personality is my whole thinking, my whole willing, my whole feeling, my whole creative activity."

In an effort to clarify his concept of personality, Berdyaev calls attention to the fact that the Latin word persona signifies a mask and has theatrical associations. "The personality is essentially a mask. Man employs it not only to disclose himself to the world, but also to defend himself from its importunity." This should be understood in a positive way. Personality as a mask implies "a task to be achieved." Its pulse is the creative act. Its aim is the triumph over all sorts of determinations.

Personality is activity, opposition, victory over the dragging burden of the world, the triumph of freedom over the world's slavery. The fear of exertion is harmful to the realization of personality. Personality is effort and conflict, the conquest of self and of the world, victory over slavery, it is emancipation.

As a task to be accomplished, as a creative activity, personality is constantly in a process of change. It requires time for the actualization of its potentialities. But with the change there is also the element of immutability in personality. This accounts for its paradoxical nature. This paradox in personality expresses itself also in the fact that, on the one hand, personality is potentially universal, and, on the other hand, it is a distinct, unrepeatable, irreplaceable being, unique in every respect. "The secret of the existence of personality lies in its absolute irreplaceability, its happening but once, its uniqueness, its incomparableness."

Personality is a religious and spiritual category. Seen in the Christian context, it is "the image and likeness of God in man and this is why it rises above the natural life." As such, personality is not a part of something but a unity possessing absolute worth. Its value is intrinsic and cannot be reduced to a common denominator. Man's worth is the personality within him.

Personality is the reflection of the divine image and likeness, and, consequently, it is the true path leading to God. Man is given the power to become a personality. He must be afforded every opportunity of achieving this. But the process requires great efforts on his part. The struggle to become a personality, integrated and consolidated, is a painful process. This is so because strong resistance is constantly encountered and a conflict with the enslaving power of the world ensues. But it is precisely in the heat of the struggle that the fruits of freedom ripen. The quest for freedom, and personality is freedom, inevitably involves suffering and a "capacity to bear pain."

The path of the realization of personality is paved with love and sacrifice. Love and sacrifice constitute the relationship of one personality to another. They are the means by which the personality is freed from the prison of self. They are the channels by which the personality identifies itself with another personality. Sacrifice is the medium through which the uniqueness is respected. This means that the personality grows and expands only in relation to another personality. The recognition of each personality's uniqueness, that it constitutes a Thou, is essential to our understanding of the mystery of love.

To be in love with another's personality is to perceive the identity and unity underlying its perpetual change and division; it is to perceive its nobility even in the midst of utter degradation.

From the point of view of ethics, Berdyaev reminds us, personality is linked with character. A strong personality implies a strong character; and a strong character signifies the victory of the spiritual principle in man. True morality begins with power over oneself and ends with triumph over slavery to oneself. This must precede any victory over the enslavement to this world. "Character is conquest and attainment; it presupposes freedom." A good character is an indication that a person has established distinctions, is not indifferent, but has made his choice. Such a person is neither blind nor enslaved to the status quo or to conventions. The personality of such a man is free.

Despite his stress on the close relationship between personality and morality, Berdyaev registers his disagreement with Kant, who passes over from the intellectual to the ethical conception of personality. According to Kant, "morality alone makes the person a person, the self a self." In the Kantian sense, and as Professor Kroner put it,

That which is called "character" in the strictly moral sense is not identical with the "nature" of an individual, but it depends upon the free decisions and actions of the person. I am responsible for my character; I myself am its author.

Because of this fact, personality is not just a phenomenon among other phenomena. Personality is an end in itself, not a means to an end; it exists through itself. "Nevertheless," concludes Berdyaev, "Kant's doctrine of personality is not true personalism because the value of personality is defined by its moral and rational nature, which comes into the category of the universal."

According to Berdyaev, the existence of the human personality with its loves and fears, with its hopes and anxieties, with its unique and unrepeatable destiny, is a paradox in the world of nature and within the confines of society, civilization, and history. Personality is unceasingly faced with an environment which is alien to it. The human personality with its aspirations, and the conditions of existence in this world are contradictory to each other and cannot but clash. In the process of its self-realization, personality must constantly struggle against the forces of estrangement and exteriorization, against what Berdyaev calls the principle of objectification which enslaves man by its chains of necessity and threatens his freedom with the fetters of causality. What Berdyaev means by this term is the next question for discussion.

2 THE PRINCIPLE OF OBJECTIFICATION

Objectification is a fundamental concept in Berdyaev's philosophy. It is a principle that operates in the '"objective world', i. e. the world of our natural and historical environment." Objectification is the process by which a subject is converted into an object. The most common and easily recognizable objectification takes place whenever a person, a spiritual entity, is treated as a thing, as an object, as a commodity. Whenever a human being is used as a means rather than as an end, objectification occurs. Everything, including God, may be, and gener-ally is, liable to be objectified.

The principle of objectification occupies a vital role in Berdyaev's dualistic world. It is a oneway bridge leading from the higher and real world, the realm of freedom, to the lower and unreal world, the realm of necessity. "Objectification is a symbolical description of the fallen state of a world in which man finds himself subservient to necessity and disunion."

The bridge of objectification on which spiritual realities, things-in-themselves, slide down into the ocean of necessity, into the world of phenomena, is itself located in man's mind and is constructed on wrong social and spiritual attitudes of hatred and injustice, of disdain and prejudice. Operating through abstraction, objectification invariably leads to the burning fires of dehumanization, depersonalization and degradation. It prevails in most social relations, which are characterized by superficial and impersonal contacts and in which the person's spiritual status is not recognized. Berdyaev often alludes to the world in which such conditions exist as the "fallen world." It is the world in which society is no longer knit by spiritual ties. It is a world in which the I-Thou relationship has been replaced by the I-It relationship.

People practice the principle of objectification more than they realize. Often, objectification becomes their second nature and they begin to think of it as quite normal. When that happens, they become spiritually bankrupt and self-alienated. Objectification is a disease which drains off man's spiritual qualities. Man ceases to be self-directed and becomes other-directed. Life degenerates into mere accommodation to what is common and average. It becomes geared to external norms and standards. Inner motivation disappears and its function is taken over by social customs and conventions, by the rule of expediency and convenience. Man is no longer a creator but an imitator. He loses his freedom and becomes a slave. To use Berdyaev's own words, "in the process of objectification the subjective spirit loses its identity."

Objectification is the ejection of man into the external, it is an exteriorization of him, it is the subjection of him to the conditions of space, time, causality and rationalization.

To sum up, Berdyaev considers the following to be the main characteristics of objectification:

1. The estrangement of the object from the subject.
2. The absorption of the unrepeatably individual and personal in what is common and impersonally universal.
3. The rule of necessity, of determination from without, the crushing of freedom and the concealment of it.
4. Adjustment to the grandiose mien of the world of history, to the average man, and the socialization of man and his opinions, which destroys distinctive character.

The process of objectification operates not only in society and people but also in nature and things. Berdyaev makes a distinction between the creative activity and the created product. While the former is a part of the noumenal world and is free from objectification, the latter is a part of the phenomenal world and is affected by objectification. The symphony which a composer creates, for instance, is a part of the objectified world, but the creative activity by which the symphony was composed is part of the world of spirit and freedom. It is in this sense that Berdyaev also equates objectification with materialization of spiritual entities. Man has a tendency to worship the product of his creation. This results in his enslavement to and by the things he produces. This explains the fact, Berdyaev points out, that property can be on the one hand a source of freedom and independence, and, on the other hand, an agent of man's slavery. Exploitation and abuse of natural resources lead to their objectification. Living exclusively by and for the power of money and the things that power can buy objectifies man's spirit. As a result, man is no longer defined by what he is but by what he has.

Berdyaev makes a deductive statement that "the world of appearance is the outcome of objectification." Objects are all created by subjects. The "fallen world," in other words, is man-made. It must be noted that the attempt to understand "the world as a product of spirit, to comprehend even the corporeal world with all its phenomena as essentially intellectual or spiritual in its origin and content," as Windelband has shown, is nothing new. It was the "final result of ancient philosophy" to conceive the world in this manner.

In his theory of objectification, Berdyaev has a close affinity to the German idealists who thought that the world is my idea or, as Schopenhauer often called it, a "phenomenon of the brain." Schopenhauer, who identified Kant's thing-in-itself with the Will, but who denied any causal relation between the thing-in-itself and the world of phenomena, nevertheless regarded phenomenal nature as objectification, that is, "as the perceptional and conceptional mode of representation of the will or the immediately real." It may be noted in passing, as Matthew Spinka has pointed out, that Karl Marx, during his early period, formulated his basic concept of "social injustice in terms of Verdinglichung (objectification), i. e., as the treatment of the proletarians as things, as a commodity."

But Berdyaev differs from the German idealists in his assertion that the agent of objectification is not the supra-personal Spirit or Absolute Idea but the human spirit itself. The objectification of the world through human manipulation turns the freedom of noumena into the necessity of phenomena. In other words, it results in the loss of freedom.

For Berdyaev, the objectified world is not the true and real world. It is only a symbol of the real world of the spirit. But the awareness that anything in this world is merely a symbol of another world has a positive function. It helps in liberating man from a slavish dependence on this world. This theory will be developed in detail later.

In the area of knowledge, objectification implies that the knower and the known are mutually alien. Applied to persons, it means knowing about them rather than knowing them. In this respect there is an essential difference between natural sciences and the humanities. In natural sciences, objectification does not destroy the object of knowledge, since nature itself is the result of objectification. In the humanities and in the realm of the spirit, objectification leads to the destruction of the reality which we seek to know.

Through the process of objectification, the true Church, as a non-authoritarian spiritual entity, as a spiritual union and communion in love and freedom, is transformed into an authoritarian social institution with conflicts within and without and with worldly ambitions. No wonder that the visible and historic church often alienates people from God. Fortunately, the earnest and faithful Christian can always transcend the objectified church and can be a part of the life of the true Church, the sobornost, which is sustained by the indwelling Spirit of the risen Lord.

The historical Church reminds one of other historical bodies, is very similar to the State, to the kingdom of Caesar … It also is subject to the power of necessity. But the Church is also meta-historical; another world beyond this world is disclosed in it. It is a spiritual society; the realm of freedom is in it.

3 DEPERSONALIZATION AND DEHUMANIZATION

The process of objectification is the chief enemy of man, his personality and his freedom. It lies at the heart of the dehumanization of modern man and the depersonalization of his personality. The principle of objectification, Berdyaev thinks, accounts for the crumbling of civilizations. This principle, by which subjects are turned into objects, operates in man's own mind.

Berdyaev underscores, first of all, the overturning of the hierarchy of values as the most dangerous and most consequential product of objectification. Those values which rank high, such as truth, beauty, goodness, and freedom are brought lower, and those which are at the bottom of the scale, such as expediency, usefulness, exploitation, and violence are elevated to the top. Putting the matter in terms of means and ends, the means in man's life, such as economics and politics, become ends in themselves. "The means take central place, and the ends are either forgotten, or become purely rhetorical."

Berdyaev convincingly shows how this reversal of values is characteristic of our times. The real aims of human life have been displaced. Man's life is filled with an abundance of the means of living but has been alarmingly emptied of the ends which make life worth living. Man has forgotten the why of living and is preoccupied with the know-how. He is too busy to think about the meaning and the purpose of life. For him the means have an immediate reality but the aims, which he has deposited in the attic of his mind, have no reality at all.

Behind this displacement of values is a pragmatic outlook, itself the outcome of objectification, which makes the usefulness of a thing or a being determine its place on the scale of values. In determining the value of entities, their qualities and quantities, the element of truth is totally ignored. "One of the worst evils," warns Berdyaev, "is a utilitarian attitude toward truth." Man has the devious illusion that the truth is his servant. There is no awareness that he has been called to serve the truth.

Berdyaev notes that part of the same confusion in values is the widespread prevalence of the principle that the end justifies the means. Evil means are being used to achieve good ends, means which contradict the very ends sought. Christianity is no exception. Its history is checkered with dark means and bright ends. In Europe, the attempt was made to spread the Christian message of love and forgiveness by blood and violence. The phantom of the professional Christian inquisitor darkens many decades of church history. Evil means have weakened rather than strengthened the church. The noble ends of the French Revolution were lost in the terror and violence of the guillotine.

Berdyaev cites with bitter criticism "the dehumanization and bestialization" of our times, the "barbaric forms of cruelty" of our modern society, and, with sarcasm, the "bestialism" which "is something quite different from the old, natural, healthy barbarism; it is barbarism within a refined civilization." "Here," he continues, "the atavistic, barbaric instincts are filtered through the prism of civilization, and hence they have a pathological character." The ABC of bestialism is that everything is permissible: "Man may be used in any way desired for the attainment of inhuman and antihuman aims." Objectification leads, with reliable regularity, to a denial of the value of the human personality. Man is depersonalized and dehumanized by its operation. He loses his personality and his humanity when he is used as a means for whatever ends. Our modern world is not moved by the values of the spirit, the value of the human personality, the value of human freedom, the value of eternal truth. It is moved by such values as power, wealth, nation, class, race. All these and many others are put above man by man himself. Power ranks high in man's estimation, even higher than his own personality. The quest for power leads him to sacrifice his humanity and thus he becomes inhuman to his fellow man. The process of depersonalization and dehumanization, Berdyaev regretfully declares, has indeed penetrated all phases of human life.

A conspicuous picture of man's dehumanization and the loss of his personal freedom may be observed in the field of economics. Personality is made to depend on what a man possesses. Property is considered the guarantee of man's freedom and security. But the freedom and security conferred by property vanish with the loss of that property. Money, "the great enslaver of a man and of mankind," is "symbol of impersonality."

Berdyaev does not hesitate to pass judgment on both Capitalism and Communism as powerful agents of depersonalization and dehumanization. As an economic system, Capitalism is the breeding of money by money for money's sake. Production exists for the purpose of making profits, and man exists to keep the wheels of production turning. No wonder such a system sees nothing wrong with destroying large quantities of food supplies for purely economic interests at a time when millions are starving. Man does have the duty to develop himself economically, but, Berdyaev cautions,

The divorce of economy from life, the technical interpretation of life, and the fundamental capitalist principle of profit, transform man's economic life into a fiction. The capitalist system is sowing the seeds of its own destruction by sapping the spiritual foundation of man's economic life.

Berdyaev's verdict on Communism is equally severe, but it takes a different direction. On the whole, he had no economic nor even political quarrels with Communism. He was in favor of its objectives of putting an end to the exploitation of man by man, and of terminating the class struggle and giving birth to a classless society. He commended the communist dream of creating a world organization that would abolish war. But he vigorously opposed both Marxism and Communism on spiritual grounds. In Marxism, he discerned an economic variation of the Hegelian theme. In his book, The Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar, Berdyaev devotes a chapter to an analysis of "The Contradictions in Marxism." "The contradiction in Marxism lies also in the fact that the realm of freedom … will be the inevitable result of necessity … This is essentially a denial of freedom." Marx subjected man "to historic necessity, to the point of deifying this necessity." He thought of the present as nothing but means to the future; and thus, as Berdyaev writes, "the value of human life for itself in the present is denied." The system that set out to humanize society produced "a process of dehumanization," for "Marx's atheism … results from his exclusion of one very important phase, of man as a spiritual being."

Berdyaev was convinced that today's Communism has deviated from the original economic philosophy of Marxism and has become a form of "State Capitalism." He recognized soon after the Russian Revolution that "Communism … imperils the living principle of freedom and personality." In his book, The Origin of Russian Communism, Berdyaev has clearly shown how "only that sort of freedom, freedom for the collective construction of life in the general direction of the communist party, is recognized in Soviet Russia." Furthermore, hostility to religion belongs to the very essence of Communism. It denies the freedom of choice and the freedom of conscience and thus it crushes with its materialistic fist man's individual personality and personal liberty. Its denial of God naturally leads to its denial of the human personality.

Having to work with and through machines, man is finding that slowly but surely his emotional life is being damaged. The machines were invented for the purpose of freeing man from slavery to nature and time, and were supposed to lighten the burden of his labor, but instead they have become his mute yet noisy slave driver and not infrequently invoke upon him the curse of unemployment. Through the mechanization of life, man is mercilessly forced to degenerate into a machine. Confronted with "almighty technics," man is dissolved into certain functions. His personality, his freedom, his real center, all disappear. Closely related to the towering achievements of modern technology are the amazing discoveries of modern science, which likewise have a hand in the process of dehumanization.

Berdyaev recognizes the symptoms of dehumanization also in modern literature and philosophy. Particularly in the novel, he finds that man is decomposed and that his whole imagination is distorted. His real image can no longer be discerned. In the psychological novel, which is concerned with the analysis of the subconscious life, man appears to be dissolved into one or a few of his component elements. "Modern novelists almost completely lack creative imagination, they are either preoccupied with themselves, or simply picture the evil realities with which they are burdened." Often, the characters disappear beneath their sadistic instincts or are lost in the blind alleys of their sex life. No doubt, admits Berdyaev, the modern novel contains much of the truth about man and about what is happening to him in the present age.

In philosophic thought, the depersonalization and alienation of the human personality is a more complex process. It may be detected in such movements as empiricism, idealism, naturalism and materialism. Modern philosophy, particularly Existentialism, although it stresses the question about man, his existence and freedom, has nevertheless betrayed signs of disintegration and degradation. In Heidegger's ontology of Nothing, Berdyaev finds a philosophy of pessimism and despair in which man is hopelessly lost in a metaphysical jungle of fear, worry, and death. Jaspers, whom Berdyaev regarded as "a far more authentic existentialist than Heidegger and Sartre," shows a modified tendency toward the same thinking as Heidegger even though he did not admit "an ontological knowledge by means of concepts" and accepted only "the possibility of metaphysics as symbolic knowledge." Berdyaev severely criticizes Sartre's philosophy, "which debases man and denies every higher principle in him," and he wonders how it "can possibly be linked with the rôle of freedom in human life, and the possibility of creating a new and better way of life." He finds Sartre's concept of freedom and his emphasis that "man is condemned to freedom" too negative, too empty, and devoid of any connection with truth. And what metaphysics is there in Freud except the metaphysics of death and nothingness? According to Freud, says Berdyaev, man is torn between the instinct of sex and the instinct of death. He also mentions the "dehumanization of Christianity" by some modern religious thinkers such as Karl Barth in whose "dialectic theology … the image of God in man is shattered."

Throughout his books, Berdyaev discusses with existential flavor the dehumanizing operations which are characteristic of "the realm of Caesar," the state. He agrees with Nietzsche that "the state is the most cold-blooded of monsters." There is in man a natural disposition to dominate others. He finds it hard to resist the temptation to develop and exercise sovereignty over his fellow men.

Unfortunately, says Berdyaev regretfully, Christians have not followed the example of Christ. They have responded to the claims of sovereigns by genuflecting without reflection. The words of Christ "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's" have commonly been misunderstood and misinterpreted. They have often been taken as a justification for reconciling the kingdom of Caesar and the Kingdom of God. But these words of the Master, Berdyaev explains, do not imply evaluations and do not give Caesar and his realm a religious connotation. They were not meant to abolish the conflict between the two kingdoms. Was not the life of Christ precisely this conflict carried out till the end with earnestness and without flinching?

The clash between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar is here to stay because under the conditions of this world the function of the state is necessary. It will always remain so. In philosophical terms, this is the conflict between freedom and necessity, between the spirit and the objectified world. What must be rejected is the state's claim of sovereignty. "Sovereignty belongs to no one: it is only one of the illusions of objectification." Caesar is the product and the agent of the objectified world and therefore cannot hold the right of sovereignty. "The relationships between church and state have been, and always will be, contradictory and they present an insoluble problem."

The tragic fact is that the cult of sovereignty is, nevertheless, practiced in the kind of world we live in, and the poison of imperial authority runs in the veins of human rulers. The state itself, especially the totalitarian state, never refrains from attempting, and never gives up pretending, to act as if it were a church in giving meaning to the lives of men, and thus exercises domain over their souls, minds, and hearts. The state has continuously shown the tendency and desire to trespass the limits of control and authority and power to which it is lawfully entitled. The totalitarian state voices and defends the arrogant and erroneous claim that man exists for its own sake. Instead of being the guardian of man's rights and the protector of his freedom, it stamps upon his rights and tramples his temple of freedom. Consequently, man is dehumanized and his personality is paralyzed by the state's hypnotic power. He surrenders his freedom at the altar where the mystifying and stultifying sacrament of imperial authority is administered. Knowingly or unknowingly, the state is inclined to be guided by the expedient principle that prevailed at the trial of Jesus: "It is better for us that one man should die for the people than the whole nation should perish." But Berdyaev is not unaware of the complexity caused by the fact that the people themselves are not always innocent but often find their own deceitful dreams come true in the actions and transactions of the state.

The state is, of course, a projection, an exteriorization, an objectification of a condition of the people themselves … and there lies the chief evil and a source of human slavery.

The greatest threat confronts man, Berdyaev argues, when the state is conceived as a personality, as an organism, having its own existence apart from the people. It is then that its depersonalizing mechanism operates on a larger and more dangerous scale. It is then that "the prince of this world" is already at the helm of the state steering it to totalitarianism and, with it, to self-destruction. But regardless of the uniform he wears and the flag he flies, Caesar has an irresistible tendency to demand not only what is properly his own, but also what is God's; he wants the whole of man to be subject to himself. And in this lies the greatest tragedy of history, that of freedom and necessity, of human fate and historic destiny.