Berdyaev (1874-1948)

Freedom is the result of spiritual growth

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) was an important Russian religious existentialist philosopher. He is sometime called a philosopher of freedom, because of the centrality of freedom in his writings. For his ideas and activities he was arrested by the Soviet authorities, and expelled from the USSR in 1922, after which he lived in Germany and France.

The following text is adapted from Berdyaev’s book Freedom and the Spirit (1927). Berdyaev distinguishes between two kinds of freedom: The freedom to choose your life, which is a limitless freedom that comes from the foundation of human existence; and the freedom that releases you from your lower nature towards the truth. Both of these freedoms, Berdyaev tells us, are problematic. The first freedom can lead to arbitrary decisions, and to slavery to our lower nature. The second freedom invites authority (the church, the state, ourselves) to “free” us from ourselves by force – which contradicts freedom. The solution which Berdyaev offers is a third kind of freedom. This is a spiritual freedom in which truth is not something external to me, but is part of my inner essence – in the form of divine grace. (For Berdyaev, this means that the human being has a human-divine nature, like Christ.) Since truth (God) is part of who I am, it does not force itself on me from the outside. To be free we must therefore cultivate our spirituality and discover our freedom in our inner depth.

The word “freedom” has two different meanings, because “freedom” can be understood either as the initial, irrational liberty which comes before good and evil and which determines the choice between them, or as the intelligent freedom which is our final liberty in truth and goodness.
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When we say of a man that he has attained a true liberty by overcoming the lower part of his nature and submitting it to the control of the highest spiritual principles – in other words, to truth and goodness, it is always this second kind of freedom that we are referring to. […] This is the freedom to which man advances, the summit of his life’s activity and its final goal.

But there is another kind of freedom, the kind from which man starts, and with which he chooses his direction in life, and through which he acquires truth and goodness. This is a sort of freedom which is, somehow, the mysterious source of life…
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Each of these two kinds of wisdom has a tragic dialectic through which it degenerates into its opposite, in other words into slavery and necessity.
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The first kind of liberty does not necessarily mean adherence to the life in truth and in God. It may mean choosing the path of conflict and hatred, in other words the way of evil. […] We know from our own experience that the anarchy of our passions and the lowest impulses of our nature can bring us into a state of slavery, deprive us of the freedom of the spirit, and bring us under the domination of necessity and our lower nature.
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The second kind of liberty […] is also in danger of degenerating into its opposite. Without the first kind of freedom, this second freedom leads to arbitrary constraints, and to virtues that are imposed from the outside. In other words, it leads to a denial of liberty of the spirit, and to the tyrannical organization of human life. While the first kind of freedom implies anarchy which ends by annihilating liberty, the second leads to an arbitrary tyranny which entirely destroys freedom of the spirit and of conscience. An authoritarian society is a product of this second kind of liberty.
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Only the coming of the new Adam, the spiritual man, can end this tragedy of freedom and can overcome the conflict between freedom and necessity. […] This is a third kind of liberty which is a reconciliation of the other two kinds. […] Redemption frees human liberty from the evil which destroys it, and it does this not through constraint or necessity, but by grace, which is a force that acts from inside freedom itself.
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Truth must correspond to my spiritual nature and life. It cannot be something external that is imposed upon me by force. In the spiritual world there is no dictatorship, and compulsion is wholly out of the question. [...] Freedom cannot be obtained by force, because you must first possess it yourself, and you must discover it from within. The development to autonomy can only be the result of spiritual growth.