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...