Too Much Individuality, Not Enough Personality

One insight from Berdyaev that I have found particularly clarifying when it comes to the problem of what it means to be oneself, to be true to oneself is the distinction between individualism and personality.

To simplify Berdyaev’s often overly complicated and circular line of thinking, I will reduce his definitions of the two to the following:

Individual

• A human being possesses both individuality and personality.
• Berdyaev defines individuality as the exteriorized, natural, societal aspects of human beings.
• Within this conceptualization, nature and society form the whole, and the individual forms the singular part of the whole.
• In other words, the individual is a part of nature and society, not vice versa.
• In this sense, the individual is largely an external phenomenon determined almost entirely by external forces, the enslaving power of the world.
• The individual is not the existential center; it is the perceived base component of an existential center that exists outside the individual, an existential center with which the individual must comply or struggle against.
• The individual is an object among objects. The object world determines an individual’s worth by evaluating the individual’s “objectness.”
• In this regard, the individual is “impersonal.”

Personality

• Berdyaev defines personality as the absolute existential center.
• Personality determines itself from within, from the inward scheme of existence, which Berdyaev equates with spirit and freedom.
• Unlike the individual, a personality is not a part of the cosmos; the cosmos is a part of personality.
• Personality is the quality of the cosmos.
• Man is a personality not through nature or society but through spirit and freedom.
• Personality is not an object among other objects and not a thing among other things. It is a subject among subjects, and the turning of it into an object or a thing means death.
• Personality contains not only a human image but also the image of God.
• Personality is not an object but a subject. It relates only to other subjects.
• God communicates with personality, not the individual because unlike the individual, personality has the capacity to be truly free and engage in self-existent, original, creative acts.

As a being, man is both an individual and a personality, but through an enslaved form of consciousness, man focuses far too much awareness and energy on the former (at the expense of the latter).

Consciousness determines being, and man is locked in a mode of consciousness that convinces him that his true self exists primarily—or in extreme cases exclusively—only in the individual; that is, at the level of an object among objects.

This mode of consciousness has made man a slave to the world and a slave to himself. The solution to this enslavement involves shifting consciousness from the individual to personality.  
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Individuals define themselves by their relations with society, nature, and the world. Personality defines itself by its relation to God, from which it draws the strength and unity needed to overcome fear and determination.