Freedom, Happiness, and the Communion of Life

Abstract

The first part of this paper discusses the question of freedom and happiness through the prism of Dostoyevsky's Story of the Grand Inquisitor and Evgenyi Zamyatin's dystopia We. It argues that the goal of human life is not happiness but freedom, and that materialistic utilitarianism and rationalism do not oppose totalitarianism. The second part of the paper shows, through the philosophy of Nikolai Berdyaev, that freedom is both personalistic and communitarian and that death and separation in our lives cannot destroy life and the meaning of life. According to Berdyaev's eschatological vision, there is no individual salvation; life is eternal and essentially communal. The argument of this paper could be described as theologia crucis.