INTRODUCTION
1.1 P.A. Florensky and Russian philosophy
CHAPTER 2. GNOSEOLOGY P.A. FLORENIAN
3.1 Symbolism
3.2 Sophiology
CONCLUSION
LIST OF USED SOURCES
INTRODUCTION
In the famous lecture about Pavel Florensky, Fr. Alexander Men said: "Florensky is a person who cannot be unambiguously characterized ... This is a figure, although he has caused and is causing controversy today, of course, of a huge scale. And controversy was caused by everyone - both Pushkin and Leonardo da Vinci (...) who do not argue, is not interesting to anyone "
One of Florensky's close friends and in many ways his associate Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (Father Sergius) gave the most general definition of Florensky's spiritual path; his conclusion was very definite: "The spiritual center of his personality, the sun that illuminated all his gifts, was his priesthood." And even earlier, another person and thinker close to Florensky, Vasily Vasilyevich Rozanov, "as his most essential definition" called Florensky "tepevs" (precisely in Greek), a priest.
Why is this involvement in the circle of clergy the main thing? After all, almost all Russian thinkers of this time asserted their faith in God, their religiosity (that is why this period in our culture is called a religious-philosophical renaissance). But there is also a huge, precisely worldview difference, which changes the very structure of life and thought - the priest considers the liturgical-Eucharistic, cult service to be the main goal of his life. For him, cult service - theurgy - becomes "the central task ... of life, as the task of fully translating reality into meaning and fully realizing meaning in reality." No, of course, the priesthood is not limited to this, but in Florensky's life it was the cult that became the determining factor in all other aspects of activity, because for him "a cult is the order of life, to which all the sacred things of life, thoughts and deeds of the Christian ascend. Cult is sacred and the only one. the basis for living thought, creativity, the public. "
Considering the state of philosophical thought in religion today and having studied the works of Abbot Andronic (Trubachev A.S.), Losev A.F., Horuzhego S.S., Fudel S.I., Florensky P.V., Galtseva R.A. and others and evaluating the philosophy of Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky from their positions, we can conclude that the significance of this philosopher for our days is enormous. And therefore the theme of our thesis "Antinomism and Symbolism in the Works of Pavel Florensky" is relevant in today's philosophical thought, requiring, of course, its disclosure.
Our study of the philosophical searches and views of P.A. Florensky is aimed at solving the following specific problem: to trace the formation of P. Florensky as a philosopher, to determine the main stages of his religious work, as well as how Russian and Western philosophical thought influenced the formation and development of Fr. Paul.
Solving the problem posed, the task of our thesis is to analyze and summarize those monographs and articles on. Pavel Florensky, which reveal his religious views and the essence of his philosophy, as well as work out critical reviews of the philosopher's work.
Based on the set goal, we consistently solved the following problems:
1. To analyze the philosophical works of Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky, which reveal the essence of the philosophical religious views and philosophical searches of the thinker.
2. To identify the main key problems of the philosophy of P.А. Florensky.
3. Determine what new was introduced by P.A. Florensky into the Russian philosophical thought of the XX and XXI centuries.
Hypothesis: the philosophical quest of Pavel Florensky takes its origins from Russian and Western philosophical thought; philosophy of priest P. Florensky is of great importance in the formation and development of Russian philosophical thought of the twentieth century.
To solve the problems posed, the following methods were used: study and theoretical analysis of P. Florensky's works and critical literature, generalization of the studied material, summing up the results of generalization.
Studying the work of P.A. Florensky, his philosophical searches, three key themes can be distinguished, which are highlighted in three main sections of our work. The first section is "The Philosophy of P.A.Florensky in the Context of Russian Culture and Philosophy", which highlights the issues of P.Florensky's formation as a philosopher and religious figure, his relationship with Russian philosophy and culture. The second section - "The Gnosiology of PA Florensky" - analyzes agnosticism and antinomianism in the philosophy of Fr. Paul. The third section "Symbolism and sophiology of P. Florensky" reveals the essence of symbolism in the works of P.A. Florensky, his doctrine of Sophia (wisdom) and anthropology. In conclusion, the role of Pavel Florensky in Russian philosophy is noted.
CHAPTER 1 PAUL OF FLORENCE: THE ORIGINS OF SPIRITUALITY AND CULTURE
Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) - scientist, religious philosopher and priest. Pavel Aleksandrovich was born near the Yevlakh station of the Transcaucasian Railway (now the Republic of Azerbaijan) in a large family of a railway engineer. Studying at the Tiflis gymnasium, he became interested in natural sciences. However, by his own admission, under the influence of the work of L. N. Tolstoy, he experienced a spiritual crisis. Florensky comes to the conclusion that physical knowledge about the world is limited, insufficient, and loses epistemological optimism. Nevertheless, in 1890 he entered the Physics and Mathematics Department of Moscow University, which he graduated in 1904.
At the university he had the opportunity to listen to the lectures of L. M. Lopatin and S. N. Trubetskoy, which directed his religious and philosophical quest to the "metaphysics of all-unity" Vl. Solovyov. It was here that Florensky became close to young people who were not indifferent to the ideas of "seeking God," the renewal of Orthodoxy. Among them were V. Ern, S.N. Bulgakov, and others. "To make a synthesis of churchliness and secular culture, to completely unite with the Church, but without any compromises, to reproduce all the positive teachings of the Church and the scientific and philosophical worldview together with art, etc. - this is how one of the immediate goals of practical activity seems to me ", - wrote Florensky in a letter to his mother, dated March 1904. Passion for these ideas leads the young scientist to participate in the newly created student circle - the section on the history of religion, and then in Moscow Theological Academy, within the walls of which he received a theological education, where in 1908 he was approved in the position of I. O. Associate Professor at the Department of History of Philosophy and in which he taught until 1919.
In 1911, Pavel Florensky was ordained a priest without holding a parish office.
The most important event in Florensky's life at that time was the defense of his master's thesis "On Spiritual Truth", which was later published under the title "The Pillar and Statement of Truth" (1914). A distinctive feature of this, perhaps the main, work of Florensky is the presence of extensive supplements containing excursions into various fields of scientific knowledge and designed to serve as confirmation of the ideas developed in the work. The book "The Pillar and the Establishment of Truth" did not go unnoticed. She drew attention to the work of Florensky, aroused the interest of the reading public. The ideas expressed by him gave rise to controversies among the religiously-minded intelligentsia, some of them received (and still receive) high marks in theological circles.
Florensky left an extensive theological and religious-philosophical heritage. He wrote works on the church, revealing the essence of religious faith, philosophy, as well as lectures on the history of philosophy: "Questions of religious self-knowledge" (1907), "The universal roots of idealism" (1908), "The first steps of philosophy" (1917), "Cosmological antinomies of I. Kant "(1909) and others. The culturology of PA Florensky is presented in the works" Cult, Religion and Culture "(1918)," Cult and Philosophy "(1918)," Philosophy of Cult "(1922)," Iconostasis "(1921 - 1922)," Reason and Dialectics "(1914), as well as in the article" Christianity and Culture ", written for the English magazine" The Peligrim "and published in 1924. Many of his works have been republished over the past decades in magazines published by the Moscow Patriarchate.
Florensky announced his socio-political position with the sermon "Howl of Blood" (1906), directed against the imposition of the death sentence on Lieutenant Schmidt, for which he was imprisoned. He did not embark on the path of active protests in the name of a radical renewal of the social order, which some of his fellow students in the student circle called for and united around the Christian Brotherhood of Freedom.
After 1917, Florensky was the scientific secretary and keeper of the sacristy of the Commission for the Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquity of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. Later he took part in research work in connection with the GOELRO plan, edited the Technical Encyclopedia. Florensky lectured, conducted research in the field of specific sciences - mathematics, linguistics, physics, as well as in the field of technology. Some of his works from this period were published in Soviet journals and scientific collections.
As a result of unjust accusations, P.A.Florensky was repressed in 1933. In 1958, the Moscow City Court ruled on his posthumous rehabilitation.
P. A. Florensky is an interesting and original figure in the history of Russian theological and religious-philosophical thought in the first third of the 20th century. He combined his versatile scientific interests with a commitment to church traditions. He was distinguished by poetic talent and a penchant for religious and philosophical research.
There are contradictions in Florensky's teachings. At the same time, he himself not only does not avoid, but rather deliberately seeks to identify them both in the field of scientific thinking and in the field of religion. This was reflected in the original concept of antinomianism, which he developed on the basis of Kant's philosophy.
Researchers of Florensky's work rightly believe that the author of The Pillar and the Affirmation of Truth “did not have time to fully publish his anthropodicya,” due to which “the reconstruction of his doctrine of man is a difficult problem”. The foundations of anthropodicy were laid by Florensky already by the time of writing a literary work about Hamlet, in which he, interpreting the vicissitudes of the struggle in the Danish prince of Christian consciousness with the clan, followed the advice of the teachers of the Church "to look in the Gospel for a solution to every question of life," since the New Testament "has its own correspondence "for" every real situation ". For a number of reasons, however, even in the book "The Pillar and the Affirmation of Truth" these thoughts did not receive a complete form, and Florensky had to promise that this task would be completed in the near future - in the work "On the Increase of Types", which should show "how and it is precisely the idea of the authority of Christ "and" how the mysterious rebirth of the soul takes place. " Therefore, it is quite understandable that in the "Memoirs", covering the earliest period of Florensky's life (presumably up to 1898 - 1899), there could be no question of a more or less thorough formulation of the question of the phenomenon of Man, especially since this problem itself (" the discovery of man as the beginning of the cognitive ") became relevant for Florensky only in his university years. Despite the fact that the "Memories" were addressed to the author's children, they remained unfinished, and their plot, unfolding in the footsteps of the creation myth, stopped at the most important place - the problem of the Man created by the Creator and the Creator himself. As a consequence of this, and also in view of the author's desire to "not run ahead" in outlining his spiritual development, the review of the issue of interest should necessarily pursue "negative" rather than "positive" goals, that is, consider primarily the reasons and considerations for how Florensky at this period was unable to come close to the problem of Man.
Analyzing the questions of the relationship between nature and culture, cosmology and anthropology, Florensky later expressed the fundamental idea for him that "the entire human race is only an insignificant part of nature"; the development of this thought eventually challenged the definition of man as "homo sapiens", preferring the "less exalted" definition of him as "homo faber". "Man is a craftsman" - this is the situation of man on a cosmic and existential scale; he is not a creator, in any case he is far from being in charge of the laws of cosmic existence. On the other hand, painting a variegated picture of the human mass in Batum, its different languages and dialects, smells, sounds and colors, Florensky in this multitude and diversity reveals the infinity of "the productive power of nature", which stands above Man in a creative sense; therefore, human houses can disappear without leaving any spiritual traces of their former existence, while the spiritual life of the ruins "harmoniously united with the life of nature." It is no coincidence that Florensky wrote in one of his 1904 letters to Bely: “We cannot compose symbols, they come themselves. When we are filled with a different content” a person owes any form of creativity not so much to his inner potencies as to signs from outside, from nature.
In a number of fragments of his memoirs, Florensky assures of his love for his parents and relatives, but such statements are nothing more than adherence to etiquette, due to the nature and purpose of the text. “It’s strange for me to think now, and even more so to write that in such a family saturated with mutual recognition and mutual love, as ours, in essence, I didn’t love anyone, that is, I loved, but loved One. This only beloved was Nature.” ... It is known that from all relatives Florensky singled out Aunt Yulia, whom he loved "tenderly and passionately", but "without inner motivation, but for her attitude to nature." In nature (in matter) Florensky found what, in his opinion, was not in people - truth, beauty and morality. According to him, people are capable of both loving and not loving depending on their desires, but they love flowers spontaneously and thoughtlessly, for this is the essence of nature. People generally suffer from loneliness "in different ways", they "harm" each other (at least in the way that they "hurt" the author of the memoirs in his childhood - "continuous warmth", "continuous affection", "continuous decency and cleanliness"); going to exotic lands, they therefore seek not contacts with other people, but touches of nature. Florensky himself "fled" from people: in early childhood - into the arms of nature, in school years - into science. Nature, however, was also "hiding" from people; only the author was her "favorite", to him alone she sent her "signs", as a result of which they with nature "knew what others do not know and should not know."
Love for nature, for the "mysterious" and "special" in it, which cannot be solved, overshadowed the young Florensky's interest in history and man.
Florensky considered his parents to be victims of Russian history; He did not want to see himself either among the victims of history, or in the harsh millstone of family education. Father's ideas about the "closed world" of the family, "island paradise", "isolated from the environment", in which "humanity", "warmth" and "softness" would reign, supposedly capable of replacing "religious dogma", "metaphysical truth", " law "and even" morality ", the young Florensky was disgusted, and he rejected them in every possible way internally, moving away from utopian ideas about the family - the prototype of the" new human race "and" clot of purest humanity "- into the natural world with its secrets and mysticism; oddly enough, the only taboo not violated by the young Florensky was a religious prohibition, as a result of which, in childhood, he not only did not learn what prosphora is, but what is narrated in the Gospel of Matthew. From his father's house, Florensky brought out not so little that was useful for his future activities, but his generally fair awareness of the limitations of the world outlook of adults also had a negative connotation: he became indifferent to people, did not trust them, in fact he shared his father's "low" assessment and " dislike "for them. "Memoirs" are full of illustrations of this kind, explaining along the way why their author became interested in the human phenomenon relatively late.
However, Florensky's decisive turn towards building an anthropodicya occurred as a result of his visit to Optina Hermitage in 1905, which gave the author of The Pillar a new understanding of the “philosophy of the people” as a disclosure of the “people's faith”, as well as a view of Optina Pustyn as the ovary of a “new culture”. "Memories", however, testify to different views of the young author and a different understanding of the world, in which a brilliant but subjective vision of the world and its fragmented, responsive parts in each other prevailed. If the plot of the "Pillar" is imprinted with the possible development of Alyosha Karamazov after the death of Zosima, then "Memories" in this respect are sustained in the key of another Dostoevsky's work, namely, "The Teenager" with his image of a young hero who is becoming a young hero who discovers his "idea", only going through the search for generic identity and personal "catastrophe".
1.1 P.A. Florensky and Russian philosophy
Pavel Florensky is a Russian Orthodox thinker. Today, there is still a discussion among scientists-philosophers, whether it was this independent Russian philosophy at all, or whether the works of Russian thinkers should be considered a kind of reflection of Western European philosophy.
This question, as scientists note, if approached without ideological bias, is really not so simple at all. The Western European and Russian traditions of philosophical thought have the same main roots-sources: ancient philosophy and Christianity - it is they that initially so sharply separate European and Russian philosophy from Eastern philosophy, for example, Chinese. And yet, just as from a single root - the teachings of Christ - different trees grew: Orthodoxy and Catholicism, so Russian and Western European philosophical aspirations followed different paths. "Russian philosophical enlightenment," writes P. Florensky in his review-response to the essay of the Moscow Academy of Arts student A. Danilovsky "The history of teaching philosophical sciences in the spiritual educational institutions of Russia," precisely the spiritual school, and only the very end of the 19th century was marked by the emergence of philosophy, which spread in a different way ... The history of teaching philosophical sciences in the spiritual educational institutions of Russia should be recognized as the main thread of the history of Russian philosophy in general, meaning, in this case, under "Russian philosophy" the totality of all philosophical trends that agitated Russian society. But, bearing on itself the high cultural task of the philosophical enlightenment of Russia, the theological school has never been just a mechanical transmitter of Western thought. All representatives of the spiritual school have a special imprint characteristic of Russian thought, and if the history of the teaching of philosophical sciences is the main If the thread of the history of Russian philosophy in the broad sense, this latter is always closely intertwined with the history of Russian philosophy, in the narrow sense of philosophy, natively Russian. " This, according to Florensky, is the historical essence of the issue. Attempts by Western thought to take possession of Russian thought for P. Florensky were largely personified in the figure of Kant, "the great cunning", as he put it. Plato and Kant - these two figures seem to absorb the qualities of polar philosophical and, more broadly, spiritual in general, ideas and ideals. In the interpretation of Florensky, "Kant takes the life-understanding of Plato and changes the sign in front of him - from plus to minus. Then all the pluses change to minuses and all the minuses to pluses in all the positions of Platonism: this is how Kantianism arises."
Russian philosophy, according to Florensky, is an original thought, originating in the teachings of Plato, enriched by the experience of Western European ideas, but not only and not so much by the experience of acceptance as by the experience of overcoming. And one more characteristic, which should be called self-evident in this interpretation, is that the main idea of Russian philosophy is a "religious idea", P. Florensky believed, that is, Russian philosophical thought at the beginning of the 20th century realized itself in a religious and philosophical understanding of the world. And the viability of the "Russian idea" is determined by its rootedness in Orthodoxy. “If Russian philosophy is possible,” wrote Father Pavel, “then only as an Orthodox philosophy, as a philosophy of Orthodox faith, as a precious robe of gold - reason - and semi-precious stones - gains of experience - on the shrine of Orthodoxy” (Greetings to Professor A.I. Vvedensky in connection with his 25-year service at the MDA).
The features of Russian philosophical thought, which are of particular importance for Florensky, but to a much lesser extent distinguished by other thinkers (for example, university science), should be called the "philosophical principles of Slavophilism" and their opposition to "periodically repeated attacks of rationalist principles" and, of course, positivism. in many respects still acceptable to Vl. Soloviev, but already rejected by Florensky.
These are the main features of Russian philosophy, to the figures of which Florensky considered himself and therefore saw them not only in his predecessors and contemporaries, but above all, perhaps, in himself, in his own world outlook.
Proceeding from the fact that the main works were published in the 1910s-1920s, it would be quite legitimate to conclude that Florensky is a thinker of the beginning of the 20th century, especially since much in his works is based on the achievements of science of this particular time (for example, on G. Cantor's set theory and N.V. Bugaev's ideas in mathematics). But if you believe Florensky himself and perceive his words with full seriousness and faith, then immediately doubts arise: a return to the Middle Ages "- this is what Florensky wrote in his abstract in 1925-1926. And a little earlier, in January 1924, Florensky made a wonderful entry in his "Memoirs": time and therefore the first - the coming Middle Ages. "
Here there was an intersection of two kinds of time - chronological time and world-contemplative time. They, both of these times, as taught by positivist science, must always fundamentally coincide. From barbarism - through antiquity, through the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance - to the New Time, if there are no breaks. So in all areas of history, including the history of thought. Florensky, however, felt him quite differently: just as in the field of spatial thinking, instead of "the monotonous plain of the earth's surface" he saw, a man of cult and philosopher of the cult, "everywhere - ladders of ascents and descents", and in time he sensitively felt breaks and breaks when " time comes out of its slots. " And he considered himself a man and a thinker of the turning point - the last and the first at the same time. And not only himself. The younger contemporary of A.F. Florensky Losev gave him the following characterization: “I regard the philosophy of Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky as a transitional period between the old and the new.
The main feature of the world outlook of the Renaissance and the New Age (including, of course, the Enlightenment - the true peak of this tradition) is anthropocentrism, i.e. a teaching that puts a human Personality in the center of the world. Raising a person (who “sounds proudly” and is the “king of nature”) to an unimaginable height, such a consciousness separates him from the world, puts him above the world, and this world itself turns only into a field of his activity, that is, into something external to man. The most obvious consequence of such a world outlook is ecological: a person belongs to the world "predatory-mechanical, taking away from him what seems necessary to him, knocking out with blood, disregarding losses. And how could it be otherwise if a person does not recognize himself as a part of the world. , but considers himself to be his undivided ruler, if there is no one above a person to whom he should give an account of what he has done. "
For the person himself, such a consciousness is no less destructive. When this type of outlook was still at the stage of formation in the Renaissance, then even then the greatest achievements of the "liberated man" on their other side turned into the greatest atrocities. Such geniuses and titans as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo professed the same faith as the geniuses of villainy, for example, Cesare Borgia and his family. AF Losev described this type of personality in this way - the "reverse side of titanism", that is, the personality in its "endless self-affirmation and in its unrestrained spontaneity of any passions, any emotions and any whims, reaching some kind of narcissism and to some wild and bestial aesthetics. "
In Russian religious philosophy of that time, the idea of using antinomies for theological purposes was often encountered. BP Vysheslavtsev, SN Bulgakov, L.I. ) used this concept most often episodically, while in the works of Florensky antinomies become the subject of special and systematic consideration, eventually turning into a widely implemented methodology.
1.2 Philosophy of Pavel Florensky and "new religious consciousness"
Comprehending Russian philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century, it can be noted that Florensky is one of the spokesmen for the "new religious consciousness." As noted by N.K. Bonetskaya, the work of a philosopher cannot be understood and appreciated outside of any philosophical traditions. So Western thinkers of the XIX - XX centuries. one way or another proceeded from the works of Kant. Russian philosophy has no such "father"; on the other hand, the common spiritual source of Russian thinkers was the Orthodox faith. Regardless of what views a Russian consciously professed, his primary intuitions, his direct experience of being were rooted in faith. The works of many representatives of Russian philosophy are based on the understanding of faith. This can be seen if we take into consideration the Khomyakov-Solov'ev line of Russian philosophy, the works of sophiologists and mystic Vyach. Ivanov. But the same can be said about those who have gone through the Kantian art, whose thought has forever remained marked by the stamp of criticism and "strict science." Faith as a spirit of cognition under various names is not difficult to find in the worldview of not only the mystics S.L. Frank and N.O. Lossky, but also completely innocent of mysticism, a supporter of the architectonic philosophical thinking of M.M.Bakhtin. In his final book, Self-Knowledge, Berdyaev writes that in emigration he was seriously considered an Orthodox thinker; and for all his truly crushing criticism of the modern faith, Berdyaev by no means categorically disputed the idea of himself as an Orthodox person.
We can say that the striving for faith is embedded in Russian thinkers "genetically" - it does not matter that the path of most of them is from Marxism (or positivism, as in the case of Florensky) to idealism. Life, upbringing and education at the turn of the XIX - XX centuries. were still imbued with the spirit of Orthodoxy. And it was faith that became the foundation on which complex mental structures were erected, the ancient Orthodox faith turned out to be the common source from which expressive and completely dissimilar philosophical systems were formed. Most of the domestic thinkers in their formation went through faith, at some point in their fate, completely sincerely, with all their being they wanted to remain in it, as in the promised land, forever. Some aspects of church experience entered their systems as positive values; others have not grafted onto their personality. As a rule, a departure from the faith occurred due to the fact that ancient Orthodoxy was unable to accommodate the intellectual depths and complexities of the human soul of the modern era. Too much of what seemed righteous was impossible to church; the best impulses turned out to be rejected by the Church - a break with it for the sake of serving God, for the sake of preserving the most valuable in oneself became inevitable. The path of the philosophers with whom the term "new religious consciousness" is associated was precisely this. But even in those who apparently did not break with historical Orthodoxy, a deep transformation of the original ancient Church intuitions took place. Therefore, Florensky and Bulgakov, in spite of their priesthood and will to confess Orthodoxy, can be quite legitimately attributed to the current of "new religious consciousness". When comprehending the views of Russian thinkers, it is important to recognize in them the original faith and the ways of its transformation.
The problem of Florensky as an exponent of a new religious consciousness could be approached from various angles. Anthropology is not a particularly emphasized and developed area of Florensky's views; Florensky has no doctrine of the human personality. Florensky does not have a whole huge range of problems associated with freedom. This is especially clearly manifested in his "anthropodicy", in lectures on the philosophy of the cult, in which the idea of magical determinism dominates and there is no hint of freedom of God and man. This is due to the absence in theology of the author of the "Pillar" and "Philosophy of the Cult" Christ, which was noted back in the 30s by G. Florovsky. Florensky's general ideas are in no way personalistic - his concept of a person and, in particular, the image of an ideal personality should be sought primarily in the characteristics of specific individuals.
At the center of the thinker's views, he consciously placed the Church as a holy creature, a creature in God; in this sense, Florensky's thinking is ecclesiocentric. Ideologically, Florensky is Orthodox, and extremely strict and tough; this Orthodox severity, in particular, manifested itself in his attitude towards Blok and Tolstoy, who turned out to be, so to speak, antiheroes in his eyes. And therefore it is natural that Florensky's thought, in search of human perfection, turned to the ministers of the Church. Florensky owns a number of characteristics of clergy, but these "portraits" clearly do not fit into Orthodox ideology. Florensky is concerned not so much with the church anthropological canon, manifested in specific people, as with its violation. It is in violations of the canon that he sees spiritual freedom and, therefore, truth. No, Florensky in no way advocated the abolition of the canon, in particular the anthropological canon. For him, truth was in the canon; he sensed in him a mysterious spiritual depth, inconspicuous for a superficial glance. But the veneration of the spirit of the canon can come into conflict with its letter. The canonical "letter" in the eyes of Florensky is not the last value, and there are people who have the highest right to cancel it: "the law does not lie to the righteous." Florensky was looking for truth beyond church forms; in faith he was dear to her "absolutely sacred core - undoubtedly he believed in this, which is present inside all" shells "- the dear life beating under the bark of all expired symbols", as he wrote in 1905 to Andrei Bely. But the same path into the depths of historical religion, the path to supra-confessional, eternal truth was the path of all, in particular Russians, who expressed the "new religious consciousness." To work out the content of a particular confession so that, having reached its last, noumenal essence, to go beyond its limits - here is the essence of the quests of Merezhkovsky, Berdyaev, and Andrei Bely - just as, we note, the essence of various theosophical and anthroposophical currents is not accidentally feeling their connection with the "Olympic" views of Goethe. In fact, for a Russian, this meant a certain degree of break with Orthodoxy - one need not add the word "historical", since Orthodoxy is understood as one of the historical phenomena of Christianity.
Florensky set the goal of his life to reconstruct the "universal human outlook." By the completed fragments of the work "At the Divides of Thought", in particular by the philological section, one can judge how Florensky saw the worldview, which he considered to be true, adequately corresponding to the objective structure of life. And least of all this worldview resembles patristic Orthodoxy. Realism in the medieval sense, based on the occult, magical-incantatory, but not the religious-prayer knowledge of the transcendental world - so, in its most general form, one could call it, according to Florensky, one at all times, primary, immediate , "folk" experience of being. In the "Pillar" there is no Christ, but there is the Church; in "Watersheds", however, faith is dissolved in a completely alien material - there is a complex of pagan-magical intuitions - the one that was abolished, historically overcome by Christianity.
If the center of Christianity is God the Redeemer, then Florensky's attention, all the forces of his powerful, truly brilliant intuition are directed to the created world. And unfriendly to Florensky, Berdyaev quite aptly defined such views as "cosmic seduction."
Like other Russian religious philosophers of the early twentieth century, Florensky felt that holiness was historically concrete. A person is faced with the task of deifying the historical anthropological type characteristic of his era. The newest time must sanctify, raise to God a complicated, deepened and contradictory soul. And it would be strange in the 20th century to be guided, as an ideal, by the image of a medieval ascetic. The mystical and existential goal of a Christian is to "give life" to Christ in his heart. Christ is not a limited individual, but an all-man in whom everyone needs to find himself. And "imitation" of Christ can consist exclusively in cleansing the heart on one or another path of spiritual life, in releasing one's own "image of God", one's eternal idea from under the wrath of sin, flesh, and emotional empiricism. Trying to bring the sanctity of someone else's era into your life is a thankless and spiritually dangerous business, since it is fraught with inner lies and deformation of the soul. Such, for example, is the "secondary simplification" of the modern refined personality, which in fact turns into conscious self-stupidity and pharisaism.
In connection with the figure of Florensky, which is very attractive for the searches of modern man, the question arises about the last foundations of his views. And talking about his orientation towards the spiritual values of the Church is clearly not enough: it is necessary to point out the shades of his philosophy. Florensky's philosophy was analyzed in a number of authoritative works, primarily in the works of Berdyaev and Florovsky. For us, as for these thinkers, there is no doubt that Florensky's "Orthodoxy" is by no means patristic: spiritually Florensky belongs to his time, and not to the "Russian Middle Ages", which he would like. This is natural - and if we talk about assessments of this moment, then the intellectual and literary honesty of a philosopher cannot evoke anything other than approval. Therefore, for a correct understanding of both the Florensky phenomenon and the whole of Russian philosophy, this conclusion must be emphasized and comprehended in every possible way, and not gloss over, thereby serving a bad service to the thinker and distorting the truth. Considering the series of spiritual portraits and sketches of faces created by Florensky that personified his ideal, one can see a Gnostic assessment of the personality of St. Sergius; stylized as a patericon, somewhere deliberately naive image of the elder Isidore - an attempt to be content with the simplicity of the icon; then, certainly not an iconographic, not at all harmonious, restless image of the archimandrite. Serapion, a Gnostic philosopher and rebel against the existing forms of Orthodoxy; and, finally, the hypothetical figure of a very complex thinking and feeling person who recognizes Christ as the Ideal, but follows Him not in a straight, artless Orthodox way, but in roundabout and confused paths. A truly Orthodox simplicity seems to Florensky too boring, everyday, "positive"; he is more attracted by extravagant deviations from the Orthodox type. Together with Berdyaev, Rozanov and Merezhkovsky, Florensky personifies the deep and essential crisis of Orthodoxy in the 20th century.
1.3 Utopia and ideology in the philosophical consciousness of P.A. Florensky
There was no utopian idea in Russian culture at the beginning of the century, to which PA Florensky would have remained indifferent. And this seems to be quite natural, if we take into account its encyclopedic scope - simultaneously a philosopher, theologian, mathematician, physicist, art critic, etc., etc. It was such a time that almost not a single intellectual enterprise could do without cardinal transformation projects. ... And therefore, the larger the thinker's workspace turned out to be, the more likely one could discover in him radical ideas.
With Florensky, in this respect, the situation is quite special. In his person, we are faced with a new phenomenon with a new structure of consciousness, which until then had not been encountered in the everyday life of Russian theoretical (and even more so theological) thought. In this regard, Fr. Pavel Florensky was often criticized for inconsistency of certain dogmas from the generally accepted ones. These disputes continue to this day. So, in this regard, the article by R.A. Galtseva "Thought as Will and Representation", in which the author sharply criticizes Florensky on a number of points.
So R.A. Galtseva reproaches Florensky for the fact that, as a student of the Moscow Theological Academy, Florensky acted as a popularizer and publisher of an unknown Fr. Serapion Mashkin as an outstanding philosopher, theologian and politician: "the most sincere in his sincerity, the most absolute in his metaphysics, the most radical in his public." Serapion Mashkin, and leaves them lying "in a pile of paper." And the author of the essay assumes that Florensky borrowed some of the ideas from Mashkin, therefore he did not want to publish his works on the pages of the Theological Bulletin, which he published. "Who is in front of us: are there really double thinkers who write under the dictation of the same medium ?! And a dilemma arises: either in the form of" Pillar "we are offered Mashkin's work, or he himself is a projection of the author - Florensky", - concludes the author of the essay.
However, there is a fact - perhaps the only known and available to us evidence from an "independent source", undermining the tempting and otherwise plausible this option. This is a review by prof. A. I. Vvedensky for the candidate's thesis of the volunteer at the Moscow Academy of Arts, hieromonk S. Mashkin ("On moral reliability"), which coincides with the descriptions of Florensky. The work of the applicant is portrayed as voluminous (586 pp.), Encyclopedically multidimensional, replete with natural-scientific insertions, as "a wonderful attempt to radically rearrange the question of the criterion of truth", substantiating it with "religious intuition ...". Moreover, the dissertation, says the reviewer, "sets out painful questions ... the author comes to the solution himself, through the experience of his own life, reflection and intense struggle with doubts ... The essay clearly reflected traces of tension and anguish experienced by the author slowly and with obstacles got out of the grip of skepticism ... ".
"There is an amazing strategy; the author does two opposite things at once: he tries to propagandize his hero - and illuminate him with a fantastically unreal light. And the hero of Florensky himself is distinguished by a fundamentally unclear status. In contrast to the character, romantic irony, in which the serious is also inseparable from the buffoonery, but where semantic diversity exists in the same plane of fiction, this character is placed in the position of a proteus, leading a double life in parallel. "Serapion Mashkin" is the name of a real person, and at the same time it is a composed figure, made up to resemble a real person. "
In all, even the harshest, responses to The Pillar, not to mention favorable or enthusiastic, reviewers traditionally proceed from the preamble that a word in a philosophical text serves to directly express thought. Susceptible to any intentionality, N.A. Berdyaev, being the spiritual antipode of Florensky, the most insured against the hypnosis of this magical person, could come closest to solving his word. Berdyaev finds in the book "artificiality" of feelings and "indifferent to good and evil ... decadent aestheticism", but he does not deny the authenticity of the struggle "with oneself" and settling "accounts with one's own elemental nature."
G. Florovsky, who is close in his assessments to Berdyaev, notes some extraordinary features of Florensky's theological and philosophical texts. When G. Florovsky denounced "ambiguity" and "double consciousness" in "Pillar", he meant, first of all, the psychological precariousness and vague thought of Florensky, resulting in the creation of "seductive alloys."
Critics point out that from the very beginning Florensky's "metautopia" was not utopian contemplative, but ideologically pragmatic and purposeful. Even in publications about Mashkin, an ambiguous word, although it testifies to the author's variable positions, is still more focused on an effective task: to shock the audience's habitual way of thinking and thereby prepare it for the second stage - the acceptance of new norms and authorities. Florensky is also related to avant-gardism by the technique itself - an orientation towards direct, subconscious communication with the public, which abolishes the requirements of logical consistency and consistency.
The fact is that Florensky's idea and, in general, judgment appear not in the usual function - to convey the author's thought, but in the applied sense - to serve the autonomous author's will, which is not so much aimed at comprehending reality as it is busy with staging, or presenting, ideas. And how in the art of pop art everything that comes to hand goes into action: pins, feathers, foil - a new type of thinking, in which the play of the mind replaces philosophy and even, perhaps, squeezes faith, is ready to borrow its material from any before the eyes of sources, from different eras and outlook. “A collage of ideas, however, is capable of creating no less shake-up of consciousness than a pictorial collage, and has no less attractive power than it. sensitivity, or when for argumentation in one discipline the author resorts to arguments from another, and logical proof turns into psychological, and that, in turn, turns out to be an argument in metaphysical reasoning. the name of the mystical and noumenal instances, it seems to be by itself reserved from criticism from the "flat rationalists".
Each statement of Florensky is a kind of attempt to create a new "wide-ranging multifaceted worldview", the need for which, in his words, "is spreading like an explosive wave in society," and "to subject the study of the most basic concepts that human thought operates". Florensky demands a revision of the "archive where our observations of the facts are recorded" in order to find out whether "there were any false documents", and one of such elements laid in the foundation of the "modern world outlook of our European civilization" declares the "idea of continuity", reigned in science, which, it turns out, misinterpreted the facts. The author is in a hurry to correct the matter, placing at the forefront, on the contrary, the "idea of discontinuity", which, as he testifies, he learned from mathematics and which, in his words, "bursts into science from all sides." The author directly calls one of these "sides" - this is "new art", which shows the way for science.
The crux of the matter is not what the relationship between the principles - evolution and revolution - was in reality in the scientific methodology of the 19th century. What is important is the author's methodology, which asserts its right to "sudden leaps" and restores "abstract principles" to each other. Having severed previously two interconnected moments of a single process and attributing to the preceding course of cultural history the dominance of one of them, declared false, the author, with a radical gesture, puts forward the opposite principle in its place as the only true beginning, while science, occupied with its objective subject, finds to correct "slopes" synthesizing paths; for example, it asserts the wave-particle theory of light, thereby, as it were, teaching a lesson in concretely embodied "criticism of abstract principles."
Florensky's word divides the world into two halves: black and white, although the principles by which the demarcation takes place may vary. If, in the course of what was conceived, it was necessary to call admiring attention to something, then in the form of a black background the antipode doomed to destruction is always found and vice versa.
Another revolution, this time in epistemology, Florensky makes stating that when thinking about the theory of knowledge "one has to proceed from the bifurcation of the act of knowledge into a subject and an object," there are some springs for thought, on which it could move without experiencing impulses from the twofold area of its research ... The theory of knowledge is and should be monistic. " Elsewhere in the same lecture, which is considered part of the "Introduction to the History of Ancient Philosophy", it is directly said: "So, we repeat the Copernican revolution, but in an expanded form." After these statements one gets the impression that in the theory of knowledge it is already extremely difficult to make ends meet.
Florensky makes a "reassessment of the dangers" of world culture, condemning, in fact, everything that the science and art of European civilization have at their disposal. So Florensky is inclined to recognize only images that come directly from the world of the noumenal, "that which is not given to sensory experience", in other words, only an icon and did not recognize the perspective in the image. Indeed, in icon painting, where the so-called reverse perspective operates, the painter is guided not by the free possibilities of direct vision, but by the prescribed canonical knowledge.
By the way, for Florensky to abandon secular fine art, it is enough that paintings in Europe were painted ... in oil. “The very consistency of oil paint,” he writes, “has an inner affinity with the thick oily sound of the organ, and the bold brushstroke and richness of colors in oil painting are internally linked with the richness of organ music. The author, without transitions and proofs, writes them into the category of malignant: the juicy-thick sound of the organ somehow turns into "unenlightened" and "flesh" by itself, the frailty of the paper turns into a spiritual deception ... the ideological principle turns out to be a reliable way of "capturing souls"; imbued with confidence in the author's insight in his vision of things, the reader, whose reason is already significantly shaken, is drawn to his driver further, assimilating along with his phenomenology and his axiology.
In The Pillar, one can find limitless variants of antinomianism, which also evoked critical responses. Florensky's antinomianism is simultaneously a characteristic of both ontological and epistemological, and evidence of sin, and a sign of truth, and good and evil. In short, complete confusion reigns supreme. Nevertheless, it does not prevent the principle of contradiction from being established as the dominant principle, excluding harmony.
Another end-to-end idea - discreteness (or "discontinuity") is also declared to be the all-pervading principle of the structure of being and time. As a structural archetype, Florensky refers, in particular, to the layering of rocks, as if being, and even more so time, does not offer us samples of fluidity and continuity. This postulated abstraction should also make a person disbelieve either his eyes or his mind, and excludes any alternative state of matter.
The true "watershed of thought" can be observed in the new "metaphysics" - evidence of yet another metamorphosis that the author himself underwent. If at the initial stage Florensky's self-expression was looking for philosophical forms and it was about truth, and at the next stage it moved into the spheres of theology, now the cosmological theme of the structure of the Universe and the knowledge of the cosmic code has moved from the periphery to the center. This obvious evolution of interests, which is not able to help in solving Florensky's first-intuition as a thinker, helps to unravel his first-intuition as a proto-ideologist with large-scale plans. From the point of view of these latter, it is quite natural and logical for attention to move from the sphere where the truth is sought, to the development of the alphabet of managing the world.
Florensky clearly would like to see his "concrete metaphysics" in the form of "the most complex and magnificently developed system of magical world outlook."
Florensky adheres to the Anglo-American style of thought, and especially the Eastern one, considers any system to be connected not logically, but only teleologically, and sees in this logical fragmentary (fragmented) and contradictory nature an inevitable consequence of the process of cognition itself as creating models and schemes on the lower planes, and at the highest - symbols. An immutable truth is one in which an extremely strong statement is combined with an extremely strong negation, that is, an ultimate contradiction: it is immutable, because it already includes an extreme negation and therefore everything that could be objected to an immutable truth will be weaker than this, contained in it its negation. The subject corresponding to this last antinomy is, obviously, true reality and real truth. This object, the source of being and meaning, is perceived by experience. Denying the abstract logic of thought, Florensky sees the value of thought in its concrete manifestation as a disclosure of personality.
However, no matter how one considers Florensky the thinker, all this concerns only a part of the visible activity, the continuation of which is hidden from us in the vicissitudes of his tragic fate, prophetically described by him in an essay on martyrs under the title "Witnesses" and deserving respectful compassion.
CHAPTER 2. GNOSIOLOGY P.A. FLORENIAN
Today, studying the legacy of P. Florensky, researchers have no doubt that the thought of the late Florensky is a very specific link in the traditions of Christian Platonism, deviating from the classical modern European stage of this tradition far in depth, to its very origins. That this thought re-examines the ties between paganism and Christianity, bringing Orthodoxy and Neo-Platonism together to the utmost (or beyond!), Interpreting Christianity as a mystical-magical religion.
As in many constructions of Russian religious philosophy, an important critical theme in the work of P.A. Florensky - a demonstration of the insufficiency, non-self-justification and non-self-proof of pure reason, formal logical thinking. Then it was often called the theme of "overcoming Kant and Kantianism."
Florensky develops a definite picture of the structure of consciousness, which already serves as the direct basis of his antithetics. According to this picture, there are only two horizons, or two basic states, two types of activity of consciousness. This is, firstly, pure reason, formal-logical thinking, and, secondly, a believing consciousness, a consciousness in communion with the Truth, "the mind of an ascetic", "a grace-filled mind, purified by prayer and deed." These two horizons of consciousness in relation to each other are mutually exclusive and polar opposite. The presence of the mind at one of its poles necessarily means its rejection of the other, a break with it and opposition to it, so that each of these states of consciousness qualifies the opposite state as insanity. The transition from a "rational" state to a "grace-filled" state cannot be a continuous, smooth evolution, but only a discrete, abrupt leap, which can be realized in an extremely super-rational, volitional way, in the exploit of faith and the attainment of grace. In the framework of the above-described path, in his fundamental work "The Pillar and Statement of Truth" P.A. Florensky describes this leap as an act of will, as a transition from the theoretical part of the path, which includes the stages of "logistics" and "probabilism", to the practical, experimental part, to "selflessness."
2.1 Agnosticism P.A. Florensky ("The Pillar and Statement of Truth")
The book by Pavel Florensky "The Pillar and the Establishment of Truth" is an exceptional phenomenon - from the very moment it was published it did not go unnoticed: someone scolded it, someone praised it. But one thing is certain - the book caused a resonance and made me think.
"Pillar and confirmation of Truth. Experience of Orthodox theodicy in twelve letters" priest. Pavel Florensky is a one-of-a-kind book, exciting, seductive. Russian theological literature did not yet know her books so refined and refined. This is the first phenomenon of aestheticism on the basis of Orthodoxy, which became possible only after the refined aesthetic culture of the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. "
The book "Pillar and Statement of Truth" is a kind of travel diary, a story about the traversed spiritual path. Hence the first and largest division of the book is born: it highlights the story about the path itself, about the changes experienced by the consciousness and personality of the author, and the story about the achieved "destination", the new world that consciousness and personality acquire. This division is very noticeable. The book opens with confused searches and ends with the prevailing attitude, which the author shares with the reader.
The initial spiritual situation, which opens the odyssey of consciousness, is an acute perception of the world as a fallen being. The world is in slavery to all-consuming death, it is a kingdom of fragmentation, fragility, unreliability, "a swamp of relativity and convention." Starting from these properties of the world, consciousness sees the only salvation in finding some absolute foundations, unconditionally reliable principles - Truth. Progress towards the goal begins with a stage that, according to Florensky's terminology, can be called the stage of logistics. Here the criteria of truth and reliability are clarified and these concepts are analyzed, and the author specifically and strictly limits the reasoning to the sphere of rational philosophy and the rules of formal syllogistics. The obtained conclusions are negative: in this area there are no and cannot be the sought-after principles, there can be no Truth.
The next stage is called the stage of probabilism, or conjectural reasoning: here the author wants to describe the necessary properties of Truth, without deciding the question of its existence. In other words, the task is posed, remaining within the framework of formal rigor, to derive all possible statements of the following form: "if Truth exists, then it necessarily is." Unlike the previous one, the fruits of this stage are extremely rich. In just a few pages, the author draws a whole series of conclusions about the very essence of Truth, its inner nature: "Truth is" intuition - discourse "," actual infinity "," coincidence of opposites ", etc. In this series, he finds even the most important provisions Christian religion - the whole dogma of Trinity: "Truth is ... Father, Son, Spirit ... Truth is a single essence about three hypostases ... Trinity is consubstantial and indivisible." the soil Christian teaching about God and penetration into the center of Christian dogma. And the only reason why this stage is not yet an actual achievement of Truth is the moment of probabilism, due to which all conclusions are still, as it were, in a conditional mood: Truth is such, if it exists.
The necessary last step is the transition from conditional to indicative. You should make sure that the resulting mental structure or "idea of Truth" really exists. This can no longer be achieved on the paths of pure rationality; here it is inevitable "to leave the realm of concepts into the sphere of living experience" (63). And since the Truth has already been identified as the Christian Trinity, we are talking, of course, about the experience of religious, spiritual practice. "The time has come for asceticism" (72), writes Florensky; and clarifies that this means "effort, tension, self-denial ... self-overcoming ... faith" (63). These are the conditions and prerequisites for a religious act, the essence of its content is love, for, according to Florensky, it and only it is “that spiritual activity” in which and through which the guidance of the Pillar of Truth is given ”(395). into a community of people bound by love; and since love is always understood ontologically by Florensky, as a grace-filled unifying force of being, this community is nothing more than "the Church or the Body of Christ," the Pillar and the statement of Truth.
Like everything Florensky writes about, he presented this three-step path with great erudition and depth of observation. But, as S.S. Khoruziy, some questions inevitably arise. After all, it is impossible by means of formal logic alone to obtain the conclusion that the unconditionally certain is the only "Trinity, consubstantial and indivisible." Almost immediately, the vulnerability of the linear scheme "logistics - probabilism - selflessness" is revealed and, first of all, the stage of probabilism, which delivers the main conclusions. Here the answer can only be one - if from the very beginning consciousness is already a religious consciousness, then it attracts to the solution of its problems not Spinoza and Descartes, but almost exclusively - church writers, often not even philosophers, with distrust rejects the arguments of not only Spencer, but also Kant - but immediately readily accepts the reasoning of Abba Falassius and Archimandrite Serapion Mashkin. And "asceticism" not only serves as the completion of the path, but at least in part is already present initially.
The linear scheme presented by Florensky is not so much the true path of conversion as the experience of its a posteriori substantiation. Mental reality, especially a religious upheaval, rarely has a simple explanation. And the scheme of three stages is just a variant of this revolution in the soul of Florensky, which made him until the end of his days a servant of the Pillar and the affirmation of Truth.
The main idea of the book is not about the path, but its result, about the Pillar of Truth itself. Two philosophical themes make up the essence of this story: "harmless being" and "the connection of the local being with harmless being".
Paying tribute to the time, where neo-Kantian epistemology still dominated, Forenskiy devotes a lot of space to the problems of cognition. His approach to them is clearly outlined by the epigraph of the book - "Knowledge is accomplished by love." Again, love is at the heart: cognition of an object is a kind of communication with it, the creation of the unity of the knower and the knowable; and only through love is true knowledge attainable. This approach, which subordinates the epistemology to ontology and is sometimes called "ontological epistemology", has long been adopted by Russian thought from St. fathers, and Florensky here follows in the footsteps of Khomyakov and Vl. Solovyov. At a new stage, when the approval of these positions required a fight against Kantian and neo-Kantian criticism, a number of major experiments in ontological epistemology arose - in the works of Lossky, Frank, Eug. Trubetskoy. Florensky was one of the first here, and his criticism of Kant is distinguished by the greatest radicalism. Not only at first, but at all its stages, Florensky's thought retained many features of the thinking of a naturalist and mathematician; and this type of thinking, as noted long ago, gravitates in philosophy precisely to the Kantian approach. Florensky experienced a similar gravitation, and in his criticism of Kant, in its very harshness, the struggle with himself is reflected.
Undoubtedly, not without the influence of Kant, such a noticeable section of the philosophy of the "Pillar" as the doctrine of antinomies was formed. A number of motives and themes adjoin this teaching in the book: about the relationship between faith and reason, about the nature and properties of truth, about the norms of the activity of reason. This whole complex is united not only by the logic of ideas, but also by its radical orientation. Here, there is a clear urge to sharpen all the contradictions inherent in the work of consciousness and inner life, fidelity to reason and the introduction of faith are opposed antagonistically, and ultimate irrationalism is affirmed, not just super-reason, but anti-reason of the truths of faith. After analyzing, one can see that behind all this there is a simplified and, so to speak, extremist picture of consciousness as capable of being only in two opposite forms: reason, subordinate to formal logic, and "a grace-filled mind, purified by prayer and deed." "Reduction of the mind into the heart", performed in asceticism, is not at all the amputation of the mind and not cruel training with a whip, notes Florensky (61-62).
This entire thematic and ideological layer is characteristic precisely of the early work of the philosopher, later partly disappearing, partly changing greatly. Already in volume 2, Florensky's mature philosophy inherited much more from the sophiology of The Pillar than from its sharp antinomies (although antinomies as such remained in his philosophical arsenal). A transparent dialectic of spiritual growth: the almost inevitable impulse - after a religious conversion - to recoil with condemnation from worldly wisdom. And only later does a new sense of proportion come.
It is also important to note that "The Pillar and the Affirmation of Truth" is far from being limited to metaphysics. The acquired faith appears to Florensky as an inexhaustible world of precious treasures of the spirit, and he sees his task in revealing this world not only in its ideological structure, but also in its direct, visible wealth and beauty. Accordingly, he also acts as a connoisseur and systematizer of Orthodox spirituality in all its areas: in the "clever art" of ascetics, in hagiographic traditions, icon painting, liturgical poetry ... like culture shock. The book became an event that crossed the philosophical framework. It amazed, attracted and irresistibly convinced that the experience of Orthodoxy is inseparable from our heritage, that it is effective and necessary, and its development is a direct duty of Russian thought.
Of course, this did not mean the infallibility of everything proposed by the author. Yes, he did not claim it, already in his "Opening speech" he recognized his work as such a stage of work, when much is still postponed "until more mature years and more experienced experience." As some critics noted, there is a lot of vulnerable in "The Pillar", and those who were not close to the author's approach and were not infectious to his pathos, found enough grounds for skepticism. Some subjectivity was also noticed in the selection of church materials, and serious objections were raised against sophiology (in general, not only Fr. Paul). Harsh critics of The Pillar were such authorities as N. A. Berdyaev and G. V. Florovsky, a prominent theologian and historian of Russian religious thought. And yet, no criticism can destroy the charm of this book - so unusual, bright, delighting with a wealth of ideas, inviting and teaching us to think about the eternal questions of life. Not reading "The Pillar" in his youth is a loss for everyone who grew up in Russian culture.
2.2 Antinomism in the philosophy of Fr. Pavel Florensky
Strongly sharpening and deepening on the theme of "overcoming Kant and Kantianism", it develops in Florensky into one of his main, most stable and most characteristic philosophical themes - the theme of antinomianism.
Attaching decisive importance to the antinomic structure of the cognitive process, the Russian thinker decisively dissociates himself from the teachings of Kant. He does not accept the classification of antinomies given by him, believing that "the proof of their actual existence ... is the most fragile place of the Criticism."
He sees the main reason for the errors of the German philosopher in the fact that Kant attached exceptional importance to reason. The core principle of Kantian philosophy - a priorism - was used in order to overcome the very real difficulties arising in the transition from limited, incomplete, empirical knowledge of the world to scientific and theoretical conclusions that are universal and necessary. It is impossible to do this by the forces of reason itself, according to Florensky.
The half-heartedness of Kant's "dialectic of antinomies" was precisely in the fact that the task set — to make room for faith — was not fully realized by Kant. The last pillar of reason "for Kant was the fact of science, or, more precisely, of mathematical natural science. Reason is, and therefore, there is Truth, for Kant believes in the Babylonian tower of mathematical natural science." Florensky believed that he begins his reasoning with what Kant ends. Antinomies, according to Florensky, destroy reason, turn it into reason, which cannot go beyond its limitations and depravity.
Antinomies appear not only as a special form of theoretical thinking, but also as the only possible form of existence of the human mind, which is doomed to wander forever in the labyrinths of antinomies when it comes into contact with the sensual, corporeal world. Despite the desire to get rid of them, whatever the human mind touches, all the phenomena and processes of the surrounding world freeze in insoluble antinomies. Religion is no exception. "Antinomy," says Florensky, "are constitutive elements of religion, if you think about it rationally." This is why he opposes "reasonable faith", which he sees as one of the worst forms of godlessness. “Reasonable faith,” he wrote, “is the beginning of devilish pride, the desire not to accept God into oneself, but to pass oneself off as God — imposture and self-righteousness.” It is here, according to Florensky, that temptation awaits man. "status" and seeks to declare knowable that which in its essence lies outside the intelligible. "rational" evidence for the existence of God.
Florensky's works ("The Pillar and Statement of Truth", "Reason and Dialectics", "The Human Roots of Idealism" and many others) are imbued with a pessimistic assessment of the cognitive abilities of the human mind. The Russian thinker talks about the infinite power of the irrational, about the fact that one should limit human cognition in the same way as one should limit oneself in food.
The desire for a rational comprehension of the world, which has found, in particular, expression in the interpretation of Christian dogmas from the standpoint of "reasonable faith", according to the Orthodox thinker, leads to "falling out" beyond the real, rational. The human mind inevitably perishes, dissolves into the incomprehensible. "We live above an abyss of fiery lava, only covered with a thin crust of the 'identified'; what carelessness, - exclaimed Florensky, - to count on the calmness of a rationalistic worldview!"
Such reasoning was fully consistent with the traditions of Orthodox theology with its apology for "faith of the heart." Opposing theological and philosophical rationalism, Florensky refers to the fact that if religious dogmas were understandable and accessible to the human mind, if there was a possibility of spreading knowledge about the objective world to the "other", "higher" world, then these dogmas would cease to be what they are, that is, the knowledge of God, and would not differ in any way from the truths of science. "The secrets of religion," writes Florensky, "are not secrets that should not be disclosed, not conditional passwords of the conspirators, but inexpressible, unspeakable, indescribable experiences that cannot be put into words otherwise than in the form of a contradiction, which immediately - and" yes "and" no "". And if a dogma, he continues his reasoning, "becomes a scientific proposition, if there is no antinomy in it, that there is nothing to believe here, there is nothing to purify oneself and perform feat".
Florensky's similar arguments were also in line with the trend of rationalism, which was clearly manifested in philosophical and religious thought at the turn of the century. To substantiate his position, the Russian thinker uses the symbols and images of this style of thinking. At the same time, in such works as "The Pillar and the Assertion of Truth," "Reason and Dialectics," "he discusses how it is possible to overcome and remove antinomies and contradictions.
Contradictions are one of the traditional problems discussed in the history of ideas, including by religious philosophers. The metaphysical point of view, which is the basis of the religious worldview, does not deny the existence of contradictions, but on the contrary, declares them in every possible way, highlighting the contradictions between man and God, sin and virtue, faith and reason, etc. Various interpretations can be found in the history of Christian thought. this question.
One of the options is offered by Florensky. Reason, in his opinion, should not be limited to the sphere of sensory experience, within which it is doomed to be reason. The upper limit of the mind is its fullness and steadiness. However, the mind can acquire these characteristics only by breaking through the illusion of the earthly, filled with "living religious experience." Therefore, the only way to save the mind is by faith. This is how it is said about it in the book "The Pillar and the Affirmation of Truth": faith. We need to either die in agony on our edge of the abyss, or go at random and look for a “new land” on which “Truth lives.” We are free to choose, but we must decide on either one or another. Or the search for the Trinity , or dying in madness. Choose, worm and insignificance: tcrtiurn non datur ".
According to Florensky, from the point of view of "harmony", religious faith can be viewed as an extension of reason, that is, as something that has a rational basis, and therefore is subject to corrosion. In addition, the contradiction between scientific positions and religious dogmas does not disappear from the life of society and the consciousness of people, no matter how much harmony or unity of faith and reason is proclaimed.
In this respect, theological irrationalism turns out to be a more acceptable concept for a crisis religious consciousness, since it boldly recognizes this contradiction. When representatives of the irrationalist point of view declare the superiority of religious faith over reason, religion over science, they thereby limit the worldview functions of science. When naive religious faith disappears, accepting without hesitation all fantastic, biblical legends and parables, theological and philosophical teachings about the "harmony" of faith and reason not only do not strengthen the position of religion, but, on the contrary, contribute to the irreconcilability of the contradiction between religion and science. Formally, these difficulties are avoided by theologians and religious philosophers, who assert that religion is immeasurably higher than science, that rational knowledge is unable to comprehend the innermost meaning of the universe.
Without stopping at the position of theological irrationalism, Florensky seeks to overcome the extremes of both the one and the other point of view. From the recognition of the absurd as a source of religious faith, the Orthodox thinker proceeds to the provisions stating that the human mind can "open" the way to faith, that a person is able to comprehend his faith. The peculiarity of Florensky's religious and philosophical concept consists not only in the theologization of cognition, but also in subjectivation, psychologization, and a religiously colored experience of scientific creativity.
The appeal to the "heart" faith shows how Orthodox antinomianism differs from Kant's "dialectics of antinomies". The German philosopher came close to understanding the need for a dialectical consideration of the phenomena of reality, posed the problem of the activity of the cognizing subject. In Florensky's doctrine, the concepts of antinomies and dialectics are ultimately torn apart. Antinomies are not contradictions that serve as a source for the development of knowledge; on the contrary, they paralyze it, as it were. The very presence of antinomies is intended to convince of the imperfection of the phenomenon or object under consideration.
However, Florensky also understands the unacceptability of the hopelessly tragic dialectic of existentialism for religious consciousness. The paradigm of thinking that was formed within the framework of this philosophical teaching, at best, could serve as a means of explaining the situation in which a person fell, but not a means of his "salvation". The Orthodox philosopher understood that a person dies in the snare of contradictions, he must be taken out of the vicious circle in which he found himself. He understood the need to "save" the human mind in an age of crisis and madness. A person should remain a person, and his mind should become a mind, and not vegetate in "rational ignorance", a person's world outlook should be holistic and harmonious. "... Salvation, in that broadest psychological sense of the word, is the balance of mental life."
By itself, this position is deeply humanistic. But the achievement of integrity, according to Florensky, is not in the power of man. It is accomplished "miraculously". Reason becomes possible only through such an object in which all antinomies disappear, through religious dogma. Ultimately, intelligence is acquired with the help of God.
In his work "Reason and Dialectics", which is the opening speech on Florensky's defense of his master's thesis, he wrote: "Religion is - or at least claims to be an artist of salvation, and its business is to save. From what does religion save us?" saves us from us - saves our inner world from the chaos lurking there. She overcomes Gehenna, which is in us, and whose tongues, breaking through the cracks of the soul, lick consciousness. She strikes the reptiles of the "great and spacious" sea of subconscious life, "they also bear numbers "and wounds the snake nesting there. She calms the soul. And by establishing peace in the soul, she pacifies both the whole society and the whole nature."
For Florensky, man is not omnipotent. He needs God's help so that he can achieve holiness and righteousness. The Divine world, the world of Absolute Good, is separated from the human world, in which there is evil. And no matter how highly moral a person is according to the laws of earthly morality, he will enter the "kingdom of God" only with the help of God. If there is no miracle of sanctification and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, then a person, having decided to raise the question of Divine good, falls into an insoluble contradiction, like the Kantian antinomies. This happened with Dostoevsky, who embodied his most painful doubts in the chapter "The Grand Inquisitor" of the novel "The Brothers Karamazov". The highest manifestation, the apotheosis of cult activity - the art of "God-making", icon painting. Florensky deduces all spiritual creativity of man from this source. Florensky sees the main value of this art in the fact that it makes it possible to "unite" the eternal and the temporary, to embody the imperishable in the perishing and disappearing.
Icon painting - touching the deity - fills the human mind with light and, according to the "sacred" concept of culture, contributes to the development of his self-awareness as "the image of God". This in itself serves as a proof of the existence of God for a religious philosopher: "There is the Trinity of Rublev, therefore, - concludes Florensky, - there is God." Thus, cult art acquires the features of the supernatural, it is declared to be a mediator between man and the "upper" world and, therefore, the true source of culture. Historically, as a result of the "stratification of the cult", various material and spiritual types of human activity arise, secular art forms, philosophy, the religious "roots" of which are explored by Florensky in the works "Cult and Philosophy", "The First Steps of Philosophy", "The Human Roots of Idealism". Florensky strove to give such an interpretation of philosophy that would allow him to "remove" the contradiction between philosophy and religion. To accomplish this, in his opinion, only that philosophy, the object of which was a religious dogma.
CHAPTER 3. SYMBOLISM AND SOPHIOLOGY P.А. FLORENIAN
The circle of those affected by Fr. Paul's problems were far from limited to discussing, commenting and arguing the dogmas of the doctrine, he is much broader and includes the problems of translating the mystical principle in being, in art, in language. The connection of visible, tangible, intelligible phenomena with the "invisible world" begins to be of particular interest when it comes to art, the degree of "materiality" of which has always been understood in different ways and, perhaps, still remains mysterious to us. At the same time, Florensky's reasoning is not straightforward, iridescent, tortuous; they freely flow from one subject to another, each time looking for new connections between them, accentuating one or the other side in the tone of the general direction of the author's thought in any particular work. In this chapter we will focus on such important aspects of Florensky's philosophy as symbolism and sophiology.
3.1 Symbolism
An understanding of the symbol began to form in Florensky in the early period - passion for symbolist poetry and friendship with Andrei Bely. In a letter to him there is the following passage: "... symbols are not something conventional, created by us on a whim or whim. Symbols are built by the spirit according to certain laws and with an inner necessity, and this happens every time some sides of the spirit. The symbolizing and the symbolized are not accidentally connected with each other. It is possible to historically prove the parallelism of the symbolism of different peoples and different times. Allegories are made and destroyed; allegories are ours, purely human, conventional; symbols arise, are born in consciousness and disappear from it, but they in ourselves - eternal ways of discovering the inner, eternal in their form; we perceive them better or worse, depending on the effectiveness of some aspects of the spirit. But we cannot compose symbols, they themselves come when you are filled with a different content. This is a different content, as it were pouring out through our insufficiently capacious personality, crystallizes in the form of symbols, and we are thrown by these bunches of flowers and understand them, because the bunch on the chest melts again, turning into what it was created from. "
So, the symbol is the fruit of the activity of the spirit. Symbols come to a person at the moment of creativity, at the moment of enlightenment. In his reply to Florensky, Andrei Bely agrees with him: "... I wrote about the symbol as a certain aesthetic unit, as the world of artistic insight, as something covering school concepts of form and content ...".
By a different content, Florensky and Bely understood the Divine essence. Therefore, the symbol is the bearer of the Divine essence. And since both Florensky and Bely at that time saw poetic creativity as one of the main embodiments of symbolism (which is quite natural), then, consequently, a work of art consists of symbols. Here, a symbolic approach to a work of art proclaims the connection of the latter with the Divine essence, with the invisible, transcendental world.
This understanding of the symbol was fully consistent with the spiritual atmosphere permeated with a mystical perception of life, which surrounded itself with Russian symbolism at the beginning of our century. "We lived then in the real world," VF Khodasevich recalled about this period in his book "Necropolis", "and at the same time in some special, foggy and complex reflection of it, where everything was" then, yes not that. ”Every thing, every step, every gesture seemed to be reflected conditionally, projected on a different plane, on a close but intangible screen. Phenomena became visions. Every event, beyond its obvious meaning, still acquired a second, which had to be deciphered. He was not easy for us, but we knew that he was the real one. "
In the future, Florensky no longer had such close ties with Russian Symbolism and its leaders. Apparently, this was due to the fact that the fundamental difference in the views of Florensky and the Symbolists became more clearly noticeable: his views, based on Orthodoxy and thousand-year patristic traditions, were distinguished by a distinct ontologism, while the Symbolists cultivated nebula, ambiguity, and vagueness. There was a falling out with Andrei Bely. However, Florensky did not lose interest in the problem of the symbol, the understanding of which has now acquired from him a deeper philosophical level, has expanded and become more complex. In the book "At the watersheds of thought", in the article "Imeslavie as a philosophical premise," the following formulation is placed: "Being that is greater than itself is the main definition of a symbol. A symbol is something that is not itself, greater than itself. We reveal this formal definition: a symbol is such an entity, the energy of which, fused or, more precisely, dissolved with the energy of some other entity, more valuable in this respect, thus carries this latter in itself. the essence in the relation that occupies us is more valuable, the symbol, although it has its own name, however, with the right can also be called the name of that, the highest value, and in the relation that concerns us, it should be called this latter. "
If in the previous, earlier, definition of a symbol is considered in the aspect of its relationship with a person and his figurative-poetic world, and the very fact of the existence of a symbol is explained, then here the symbol is more abstracted, it is understood as a kind of being, and the formation of this being is shown as interaction energies. Certain entities are endowed with these energies; one of them has more valuable energy, the other less valuable. In principle, the world is indeed filled with the pulsating energies of various entities; in the most general terms, we, apparently, can divide them into material entities, having, respectively, material energies, and spiritual entities, guided by spiritual energies. Which of these energies are more valuable, according to Florensky, it is obvious - of course, these are spiritual energies. So, the material, material appearance of the symbol acquires a new, higher (spiritual) energy and due to this it itself is transformed, losing its material meaning, and becomes the embodiment of a higher one, i.e. Divine essence. Thus, the views of the young Florensky receive a deeper justification.
Florensky's interpretation of the symbol differs significantly from the understanding of the symbol as a sign, i.e. when they want to say that something one points to something else; and also differs from the rational-logical interpretation of the symbol as, for example, "the principle of endless becoming with an indication of all that regularity to which all individual points of this becoming are subject", i.e. when the understanding of a symbol is associated not with its fullness with spiritual energies, but with a certain general law inherent in the entire series of these phenomena, a generalization and an undeveloped sign of which the symbol appears. For example, A.F. Losev offers the following dialectics in understanding the symbol: he defines the possibilities of the symbol as, first of all, the possibility of the formation (development) of its essence and its filling. Thus, the relationship between the views of Florensky and those of Losev is an antinomy of the spiritual and structural approaches.
Describing a verbal symbol - and that is what a "concrete metaphysician" should operate with, Florensky gives it a definition that erases the distinction between the visual image and the word, exaggerating the idea of the inner form of the word. "Words," the author writes, "are primarily concrete images" and even "works of art."
The fact is that in the works of Florensky, two possibilities are realized, inherent in the bipolar structure of a sign or meaning-image, which is a symbol in its structure. Using the same concept, Florensky calls them two different versions of the symbol and thus reveals his dependence on two different types of symbolism at the same time.
The first symbolism he declares in art theory is traditional, platonic, where the transcendental world is firmly postulated. In this case, the symbol is allowed to play all the roles it should play: it, according to the definition, as an image is identical to itself and at the same time as a sign goes beyond its own limits, indicating "other" than itself. Moreover, this "other" also guarantees its essential content and value force, for it has the power of assigning meaning.
For Florensky, the symbol hastens to be identified with the unconditional being: these icons "are the saints themselves", sunlight is uncreated light, "water is sacred as such."
In the second case, which refers precisely to "concrete metaphysics", where the author plunges into "empirical" ontology and concentrates entirely on the immanent, the conditions for the existence of a symbol change dramatically, although it also seems to satisfy the requirements of the definition. Dividing reality into delimited, "discrete" layers, Florensky sees in each of them a certain set of primary, "building" elements (he directly calls them "symbols"), which, in the spirit of A. N. Scriabin's synthetic philosophy, must correspond to a set of elements in other areas. In other words, each primary element of one area of being simultaneously points, according to Florensky, to a certain element or image in another existential compartment: sound, color, plastic form and even smell should correspond here to each other and mean each other. The symbol serves as a key to the Universe, with the help of which - through the system of the corresponding qualities of being - one can penetrate into the structure of the cosmos and its secrets, learn all the keys of this cosmic organ.
Florensky's philosophy is distinguished by a very peculiar character that separates it from the traditional mainstream of European metaphysics. As you know, Florensky called his mature doctrine concrete metaphysics, and this main requirement to keep to concreteness, that is, to avoid abstract, purely speculative philosophizing, at first glance, brings his thought closer to Anglo-American philosophy, in which, as a rule, prevails experienced, anti-speculative bias. This rapprochement is not apparent, it was recognized by Florensky himself; but nevertheless its limitations and narrowness are indisputable. The difference is deeper than the similarity. If for Anglo-American thought the criteria of experience and concreteness meant, in fact, a persistent gravitation towards empiricism and pragmatism, a positivist denial of the spiritual dimensions of reality, then Florensky's understanding of concreteness was radically different. Concreteness for him does not mean the absence of a spiritual object, a noumenon (when reality is equated with a sensible given, with a bare empirical fact), but precisely the specific character of this spiritual object, which he acquires due to its indispensable embodiment in the sensible. The inner essence and the outer appearance, the spiritual and the sensual, the noumenon and the phenomenon are, for Florensky, two inalienable sides of any phenomenon, two sides of reality itself; the connection of these sides was his main philosophical problem. “All my life I have been thinking, in essence, about one thing: about the relation of the phenomenon to the noumenon,” he writes in 1923. The solution to the problem, which he developed and firmly, unswervingly defended, was philosophical symbolism. This position asserts that the noumenon and the phenomenon cannot be isolated from each other, they are fused together in an inseparable unity. There are no abstract spiritual essences or abstract ideas, for a spiritual object is always concrete, that is, it is expressed in the sensuous, manifested plasticly and visibly. And there are no purely empirical phenomena, for every phenomenon is a revelation of the spiritual essence, the sensory appearance of a certain noumenon. Thus, the phenomenon and the noumenon mutually provide an exact expression of each other, forming an inseparable bi-unity, which, by definition, is a symbol. Concreteness, the main distinguishing principle of Florensky's metaphysics, means nothing more than symbolism, that is, the composition of all reality from symbols. Accordingly, reality as a whole, integral being, is also a bi-unity of the sensible given, that is, the reality of the physical Cosmos, and the semantic content corresponding to it, the noumenon; and also constitutes a single symbol.
Being is the Cosmos and the symbol - this is the formula of Florensky's ontology. Reality is entirely and through and through symbolic, and the world is a collection of two-unit, noumenal-phenomenal phenomena-symbols. The task of the metaphysician is then to streamline this world of symbols, to see its structure, to reveal the principle of its unity. And it is immediately clear that the structure of reality will be seen here differently than in the traditional philosophical representation. The symbol combines the natural and the spiritual, and symbolism rejects the division of reality into the kingdom of sensible things and the kingdom of the spirit, isolated from each other.
Reality is one, it is everywhere. The goals of cognition are changing; If earlier it was customary to think that knowledge should be directed to the discovery of some abstract "laws" that govern different spheres of reality, then the study of any of the areas of symbolic reality rather seeks to identify some fundamental, primary symbols that make up this area. These primary symbols stand out among all symbols for their simplicity and elementary character, due to which they acquire generality and universality. They represent various elementary structures - such as, say, a point, a circle, etc. - which, although they retain concreteness (visualization, visibility), no longer have an unambiguous connection with any single sensory shell. Rather, they can clothe themselves in very different material, take on a very different nature, that is, in other words, be realized in a multitude of particular realizations, so that their appearance becomes a generalized expression or a diagram of all these realizations. As Florensky said, "the sensible can become a schema of the supersensible." According to modern terminology, Florensky's elementary symbols act as structural paradigms or generative models of symbolic reality, and each of these paradigms is universal, permeating itself (with its realizations), generally speaking, all spheres and horizons of reality. This is how a new picture of reality arises when primary symbols (they are also structural paradigms or generative models), that is, concrete, visible, but at the same time meaningful elements instead of abstract laws, dualistically opposed to pure empiricism as a cluster raw facts. Hence, further features of Florensky's philosophical symbolism are revealed. It is already evident that by its nature and tasks it is very different from philosophy in the traditional sense. The business of philosophy is usually considered the comprehension of the most general laws of reality, the laws of being, existence, thinking. At the same time, it is assumed that philosophy considers its subject as a special "philosophical subject", which it examines with the help of a special "philosophical method", say, dialectical or phenomenological. However, in the picture of symbolic reality, where the spiritual is absolutely inseparable from the sensible, and cognition is inseparable from phenomena and is reduced only to the recognition of symbols and primary symbols in them, - in such a picture, as it is easy to see, there is no room for a special philosophical subject or for a special philosophical method. Neither pure being, nor pure thinking, nor, therefore, abstract philosophical categories here simply does not exist, all this is the essence, according to Florensky, empty abstractions, equated to pure nothing. Thought is also symbolic, does not exist outside the sensory phenomenon, and Florensky constantly ascribes to it the modes of a natural object, speaking of its "geological structure", "chemical composition" and "plant forces". In the circle of sciences, in which everyone is engaged, in essence, the same (identifying the primary symbols and describing reality as a constituent of them) and, in the main outlines, according to the same method (keen eyeing and subtle feeling, sharpened to distinguish in the phenomenon of the noumenon), the difference between metaphysics is only its comprehensiveness: it is occupied by all the primary symbols as such, wherever they are seen in reality; it seeks to know all the multitude of them and, thus composing the complete "alphabet of the world", with its help to decipher the world, to read the Whole Reality as the Cosmos and as the Pan-Symbol, which embraces all symbols. Thus, it acts as a general systematics of symbols and a complete course of practical symbolism. It is essential that it (like all disciplines in general) should be precisely practical, experimental, not breaking away from concrete phenomena and not deviating from the only recognized cognitive method, which is gazing and feeling.
The identification of the primary symbols is achievable only by means of "specific examinations" (Florensky's term) of all possible spheres of reality. From this it follows that "concrete metaphysics" must conduct "concrete surveys" in all directions - of course, not trying to substitute for the sum of all knowledge, but finding and examining some of its key points in each area. Thus, a necessary feature of a concrete metaphysics is universalism, and a "concrete metaphysician" must have a specific intuition or the gift of deep vision, providing an unmistakable choice of key points, semantic nodes in each sphere of reality. This gift of secret vision, seeing the innermost depth of things can easily be felt as a kind of magical power over things.
Here there is a direct connection between the peculiarities of philosophy and the traits of a creative personality, namely, such well-known features of Florensky as his amazing universalism and his attraction to the magic. This connection is by no means causal, but reciprocal, like a duality of different sides of the symbol: the universalism and magic of Florensky's personality and his philosophy equally express, work out and shape each other. This is life-creation.
3.2 Sophiology
These topics are revealed by the author on the basis of the same fundamental concept - the concept-symbol of Sophia, the Wisdom of God. The philosophy of the "Pillar" is defined as "sophiological" or "sophiological" teaching, as the experience of "sophiology". The first such experience in Russia was the philosophy of Vl. Solovyov, but, as is often the case in history, the thought of Florensky and his predecessor is more likely to be linked by relations of repulsion. This is a completely independent teaching, growing from different roots, and what is in common with Solov'ev here is exhausted by a minimum of ideas inseparable from Sophia.
There have been many Sophian teachings in history (the richest in them are Gnosticism, the mysticism of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, new Russian philosophy); and the common primary source for them are the biblical books of the Wisdom of Solomon and the Proverbs of Solomon, which speaks of the personified Wisdom of God. This mythologeme has absorbed much from the Hellenic goddess of wisdom Athena, and equally the Hellenic and Jewish traditions are answered by her main motive: the assertion of the wisdom and beauty of the universe, the idea of creating the world as an intelligent art. Sophia is an "artist with God", the bearer of the eternal creative concept, the ideal prototype of the world. In Christianity, however, this mythologeme did not acquire a lasting status due to the initial dogmatic difficulty: it is unclear how Sophia can be associated with the Persons (Hypostases) of God and whether there is generally a place for her in the sphere of the Divine (unless we identify her with one of the hypostases, thereby depriving independence). But at the same time, the well-known ground for Sophia's ideas has always been preserved in the Christian picture of being and, first of all, in line with the tradition of Christian Platonism, where there are analogues of Plato's concepts of the idea-eidos of every thing and the "smart world", a collection of ideas-eidos of all things. Regardless of this, Sophia traditionally has a prominent place in the Orthodox cult: her veneration (in folk religiosity, which is not distinctly separated from the veneration of Christ, the Mother of God and the Church) flourished both in Byzantium and in Russia, as Florensky writes about in detail in the letter X of the Pillar "(319-389). (On the contrary, in Solov'ev this layer of Christian sophianism is completely ignored.)
It is these two sources, the concepts of Christian Platonism and the tradition of the Sophian cult, that provide the basis for Florensky's sophiology. Its construction begins with a description of the connection between the world and God. The latter, according to Florensky, is expressed in two ways: in the presence of the meaning of created being (interpreted according to the canons of Christian Platonism as God's plan for him and as his eternal image in God) and in the love of creatures to God. Both of these aspects, combining together, lead to a new concept: each created personality (for love is the ability of living and personal being) is compared with its "ideal personality" or "love is an idea-monad" - a discrete element, a "quantum" of meaning and love, realizing the connection of the person with God. This is an analogue of Plato's idea-eidos, and all of them, respectively, are analogous to the "smart world". However, Florensky's "monads" are filled with love, which binds them not only with God, but also with each other, so that they form a special "unity in love." Such unity is supported by the unceasing activity of love, by the mutual "feat of self-denial" and therefore is "not a fact, but an act" (326), not a mechanical assembly, but a living unity, a "multi-unity being." Belonging to being divine, perfect, this being must be endowed not only with life, but also with a hypostatic, personal nature - must be a perfect person. This person is Sophia.
Along with Sophia, and inextricably linked with her, love is the central concept of the metaphysics of the "Pillar". It is through love that platonic constructs are revived and personified. In perfect love, according to Florensky, "consubstantial lovers in God" are established, their essential identity, for which he introduces a special term - "numerical identity" (letter IV). The collection of persons connected by such an identity is a perfect unity, but at the same time it is a multitude, for each person remains as such, without merging with others. Therefore Sophia is the perfect unity of the multitude; and, moreover, being a person herself, she is also linked by numerical identity with any of the personalities in her composition. The principle of its internal structure, internal life is the identity of the parts to the whole, which, by definition, is the principle that characterizes all-unity.
However, Florensky avoids the term "total unity", preferring to it equivalent Greek formulas, more often - "one and many", hen kai polla. The root of this is simple: at that time the term was strongly associated with the teachings of Vl. Solov'ev, while Florensky, in his own words, "did not at all put into it Solov'ev's interpretation" (612). For Solovyov, all-unity is the principle of constructing speculative philosophical system traditional new European - primarily German - type (which did not satisfy him himself, forcing him to strive for renewal, alteration of his philosophy, which he, however, only had time to start). Florensky, on the other hand, developed a different interpretation of total-unity, and a different way of philosophy, gravitating more towards ancient philosophy, and partly consonant with the later structural-semiotic approach. These tendencies of his thought fully expressed themselves only at the next stage, in the philosophical symbolism of concrete metaphysics, but some of their traces are already discernible in The Pillar.
3.3 Cult and anthropology in the philosophy of P.A. Florensky
As you know, the cult is the most important theme of both thought and life. Florensky. In his deepest conviction, the whole higher essence of man is connected with this possibility - and, therefore, his duty - to see another world, to enter it with the help of a cult. Like any symbolism, Florensky's philosophy shuns anthropology and would like, as far as possible, to dissolve it in the philosophy of nature; but if it were necessary to give a definition of a person within its framework, such a definition would be; man is a cult-sending creature. The mission of the cult is multifaceted; it is by no means reduced to creating the prerequisites for symbolic vision. On the contrary, behind this, so to speak, cognitive and philosophical function, there is a deeper aspect. In the biblical-Christian ontology, this world is viewed as a fallen world, that is, struck by a fundamental imperfection, which is expressed in its subordination to the principles of sin and death. The action of these principles is what damages the connection between the two worlds and introduces damage to the phenomena, creating a barrier, inconsistency between the phenomenon and its meaning and turning phenomena into flawed, imperfect symbols. The cult turns out to be that unique activity that alone is capable of overcoming, removing this ontological damage, or, more precisely, not eliminating it entirely, but giving a guarantee, creating the necessary ontological prerequisites for restoring the integrity of being. In the cult, the removal of damage, the barrier between the phenomenon and the noumenon, the ontological healing of reality, is carried out, so that it is not just debugging, but above all, the repair of the connection between the worlds. Following the church tradition, Florensky calls this debugging-repair the consecration of reality and recognizes in it the essence, the existential mission of the cult.
For each kind of encounter with another world, the cult gives a person a special learning and preparation, for each there is his own practical science or art, his own way of life and rank. Of these, in addition to icon painting, Fr. Paul examines with the greatest attention the rank or art of death. Like any art, it has, according to Florensky, different levels of development and heights. In the essay "On the funeral oration of Father Alexei Mechev" (1923), he distinguishes at least three such levels:
Low, coarse, animal - "superficial physiological death, often little recognized";
Ordinary death, accompanied by the "vision of death", the appearance of the Angel of death;
The highest, spiritual level is Assumption. This is "death to the world" before physical death and the subsequent smooth transition, "transposition" into the spiritual world without seeing death, according to the words of the Savior: "He who believes in Me will not see death forever."
Obviously, this thanatology of Florensky is entirely consistent with the ancient mysticism of death, as it existed in Dionysianism, in its developed, intellectually elaborated Orphic reception. Here we have the whole ideological framework of the Orphic doctrine of death: a two-fold cosmos, embracing this and another world, the realm of life and the realm of death; death as a transition from one world to another, associated for a person with a mysterious transformation; the possibility and necessity of the art of death; cult as a mediation between the worlds and a necessary prerequisite for the art of death. It is not difficult to notice many other coincidences, down to the smallest details. So, naturally and necessarily, Florensky's famous Orphic thesis about the identity of birth and death appears: here he is a direct consequence of the similarity affirmed by the philosopher, the symmetrical structure of the local and other worlds.
Attention is drawn to the radicalism and breadth with which Fr. Paul absorbs elements of the ancient mystery religion. We see that Florensky's space is an antique space; his death mysticism is Orthodox Orphism; and, no longer surprised, we find further coincidences. His justification for these coincidences is also characteristic: he declares the features of the ancient religion that he adopted to be inherent not only in Hellenic paganism or paganism in general, but in any religion as such, thereby affirming the universality of the ancient religious type and not recognizing the fundamental novelty and otherness of Christianity. The original and indispensable aspect of pagan religiosity is magic; and Florensky in "Watersheds" emphatically affirm that magic is a "nationwide", "universal" and enduring feature, inherent, in particular, in the Christian religion. Along with magic, they likewise defend occultism; he seeks to interpret both phenomena in his own way, wider than usual - and to combine with Christianity.
This apology for magic and occultism in the later work of Fr. Paul relies on new important ideas that entered his metaphysics at its last stage. The bottom line is that one of the main concepts is now being made for Florensky the concept of energy, which was previously little encountered in him. With its help, the understanding of the symbol is significantly deepened: it is possible to penetrate the very mysterious mechanics, which produces a combination of the phenomenon and the noumenon. The thesis is put forward: this connection is nothing more than a combination of the energies of both. The symbol lives with energies, the fusion of the energies of its sides: this is the old intuition of Fr. Paul, which he expresses in "The Universal Roots of Idealism" (1908). But now intuition has matured into a definition, and with it a new concept is born - an energy symbol: "such an entity, whose energy, spliced or, more precisely, dissolved with some other, more valuable energy ... thus carries this latter in itself." The concept of an energy symbol opened up rich perspectives. There was an opportunity to see any object deeper or in a completely new way, where there is both a sensual and spiritual side, in essence - to develop a new picture of the world, still standing on symbols, but more constructive, revealing the inner dynamics of phenomena. The thought of the philosopher is moving towards the creation of such an "energetic" picture in his latest developments, cut short by persecution and death. Florensky managed to develop certain topics - from the field of theology, from linguistics - but many bold ideas and generalizations remained only outlined. Sparse sketches make it clear that the philosopher was developing a new image of the cosmos, based on the concept of pneumatosphere introduced by him: this is a spiritualized universe, which in all spheres connected and not connected with man, from the microcosm to the megaworld, is built on energy symbols and carries the spiritual content, energetically fused with the material.
From this we can make a bold conclusion that Fr. Pavel comes close to predicting the genetic code and clearly anticipates the circle of ideas that today is associated with the concept of an informational picture of the world.
In the religious aspect, the "energetic" stage of Florensky's thought served, as already mentioned, to strengthen and consolidate the features of archaic religiosity.
There are many more features of concrete metaphysics that have their origins in the life myth. Returning to the philosophy of the cult and the symbolic Cosmos - Pan-Symbol, we note that due to "borderline activity", various messages and meetings between the two worlds, the layers of symbolic reality are permeated with connecting paths - and the exact reflection of this is the motive of "penetration with roots" in the geological paradigm of being ... The cult, which makes all these messages possible and regulates them, thus acts as a kind of Department of Ways of Communication. The philosophy of the Florensky cult reveals yet another coincidence with the ancient mystery religion, where the mission of the cult was firmly understood as guiding and observing paths or bridges between this world and the other world. And Father Pavel Florensky as a priest turns out to be the successor of his father, who was a railway engineer. For another biography, it would only be absurd to find meaning in such a correspondence, but in the case of Florensky, it really deserves attention, as well as a similar correspondence in the next tribes of the genus. Florensky's existential intuitions go back to the geological image-archetype, and his central ontological paradigm was called the geological paradigm. Let's remember that two generations after Father Pavel, the eldest in his family is a geologist. The continuity of the essence is observed in the family, although in different tribes the realization of this essence is shifted from the more phenomenal to the more noumenal plane, and vice versa. All this exactly corresponds to the metaphysics of the Florensky family, and therefore we again have a unity of life and thought, a life-creation that goes beyond the limits of empirical biography.
This is how Florensky's survey of the Pan-Symbol, symbolic reality as a whole, is taking shape. Very close to this capital realization of the ontological paradigm is the one that Florensky discovers in the structure of a Christian church. Analyzing this structure in the Iconostasis, he again leads to a scheme of existential shells of different noumenal saturation: "The organization of the temple is directed from the surface shells to the central core ... The spatial core of the temple is outlined by shells: the courtyard, the vestibule, the temple itself, the altar, the Throne, the antimension , chalice. Holy Mystery, Christ, Father ". As we can see from this, Florensky subordinates even the inner dispensation of the Absolute, the Most Holy to the principle of spatiality and the paradigm of structured All-Unity. The Trinity, whose hypostases are also placed by him in a series of "spatial shells". Of the other realizations of this paradigm, linguistic realization is characteristic of Florensky's interests. The area of the word, language is given an important place in concrete metaphysics, and it is essential that this area is also described on the same universal basis. According to Florensky, the main linguistic unit, the word, is built from concentric semantic shells, and the structural elements act as shells: phoneme, morpheme and sememe. "A word can be represented as sequentially covering one another circles, and, for the sake of clarity of the graphic scheme of the word, it is useful to imagine the phoneme as the main nucleus or bone wrapped in a morpheme, on which the sememe rests in its turn ... There is a phoneme of the word ... . the symbol of the morpheme, as the morpheme is the symbol of the sememe. " Finally, the sphere of social life, which did not so much preoccupy Florensky, also has a structured Unity as its basis. She is depicted by Florensky as a series of concentric spheres, the inhabitants of which are linked by bonds of kinship and love. The spheres differ from each other in the strength of these bonds, and the latter decreases from the central sphere (family, friendly couple), where people are connected most closely and closest of all, to peripheral spheres that correspond to broad social formations. Force, or activity, uniting society, Florensky calls unction.
Thus, the structural paradigm of the All-Unity is subjected to a certain generalization and complication by Florensky; he introduces the idea that in this world, since it cannot be identified with the perfection and completeness of being, a phenomenon, generally speaking, may by no means perfectly express a noumenon. At the same time, the fundamental postulate of symbolism - everything sensible is spiritual, every phenomenon is a manifestation of meaning - remains unshakable; however, it is accepted that a phenomenon can be rich in meaning to varying degrees, it can have different noumenal expressiveness, elaboration, transparency. In the world of phenomena, there are steps, gradations of symbolicity, and in accordance with his idea of Discreteness, Florensky accepts that these gradations are not continuous, but discrete: the degree of noumenal saturation of the command, the noumenal manifestation of the noumenon in a phenomenon does not change as you like from phenomenon to phenomenon, but is split into a series discrete levels clearly differing from each other. As a result, Being-Cosmos is additionally structured: a number of degrees (horizons, layers, layers, etc.) are distinguished in it, differing from each other in the degree of identification of noumena in phenomena.
It is the geological image that is most closely associated with Florensky with the universal paradigm of the structure of being; he even introduced the special term "metageology". Moreover, this image directly originates from the deepest sources of Florensky's philosophical views, which, as he repeatedly pointed out, are hidden in childhood impressions of nature. In "Memoirs" we read: "My later religious and philosophical convictions did not come from philosophical books, but from childhood observations and, perhaps, most of all, from the nature of the landscape I am accustomed to. These layers of rocks and, separately, these layers of soil, gradually changing, permeated with roots ... ". This is a very vivid example of Florensky's philosophical style: the structural paradigm, which expresses general ideas about being, turns out to be at the same time extremely concrete, sensual and material. Even such a detail as "penetration with roots" is philosophically very important as well. In "The Philosophy of Cult" Florensky gives another image for his fundamental paradigm, and he is even more striking in its rough materiality: It consisted of several concentrically located low platforms, covering the exhibition area and constantly rotating at different speeds, the rotation of the outermost ring occurred at a very high speed, the rotation of the adjacent inner ring was somewhat slower, and finally, even more internal concentrates had a speed that is lower than closer to the middle. "
CONCLUSION
So, considering the problems of the philosophical searches of Pavel Florensky, the origins and essence of antinomianism and symbolism in his philosophical views, it can be noted that Florensky's work is of great importance for today's philosophy. Representatives of modern Russian Orthodoxy find many, from their point of view, Florensky's attractive ideas, such as sophiology, "dialectical antinomianism", pastoral aesthetics, ecumenism, and ecclesiology. The enduring, general cultural significance of his works, his social position is great. Unlike most representatives of the "new religious consciousness", Florensky directed his efforts to "fit" the Orthodox religion into the context of contemporary culture, sought to give religious sanctification of the social and creative activity of man, and this circumstance is highly valued in modern church-theological circles Moscow Patriarchate. He wrote: "... religion is the mother's bosom of philosophy."
Attaching exceptional importance to the role of the Christian faith in the formation and transformation of culture, Florensky pays tribute to the traditions of Orthodox ecclesiology. At the same time, his theological views include a number of points that allow us to see in him a conductor of innovative tendencies observed in the modern Russian Orthodox Church. An innovation in the scientific understanding of faith can be considered the fact that Pavel Florensky drew on the experience of a number of church testimonies that had not previously been involved. For example, before, neither philosophers nor ministers of the church turned to the evidence of church archeology, understood broadly, that is, including church art (icon painting) and church music. Church archeology was previously considered only as a purely auxiliary discipline, and Fr. Paul showed how the theological laws, or canons, are manifested in it, and they, in turn, are already directly related to the dogmas of faith.
In scientific theology, he strove for methods of presentation that banished dryness - he was ready to pass on his personal religious experience to other people.
Florensky was one of those religious thinkers who, already in the first decades of our century, understood the need to overcome narrow confessional boundaries and the importance of joining the efforts of all Christian churches... "Before the coming crisis of Christianity, all who call themselves Christians should pose an ultimatum question and repent with one mouth and one heart (Rom. 15: 6), exclaiming: Lord, help my unbelief (Mk. 9, 24). Then the question of unification For the first time, the Christian world will get out of chanceries into the fresh air, and the difficult and impossible for people will be quite possible for God. " By this, Florensky placed himself in the ranks of the founders of ecumenism.
Florensky himself divided his work into three stages.
The first stage he called Purification, or "Cleansing of the Soul". It was about cleansing the soul from positivism and rationalism. This stage was completed for him by 1900 - 1904. At this stage, mathematical works were written that led him to philosophical idealism.
Learning, as Florensky called the second stage, which in turn was divided into two parts. The first part is theodicy, that is, "justifying God." At this time (1904-1911), The Pillar and Statement of Truth was written, which appeared surrounded by a number of early works. The second part is anthropodicya, "justification of man". This includes the lecture series "At the watersheds of thought", "Philosophy of worship" and others.
And if the early work of Florensky is an organic part of the Russian metaphysics of total-unity; his doctrine of Sophia - in the mainstream of the then thought, inheriting the sophiology of Soloviev (with all radical disagreements with it) and preceding the teachings of Trubetskoy and Bulgakov, then his mature thought, which fused together Orthodoxy, magic, a new type of philosophy and bold scientific foresight, takes place special. Now, when its main fruits are just emerging from under the skin, this place has not yet been definitively determined. However, Florensky's "special", individual distinctions are no less important.
And he called the third stage: Action. This stage turned out to be unfulfilled in creativity, but it was realized in life. If we approach this stage from the point of view of antiquity, it is a tragedy of man, but if we look at it in a Christian way, then this is a sacrificial service to Christ and sacrificing oneself for unity with Christ.
So, Florensky's experience of life-creation received integrity and completeness; and it should be amazing if we notice all the difficulty, even the problematic, in achieving such an outcome. In order to achieve a strict unity of ideas and full agreement with life experience in the entire widest range of his creativity, he had to break the usual ideas, develop new methods and approaches in many areas at once, catch the common in extremely distant phenomena and, perhaps, the most difficult thing - often to defend controversial, even dubious decisions that had to be carried out and approved, because this was required by the experience of his life. For the time being, Florensky deliberately rejected many topics until he approached them "in a vital way." He did not want to transfer to paper what he had not yet experienced in his own experience. It is not even easy to assess what will and strength were needed for his philosophical works. No wonder one of the deepest judgments about him, belonging to Fr. Sergiy Bulgakov, says: "The most basic impression of Father Pavel was the impression of strength, knowing itself and owning itself."
Using his own image of Florensky, we can say that his positions clearly reveal the watershed of his thought with the mainstream of Russian spirituality. For it is no less certain that in the entire history of Russian thought, Russian spiritual culture, a clear gravitation towards a dynamic picture of being was invariably prevailing. The deep religious origins of this gravitation can be seen in the Orthodox concept of deification, which sees the purpose of a person precisely in actual ontological growth, transformation, and their achievement makes them directly dependent on the free effort of a person, on the path he traverses. A generic feature of Russian thought has always been personalism, which also presupposes a dynamic picture of being, but it is alien to Florensky. The very word "path", which for Florensky is ontologically empty, for Russian culture has long become a word-symbol, denoting something with which a deep meaning, hope and value are associated.
So, we have to conclude that in the integral context of Russian spirituality, Florensky's ideas and his philosophy are rather peripheral, marginal in relation to a certain central channel. But, having made such a conclusion, it is worth noting immediately that a philosophy that fully corresponds to this channel, perhaps, has not yet been created in Russia.
There are no absolutely original teachings in nature. And we will not find especially original ideas in the philosophy of Pavel Florensky. In the 1920s, Fr. Paul formulated that the fundamental law of the world is the law of lowering energy, unless a higher principle dominates the world system. If we translate what has been said in the field of philosophy, then we are talking about the struggle between Logos and Chaos. If, finally, we go into the field of theology, then we have before us the struggle of Christ and Anti-Christ. And there seems to be nothing original about it. Similar constructions can be derived from the Gospel, and from Plato, and from modern cybernetics. But Pavel Florensky has a truly original trait. He knew how to present his thoughts in such a simple way that, after reading, he wondered: "What, in fact, is special?" And many think so: "Where are the discoveries expected from Florensky? This is common knowledge." And for Pavel Florensky, such judgments were equal to the best praise. He just wanted to free non-human thought and beliefs from the taint of positivism, rationalism and godlessness and make it acceptable as his own.
There is every reason to believe that the fundamental intuitions of Russian spirituality, the beginnings of the national spiritual make-up have not yet been fully expressed in the forms of philosophical reason, and there is still no philosophy in which Russia without hesitation would recognize its spiritual appearance. Its creation, it should be hoped, is a matter of our future.
LIST OF USED LITERATURE
The works of P.A. Florensky:
1. Collected works: in 4 volumes. Vol. 1, 2, 4, - M., 1994-1996
3. To my children. Memories of days gone by. - M., 1992
4. Notes on Orthodoxy // Siberian Lights. - 1991. - No. 5. - S. 263-272
5. On the spiritual heritage of Russian thinkers of the twentieth century. // Our contemporary. - 1997. - No. 5. - S. 216-225
6. Pillar and statement of Truth. Polutom 1. - M., 1990
7. Abramov A. I. Preface to the publication "Abstracts of P. A. Florensky" // Vopr. philosophy. - 1988. - No. 12. - S. 108-112
8. Averintsev S. S. Florensky's thought - today // Sov. culture. - 1989.-May 18 (No. 59). - P. 6
9. Akulinin V. H. Philosophy of all-unity. From Vl. S. Solovyov to P. A. Florensky. - Novosibirsk, 1990 .-- 158 s
10. Andronicus, abbot (Trubachev A.S.). Preface to the publication of the work "Memories" // Lit. studies. - 1988. - No. 2. - P. 144-147
11. Andronicus, abbot (Trubachev A.S.). Preface to the article "Hamlet" // Lit. studies. - 1989. - No. 5. - S. 135-137
12. Andronicus, abbot (Trubachev A.S.). "Pillar and Statement of Truth" // Memorable book dates. 1989. - M., 1989. - S. 56-60
13. Andronicus, abbot (Trubachev A.S.). Foreword // Florensky P.A. To my children ...- M., 1992. - S. 7-22
14. Andronicus, abbot (Trubachev A.S.). Life and Fate // Priest Pavel Florensky. Works: In 4 volumes - M., 1994; T. 1. - S. 3-36
15. Bonetskaya H. K. P. A. Florensky and "new religious consciousness" // Bulletin of the RKhD. Paris. 1990. No. 160. S. 90-112
16. Bychkov V. V. Aesthetic face of life: the speculation of Pavel Florensky. - M., 1990 .-- 64 p.
17. Volkov S. A. Portraits: From the memoirs of the Russian philosopher // Science and religion. - 1989. - No. 9. - S. 44-47
18. Voronkova LP Idealistic essence of Florensky's cultural studies // Philos. Sciences. - 1984. - No. 4. - S. 80-87
19. Voronkova L. P. Worldview of P. A. Florensky // Vestn. Moscow un-that. Ser. 7. Philosophy. - 1989. - No. 1. - S. 70-81
20. Vylegzhanin Yu.N. Methodological aspects of the analysis of the "sacred theory" of culture (PA Florensky) // Interaction of theory and practice in the light of the decisions of the XXVII Congress of the CPSU. - Kemerovo, 1988 .-- S. 163-167
21. Galinskaya IL Aesthetic views of P. Florensky: Scientific and analytical review. - M., 1991 .-- 88 p.
22. Galtseva R. A. Cultural tradition in front of the face of philosophical avant-gardism // Renaissance: Image and place of the Renaissance in the history of culture-M., 1987. - P. 13-29
23. Galtseva R.A. Essays on Russian Utopian Thought of the 20th Century. - M., 1992 .-- S. 120-180
24. Goricheva TM From darkness to light // Context. - 1986. - No. 50. - S. 413-418. Goricheva T.M. - 1986. - No. 140. - P. 299 -303
25. Gorodetsky S.M. Life is indomitable. - M., 1984 .-- (about Florensky see p. 16)
26. Gulyga A.V. The origins of spirituality // Lit. studies. - 1988. - No. 2. - S. 144-148. Gulyga A.V. Dynasty of the Spirit // Prometheus. - M., 1990 .-- T. 16. - S. 379-395
27. Dlugach TB The problem of time in the philosophy of I. Kant and P. Florensky // Kant and philosophy in Russia. - M., 1994 .-- S. 186-211
28. Zotkina O. Ya. The symbol "ontology of creativity" by PA Florensky (On the characteristic of "religious aestheticism"). - M., 1991 .-- 22 p.
29. Ivanova EI Is Florensky real or imaginary? // Lit. studies. - 1990. - No. 6. - S. 106-114
30. Ivanova E.I. Florensky and Christian brotherhood // Vopr. philosophy. - 1993. - No. 6. - P. 33-41
31. From the heritage of P.A. Florensky // Context-91. - M., 1991 .-- S. 3-99
32. Ilyin V.N. Father Pavel Florensky. The silent great miracle of science of the XX century // Renaissance. - 1969. - No. 216. - P. 45
33. Isupov KG Alternative to aesthetic anthropology: MM Bakhtin and P. Florensky // MM Bakhtin: Aesthetic heritage and modernity. - Saransk, 1992 .-- Part 1. - S. 161-168
34. Yu.A. Kalinin Modernism of Russian Orthodoxy. - Kiev, 1988. - S. 41-43
35. Kopeliovich A. The World of Florensky // Prostor. - 1990. - No. 10. - S. 190-194
36. Levin I. D.<1901-1984>... "I saw Florensky once ..." // Vopr.
37. philosophy. - 1991. - No. 5. - S. 60-65
38. Losev A. F. "In search of meaning" // Vopr. literature. - 1985. - No. 10. - P.205-231 (about Florensky see: p. 212, 217; ill.)
39. Losev A.F. Remembering Florensky ... // Lit. studies. -1988. -№ 2. - S. 176-179
40. <Лосев А. Ф.>P.A.Florensky based on the memoirs of Alexei Losev // Context-90. - M., 1990 .-- S. 6-24
42. Neretina S, S. Berdyaev and Florensky: on the meaning of the historical // Vopr. philosophy. - 1991. - No. 3. - P. 67
43. P. Palievsky. Florensky and Rozanov // Lit. studies. - 1989. - No. 1. - P.111-115.
44. In memory of father Pavel Florensky // North. - 1990. - No. 9. - S. 113-118
45. Polovinkin S.M. P. A. Florensky: Logos against Chaos. - M., 1989. - (Review: Toporkov A. L. // Problems of Philosophy. - 1989. - No. 12)
46. Rozanova T. V. Memories of Tatyana Vasilyevna Rozanova about her father - Vasily Vasilyevich Rozanov and the whole family / Vstup. Art., note. M. M. Pavlova // Rus. literature. - 1989. - No. 3. - S. 209-232; No. 4. - P.160-187
47. Svasyan KA The four-act drama of prototypes // Sotsiol. research. 1988. - No. 6. - S. 104-106
48. Trubetskoy E. N. Light of Favorsky and the transformation of the mind // Vopr. philosophy. - 1989. - No. 12. - S. 112-129)
49. Florensky PV Notes on the symposium in Bergamo // Vopr. philosophy. - 1988. - No. 10. - S. 69-173
50. Florensky PV The fate of two ideas // Nature and man. - 1989. - No. 9. -S.65-68
51. Fudel S. I. (F. I. Udelov). About about. Pavel Florensky. - Paris, 1988 .-- 78 p.
52. Horuzhy S. S. Philosophical symbolism of P. A. Florensky and his life sources // Historical and Philosophical Yearbook. 1988. - M., 1989. - S. 180-201
53. Horuzhy S. S. Priest Pavel Florensky: reality and symbol // Lit. Russia. - 1989 .-- May 26. (No. 21). - P. 21
54. Horuzhy S. S. On the philosophy of the priest Pavel Florensky // Florensky P. A. Pillar and the statement of Truth. By half I. - M., 1990. - S. VI-XVI
55. Khoruzhy S.S. Finding Concreteness // Florensky P.A.<Сочинения.>T. 2: At the watersheds of thought. - M., 1990 .-- S. 3-12.
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Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky is one of the most outstanding and mysterious personalities of the "Silver Age". "Russian Leonardo da Vinci", "Lomonosov of the XX century" - characteristics of one side. “The hoaxer”, “the stylist” (the title of Berdyaev’s review of “The Pillar and the Assertion of Truth” is indicative - “Stylized Orthodoxy”), as the opponents state.
Others, on the contrary, emphasize a filigree analysis of historical realities - in works on ancient philosophy or ancient Russian icon painting, for example. There is no unanimity in the assessment of the religious side of the legacy of Father Paul - some are repulsed by the lack of writing of Christology (S.S. traditionalism than innovation).
Florensky considered the second principle of thermodynamics to be the main law of the world - the law of entropy, like the law of Chaos in all areas of the universe. Chaos is opposed by Logos - the beginning of ectropy. Culture is a deliberate struggle against world leveling. It is interesting that Berdyaev's Philosophy of Inequality, written at the height of the revolution and civil war, also considers culture as a principle opposing equalization, which acquires from Nikolai Aleksandrovich not only a social, but also a cosmic status.
1.Asoyan Yu., Malafeev A. Discovery of the idea of culture (Experience of Russian culturology of the mid-19th early 20th centuries. M .: OGI, 2000. P. 211.)
2.Compositions. T.3. (2). M., 1999.
3.Mikhailov A.V.O. Pavel Florensky as a philosopher of the border // Mikhailov A.V. Reverse translation. M .: Languages of Russian culture, 2000. P. 464. Yu.P. Ivask (see Ivask Yu.P., Rozanov and Father Pavel Florensky // P.A.Florensky: pro et contra. SPb .: RHGI, 1996. P. 442).
4.Palievsky P.V. Rozanov and Florensky // P.A. Florensky: pro et contra. SPb., 1996
5. Florensky P.A., Priest. Works in 4 volumes. Vol. 1. M .: Mysl, 1994.S. 38.
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Cheat Sheet: The Philosophy of Florensky
Introduction
The most durable, indestructible and constantly self-renewing in the world is that which has been worked out by the human spirit, human thought. On September 21, 1929, the priest Pavel Florensky wrote to V.I. Vernadsky “about the existence in the biosphere, or, perhaps, in the biosphere of what could be called the pneumatosphere, ie. about the existence of a special part of the substance involved in the cycle of culture, or, more precisely, the cycle of the spirit. " Note that in theology there is a special section of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit - pneumatology, and what the naturalist Florensky wrote to the naturalist Vernadsky, the latter explained as follows: “The irreducibility of this cycle to the general cycle of life can hardly be doubted. But there is a lot of data, however, not yet sufficiently formalized, hinting at the special persistence of material formations, worked out by the spirit, for example, objects of art. This makes one suspect the existence of a corresponding special sphere of matter in space. " To this P.A. Florensky, a scientist who attached great importance to the experimental-specific study of matter, added: “At the present time it is still premature to speak of the pneumatosphere as a subject of scientific study; perhaps such a question should not have been fixed in writing. However, the impossibility of a personal conversation prompted me to express this idea in a letter. " 1 So, the idea of the pneumatosphere was preserved in the letter. Any letters, like many other sheets of paper covered with writing, belong to the pneumatosphere, which is inseparable from a person, whose spiritualized efforts determine the "special stability" of its "material formations."
Many of the works of the priest Pavel Florensky are essentially personal conversations or letters filled with an intimate inner light playing on the edges of the composition, and addressed to the reader-friend. “The Pillar and Statement of Truth” 2 in the subtitle even has a clarification - “The Experience of Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters”. Sometimes letters modified by P.A. Florensky, became the chapters of his works. So, for example, the preface "On Makovets" to the work "At the watersheds of thought" 3 grew out of a letter to V.V. Rozanov. Florensky's word is a symbol, i.e. it is always something else. This "something" should be disclosed to those who are more or less akin to the author in terms of their worldview - hence the appeal to a person, to a friend, and not to an abstract public. Florensky and his relatives lived in the "epistolary" time. Correspondence genre friend of Florensky V.V. Rozanov called "the golden part of literature." This genre is one of the most ancient: the letters found during excavations give an idea of bygone civilizations, of the personal relationships of people, and the letters of the apostles addressed to close people or Christian communities formed part of the Holy Scriptures. Letters are subjective by definition and keep the concrete and momentary dialogue undistorted, but they are also mythological, understanding the myth as an eternally existing reality. The epistolary genre is a Socratic conversation that preserves the dialectic of communication. In this, the letters are fundamentally different from memoirs, which are essentially modeled conversations of the memoirist with himself in the past or with an interested interlocutor in the present, or justifying himself in front of descendants in the future. That is why the epistolary genre is sometimes more accurate than the memoirs worked out by time, often claiming to be an objective reassessment of the past.
1. Biography of Florensky
Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) - Russian religious philosopher and scientist, was born on January 9 (old style) in the town of Yevlakh in the west of present-day Azerbaijan. According to his father, his ancestry goes to the Russian clergy, while his mother came from an old and noble Armenian family. Florensky very early discovered exceptional mathematical abilities and, after graduating from the gymnasium in Tiflis, entered the mathematical department of Moscow University. After graduating from the University, he did not accept an offer to stay at the University to study in mathematics, but entered the Moscow Theological Academy. During these years he, together with Ern, Sventsitsky and Fr. Brychnichev created the "Union of Christian Struggle", striving for a radical renewal of the social system in the spirit of the ideas of Vl. Solovyov on the "Christian community". Later Florensky completely abandoned radical Christianity.
Even as a student, his interests spanned philosophy, religion, art, folklore. He enters the circle of young participants in the symbolic movement, strikes up a friendship with Andrei Bely, and his first creative experiences are articles in the symbolist journals Novy Put 'and Libra, where he seeks to introduce mathematical concepts into philosophical problems.
During the years of study at the Theological Academy, he had the idea of a major composition, his future book "The Pillar and Statement of Truth," most of which he completes by the end of his studies. After graduating from the Academy in 1908, he became a teacher of philosophical disciplines there, and in 1911 he accepted the priesthood and in 1912 was appointed editor of the academic journal "Theological Bulletin". The complete and final text of his book, The Pillar and Establishment of Truth, appears in 1924.
In 1918, the Theological Academy moved its work to Moscow, and then closed. In 1921 the Church of St. Sergius was also closed, where Florensky served as a priest. In the years from 1916 to 1925, Florensky wrote a number of religious and philosophical works, including "Essays on the Philosophy of Cult" (1918), "Iconostasis" (1922), works on his memoirs. Along with this, he returned to physics and mathematics, working also in the field of technology and materials science. Since 1921 he has been working in the Glavenergo system, taking part in GOELRO, and in 1924 he published a large monograph on dielectrics. Another area of his activity during this period was art history and museum work. At the same time, Florensky works in the Commission for the Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquity of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, being its scientific secretary, and writes a number of works on ancient Russian art.
In the second half of the twenties, Florensky's circle of studies was forced to be limited to technical issues. In the summer of 1928, he was exiled to Nizhniy Novgorod, but in the same year, due to the efforts of E.P. Peshkova, will be returned from exile. In the early thirties, a campaign was launched against him in the Soviet press with articles of a pogrom and denunciatory nature. On February 26, 1933, he was arrested, and 5 months later, on July 26, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. From 1934 Florensky was held in the Solovetsky camp. On November 25, 1937, by a special troika of the NKVD of the Leningrad Region, he was sentenced to capital punishment and shot on December 8, 1937.
2. Stages of creativity P. Florensky
In the works of P.A. Florensky usually distinguish two stages, which culminated in the fundamental works on theodicy and anthropodicy.
Theodicy, which in a somewhat simplified translation means justification, explanation, justification of the existence of God, is the book Pillar and Statement of Truth, the only major work on philosophy published during his lifetime, written when its author was less than thirty years old. The book played an important role in the churching of the intelligentsia of both the Silver Age and ours, the "Iron" Age. It was read and known when reading religious literature was unsafe. Florensky was a symbol of the scientist-priest who died in the camps. It is now forgotten that it was dangerous to have patristic and church literature in general. Even in the late 1980s, for a Bible discovered by customs officers, a person became at least "restricted to travel abroad." The names of church leaders in general, and the names of religious philosophers in particular, were crossed out both literally and figuratively, just as the names of those objectionable to Orwell's "ministry of truth" were erased.
Another work by P.A. Florensky - anthropodicy, justification of a person - was created by a mature forty-year-old thinker without hope for publication. It includes several volumes, the manuscripts of which were secretly kept by his family. Now they have been published by the efforts of his grandchildren, and many of them, especially Iconostasis 4 and Imena, 5 have entered our culture. Priest Pavel Florensky continued his posthumous way of the cross.
However, in the work of P.A. Florensky, as in his life, it is appropriate to single out two more stages, which correspond to completed and perfect literary and philosophical works. This is his correspondence of the beginning and end of his life and creative path.
Letters to the family from the 1933-1937 camps.
- the work of the last stage of the work of the prisoner P.A. Florensky. In them, he transfers the accumulated knowledge to his children, and through them to all people, therefore the main direction of their thought is the clan as the bearer of eternity in time and the family as the main unit of human society. The focus of experiences becomes the unity of the clan, family and personality, a personality formed, unique, but at the same time connected by thousands of threads with its own kind, and through it - with Eternity, for "the past has not passed." The genus, in turn, finds in the family a balance of formed personalities, unmerged and inseparable, in the family there is a transfer of the experience of the genus from parents to children, so that they "do not fall out of the slots of time." By analogy with previous works, letters from prisons and camps can be called genodicy, justification of the clan, family.
There is another, no less perfect work - Florensky's youthful correspondence with relatives, letters from the time of his studies at the Tiflis gymnasium, as well as the period of his studies at Moscow University and the Moscow Theological Academy. In the correspondence of 1897-1906. reflected the formation of Florensky's personality, how he separates himself from the family, from the environment, how he sets life tasks. It is appropriate to call this stage self-justification, personality justification - egotice. With his philosophizing, the unity of his creative biography - theodicy, anthropodicya, genodicya, egodicea - priest Pavel Florensky embraced three usually non-intersecting worlds: the heavenly world, the pneumatospheric world, the human, and the personal-tribal family. Each with its own objects, their special hierarchy, specific axioms.
3. Philosophy of culture P.А. Florensky
Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky is one of the most outstanding and mysterious personalities of the "Silver Age". "Russian Leonardo da Vinci", "Lomonosov of the XX century" - characteristics of one side. “The hoaxer”, “the stylist” (the title of Berdyaev’s review of “The Pillar and the Assertion of Truth” is indicative - “Stylized Orthodoxy”), the opponents state. Others, on the contrary, emphasize a filigree analysis of historical realities - in works on ancient philosophy or ancient Russian icon painting, for example. There is no unanimity in the assessment of the religious side of the legacy of Father Paul - some are repulsed by the lack of writing of Christology (S.S. traditionalism than innovation).
Florensky undoubtedly threw down a kind of challenge to intellectual stereotypes, striving to return to the path of their ancestors. On the paternal side, the latter belonged to the Orthodox clergy (recall, by the way, that the ancestors of V.V. Rozanov and Vyach. Ivanov were also representatives of "Levitic" clans "), while the mother came from a noble Armenian family (her ancestors ruled Karabakh). Accepting the priesthood, Pavel Alexandrovich carried out a synthesis of churchliness and secular culture not only in theory, but also in practice.
In the “Abstract” for the dictionary “Pomegranate”, Father Pavel described the tasks and method of his philosophizing as follows: “F [Lorensky] understands his life task as paving the way to a future integral worldview. In this sense, he can be called a philosopher. But in contrast to the methods and tasks of philosophical thinking that have become established in modern times, he starts from abstract constructions and from the exhaustive, according to the schemes, completeness of problems. In this sense, he should rather be considered a researcher. His broad prospects are always associated with specific and closely posed surveys of individual, sometimes very special, issues. "
Each phenomenon ("phenomenon") contains in itself, in its sensible form, being intelligible ("noumenal"). Florensky rejects abstract essences, for a spiritual object is always expressed in the sensible, given visibly and plastically. "The complete representation of the world as a whole in a single, individual and, as it were, private (in a symbol) - this is how the concreteness of metaphysics according to P. Florensky can be determined." In this regard, it is necessary to consider the concept of the "Dictionary of Symbols", begun by Pavel Alexandrovich, but not completed (the article "Point" was written).
Florensky considered the second principle of thermodynamics to be the main law of the world - the law of entropy, like the law of Chaos in all areas of the universe.
Chaos is opposed by Logos - the beginning of ectropy. Culture is a deliberate struggle against world leveling. It is interesting that Berdyaev's Philosophy of Inequality, written at the height of the revolution and civil war, also considers culture as a principle opposing equalization, which acquires from Nikolai Aleksandrovich not only a social, but also a cosmic status.
Being the antipode of Kant, Florensky regarded himself as a thinker of the medieval type, and considered his worldview to be in line with the style of the 14th – 15th centuries. Russian Middle Ages. However, he considered it possible and even desirable constructions that corresponded to a deeper return to the Middle Ages. However, one cannot ignore the following remark: “The mind and soul of Fr. Paul lay not to the Middle Ages with its sums of knowledge, but to, if you will, the final and the Middle Ages, and a whole huge tradition of knowledge (diverging in its self-understanding from the modern European scientific) period of the Baroque: if in the Middle Ages, sums of true knowledge are created within oneself, then The 17th century begins to open up into the historical and cultural breadth, to collect, put side by side, synthesize, encyclopedically formulate a wide variety of knowledge, he continues to know and remember his own truth, however, he furnishes it with heaps of someone else's, alien, curious, strives for the completeness of just the curious, all this confusion ... ".
Bibliography
Asoyan Y., Malafeev A. Discovery of the idea of culture (Experience of Russian cultural studies in the middle of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Moscow: OGI, 2000. P. 211.).
Compositions. T.3. (2). M., 1999.
Mikhailov A.V.O. Pavel Florensky as a philosopher of the border // Mikhailov A.V. Reverse translation.
M .: Languages of Russian culture, 2000. P. 464. Yu.P. Ivask (see Ivask Yu.P., Rozanov and Father Pavel Florensky // P.A.Florensky: pro et contra. SPb .: RHGI, 1996. P. 442).
P.V. Palievsky Rozanov and Florensky // P.A. Florensky: pro et contra. SPb., 1996
Florensky P.A., Priest. Works in 4 volumes. Vol. 1.
The philosophy of P.A. Florensky
M .: Mysl, 1994.S. 38.
1.2 Philosophy of Pavel Florensky and "new religious consciousness"
Pavel Florensky - biography, information, personal life
Pavel Florensky
Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky. Born on January 22, 1882 in Yevlakh, Elisavetpol province - died on December 8, 1937 (buried near Leningrad). Russian Orthodox priest, theologian, religious philosopher, scientist, poet.
Pavel Florensky was born on January 9 in the town of Yevlakh in the Elizavetpol province (now Azerbaijan).
Father Alexander Ivanovich Florensky (September 30, 1850 - January 22, 1908) - Russian, came from a clergy; an educated cultured person, but who has lost contact with the church, with religious life. He worked as an engineer on the construction of the Transcaucasian Railway.
Mother - Olga (Salome) Pavlovna Saparova (Saparyan) (25.03.1859 - 1951) belonged to a cultural family descended from the ancient clan of the Karabakh Armenians.
Florensky's grandmother was from the Paatov family (Paatashvili). The Florensky family, like their Armenian relatives, had estates in the Elisavetpol province, where local Armenians took refuge during the unrest, fleeing the onslaught of the Caucasian Tatars. Thus, the Karabakh Armenians retained their dialect and special customs. The family had two more brothers: Alexander (1888-1938) - a geologist, archaeologist, ethnographer and Andrei (1899-1961) - a weapons designer, winner of the Stalin Prize; as well as sisters: Julia (1884-1947) - a psychiatrist-speech therapist, Elizaveta (1886-1967) - married Konieva (Koniashvili), Olga (1892-1914) - an artist-miniaturist and Raisa (1894-1932) - an artist, member of the Makovets association.
In 1899 he graduated from the 2nd Tiflis Gymnasium and entered the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow University. At the university he met Andrei Bely, and through him with Bryusov, Balmont, Dm. Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius, Al. Block. Published in the magazines "New Way" and "Libra". During his student years, he was carried away by the teachings of Vladimir Solovyov and Archimandrite Serapion (Mashkin).
After graduating from the university, with the blessing of Bishop Anthony (Florensov), he entered the Moscow Theological Academy, where he conceived the idea of the essay "The Pillar and Statement of Truth", which he completed by the end of his studies (1908) (he was awarded the Makariyev Prize for this work). In 1911 he received the priesthood. In 1912 he was appointed editor of the academic journal "Theological Bulletin" (1908).
Florensky was deeply interested in the infamous "Beilis case" - the falsified accusation of a Jew in the ritual murder of a Christian boy. He published anonymous articles, convinced of the truth of the accusation and the reality of the Jewish drinking of the blood of Christian babies. At the same time, Florensky's views evolved from Christian anti-Judaism to racial anti-Semitism. In his opinion, “even an insignificant drop of Jewish blood” is enough to evoke “typically Jewish” bodily and mental traits in entire subsequent generations.
He perceives the events of the revolution as a living apocalypse and in this sense metaphysically welcomes, but philosophically and politically he is more and more inclined towards theocratic monarchism. He becomes close to Vasily Rozanov and becomes his confessor, demanding renunciation of all heretical works. He is trying to convince the authorities that the Trinity-Sergius Lavra is the greatest spiritual value and cannot be preserved as a dead museum. Denunciations are received against Florensky, in which he is accused of creating a monarchist circle.
From 1916 to 1925, P. A. Florensky wrote a number of religious and philosophical works, including "Essays on the Philosophy of Cult" (1918), "Iconostasis" (1922), works on memories. In 1919, P. A. Florensky wrote an article "Reverse Perspective", dedicated to the understanding of the phenomenon of this method of organizing space on a plane as a "creative impulse" when considering the icon painting canon in retrospective historical comparison with examples of world art endowed with such properties; Among other factors, it first of all points to the regularity of the artist's periodic return to the use of reverse perspective and the rejection of it in accordance with the spirit of the times, historical circumstances and his worldview and "feeling for life."
Along with this, he returned to physics and mathematics, working also in the field of technology and materials science. Since 1921 he has been working in the Glavenergo system, taking part in GOELRO, and in 1924 he published a large monograph on dielectrics. His scientific activity is supported by Leon Trotsky, who once came to the institute with a visit of revision and support, which, possibly, in the future played a fatal role in the fate of Florensky.
Another area of his activity during this period was art history and museum work. At the same time, Florensky works in the Commission for the Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquity of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, being its scientific secretary, and writes a number of works on ancient Russian art.
In 1922, he published at his own expense the book "Imaginations in Geometry", in which, with the help of mathematical proofs, he tried to confirm the geocentric picture of the world in which the Sun and the planets revolve around the Earth, and refute the heliocentric ideas about the structure of the solar system, which have been established in science since time Copernicus. In this book, Florensky also argued the existence of a "border between the Earth and Heaven", located between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.
In the summer of 1928, he was exiled to Nizhny Novgorod, but in the same year, due to the efforts of E.P. Peshkova, he was returned from exile and given the opportunity to emigrate to Prague, but Florensky decided to stay in Russia. In the early 1930s, a campaign was launched against him in the Soviet press with articles of a devastating and denunciatory nature.
On February 26, 1933, he was arrested and 5 months later, on July 26, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was sent on a convoy to the East Siberian camp "Svobodny", where he arrived on December 1, 1933. Florensky was assigned to work in the research department of the BAMLAG administration. While in prison, Florensky wrote the work "Prospective government in the future." Florensky believed that the best state structure was a totalitarian dictatorship with a perfect organization and a system of control, isolated from the outside world. Such a dictatorship should be headed by a brilliant and charismatic leader. Florensky considered Hitler and Mussolini to be a transitional, unresolved stage in the movement towards such a leader. He wrote this work at the instigation of the investigation within the framework of a fabricated trial against the "national-fascist center" "Party of the Renaissance of Russia", the head of which was allegedly Fr. Pavel Florensky, who confessed in the case.
Here Florensky conducted research, which later formed the basis for the book of his collaborators N. I. Bykov and P. N. Kapterev "Permafrost and construction on it" (1940).
On August 17, 1934, Florensky was placed in the isolation ward of the Svobodny camp, and on September 1, 1934, he was sent with a special escort to the Solovetsky special purpose camp.
On November 15, 1934, he began working at the Solovetsky camp plant of the iodine industry, where he dealt with the problem of the extraction of iodine and agar-agar from seaweed and patented more than ten scientific discoveries.
On November 25, 1937, by a special troika of the NKVD of the Leningrad Region, he was sentenced to capital punishment and shot.
He was buried in the common grave of those executed by the NKVD near Leningrad ("Levashovskaya wasteland").
Rehabilitated on May 5, 1958 (by the 1933 sentence) and March 5, 1959 (by the 1937 sentence)
Family of Pavel Florensky:
In 1910 he married Anna Mikhailovna Giatsintova (1889-1973). They had five children: Vasily, Cyril, Mikhail, Olga, Maria.
The second son Kirill is a geochemist and planetary scientist.
Pavel Vasilyevich Florensky (b. 1936), professor at the Russian University of Oil and Gas, academician of the International Slavic Academy of Sciences, Arts and Culture, academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, member of the Writers' Union of Russia, head of the Expert Group on Miracles at the Synodal Theological Commission of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Hegumen Andronic (Trubachev) - Director of the Center for the Study, Protection and Restoration of the Heritage of Priest Pavel Florensky, Director of the Museum of Priest Pavel Florensky in the city of Sergiev Posad, founder and director of the Museum of Priest Pavel Florensky in Moscow.
MINISTRY OF SCIENCE EDUCATION OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
FEDERAL EDUCATION AGENCY
ROSTOV STATE ECONOMIC
UNIVERSITY "(RINH)"
TEST
in the discipline "Philosophy"
on the topic: "Religious and philosophical views
P.A. Florensky "(No. 15)
Is done by a student:
Groups 412 s / s
Popova Natalia Viktorovna
Bataysk, 2012
Introduction
Biography of P. Florensky
Cosmological views of P. Florensky
Teaching about the created Sophia of the Wisdom of God.
Conclusion
Bibliography
Introduction
The assertion of a solid support past the current in eternity, "the ontological nature of the spiritual world", "paving the way to the future integral worldview" characterizes the teaching of P.A. Florensky as a metaphysics of all-unity. The conviction of integrity and unity, deep connection and harmony of being unites him with the philosophical quests of V. Soloviev, N. Fedorov, S. Bulgakov, N. Berdyaev, V. Vernadsky.
Florenian philosophical being divine
1. Biography of P.A. Florensky
P.A. Florensky was born on January 9, 1882. In the city of Yevlakh, Elizabethan province (now Azerbaijan). His father was an engineer, builder of the Transcaucasian railway. According to his mother, his roots go back to the ancient Armenian family of the Saparovs. Being of different religions, breaking away from their clans, the father and mother strove to turn the family into a special world, to bring up the cult of the family principle in children. This cult is deeply rooted in the soul of the poor philosopher, but it complements it with the cult of the clan, the memory of ancestors, and the appeal of the soul to previous generations. And deep faith in God, the Church overcomes discord and unites generations.
Impressions from the rich nature of the Caucasus, childhood spent in constant family relocations (due to the service of the father), were in many ways decisive factors for the formation of the personality and worldview of the poor philosopher. A sincere treatment of nature turns into a passion for the natural sciences.
After graduating from the Tiflis gymnasium, P. Florensky entered the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow University. At the university, the range of his interests is unusually wide: philosophy, mathematics, religion, art, folklore. During these years he took part in the Symbolist movement, met A. Bely, collaborated in the journals Novy Put and Vesy, where he was already trying to introduce mathematical concepts into philosophy.
After graduating from the university in 1904, he entered the Moscow Theological Academy. In 1911 he defended his master's thesis "On Spiritual Truth" and was ordained a priest.
In 1914, Florensky's book “The Pillar and Statement of Truth. Experience of Orthodox Theodicy ”, which brought him recognition and fame, although by no means exhaust the problems that interested him. The main task of the book is to comprehend and express the path that led the author to the world of Christianity and Orthodoxy.
Despite the repressions against the church, P. Florensky continues his active work, showing himself as an extremely multifaceted and unique personality. In addition to philosophy, he professionally works in several directions at once: natural science, linguistics, art theory, mathematics, technology, etc. Moreover, this work is united by one goal - the creation of a global synthesis, a single picture of being, reflected in the new work “At the watersheds of thought. Features of Concrete Metaphysics ”. But she never came out.
BUT. Lossky in the History of Russian Philosophy cites an excerpt about a philosopher from an article in the Pskov city newspaper, which best describes P. Florensky: religious and philosophical articles, a symbolist poet, whose works appeared in Libra and a separate book, a gifted astronomer who defended the geocentric concept of the world; a remarkable mathematician, the author of "Imaginations in Geometry" and a number of monographs in the field of mathematics, an authority in the field of physics, the author of the exemplary work "Dielectrics and their technical application. General Properties of Dielectrics ”, art historian and author of several monographs on art, and especially woodcarving; a remarkable electrical engineer who held one of the main posts in the electrification commission ... He was a professor of perspective painting (at Vkhutemas); an excellent musician, an astute admirer of Bach and the polyphonic music of Beethoven and his contemporaries, who perfectly knew their works. Florensky was a polyglot, fluent in Latin and Ancient Greek and most modern European languages, as well as the languages of the Caucasus, Iran and India ... "
The first link of P.A. Florensky falls on the summer of 1928. In the early 30s. persecution was again unleashed against him, and in 1933 he was arrested. In December 1937, Father Pavel Florensky was shot in the Solovetsky camp.
The whole life and work of P.A. Florensky are imbued with a very characteristic practical aspiration for him, a concrete, laborious attitude to the world. He became a priest in order to practically, really help people. In science, Florensky was interested in research that is applicable in reality. Even in exile, he continued his research work; made a number of discoveries.
P.A. Florensky was a patriot of his homeland. His friend S. Bulgakov wrote: “He wanted to share his fate with his people to the end. Father Pavel organically could not and did not want to become an emigrant in the sense of voluntary or involuntary separation from his homeland, and he himself and his fate are the glory and greatness of Russia, although at the same time it is her greatest crime. "
2.Cosmological views of P.A. Florensky In the philosophical heritage of Florensky, a line stands out that is close to the ideas of Russian cosmism. This direction of Russian Orthodox philosophy, which N. Berdyaev in his work "Russian Idea" described as "cosmocentric, beholding divine energies in the created world, facing the transformation of the world." This direction, which not only considers man as a microcosm, a particle of the Universe, but also raises the question of the active, creative mission of man, his ability to transform his own nature and the external world. Man is a spiritual, rational being, capable of introducing conscious creativity into nature, spiritualizing the world. The idea of the meaning of human life is considered through comprehending the unity of the Earth, Space, biosphere and the interests of a particular person. The evolution of life and man as its highest manifestation is endless. Man is not the crown of creation, his perfection is infinite. This is the unity of the Cosmos and man, the essence of the idea of the meaning of the cosmic process. Man is the pinnacle of spontaneous evolution and at the same time the beginning of a new, rationally directed evolution. It is indicative that a concept identical to the "noosphere" (the sphere of reason, the idea of a new specific shell of the Earth, as it were, superimposed on the biosphere and exerting an increasing influence on it) is encountered by many followers of cosmism. So, P. Florensky in a letter to V.I. Vernadsky of September 21, 1929 writes: “For my part, I want to express an idea that needs a specific justification and is rather a heuristic principle. This is precisely the idea of the existence in the biosphere, or, perhaps, on the biosphere of what could be called the pneumatosphere, i.e. about the existence of a special part of the substance involved in the cycle of culture, or, more precisely, the cycle of the spirit. " Russian religious thought at the end of the 19th-20th centuries. developed an integral concept of God-manhood as a catholic, universal cosmic deification. Not only God descends into the World to save man, but man can, in a special act of creation, go beyond the limits of his own created nature, see God, i.e. what, ideally, should become the nature of man himself. The true essence of being, or "the unity of all creation in God", is considered by P. Florensky as a process of ascent from creature to the Absolute, and not vice versa. "A creature is a creature because it is not an Unconditionally Necessary Being and that, consequently, the existence of a creature is in no way deduced not only from the idea of Truth ... but even from the fact of the existence of Truth, from God." And below: “The existence of a creature is not deducible by any, even the most refined, reasoning, and if thinkers nevertheless try to do this deduction, then ... they either perform a logical trick, or destroy the God-given creatureness of the creature, relegating it, personality, free - albeit feeble, from the stage of being godlike-creative to the plane of being abstract - as an attribute or mode of the Divine. " Such an understanding of the creature is possible only on the basis of Christianity. Only in Christianity created being, nature is viewed as an independent living reality, and not a reflection of some other reality. "... This attitude to the creature became conceivable only when people saw in the creature not a simple shell of demons, not some emanation of the Divine and not its ghostly appearance, like the appearance of a rainbow in splashes of water, but an independent, self-lawful and self-responsible creation of God ..." , i.e. Florensky adheres to the perception of the inexhaustible forces of nature, characteristic of Russian cosmism, of its creative force acting in it, and not from outside. The ideal sphere of being for Florensky is a living feeling of the dynamics of being in its roots, a feeling of its living power. This is especially evident in the doctrine of concrete ideal being and in the "philosophy of the name" of Florensky. According to the views of the philosopher, to cognize specifically the ideal principles underlying the universe is to see a living being as a unity in a heterogeneous one. To recreate living being in its ideal essence is the goal of true art. Synthetic images created by artists and sculptors represent a harmonious unity of various expressions, facial expressions, various changes in time. The ability to express ideal integrity symbolically means seeing that root, an idea, which is not an abstract concept, but a manifestation of both a higher reality and a concrete living being. This unity is manifested most fully in the idea of beauty, which belongs to this reality and a living being. The deep experience of P. Florensky of the secret power of every word, name is closely connected with the understanding of concretely ideal being. The name for him is the metaphysical principle of being and cognition, the divine essence, the substance of a thing. Florensky deduces the formula: "The name of God is God himself," but God is neither the Name of God, nor a name in general. The name is not letters or sounds. Letters and sounds are icons. God exists in his names, which we spell. But it does not exist substantively, but incidentally, in its manifestation, in its energy. The name of God has an objective divine side. The entire Orthodox rite, including prayer, cannot be reduced exclusively to the subjective. People worship and pray to the icon because the Deity is present in it. Otherwise, the icon would be just a piece of wood with more or less pronounced artistic merit. Florensky's doctrine of name (or name-Slavia) was most fully developed by A.F. Losev, his follower and student. These are the cosmological views of P. Florensky. 3.The doctrine of the created Sophia of the Wisdom of God The philosopher's constructions are completed with the doctrine of the created Sophia of the Wisdom of God. The doctrine of Sophia is a definite direction in the metaphysics of total-unity. Sophia is an ideal prototype of the world, an assertion of the wisdom and beauty of the universe. The focus of P.A. Florensky is still the question of the relationship, the unity of created being and the divine, i.e. how is the perfect unity of the world possible? P. Florensky answers this question, revealing the essence of Sophia in his work "The Pillar and Statement of Truth". The sophiology of P. Florensky is based on two sources: ) the traditions of the Sophia cult (the assertion of the wisdom and beauty of the universe; Sophia as the bearer with God of the eternal creative plan of the ideal prototype of the world); ) the concept of Christian Platonism (the correspondence of each thing to the ideas-eidos and the recognition of the rational world as the unity of the ideas-eidos of all things). The relationship between the World and God is expressed by Florensky in two ways. On the one hand, it consists in recognizing the meaning of created being (being as God's plan for it and its image in God). On the other hand, in the love of the creature to God. Consequently, each created personality corresponds to its "ideal personality" or "love - idea - monad", in which the connection of the personality with God is realized. Love acts as the unifying force of being, which connects the monads with God and among themselves. For a philosopher, love is the force that determines total-unity, it is the most important ontological category. In letter XI of the Pillar, which is called Friendship, he analyzes in detail the various Greek verbs of love, defines what love means. This analysis shows that the Greek language distinguishes four directions in love: passion, affection, respect and affection. But none of these words expresses that love - friendship that would combine all four components. Investigating specific philological material, Florensky carries out the idea of the existence of stages of love. There are various degrees of love, gradations of love, from perfect love, "numerical identity". Consequently, there are also steps, gradations of all-unity itself as the unity and cohesion gradually decrease, depending on the degree of its “beingness” and authenticity. Such a unity of being, supported constantly by the creative power of love, is for P.A. Florensky "multi-one being". It belongs to the divine being and is endowed not only with life, but with a hypostatic, personal nature - it is a perfect personality. This person is Sophia. From the point of view of the three hypostases, Sophia for Florensky "is an ideal substance, the basis of creation, its power or force of being." Further: "Sophia is the mind of a creature, its meaning, truth or truth." And, finally, it is “the spirituality of the creature, its holiness, purity and integrity, that is, beauty". Sophia is "the fourth hypostatic element ... entering the fullness of the Trinity depths ... by the grace of God." In addition, Florensky brings the concept of Sophia closer to the concept of the Church and the Mother of God. Thus, since Sophia participates in the life of the tri-hypostatic Deity, the Cosmos itself enters the sphere of the Absolute together with her. Florensky is characterized by the recognition of the mystical unity of nature, the counter movement of two worlds: visible and invisible. In this cosmological channel, the doctrine of Sophia as an ideal root connecting the two worlds is developing. Tracing the process of ascent from the Cosmos to the Absolute, the philosopher arrives at the affirmation of the unity of all creation in God, the all-unity of the Cosmos and the Absolute. Thus, the "spiritual experience of the fullness of being" is comprehended. Sophia is the perfect unity of the multitude. The principle of its arrangement is the identity of the parts to the whole (which, by definition, is all-unity). Each person, while remaining himself, at the same time merges with others, forming a unity in diversity. This identity is established through love, primarily the love of God. Personality is dual in nature. This creature is original and suffering, beautiful and polluted at the same time. The opposites of light and darkness, good and evil, sin and salvation from it, redemption destroy the person. This destruction leads not only to mental breakdowns, but also, what is much more terrible, to the separation of the soul from the spirit, to the separation of the self from the person himself as a substantial image of God. The self becomes satanic, loses its creative, constructive power. The preservation of the integrity of the personality is possible only, from the point of view of Florensky, in the love of God, in overcoming egoistic self-absorption into one's own self, and, consequently, in repentance. "In the face of eternity, all must be exposed from all that is corruptible and become naked." Florensky clearly contrasts reason and communion with the Church, although he speaks of the convergence of faith and knowledge. He affirms the super-intelligence, even the anti-intelligence of the truths of faith. In addition, the deep antinomianism of human consciousness is manifested in the separation of reason, subject to formal logic, and reason, close to faith and purified by prayer and asceticism. Thus, a single integral truth is possible only "in heaven", and on earth - only a multitude of truths or fragments of truth. Truth is conceivable only as an integral Unity. It is both real rationality and reasonable reality, finite infinity and infinite finiteness. Conclusion These are, in general terms, the religious and philosophical views of the Russian philosopher Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky. As many historians of philosophy correctly point out, his theoretical constructs are far from infallible. Attitude to philosophy of P.A. Florensky is very contradictory and ambiguous. She was severely criticized by N. Berdyaev. In particular, he considered Florensky too close to decadence, to subtle aesthetic experiences, and this contradicts the strict Orthodoxy, which Florensky himself wanted to achieve. "Sacred Pavel Florensky is a brilliant, gifted, exquisitely clever and exquisitely refined stylist of Orthodoxy - he has not a single thought, not a single word that has not gone through stylization. His Orthodoxy is not living, not spontaneous, but stylized, not naive, but sentimental (in Schiller’s sense). This is Orthodoxy of complex and refined aesthetic reflections, and not of direct creative life, Orthodoxy of a period of decline, not a flourishing. " The teachings of P.A. Florensky was not accepted by the church. P. Florensky very peculiarly, non-trivially illuminates many questions of Orthodoxy. This innovative approach, apparently, caused the resistance of everyday theology. The fact is that innovation and everyday life are contradictory combined for creative perception. Usually, attention is focused on the meanings of everyday life only as ordinary, too boring and uninteresting. What becomes too commonplace, thereby becomes uninteresting for communication and perception. P. Florensky drew attention to this aspect of the matter, analyzing Orthodoxy in connection with its too everyday character. Religion must combine the everyday and the extraordinary, the unusual, otherwise it will become familiar and ordinary. P. Florensky's creativity to renew the too traditional, prosaic, boring Orthodoxy was associated with his attention to art history, to the question of the importance of art for theology and church life. These ideas are of great methodological significance for understanding everyday culture and the culture of communication. Despite all the criticism of the works of P.A. Florensky, they deserve very high marks. P.A. Florensky connects religious issues with modern science and metaphysical research of those spheres of life that go beyond the human world. He revives the ideals of Christian humanism and clearly shows that the experience of Orthodoxy cannot be separated from Russian culture, from the entire spiritual heritage. The true ideal of Christian life, the achievement of the holiness of P.A. Florensky sees not in withdrawal from the world, not in alienation from life, but in a complete perception of the world, practical service to God and people. It is safe to say that the whole life and works of Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky are a vivid embodiment of this ideal. Bibliography: 1.V. V. Bychkov The aesthetic face of being: The speculation of Pavel Florensky. - M., 1990. 2.Voronkova L.P. P.A. Florensky // Vestn. Moscow un-that. Ser. 7. Philosophy. - 1989. - No. 1 .A.G. Zarubin Foundations of philosophy. Rostov N / A, 2006 .Losev A.F. Remembering Florensky ... // Lit. studies. -1988. .Khoruzhy S.S. Philosophical Symbolism of P.A.Florensky and Its Life Origins // Historical and Philosophical Yearbook. 1988 .-- M., 1989 .Shaposhnikov L.E. P.A. Florensky and modern Orthodoxy // Philos. Sciences. - 1987. - No. 5
Pavel Florensky is a Russian Orthodox thinker. Today, there is still a discussion among scientists-philosophers, whether it was this independent Russian philosophy at all, or whether the works of Russian thinkers should be considered a kind of reflection of Western European philosophy.
This question, as scientists note, if approached without ideological bias, is really not so simple at all. The Western European and Russian traditions of philosophical thought have the same main roots-sources: ancient philosophy and Christianity - it is they that initially so sharply separate European and Russian philosophy from Eastern philosophy, for example, Chinese. And yet, just as from a single root - the teachings of Christ - different trees grew: Orthodoxy and Catholicism, so Russian and Western European philosophical aspirations followed different paths. "Russian philosophical enlightenment," writes P. Florensky in his review-response to the essay of the Moscow Academy of Arts student A. Danilovsky "The history of teaching philosophical sciences in the spiritual educational institutions of Russia," precisely the spiritual school, and only the very end of the 19th century was marked by the emergence of philosophy, which spread in a different way ... The history of teaching philosophical sciences in the spiritual educational institutions of Russia should be recognized as the main thread of the history of Russian philosophy in general, meaning, in this case, under "Russian philosophy" the totality of all philosophical trends that agitated Russian society. But, bearing on itself the high cultural task of the philosophical enlightenment of Russia, the theological school has never been just a mechanical transmitter of Western thought. All representatives of the spiritual school have a special imprint characteristic of Russian thought, and if the history of the teaching of philosophical sciences is the main If the thread of the history of Russian philosophy in the broad sense, this latter is always closely intertwined with the history of Russian philosophy, in the narrow sense of philosophy, natively Russian. " This, according to Florensky, is the historical essence of the issue. Attempts by Western thought to take possession of Russian thought for P. Florensky were largely personified in the figure of Kant, "the great cunning", as he put it. Plato and Kant - these two figures seem to absorb the qualities of polar philosophical and, more broadly, spiritual in general, ideas and ideals. In the interpretation of Florensky, "Kant takes the life-understanding of Plato and changes the sign in front of him - from plus to minus. Then all the pluses change to minuses and all the minuses to pluses in all the positions of Platonism: this is how Kantianism arises."
Russian philosophy, according to Florensky, is an original thought, originating in the teachings of Plato, enriched by the experience of Western European ideas, but not only and not so much by the experience of acceptance as by the experience of overcoming. And one more characteristic, which should be called self-evident in this interpretation, is that the main idea of Russian philosophy is a "religious idea", P. Florensky believed, that is, Russian philosophical thought at the beginning of the 20th century realized itself in a religious and philosophical understanding of the world. And the viability of the "Russian idea" is determined by its rootedness in Orthodoxy. “If Russian philosophy is possible,” wrote Father Pavel, “then only as an Orthodox philosophy, as a philosophy of Orthodox faith, as a precious robe of gold - reason - and semi-precious stones - gains of experience - on the shrine of Orthodoxy” (Greetings to Professor A.I. Vvedensky in connection with his 25-year service at the MDA).
The features of Russian philosophical thought, which are of particular importance for Florensky, but to a much lesser extent distinguished by other thinkers (for example, university science), should be called the "philosophical principles of Slavophilism" and their opposition to "periodically repeated attacks of rationalist principles" and, of course, positivism. in many respects still acceptable to Vl. Soloviev, but already rejected by Florensky.
These are the main features of Russian philosophy, to the figures of which Florensky considered himself and therefore saw them not only in his predecessors and contemporaries, but above all, perhaps, in himself, in his own world outlook.
Proceeding from the fact that the main works were published in the 1910s-1920s, it would be quite legitimate to conclude that Florensky is a thinker of the beginning of the 20th century, especially since much in his works is based on the achievements of science of this particular time (for example, on G. Cantor's set theory and N.V. Bugaev's ideas in mathematics). But if you believe Florensky himself and perceive his words with full seriousness and faith, then immediately doubts arise: a return to the Middle Ages "- this is what Florensky wrote in his abstract in 1925-1926. And a little earlier, in January 1924, Florensky made a wonderful entry in his "Memoirs": time and therefore the first - the coming Middle Ages. "
Here there was an intersection of two kinds of time - chronological time and world-contemplative time. They, both of these times, as taught by positivist science, must always fundamentally coincide. From barbarism - through antiquity, through the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance - to the New Time, if there are no breaks. So in all areas of history, including the history of thought. Florensky, however, felt him quite differently: just as in the field of spatial thinking, instead of "the monotonous plain of the earth's surface" he saw, a man of cult and philosopher of the cult, "everywhere - ladders of ascents and descents", and in time he sensitively felt breaks and breaks when " time comes out of its slots. " And he considered himself a man and a thinker of the turning point - the last and the first at the same time. And not only himself. The younger contemporary of A.F. Florensky Losev gave him the following characterization: “I regard the philosophy of Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky as a transitional period between the old and the new.
The main feature of the world outlook of the Renaissance and the New Age (including, of course, the Enlightenment - the true peak of this tradition) is anthropocentrism, i.e. a teaching that puts a human Personality in the center of the world. Raising a person (who “sounds proudly” and is the “king of nature”) to an unimaginable height, such a consciousness separates him from the world, puts him above the world, and this world itself turns only into a field of his activity, that is, into something external to man. The most obvious consequence of such a world outlook is ecological: a person belongs to the world "predatory-mechanical, taking away from him what seems necessary to him, knocking out with blood, disregarding losses. And how could it be otherwise if a person does not recognize himself as a part of the world. , but considers himself to be his undivided ruler, if there is no one above a person to whom he should give an account of what he has done. "
For the person himself, such a consciousness is no less destructive. When this type of outlook was still at the stage of formation in the Renaissance, then even then the greatest achievements of the "liberated man" on their other side turned into the greatest atrocities. Such geniuses and titans as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo professed the same faith as the geniuses of villainy, for example, Cesare Borgia and his family. AF Losev described this type of personality in this way - the "reverse side of titanism", that is, the personality in its "endless self-affirmation and in its unrestrained spontaneity of any passions, any emotions and any whims, reaching some kind of narcissism and to some wild and bestial aesthetics. "
In Russian religious philosophy of that time, the idea of using antinomies for theological purposes was often encountered. BP Vysheslavtsev, SN Bulgakov, L.I. ) used this concept most often episodically, while in the works of Florensky antinomies become the subject of special and systematic consideration, eventually turning into a widely implemented methodology.
1. In his lectures on the history of philosophy, Hegel wrote: “Created by each generation in the field of science and spiritual activity is a heritage, the growth of which is the result of the convergence of all previous generations, a sanctuary in which all human generations would gratefully and joyfully place everything that helped them pass the life path what they found in the depths of nature and spirit. This inheritance is at the same time receiving an inheritance and taking possession of this inheritance. It is the soul of each subsequent generation, its spiritual substance, which has become something familiar, its principles, prejudices and riches; and at the same time this inheritance received is reduced by the generation that received it to the level of the subject material, modified by the spirit. What is obtained in this way changes, and the processed material is precisely because it is processed, enriched and at the same time preserved. "
What phenomenon in the history of mankind does Hegel describe in the quoted passage? Why does the philosopher compare the introduction to the cultural heritage of the older generations with receiving an inheritance and with taking possession of this inheritance? What is the meaning of the difference between receiving an inheritance and taking possession of it?
2.M. Born in his book "My Life and Views" discusses the responsibility of the scientist. He believes that there is no science that would be completely separated from life. Even the most dispassionate scientist is not alien to the human: he wants to be right, wants to make sure that intuition does not deceive him, hopes to achieve fame and success. These hopes stimulate his work as well as the thirst for knowledge.
Today, the belief in the possibility of a clear separation of objective knowledge from the process of its search has been destroyed by science itself. In real science and its ethics, changes have taken place that make it impossible to preserve the old ideal of serving knowledge for its own sake, the ideal in which my generation believed. We were convinced that he can never turn into evil, since the search for truth is good in itself. It was a beautiful dream from which world events awakened us. Even one who plunged into this hibernation deeper than others woke up in August 1945 from the explosions of the first atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities. Since then, we have realized that the results of our work fully link us with the lives of people, with the economy and politics, with the struggle for domination between states, and that therefore we have a huge responsibility.
Why can't science be separated from life? What changes have occurred in the ethics of science? Is a scientist responsible for his discoveries and their application?
3. Get acquainted with a fragment from the essay of Academician DS Likhachev "Notes on Russian":
“To a certain extent, losses in nature are recoverable ... The situation is different with cultural monuments. Their losses are irreparable, because cultural monuments are always individual, always associated with a certain era, with certain masters. Every monument is destroyed forever, distorted forever, wounded forever.
The "stock" of cultural monuments, the "stock" of the cultural environment is extremely limited in the world, and it is being depleted at an all-progressive rate. Technology, which itself is a product of culture, sometimes serves more to mortify culture than to prolong its life. Bulldozers, excavators, construction cranes, driven by thoughtless, ignorant people, destroy both that which has not yet been discovered in the earth, and that which is above the earth, which has already served people. Even the restorers themselves ... sometimes become more destroyers than guardians of the monuments of the past. Monuments and city planners are destroying, especially if they do not have clear and complete historical knowledge. The land becomes cramped for cultural monuments, not because there is little land, but because builders are attracted to old places that are inhabited and therefore seem especially beautiful and tempting for city planners ...
Determine what is the main point of this passage. Explain why the loss of cultural heritage is irreparable. How do you understand the author's expression "moral settledness"? Why do you need to preserve cultural monuments? What cultural monuments, in your opinion, need special protection?
4. Based on the text “Sparkling Brush. Karl Pavlovich Bryullov. (1799-1852) "draw a conclusion about the essence of creativity.
None of the European artists in the 19th century. did not know such a grandiose triumph, which fell to the lot of the young Russian artist Karl Bryullov, when in the middle of 1833 he opened the doors of his studio for the audience with the just finished painting "The Last Day of Pompeii". Like Byron, he had the right to say about himself that one fine morning he woke up famous.
Bryullov learned to draw before he could walk. Very sickly, he lay in bed until he was five years old and drew with a pencil on the blackboard. From the age of five, serious training began under the guidance of his father. The Bryullov family gave Russia talented artists, architects, sculptors, woodcarvers. The traditions of hard work have been passed down from generation to generation in the family. The boy was 9 years old when he was admitted to the Academy of Arts. He graduated from the Academy with a gold medal and was sent to continue his art education in Italy. There, a picture was conceived and painted, which became the main work in the artist's work.
The sight of Pompeii stunned Bryullov. He wandered the streets of the excavated dead city and tried to imagine a terrible day on August 24, 79 AD ... Black gloom descended on the city. Lightning rips through the darkness. The volcano rumbles. People are shouting. Buildings crack and collapse. The statues of the gods are falling ... Here, on the streets of ancient Pompeii, the idea of the painting was born. The blind element takes life away from people, but in the most terrible trials a real person overcomes fear and retains dignity, honor, humanity. Both of these thoughts formed the basis of the picture. But in order to bring the idea to life, the artist had to solve many problems. He reads historical materials, makes sketches of frightened horses, studies drawings of antique buckles on women's clothing. He, like an actor, turns into an old man, then into his son, then into the head of the family, saving the family. He brings sitters and he demands the impossible - to feel horror, fear and at the same time a willingness to show courage for the sake of saving other people.
Bryullov painted the picture without sparing his strength. Several times he fell against the canvas, losing consciousness from overwork. After finishing the painting, he was dissatisfied with it. According to his calculation, the figures should come out of the canvas, and on the canvas they did not have the relief that he wanted to give them. “For two whole weeks,” Bryullov said, “I went to the workshop every day to understand where my calculation was wrong. Finally it seemed to me that the light from the lightning on the pavement was too weak. I illuminated the stones near the warrior's feet, and the warrior jumped out of the picture. Then I lit up the whole pavement and saw that my painting was finished. "
The artist seemed to have ripped a tragic day out of history. But horror is not the main mood of the picture. The people on his canvas are beautiful, they are selfless and do not lose their spirit in the face of disaster. In these terrible moments, they do not think about themselves, but about their loved ones. We see two sons carrying an old father on their shoulders: we see a young man begging his mother to get up, a man trying to block the path of stones and protect his wife and children from death. We see a mother hugging her daughters for the last time. Bryullov also depicted himself with a box of paints and brushes on his head among the inhabitants of Pompeii. At the same time, he shows the keen observation of the artist - in the sparkle of lightning, he clearly sees human figures perfect in their plastic beauty. “Bryullov has a man in order to show all his beauty,” wrote Gogol about the painting. His beauty turns into a courageous force, opposed to the destructive elements of nature.
Painting exhibitions in Rome and Milan turned into an event. The enthusiastic crowds carried the artist in their arms - by the light of torches, to the sound of music. He was given a standing ovation in the theater, he was greeted on the street. Old sick Walter Scott came to see the picture. He was brought to Bryullov's workshop and seated in an armchair in front of the canvas. “This is not a painting, this is a whole epic,” the great novelist repeated with delight.
How to explain the unprecedented success of the painting "The Last Day of Pompeii"? What reflections does the painting inspire? Explain the meaning of the title of the text "Glittering Brush". Based on the proposed text, prepare a story about the life and work of Karl Bryullov.
5. Learn about different approaches to classifying art.
In ancient Greece, nine Muses were revered and were heroes of myths: Cleo is the muse of history, Euterp is the muse of poetry and music, Thalia is the muse of comedy, Melpomene is the muse of tragedy, Terpsichore is the muse of dance, Calliope is the muse of the epic, Polyhymnia is the muse of hymns, Urania is the muse of astronomy, Erato is the muse of love lyrics.
The modern classification of art did not take shape immediately. In the Middle Ages, in addition to poetry and music, the "liberal arts" included astronomy, rhetoric, mathematics, and philosophy. And sculpture, painting, architecture were included in the handicrafts. If we consider the dynamics of the development of art in a large historical space, then we will find that from time to time there is a change in the ratio of types of art - one or the other of them occupy a dominant position. For example, painting during the Renaissance, literature during the Enlightenment, etc.
The modern typology of art is based on three criteria. In accordance with the first criterion, arts are divided into spatial (visual arts, architecture, arts and crafts), where the image does not change in time, temporal (literature, music) and space-time (cinema, theater, dance), where the image exists in time and in space.
The second criterion is the perception mechanism. In accordance with this - visual arts (visual arts, architecture, arts and crafts), visual and auditory (cinema, theater, dance) and auditory (music). Literature occupies a special place in this classification.
The third criterion comes from the language of art. Then the species are grouped as follows: literature, where an image is born only through words, visual arts, music, dance, architecture, arts and crafts, which use a special language of art, but not a word, and the third group, which combines the word and other languages - cinema, theater, vocal music.
The boundaries between the arts are flexible, often different types are intertwined or combined. For example, musical theater is vocals, dance, literature (libretto), theatrical painting. In such cases, they speak of the polyphonic language of the arts.
And, finally, in some cases they speak of a synthesis of arts, in particular when it comes to temple action. The synthesis of temple action involves visual arts, vocal, poetry of all kinds. Everything that is connected with the temple - both the external, architectural form, and the interior decoration, and the action - is subordinated to a single goal - to achieve catharsis, spiritual purification (P. Florensky).
The synthesis of arts turned out to be possible precisely because at the heart of each of them is a human experience expressed in different languages - word, color, sound or form. Therefore, the artist often describes some types of art through others.
Describe each of the nine muses using examples from history, literature, music. Which of the criteria for classifying art seems to you the most reasonable? Explain your choice.
6. Get acquainted with the reasoning of the famous Russian philosopher Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky:
“... Our philosophers strive to be not so much clever as wise, not so much thinkers as sages. Whether the Russian character, whether historical conditions influenced here - I do not presume to decide. But there is no doubt that the philosophy of the "head" was not lucky in our country. Starodumov's "mind, if it is only mind, is a mere trifle" - finds a response, it seems, in all Russian.
The philosophy of each people in its deepest essence is the disclosure of the faith of the people, it proceeds from this faith and aspires to the same faith. If Russian philosophy is possible, then only as a philosophy of the Orthodox faith.
What have I been doing all my life? He considered the world as a whole, as a single picture and reality, but at every moment or, more precisely, at every stage of his life, from a certain angle of view. I looked through the world relations in a section of the world in a certain direction, in a certain plane and tried to understand the structure of the world, therefore, at this stage, I am interested in the attribute. The planes of the cut changed, but one did not cancel the other, but only enriched. Hence the incessant dialecticism of thinking (change of the plane of consideration), with a constant attitude towards the world as a whole.
The Russian faith developed from the interaction of three forces of the Greek faith, brought to us by the monks and priests of Byzantium, Slavic paganism, which met this new faith, and the Russian folk character, which in its own way adopted Byzantine Orthodoxy and reworked it in its own spirit. "
7. Academician N. Moiseev writes: “A new civilization must begin with new scientific knowledge and new educational programs. People should perceive themselves not as masters, but as part of nature. New moral principles must enter the blood and flesh of Man. To do this, it is necessary to have not only special, but also humanitarian education. I am convinced that the XXI century. will be the century of humanitarian knowledge, just like the 19th century. was the age of steam and engineering. "
Do you agree that it is impossible to achieve coordinated development of mankind and nature without humanitarian knowledge? Argument your answer.
8. Get acquainted with an excerpt from VI Vernadsky's work "Scientific Thought as Planetary Thinking" (1937–1938).
“There is one fundamental phenomenon that defines scientific thought and distinguishes scientific results ... from the statements of philosophy and religion - this is the universality and indisputability of correctly made scientific conclusions, scientific statements, concepts, conclusions. Scientific, logically correct actions are so powerful only because science has its own definite structure and that in it there is a field of facts and generalizations, scientific, scientifically established facts and empirically obtained generalizations, which in their essence cannot be really challenged. Such facts and such generalizations, even if they are created at times by philosophy, religion, life experience or social common sense and tradition, cannot be they, as such, are proved ...
Manifestation of personality , so characteristic and striking for philosophical, religious and artistic constructions, it fades sharply into the background ... "
How, according to Vernadsky, science differs from philosophy, religion, common sense? Is it possible to assert on the basis of the above fragment that the author considers the empirical level of science to be the most convincing? Argument your answer. Do you share the opinion of Vernadsky that the personality in science fades into the background? Explain your position.
9. The modern Italian philosopher E. Agazzi characterizes human features as follows: “Philosophers very often tried to describe the specifics of a person. They usually saw it in the mind: "intelligent creature" or "intelligent animal" - these are the classic definitions of man.
In other characteristics, they emphasized various aspects: a person as a "political animal", a creator of history, a native speaker capable of expressing religious feelings ...
I do not deny that all these aspects still require philosophical analysis for their fuller understanding, but it seems to me that it is better to offer a clearer "instrumentally" way of identifying the specificity of a person ... This specific feature can be expressed in general by the statement that every human action necessarily accompanied by an idea of what he "should be" ...
The master who creates the instrument already knows what it “should be”, and usually he admits that his instrument is imperfect in comparison with what it “should” be according to the idea of it, that is, with what can be called "Ideal model" ...
When human activity is not aimed at creating a specific specific result, then "should be", "perfect, ideal way" is more related to the nature of the actions. These are speaking, writing, dancing, painting, arguing. Such activities are assessed by their performance (in these cases, the assessments are expressed in the words "good" or "bad").
In what does E. Agazzi see the specificity of a person? What understanding of the activity does the author give?
10. Get acquainted with an example of absolute truth, which was used in their works by E. Engels, and then by VI Lenin - "Napoleon died on May 5, 1821", and then with the criticism of this example by AABogdanov. In the article "Faith and Science", written by him as a polemic response to Lenin's book "Materialism and Empirio-criticism", Bogdanov tried to prove the relativity of this truth and put forward the following arguments: for 13.5 hours; b) death is recorded by the cessation of breathing and heartbeat, they are considered signs of death as a result of a kind of agreement reached in the medical world (perhaps, in the future, death will be established on other grounds); c) the concept of "Napoleon" is relative - physiologically and mentally, the human "I" is updated several times throughout life; the dying Napoleon, in fact, was no longer what he was, for example, in the battle of Austerlitz.
What arguments of A.A. Bogdanov seem convincing to you? With what their reasoning, in your opinion, it is impossible to agree? Can it be argued that absolute truth is not so much a part of relative truth as the ideal towards which knowledge aspires?
