155Th Anniversary of Vladimir Solovyov (1853 - 1900)
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V. THE UNEVEN PATH OF RUSSIAN SPIRITUALITY 151 THE PHILOSOPHER OF “THE SILVER CENTURY”: 155TH ANNIVERSARY OF VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV (1853 - 1900) Dimiter Mirchev (St. Paisiy Hilendarsky University of Plovdiv) Vladimir Solovyov discerns three types of Being: phenomena, the world of ideas, and the absolute. Three basic kinds of cognition are hence discerned in his gnoseologic system: empiric, reasonable, and mystic. The ontologism of Solovyov’s philosophy shows the essential task of cognition, which consists in transferring the centre of the human being from his nature to the absolutely transcendental world, thus connecting it internally to true Being. The mystic or religious experience plays a particular role in this transfer. Solovyov will have it that the bases of true cognition contain the mystic or the religious perception which gives our logical thinking its incontestable sense, and our experience the meaning of incontestable truth. The fact of faith is more essential and more immediate than scientific knowledge or philosophical debates. The experience of faith can and should always be submitted to the judgment of critical and philosophical reason. Philosophical is the mind which is never contented even with the strongest belief in truth; it perceives only the incontestable truth which answers all the questions of thinking. The recognition of the exclusive meaning of philosophical (metaphysical) cognition has always been characteristic of Solovyov. Still in his uncompleted treatise Sofia (started in French in 1876 and translated in Russian 120 years later) he wrote that one of the most important and distinguishing characteristics of the human among live beings is the striving for truth and the aspiration for metaphysical knowledge. We could consider as abnormal those who lack this aspiration. Therefore the destiny of philosophy is inseparably linked to the destiny of the human race; philosophy is one of the human race’s achievements. Vladimir Solovyov 152 SOFIA PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW insists on the impossibility of becoming a personality out of the striving for absolute truth and that a cognitive subject who does not follow the way of the philosophical (metaphysical) ascent towards truth is nobody! Solovyov considers the problems of morals in many of his works but he presents it most systematically in Justification of Good (1894 - 1899). The original faith of Solovyov in the absolute meaning of moral norms is “Good determines my choice in its favor of the entire eternity of positive content”. In the unity of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty it becomes the basis for rationalizing morals and it also acquires its philosophical substantiation or justification. The philosopher distinguishes three types of moral attitude or feeling: the feelings of shame, pity, and veneration. Shame proves the over-natural status of the human being: “The human being can not be equal to the animal; the human being is always situated over it or under it…”; pity means solidarity with live beings; veneration means voluntary submission to the supreme, divine origin. All the other moral qualities in the Justification of Good are only different forms of the manifestation of basic origins. In determining the moral sense of love as the founding commandment of Christianity, Solovyov confirms that the commandment of love is not connected to any specific virtue but is the accomplished expression of all the basic requirements of virtue. The aesthetic views of Vladimir Solovyov are an inherent part of his metaphysics, and they are determined to a high extent by the idea of the God-human transformation of reality. Art has to become a real force for enlightening and rebirth of the entire human world. Solovyov confirms the reality of the aesthetic origin already in the natural cosmic process in his article “Beauty in Nature” (1889) taking for an epigraph Dostoyevsky’s thought “Beauty will save the world”; he writes there about the complex and great body of our universe. The aim of art is not the repetition but the continuation of that act of art started by nature. Solovyov determines the high theurgical task of the artist as an act of communication with the Supreme World through internal artistic activity. Vladimir Solovyov carries deep inside a combination of irreconcilable contradictions which have equally impressed his contemporaries as well as his adherents. His idea-mate E. Radlov has good reasons to share that this is inherent to every talented person: while it’s possible to bring the average IV. CLARIFYING THE CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL DISCOURSE 153 human type under certain categories, it’s difficult to describe a gifted person with the abstract categories of reflection so we have to apply in transforming them in the way to be able to understand this person.1 His first biographer and researcher continues with the reflection that different writers could work out some very contradictory principles on the bases of his doctrine, and this makes him similar to Socrates. Indeed, haven’t some people seen in Solovyov the Catholic theologian while others thought he was truly Orthodox? Haven’t some seen in Solovyov a mystic while others took him for a rationalist? For some Solovyov the politician was a renegade of true Russian origin while others thought he was a representative of true Russian spirit. Some see in him the liberal while others directly state he was conservative. And finally, some try to see in Solovyov a decadent poet while others see a champion of art for art’s sake.2 Vladimir Solovyov attached considerable importance to the fact that people live hard because they don’t distinguish the big from the small. People easily distinguish the Creator from the creation, the supreme from the ignoble, the eternal from the limited in time, but can hardly tell their place among these limits, and the hardest of things is to find this place. One can be and has to be able to see the separation but also to unite what has been separated. But man doesn’t see the true: he prefers not to unite but to disunite even what has been united. Men suffer and wonder why they suffer: they look for the reason of this suffering everywhere but in themselves. The philosopher has made explicit enough his vision on the world and the universe as he constantly applied a three-part scheme: God is eternal, the material is limited, the human being is endless: he exists as well after death as before birth.3 Solovyov does not prove it: for him this is an axiom, a dogma of belief. That’s why he is the first Russian philosopher of his time who himself believed and endured and who didn’t just search in other 1 Радлов, Э., Вл. С., Соловьев., Биографический очерк, в: Собр. соч. В.С. Соловьева, IX, СПб., 1907, с. XVII, XVIII and following. 2 Ibid., p. XVIII. 3 Соловьев, В. С., Чтения о Богочеловечестве, III, 1877, p. 128. All further references (unless others have been suggested) are after: Соловьев, В. С., Собрание сочинений в Х томах. Edition «Жизнь с Богом», Bruxelles, 1960. 154 SOFIA PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW people’s experience and belief. He applied various classifications in order to express the main point, and these three principles are alive and intermittent at every classification as they influence the human being. God is unconditional and supreme, but this is a supremacy Who not only contemplates humans from above but who also calls them to Him and who descends over them. This is the human’s basic Godly origin which makes humans more than humans. According to the principle of symmetry, the natural and the material turn humans into less than humans.4 Humans are not indifferent to God and to the “natural” elements all the same: these principles work on humans all the time. It’s maybe not very nice to be indifferent and passive towards Eternity but most people feel differently anyway at the thought that God exists. The faith is weak, superstitions predominate: believing that we are not indifferent to the material world is symptomatic and it does not impose big requirements on humans. But Vladimir Solovyov does. God is not simply God: God is an ideal, a task for humans, while the matter is the means to accomplishing this task.5 Man becomes a creator when he uses the material means for achieving the Divine ideal: “The endlessness of the human soul revealed trough Christ is able to fit in itself the entire endlessness of the Divinity: this idea is the greatest Good, the greatest Truth, and the greatest Beauty”.6 If matter is limited and God is eternal then the matter changes and develops accidentally so that the human being is unlimited and even more: he has been called to transform what is limited and give it sense as well as to unite it with the unlimited. In other words, the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis of Vladimir Solovyov would look like this: God is constant, matter changes and develops accidentally, so when it changes and develops in the right way the human being is not an animal (the human kind by itself) but a Man (God-manhood). If the Divinity in itself is absolutely constant then the God- manhood develops in the right way; it grows not only externally by volume 4 Соловьев, В. С., Письма, p. 98. 5 The Divine origin requires another for its realization: this Other was given in the natural field also called material Being. Соловьев, В. С., Письма, II, p. 98. 6 Соловьев, В. С., Чтения, p. 202. IV. CLARIFYING THE CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL DISCOURSE 155 but also in its inner completeness and the perfection of its manifestations.7 Man is capable of perfection and to lead the material world to perfection. Every earthly material thing is earth-born: the fear Solovyov describes this limitation with is similar to the existential philosophers taking the tragic sense of life as a departure point of thinking: The essential illusion of every natural life consists in destroying the other’s existence without being able to preserve its own,… in eating up its past and being eaten by its future, and so it represents an endless transition from one worthlessness to another.