Phenomenological Reviews
Brill
2024
Hardback
228
Reviewed by: Thomas Nemeth
Andrea Oppo has given us an interesting and thoughtful book on a most unusual person. Pavel Florensky, part Russian, part Armenian, was born in Azerbaijan, schooled in Georgia, educated at Moscow University and then the Moscow Theological Academy, became an Orthodox priest in 1911. The closure of the Academy shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution made continuance of his teaching activities at the Academy impossible. However, he, like Gustav Shpet, but unlike many others chose to remain in the Soviet Union and was not forcibly deported. Undoubtedly, the Soviet authorities realized for a time that his technical skills could be put to use in service to the goals that they and he shared. Notwithstanding the sheer number of his writings on various esoteric topics and his ecclesiastic position, which he refused to conceal, he, as Oppo states, ‟enjoyed the trust of the [Soviet] government as an applied scientist and electrotechnical engineer” (p. 1). When in 1933 those authorities realized he was an implacable opponent of their fundamental viewpoint – or their patience ran out, he was summarily dispatched to forced-labor camps. Finally, despite increasingly difficult prison conditions, Florensky survived until his ‟number” came up in connection with the order to reduce the camp population in the autumn of 1937. In his case, the camp population was reduced by one in the simplest manner possible. His family was not informed of the exact date of his death until 1989.
Although there are substantial biographies – even in English – of Florensky, Oppo provides in the appropriate context relevant biographical information including recently unearthed material that helps illuminate his topical discussions of Florensky’s thought and that were unavailable to previous biographers. In bringing this material to the attention of Western audiences, Oppo has rendered a valuable service to those interested and capable of consulting these many Russian-language sources.
Clearly of the major figures in the history of Western philosophy Florensky was closest to Plato, whose works he began to read even before entering Moscow University. Notwithstanding his enrollment in the undergraduate course in mathematics there, Florensky read and re-read Plato allegedly in Greek and regularly attended student philosophical circles. In his third year of study, he helped organize a mathematics-physics circle and wrote an address he planned to deliver – but ultimately did not – at the opening of the circle (late October-early November 1902) in which he affirmed that mathematical laws are the laws of the universe. As such, those laws should guide us in understanding the world. Although from a contemporary Western viewpoint such a claim may sound promising, as an expression of the legitimacy of mathematical physics, of the marriage of the a priori of mathematics with the a posteriori of physical observations, Florensky had a different understanding of mathematics than we typically associate with mathematics today. We should add here that Florensky was initially disappointed or dismayed with the narrow focus of the courses typically available to students studying mathematics. He did manage, however, to overcome institutional obstacles, and already in his first year at the University he attended Sergei Trubetskoi’s seminar-course on ancient philosophy, for which he wrote essays on Plato’s Meno and The Republic. Additionally, he attended Lev Lopatin’s seminar-course on psychology, for which he wrote an essay on John Stuart Mill’s view of the inductive origin of geometrical concepts.
Florensky’s desire to extend mathematical reasoning beyond the confines of an abstract discipline was evident from his first years in Moscow. Oppo writes that Florensky’s undergraduate thesis reveals a shift on his part from pure mathematics with his discovery of discontinuity in geometry to seeing discontinuity in every natural phenomenon (p. 38). Clearly, Florensky already in his first years at the university had little interest in pure mathematics and mathematics for its own sake. His outlook was grander. As a first-year student in October 1900, he wrote his mother that he saw mathematics as key to a worldview in which everything is worth study. Through mathematics, nature can be united with ethics and aesthetics to form a whole, and religion obtains a new sense. Florensky’s publication in 1904 of two articles ‟On the Symbols of Infinity” and ‟The Idea of Discontinuity as an Element of a Worldview” surely was taken at the University as an indication of his great promise. Although offered a position to continue his work as a graduate student in mathematics, Florensky opted instead upon graduation to study theology at the Moscow Theological Academy.
Oppo writes that Florensky’s active engagement with Greek thought, particularly with Plato’s philosophy, occurred upon entering the Theological Academy and the start of the ‟Great War.” He is undoubtedly correct, but we must not understand that engagement as exclusive. As we shall see, his interests remained wide-ranging until the end. During that decade-long period, Florensky wrote much that concerned ancient philosophy, but these largely stemmed from lecture notes for a course on the history of philosophy that he taught for an extended period starting in 1908. (It was typical at the time at the theological academies for outstanding students to be retained to teach upon graduation, typically in the subject of their magister’s thesis. Oppo correctly gives Florensky’s graduation from the Academy as 1908 (p. 59f and p. 63) but a few pages later as occurring in 1910 (p. 67) – most likely a simple oversight. Oppo points out that Florensky’s notes clearly reveal an influence from Sergei Trubetskoi and that Florensky’s understanding of Plato’s thought underwent no substantial change afterward (pp. 59-60). Make no mistake, though, Florensky’s Plato was not the Plato of the Marburg neo-Kantians, a Kantian before Kant. His reading of Plato’s dialogues was one from a distinctly Christian, even mystical, viewpoint. As Oppo writes, Florensky’s ‟view of Platonism is integrated entirely within a Christian medieval context and, even beyond that, within a universal and extra-historical dimension” (p. 68).
In order formally to qualify for the teaching position at the Academy, Florensky had to present two lectures, which would meet with approval. The first of these was presented in mid-September 1908 and entitled – at least as given the following year in the published version – ‟The Universal Roots of Idealism.” It was Florensky’s first significant work centered on Plato, but a Plato portrayed as a ‟Christian before Christ” (p. 63). Oppo correctly provides Florensky’s claim in this lecture that only ‟magic” is capable of resolving the Platonic question, but just what is that question? Unfortunately, a plain and precise question, one not couched in vague, metaphoric language is not forthcoming. Oppo writes that theology and mathematics may appear to be concerned with two different worlds, but Florensky found Plato’s philosophy to be the bridge between the two. The difficulty here is that mathematics at least is a precise discipline that allows little ambiguity but offers a great deal of analyticity. There is little of the latter in Florensky’s lecture but a great deal of the former. What Oppo does not dwell on in Florensky’s lecture is the attempt there to make Plato a Solovyov-like prophet of integral knowledge and of ‟all-unity” more than two millennia before Solovyov and the Slavophiles. Rather as Oppo points out, Florensky attempted to assimilate Plato, on the one hand, to Pythagorean mathematics and, on the other hand, with the late Neoplatonism of Proclus (p. 108).
The second of the two lectures, ‟The Cosmological Antinomies of Immanuel Kant,” demonstrated Florensky’s absorption not just with Kant, but also with Western idealism. It is surprising, then, given Solovyov’s fascination with Schelling, on the one hand, and the hold Hegel held on nineteenth-century Russian thought, on the other hand, that Florensky devoted so little explicit attention to the further development of German Idealism. This appears to be something generally overlooked by secondary studies. One also cannot overlook the curious absence in Florensky’s writings of references to the Marburg neo-Kantians, whose interests in certain respects was similar to his own, albeit from a different direction. Like Florensky, Cohen and Natorp were very interested in Plato, and like Florensky Cohen was interested in developing philosophy around a conception of the infinitesimal in mathematics. Oppo makes no mention of these similarities and differences but does note that Florensky displayed no interest in the Russian neo-Kantian movement that was arising as he himself was turning to Kant (p. 107). Oppo writes that Florensky’s Kant was a ‟Mach-like” Kant, the positivistic Kant presented in the early works of Alois Riehl. But apart from a mention by Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) in his highly polemical Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which was intended as an intervention in a political dispute and was not an abstract philosophical treatise, Oppo presents no grounds for saying that Riehl’s works were well-known in Russia. Purely as an aside, we can note that of Riehl’s two-volume work Philosophical Criticism and Its Importance for the Positive Sciences only the second part of the second volume was translated into Russian. Apart from Peter Struve, who certainly could have known Riehl’s work in German, it was generally ignored by the Russian neo-Kantians and Kant-scholars, though these were few in number.
In his lecture on Kant, Florensky dealt with Kant’s epistemology as if it were the stark antithesis of Plato’s. In this he may have been consciously emulating Pamfil Iurkevich’s similar contrasting of Plato vis-a-vis Kant in an address he delivered at Moscow University in early 1866. However, whereas Iurkevich sketched Plato as starting where Kant had stopped his investigations, Florensky saw the philosophical ideas of Plato and Kant in sharp opposition. Florensky, not unlike many other theologically-oriented commentators on the first Critique, was chiefly concerned not with the ‟Transcendental Deduction,” but, as the title of his presentation indicates, with the cosmological antinomies. Oppo finds Florensky’s dissatisfaction with Kant to lie in the latter’s reasoning. Kant confused the conditions that he assigned to appearances with those he assigned to things in themselves (p. 85). Florensky also found a petitio principii in Kant’s placing conditions in the concept, not in experience. Oppo’s interpretation here could be greatly clarified. Are the conditions in the two cases identical or different? That is, Oppo fails to inform us as to just what these conditions in either case are so that the Kant-scholar can determine whether Florensky’s position is substantial or illusory. Just what are the conditions that Kant assigned to things in themselves? Is there a dichotomy in Kant’s epistemology between conceptual conditions and experiential ones? Florensky certainly rejected Kant’s strict distinction between appearances and things in themselves, but where does Florensky make the case for this rejection? For Kant, the basis for that distinction lies primarily in his ‟Transcendental Aesthetic,” and it is not his conclusions that are sophistical, but Florensky’s.
Oppo tells us that Florensky lectured for four years on Kant, presenting the latter’s Critical system, his scientific outlook, and even his biography. In this connection, Oppo writes that Florensky translated Kant’s pre-Critical Physical Monadology, which of course he did, but not in connection with his lecturing. Rather, it appeared in the house organ of the Moscow Academy, Bogoslovskie trudy, in 1905, although the original plan, as we see from Florensky’s letter to his mother from October 1902, was devised in conjunction with others in the university’s new mathematics society to publish such Kant-translations. Again, though only as an aside, Oppo refers to a 2020 edition of Florensky’s lecture notes on the history of philosophy, which includes a listing of Kant’s works in Russian. This listing, however, is quite unreliable. Vladislavlev’s translation of the Critique of Pure Reason is given as 1807 instead of 1867, and Florensky’s translation of the Physical Monadology is given as ‟1901 August?” note the question mark found in this listing. These lecture notes as published contain no critical apparati that would inform us of the ambiguities in deciphering Florensky’s handwriting and his ample use of abbreviations. Additionally, if the listing of Kant’s works was made by Florensky himself, how is it that he did not recognize the errors pointed out above? And if these errors were ones introduced by unnamed editors of these notes in deciphering Florensky’s handwriting, then must we not be suspect as well of any precise reading of these notes?
Oppo declares that his main objective consists in identifying Florensky’s philosophy as a ‟dialectical part” of the Western tradition. Thus, being such a part it can confront that tradition (vii). One is hard pressed, however, to understand how Florensky could be considered as part of a tradition – or at least that part of the Western philosophical tradition – that upholds the fundamental laws of logic. For Florensky was apparently comfortable with rejecting its most elementary law, namely that of non-contradiction. Florensky questioned ‟the idea of truth based on an absolute and dogmatic faith in the law of non-contradiction” (p. 89). Thus, Oppo clearly recognizes Florensky’s position but seeks not to question it. How can dialogue occur if one of the participants rejects the very possibility of being contradicted and thereby refuted? Are we to take Florensky’s statements at face value without question, i.e., dogmatically? Arguably in contrast to Oppo’s picture of Florensky here, Zenkovsky in his classic history of Russian philosophy contended that Florensky made a sharp distinction between Russian philosophy and philosophy in the West. Turning to his criticism of Kant’s antinomies, Florensky held that contrary to Kant’s position the antinomies arise not from a misapplication of the cognitive faculties, in subjectivity. Rather, they lie in objective space and time themselves. Would it not be more accurate to say that Florensky saw himself as the antipode of the modern Western tradition? Could we not say that Florensky saw his thought as fundamentally an effort, as Oppo himself declares, ‟to demonstrate the profound value – both ancient and modern at the same time – of Russian-Christian culture” against the scientistic one offered by the West (p. 7)? Oppo writes that although Florensky and Husserl are antithetical figures in many senses, both shared the view that Western science has an essentially nihilistic character (p. 15). I will defer to Oppo concerning Florensky’s position, but Husserl in the early pages of his Crisis of European Sciences did not charge science with nihilism, with the denial of values, but with indifference toward them. Husserl exclaimed that fact-minded sciences make for fact-minded people, but he does not say that such people reject values and ethical goods.
Oppo holds that Florensky’s originality, presumably overall originality, lies in his philosophy of discontinuity, a philosophy or, rather, a conception that he believed could be extended to all of nature and human culture (p. 13). This idea came to him with his discovery of Cantor’s work while still an undergraduate in mathematics. We should also mention Florensky’s early recognition of the continuum hypothesis, which Cantor proposed but which Florensky saw utilized, albeit without the term ‟continuum,” in Aristotle and even the pre-Socratics. However, in Florensky’s revisionistic history of mathematics Galileo relying on Descartes’ mechanistic philosophy abandoned the continuum hypothesis. Florensky found discontinuity seemingly everywhere in physical laws and in the natural world, in human history and in human culture, even in language, words, and names. In fact, the term, as Oppo recognizes, appears almost everywhere in Florensky’s works. What it lacks in them, unlike in mathematics, is a precise definition. Rather, it is an operative term, the understanding of which is tied to its specific usage. In other words, Florensky assumes the widespread, if not universal, presence of discontinuity without concluding to it on the basis of evidence. It is disconcerting also that having claimed discontinuities can be found in mathematics and physics, all other sciences should assume discontinuities are present in their respective investigative fields of reality (p. 52). Nonetheless, Oppo writes that Florensky held discontinuity to be a general theory in which there is an unresolved opposition of two truths that form a self-contradiction (p. 29). Here, we surely have moved beyond Cantor’s innovations in mathematics. Whether the term ‟discontinuity” is, then, the appropriate one when speaking of unresolved oppositions remains unexamined. Is Florensky’s conception of ‟discontinuity” the same as that used today in mathematics when speaking of discontinuous functions? In any case, Florensky viewed this ‟tension” between the two ‟truths” in a discontinuity to be necessary in order for knowledge to be ‟alive and not dead” (p. 29). Can we really speak of knowledge as being ‟alive”?
Oppo tells us that Florensky’s conception of discontinuity sets it against the reigning positivistic conception which has knowledge evolving progressively and accumulatively (p. 30). But is that not what we would mean if we say that knowledge is ‟alive”? Do we not then have a contradiction in Florensky’s conception of knowledge? Or is this again a ‟discontinuity” and thus acceptable? If we look at, say, Hegel’s Science of Logic, do we not also see a progression, a progression following a dialectical circuit through discrete stages each of which arises through the development of the previous one toward the Absolute? Was Hegel, therefore, a positivist? Or does Florensky propose a discontinuous model of knowledge that includes transitional stages arising purely by chance and thus as unable to be predicted in any way beforehand? Or is the model far more subtle with shifting reigning paradigms as in Kuhn’s now-classic study of scientific revolutions? Regrettably, these issues are passed over in silence.
Oppo writes that after the original publication of his The Pillar and Ground of the Truth in 1914 Florensky turned toward the second dimension of the world, viz., natural reality including culture (p. 122). But we are not to take this as meaning there was a sharp break or radical turning point in Florensky’s interests. In Oppo’s eyes, this second period in Florensky’s philosophical oeuvre can be characterized as a rational attempt to justify certain symbolic theories of his own. This reading of Florensky sets it apart from and against Cassirer’s constructivist theory of the symbol, which sees the symbol as ‟arbitrarily produced to give meaning to the world” (p. 136), and it is this that Florensky combats. It is highly unlikely that Cassirer would have agreed with Oppo that symbols are ‟arbitrarily produced.” Oppo regrettably ceases his confrontation of Florensky with Cassirer at this point which would have aided an understanding of the former’s theory. Instead, the author pursues a connection, though again only briefly, with the medieval theologian Gregory Palamas. This turn to a medieval theologian marks another characteristic of Florensky’s thought, a concern not with having science and evidence lead the way, but religious belief, indeed a sectarian religious belief. To be fair, though, Oppo makes an admirable study of Florensky’s work, as he phrases it, from the perspective of the philosophy of discontinuity, tracing its development chronologically (p. 31). The final result of this ‟new” philosophy is a ‟scientific Neoplatonism” (p. 35). What are some of the features of this ‟scientific” outlook? Here, Oppo cannot help but remark that Florensky held ‟unorthodox conceptions” (p. 48). Without delving into details – perhaps Oppo believes his own English-language edition of Florensky’s Imaginaries in Geometry is sufficient – Florensky sought to resurrect the Ptolemaic view of the solar system! The result of this was that, as another scholar of Russian religious thought has commented, ‟scientific terms lost their physical meanings and started playing the role merely of religious-metaphysical metaphors” (Obolevitch, p. 106). What are the constraints, then, in the construction of such metaphors? Whereas conceivably we give Florensky the benefit of some ‟poetic license,” he himself thought that data supported the veracity of the Ptolemaic view over the Copernican! Florensky also concluded, for example, that the speed of light was not an inviolable speed limit and arguably most astonishing that the border between Earth and Heaven lies between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. Are we to take Florensky seriously at this point?
Clearly, Oppo attempts to cover as many of the lines of inquiry that Florensky pursued as possible. A short review, such as this, cannot do justice to all of them. But we can, however briefly, mention Florensky’s foray into aesthetic realism. Oppo tells us that Florensky called Renaissance painting ‟fake art,” an accusation meant to be a provocation. He set himself against ‟a specifically Western and positivistic” nineteenth-century idea (p. 146). But as Florensky’s reflections were written in Russian, not German, French, or English, soon after the Bolshevik Revolution, a time when disturbances in the country were widespread, just whom did Florensky seek to provoke – the Bolshevik authorities? One cannot help but be suspicious of Florensky’s fundamental attitude. He, unlike his esteemed teachers never sought to journey, let alone study, in the West. He demonstrated a considerable facility with Western languages, but again unlike his teachers in mathematics and philosophy never thought to express his ideas in what was then regarded as the lingua franca for science. Why was this if he thought his ideas were true and be recognized as such?
Evaluating Florensky’s work is particularly difficult for the contemporary scholar, the Husserlian phenomenologist perhaps most of all, since, as alluded to above, it covers, on the one hand, such a wide range of topics in a quite peculiar, long forgotten style, largely dismissed as antiquated. On the other hand, it explicitly abjures logical reasoning, subjectivity, and manifest evidence. One contemporary scholar of Florensky’s writings, Michael Chase, has conjectured that no one, not even Leonardo Da Vinci, has made as many substantive contributions to a wide range of fields. The question remains, however, whether any of Florensky’s ‟contributions” were indeed substantive or nothing more than jottings of an overly zealous religious mindset. After all, Florensky’s various pursuits were in the interest of uniting all in a distinctly Russian Orthodox Christian worldview that owed so much to an idiosyncratic Platonism. To be sure, some have seen him as an obscurantist. Comparison with Solovyov – at least the later Solovyov – is misplaced. There is little of his ecumenical and internationalistic attitude in Florensky.
Oppo’s work remains a valuable contribution to the expanding literature on Florensky, the comments above notwithstanding. An understanding of Florensky’s wide-ranging thought, however flawed it may be from today’s perspective, can help illuminate the era, particularly its vying intellectual extremes, in which that thought, the consequences of which resonated around the world for decades. Oppo, as it were, presciently recognized the criticisms expressed here in writing that it can be hard to be objective with Florensky (p. 189). Whatever we may think of the object of Oppo’s study, it must not be confused with patience and diligence of the study itself.
Bibliography:
Obolevitch, Teresa. Faith and Science in Russian Religious Thought. Oxford University Press, 2019.