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Making Sense of the Sensual in Pavel Florenskii's Aesthetics: The Dialectics of Finite Being
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
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A boundary is not that at which something stops, but…that from which something begins its presencing.
—Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, ThoughtPersonhood is a living contradiction—between private and social, form and content, finite and infinite, freedom and fate. Personhood would be lost if the boundaries and the forms that contain it were to disappear, if it were to dissolve into cosmic infinity. But personhood would not be the image and likeness of God if it did not accommodate within itself infinite content.
—Nikolai Berdiaev, Filosofiia svobodnogo dukhaThe aesthetic…is the first stirrings …of the body's long, inarticulate rebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical.
—Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic- Type
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1999
References
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2. Florenskii's peers Vladimir Solov'ev and Nikolai Berdiaev were recently subjected to Foucauldian critique in Costlow, Jane, Sandler, Stephanie, and Vowles, Judith, eds., Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture (Stanford, 1994).Google Scholar
3. See Terras's, Victor entry under “Florensky” in Terras, V., The Handbook of Russian Literature (New Haven, 1985), 138 Google Scholar. For Florovskii's critique of Florenskii, see Florovskii, G. B., Puti russkogo bogosloviia (Paris, 1937), 497.Google Scholar
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12. Cassedy, “P. A. Florensky,” 100.
13. Ibid., 100–101.
14. Florenskii, P., Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny, 2 vols., ed. Utkina, N. F. (Moscow, 1990), 1: 138 Google Scholar. All translations from Russian texts are my own.
15. Cassedy, “P. A. Florensky,” 102; David Bethea, “Florensky and Dante: Revelation, Orthodoxy and Non-Euclidean Space,” in Kornblatt and Gustafson, eds., Russian Religious Thought, 122–23.
16. Judith Kornblatt, “Introduction,” in Kornblatt and Gustafson, eds., Russian Religious Thought, 8.
17. Cassedy, “P. A. Florensky,” 106.
18. David Bethea mentions Florenskii in this context in The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Literature (Princeton, 1989), 201–5.
19. Baudrillard, Jean, The Illusion oftheEnd, trans. Turner, Chris (Stanford, 1994), 98, 120–21.Google Scholar
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21. The argument is between constructivists for whom, in Sneja Gunew's words, “the male-female dichotomy is … a construct… which must be exploded” and essentialists for whom the idea of gender equivalence “reduces all specificities, including those that serve to distinguish the positions of the oppressed from those of the oppressor.” Gunew, ed., Feminist Knowledge, 7, 338. This is a recapitulation in contemporary terms of the spirit/ matter dichotomy.
22. Baudrillard, The Illusion, 58.
23. Florenskii's work is influenced by Gregory of Palamas, who links the ability to perceive divine light with knowledge of God's mysterious power and the enactment of his Truth. The integration of aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics is thus no contradiction for Florenskii.
24. Until recently, a shroud of mystery hung over Florenskii's final destiny, but prison records eventually confirmed that he was shot at the Solovki concentration camp in 1937. For full biographical details, see Trubachev, A. S., “Zhizn’ i sud'ba,” in Florenskii, P., Sochineniia v chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow, 1994), 1: 3–34.Google Scholar
25. Costlow, Sandler, and Vowles write: “Berdiaev's narrative plots a history of heroic spiritual denial, finding in Russian culture an eschatological essence that grants no legiti macy to the pleasures of the world and the body…. His is a story that depicts and celebrates the triumph of morality and sublimation over the temptations of the flesh.” Costlow, Sandler, and Vowles, eds., Sexuality and the Body, 10.
26. Florenskii turned down a position in the Moscow University Faculty of Mathematics and Physics in 1904 for a place at the Moscow Spiritual Academy.
27. Bethea describes Florenskii as a “true Renaissance man whom fate preserved into the Soviet period.” The Shape of Apocalypse, 201–2.
28. See Pavel Florenskii, “Obratnaia perspektiva,” in Uvodorazdelov mysli, 43–102.
29. Ibid., 60, 59.
30. Ibid., 60.
31. Ibid., 52.
32. Ibid., 96, 93.
33. Ibid., 93.
34. Pavel Florenskii, “Itogi”, in U vodorazdelov mysli, 342.
35. Florenskii, “Obratnaia perspektiva,” 51.
36. Florenskii, “Itogi,” 344.
37. Florenskii, “Obratnaia perspektiva,” 59, 58.
38. Florenskii, Stolp i utvenhdenie istiny, 1: 493–500. Both mathematician Marvin Kantor and medieval theologian Nicholas of Cusa, who advanced actual infinity as the path to an understanding of God, influenced Florenskii's thinking.
39. For gravity as an effect of warped space, see Kaku, Michio, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps and the Tenth Dimension (New York, 1994), 36–107.Google Scholar
40. Florenskii, “Itogi,” 343.
41. See Florenskii, “Imeslavie kak filosofskaia predposylka,” in U vodorazdelov mysli, 300.
42. I would question Terras's rigid delineation of a pre- and post-theodicy Florenskii. See Terras, Handbook of Russian Literature, 138
43. Florenskii, “Imeslavie,” 284.
44. Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny, 1: 264.
45. Ibid., 265, 266–67. The heart was also of seminal importance in the religious philosophy of Boris Vysheslavtsev. See, in particular, his essay “Znachenie serdtsa v filosofii i v religii,” in Vysheslavtsev, B., Etika Preobrazhennogo Erosa (Moscow, 1994), 271–79Google Scholar. The frequent exploitation by Berdiaev and, indeed, Florenskii, of the semantic link between the Russian words for the “bodily” term face (litso) and the “spiritual” term personality (lichnost’) can be viewed in the same context.
46. Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny, 1: 271.
47. Florenskii, “Itogi,” 349.
48. Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny, 1: 278.
49. Ibid., 308, 310.
50. Nikolai Berdiaev, Fihsofiia svobodnogo dukha (Moscow, 1994), 402.
51. Ibid., 308.
52. Bakhtin writes, “My actual participation in time and space from my unique place in Being guarantees their inescapably compellent actuality and their valuative uniqueness— invests them, as it were, with flesh and blood.” See Mikhail Bakhtin, Toward a
53. Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny, 308, 292. For Berdiaev, ascesis is likewise “the acquisition of strength for the body as the weapon of the spirit.” Filosofiia svobodnogo dukha, 402. Florenskii also anticipates the ethics of the early Bakhtin who writes: “The truth of the event is not the truth that is self-equivalent… in its content [istina], but is the rightful and unique position of every participant—the truth [pravda] of each participant's actual, concrete ought…. It is only from my unique place that self-sacrifice is possible.” Toward a Philosophy, 44, 49.
54. Eagleton writes of the postmodern fashion for treating subjectivity in terms of the invisible effect of power dispositions: “The term ‘post, ’ if it has any meaning at all, means business as usual, only more so…. The result … is a new kind of transcendentalism, in which desires, beliefs and interests now occupy just those a priori locations which were traditionally reserved for World Spirit or the absolute ego.” Eagleton, The Ideology, 382
55. Aleksei Losev, Bytie, imia, kosmos (Moscow, 1993), 705–6.
56. Florenskii, “Imeslavie,” 289.
57. Florenskii, “Magichnost’ slova,” in U vodorazdelov mysli, 269.
58. Ibid., 253, 255.
59. Ibid., 272–73.
60. Epstein, Mikhail, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture, trans. Miller-Pogacar, Anesa (Amherst, 1995), 237.Google Scholar
61. N. K. Bonetskaia is sympathetic to Florenskii's linguistic theory, but characterizes his axiom that “the word is the object itself” as a primitivisuc realism that required modification before it could be incorporated into the sophisticated, Hegelian dialectics of Losev. See N. K. Bonetskaia, “O filologicheskoi shkole P. A. Florenskogo, Studia Slavica Hungaricae37 (1991–92): 112–88.
62. Florenskii, “Itogi,” 345–46.
63. Florenskii, Sochineniia, 1: 28–29.
64. Florenskii, “Obratnaia perspektiva,” 59.
65. Florenskii, Sochineniia, 1: 25.
66. See Bethea, The Shape of Apocalypse, 36.
67. Bethea writes of Florenskii's “passionate search for ‘actual infinity’ and the coincidentia oppositorum … that so clearly opposes Bakhtinian logic.” The Shape of Apocalypse, 204.
68. In his early aesthetics, Bakhtin posits as his supreme value finalization (zavershenie)— the process by which an author's excess vision “rounds off” his hero's life and establishes its meaning from the external position of the loving other, without compromising the infinite freedom deriving from his corresponding ability to perceive the world from within the hero's “self for itself.” See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel'nosti,” in Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, ed. S. Bocharov (Moscow, 1990), 9–192.
69. Florenskii, Sochineniia, 1: 7.
70. Bulgakov, quoted in Florenskii, Sochineniia, 1: 23.
71. Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny, 308.