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Ayn Rand. Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Читать онлайн.Название Ayn Rand
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isbn 9780271063744
Автор произведения Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Жанр Философия
Издательство Ingram
In his lectures, Lossky presented broad methodological tools with which to analyze the contributions of important thinkers in intellectual history. According to Rand, Lossky introduced her to the thought of Plato and Aristotle. Since Rand paid homage to Aristotle as her philosophical forefather, this first encounter with his work was of prime significance to her intellectual development. It is quite possible too that Rand’s interpretation of Aristotle may have taken root in Lossky’s.
It is nearly impossible to establish with certainty that Rand actually studied Lossky’s writings. But Lossky’s conception of the history and method of philosophy—his intuitivist epistemology and organicist ontology—permeated his lectures and seminars. He was famous for teaching several Petrograd courses that explicitly reflected his antimaterialist and anti-Marxist orientation. And in the years before Rand entered the university, he published two of the most important works of his career, The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge and The World as an Organic Whole. It is very likely that she would have been presented with significant Losskyian themes within the context of the course she attended.
AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE
Nicholas Onufrievich Lossky was born in the village of Kreslavka in Vitebsk, a province west of Moscow, on 6 December 1870. He was educated at the classical gymnasium in Vitebsk, but was expelled for his socialistic and atheistic beliefs.1 Continuing his studies in Switzerland, Lossky returned to Russia in 1889 and entered St. Petersburg University two years later. Lossky graduated from the college of History and Philology and the college of Natural Science. His mentor at the university was the distinguished Kantian philosopher, Aleksandr Ivanovich Vvedensky. It was through his interactions with Vvedensky that Lossky developed a passion for philosophy. Eventually, Lossky became privatdocent of philosophy and delved deeply into the thought of Vladimir Solovyov.2
In 1899, Lossky went abroad to study with Wundt, Muller, and Windelband. These three helped Lossky to prepare for a full-time professorship, while also influencing his emerging religious idealist perspective. Wilhelm Wundt, who occupied the Chair of Philosophy at Leipzig from 1875 to 1918, shared Lossky’s view of the world as a totality of individual agents. Wilhelm Windelband, who occupied the chairs of Philosophy at Zurich, Strasbourg, and Heidelberg, was a post-Hegelian, neo-Kantian thinker of the Baden school. It was from thinkers such as Windelband that Lossky further developed his mastery of philosophic integration. Rand’s protégé, Leonard Peikoff, reviewing Windelband’s classic History of Philosophy, praises its structure, coherence, and logic. Windelband was known for his uncanny ability to trace interrelationships between seemingly disconnected topics3 and must have marveled at his student, Nicholas Lossky, who was learning to do the same.
Lossky received his master’s in 1903 and completed his doctorate in 1907 with a dissertation titled “The Foundations of Intuitivism” (Obosnovanie intuitivizma), which was later published.4 During this period, Lossky contributed to several Russian journals, including Novaia zhizn’ in 1905, Poliarnaia zvezda in 1906, and Russkaia mysl’ in 1909 (Kline, 18 August 1993C). In that same year, 1909, many Russian intellectuals, including Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Gershenzon, Struve, and Frank, contributed to the publication of a famous symposium, Vekhi (Signposts). As ex-Marxists, these thinkers warned prophetically of revolutionary excesses and proclaimed a manifesto for Russia’s spiritual reawakening. (Rosenthal and Bohachevsky-Chomiak 1990, 4, 22–23). Like several of his contemporaries, Lossky was moving toward a synthesis of neo-Idealism and religion.
But Lossky also owed a debt to German scholarship and philosophy, which was reflected in his sustained efforts to bring German works to a Russian audience (Kline 1985, 265–66). He translated Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s dissertation of 1770, and Friedrich Paulsen’s monograph on Kant. He also edited two translations of Fichte in 1905 and 1906 and was a cotranslator of works by Fischer in 1901–5 (ibid.).5
Lossky became a lecturer at St. Petersburg University and held a professorship from 1916 until 1921. During this period, he wrote several works that firmly established his reputation in Russian philosophy. Throughout his career, he published such distinguished books as The Fundamental Doctrines of Psychology from the Point of View of Voluntarism (1903); The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge (1906); The World as an Organic Whole (1917); The Fundamental Problems of Epistemology (1919); Logic (1922); Freedom of Will (1927); Value and Existence (1931); Dialectical Materialism in the U.S.S.R. (1934); Sensuous, Intellectual and Mystical Intuition (1938); his acclaimed History of Russian Philosophy (1951); and Dostoyevsky and His Christian Understanding of the World (1953).
Lossky’s works eventually were published in many languages. His student, English interpreter, and lifelong friend, Natalie Duddington, was the first to read one of his articles on intuitivism before the Aristotelian Society in England in 1914. Her translations of The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge and The World as an Organic Whole were the first presentations in English of a bona fide technical work by any twentieth-century Russian philosopher (Edie, Scanlan, and Zeldin 1965, 315). Throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Lossky continued to publish in many journals worldwide, including the Personalist, for which he served as a foreign advisory editor. Coincidentally, the Personalist would later become the first forum in which professional philosophers would debate the ethical theories of Lossky’s student, Ayn Rand.
Lossky’s life was severely disrupted in 1921–22, when despite his adherence to Fabian socialism, he was denounced by the regime as a religious counterrevolutionary. Under the guidance of Father Pavel Florensky, Lossky had reentered the Russian Orthodox Church in 1918 after having miraculously survived an elevator accident. His religious views cost him his professorship in philosophy and eventually led to his exile from Russia.
Lossky left the Soviet Union in November 1922 and settled in Prague, where at the invitation of Thomas Masaryk he began teaching at the Free Russian University. He also taught at Charles University and the University of Bratislava, where he was appointed professor in 1942. When the Soviets entered the city toward the end of World War II, Lossky escaped to the United States. His son Vladimir became a theologian and historian of religion. His son Andrew, a graduate of Yale University, went on to teach history at UCLA. His son Boris became a distinguished art historian.
In 1946, Lossky was appointed professor of philosophy at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary and Academy in New York City.6 Lossky taught and lived at the Union Theological Seminary building on 121st Street and Broadway, before St. Vladimir’s moved to Crestwood in 1963. By the early 1950s, Ayn Rand was also living in New York City. Some thirty years after their initial encounter, Rand and Lossky were neighbors again, a fact which neither realized.
In October 1961, Lossky entered a Russian nursing home near Paris, closer to his son Boris, and in 1965, died.
More than twenty-five years after Lossky’s death, a postcommunist Russia is beginning to rediscover the richness of its prerevolutionary intellectual heritage. Starting in 1989, such journals as Voprosy filosofii and Voprosy literatury began publishing the first of a projected thirty-five to forty volumes on Russian philosophy and literature, featuring the works of the Symbolists, Solovyov, Frank, Shestov, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Florensky, and Lossky, among others.7 Voprosy filosofii began publishing Lossky’s memoirs, Vospominaniia, in 1991.8
LOSSKY’S PHILOSOPHY: AN ECLECTIC SYNTHESIS
Lossky characterized his intuitivist philosophy as an integration of idealism and realism. He rejected “one-sided idealism” and “one-sided materialism,” and proposed an “ideal-realist” perspective that sought a “unity of opposites.”9