LITMIR.BIZ

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The intellectual debt that Lossky owes to Leibnizian monadology and Bergsonian intuitionism is expressed in his dictum that “everything is immanent in everything else” (Shein 1967, 86). Though Lossky was more rationalistic than most of his Russian predecessors, he combined Leibnizian and Platonic realism with a deeply organic view of the world.

      As part of the Russian religious renaissance, Lossky, like Solovyov, rejected the Thomistic separation of philosophy from theology (Copleston 1988, 60). Like Semyon Frank, Lossky conceptualized three hierarchical levels of existence: the physical/real, the spiritual/ideal, and the mystical/ metalogical in which both material and spiritual elements are united.¹¹ Real being has a spatiotemporal character. Ideal being, which has a nonspatiotemporal character, includes the apprehension of relations, number, unity, and plurality. Metalogical being corresponds to the Absolute. To apprehend each of these three levels, human cognition engages three corresponding types of intuition: sensory, intellectual, and mystical. Each of these forms is organically linked to the others.

      Lossky’s philosophy aims to overcome both Humean skepticism and Kantian rationalism. Acclaimed as “a great master of the word” (Zenkovsky 1953, 662), Lossky defended a pluralistic, though organic, view of the world. He saw his epistemological theory as a form of intuitivism. Rejecting Cartesian dualism and subjectivism, he insisted on the integrity of knowledge. His intuitivism is a doctrine of “epistemological coordination,” in which “the cognized object, even if it forms part of the external world, enters the knowing subject’s consciousness directly, so to speak in person, and is therefore apprehended as it exists independently of the act of knowing” (Lossky 1951, 252). Hence, we do not perceive the mere stimulation of sensory organs. We perceive and apprehend real existents. Even though our perceptions are selective and fragmentary and may differ based upon each individual’s subconscious choices, the knowing subject directs his or her attention on the actual objects of the external world (ibid.).

      Relational contemplation becomes possible because the world is an organic whole of constituent elements. Like Leibniz, Lossky argued that the world consisted of monads, or “substantival agents,” of which human beings were of prime importance. But for Lossky, these agents were not “windowless.” Lossky rejected metaphysical atomism. He insisted that substantival agents were not self-contained and independent, but interacted in an organic system of “hierarchical personalism” (Zenkovsky 1953, 659, 662, 666). He argued that “the whole world consists of actual or potential persons.”¹² In Lossky’s view, every agent in the universe, even an electron, is a potential person. These agents enter into relations with one another to form a single systemic whole. But as a religious idealist, Lossky asserted that the highest agent is the World Spririt. By conceptualizing an organic system united by an Absolute, Lossky attempted to avoid the radical plurality of the atomists, while making the universe intelligible (Shein 1973, 146).

      Lossky opposed what he described as the “extremes” of both “universalistic” and “individualistic” systems of philosophy. In the former, the individual is granted no independent value, whereas in the latter, the individual is totally independent of the whole. Although it aims to promote human diversity, individualism constructs a social system of undifferentiated atoms and culminates in a crude solipsism.¹³ The truly organic system is neither wholly collectivistic nor atomistic, but interweaves unity and plurality.

      However, Lossky achieved such organicism through a mystical union. Deeply influenced by his Russian philosophic predecessors, Lossky was part of a pre-Bolshevik religious renaissance. He incorporated mystical and communitarian notions into the corpus of his thought. He opposed ethical relativism, and presented an absolutist morality. He argued that existence and value are mutually related through a Supracosmic principle discoverable by mystical intuition (Shein 1967, 86–87). This Absolute is God, the perfect, almighty, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent being. All substantival agents and all intrinsic values (e.g., Being, Love, Beauty, Truth, Freedom) emanate from God. As an adherent of Russian Orthodoxy, and in quasi-Hegelian fashion, Lossky argued that the gulf between God and Man is bridged by Christ, the God-Man of the Trinity.

      Like most Russian philosophers, Lossky (1951) also embraced the notion of sobornost’, such

      that the creativeness of all beings that live in God must be completely unanimous, soborny (communal). Every member of the kingdom of God must make his individual, i.e., unique, unrepeatable and unre-placeable contribution to the communal creativeness: only in that case will the members’ activity be mutually complementary, creating a single and unique beautiful whole, instead of being a repetition of the same actions. (259)

      In the Kingdom of Harmony, each part exists for the whole, just as the totality exists for each part. For Lossky ([1917] 1928), in the Kingdom of Harmony, there is “a complete interpenetration of all by all, the distinction between part and whole disappears: every part is a whole. The principles of organic structure are realized in the completest way possible. It is a wholly perfect organism” (81). In the Kingdom of Harmony, there are no egoistic “acts of repulsion.” For Lossky, as for Solovyov before him, selfishness separates us from God, and is the primary evil. Because human beings have free will, they must choose the purity of moral perfection by embracing the path to God. In Lossky’s view, only “Goodness and beauty can exist in their pure form without any admixture of evil or ugliness.” But the evil must depend upon the good in order to survive, for “evil and ugliness can have no reality without having some element of beauty and goodness in them.”¹⁴

      LOSSKY AND ARISTOTLE

      It is easy to see why, in later years, Rand characterized Lossky as a Platonic philosophical adversary (B. Branden 1986, 42). Given Lossky’s idealistic notions, Rand’s depiction is certainly not without merit. Yet, though Lossky had much in common with Platonists, he argued that his “ideal-realism” was rooted in the “concrete ideal-realism” of Aristotle. For Lossky, Aristotle offered the first version of the concrete ideal-realist perspective. It is here that we can begin to appreciate Lossky’s method of analysis, despite the explicitly mystical content of his formal philosophy. It is here that we can begin to dissect the dialectical kernel in Lossky’s mystical shell. For in his dialectical methodology, Lossky has integrated a Russian tendency toward synthesis with complementary elements in Aristotelian, Leibnizian, and Hegelian thought. Lossky ([1917] 1928) writes:

      According to Aristotle, every particular thing and being in the world is the result of the combination of matter and form.… Abstraction being made of these definite characteristics of concrete things, matter is conceived of as the possibility of any one of these forms or characteristics.… Aristotle was a naturalist who never lost sight of living reality … [forming] abstractions without separating from living reality that which is abstracted from it, but merely mentally emphasizing it for the sake of observing it more carefully against the whole background of real existence. (193–94)

      By tracing his own position to the “concrete ideal-realism” of Aristotle, Lossky suggested that the classical Greek thinker was a forerunner of the intuitivist perspective. This is not to say that Lossky’s epistemology is essentially Aristotelian. In later years, Lossky claimed that he shared the Aristotelian realist view that people directly apprehend their own mental states and the objects in the external world. But for Lossky, this realist tradition fails because it accepts the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter. Lossky (1957) explained that in the Aristotelian epistemology,

      Man can cognize objects of the external world because human reason is the potential form of all objects which becomes actual when those objects are perceived.… When a man perceives a stone, the form of the stone is present in his mind, but he does not become a stone because only the form, and not the matter, of the stone enters his mind. Since, however, the form is the essence of an object, we may say that in a certain sense knowledge of an object implies the identity between the thought and the object of thought. This identity is but partial, because only the essence of an object, and not its existence, is present in the human mind. (38)

      This is not sufficient, in Lossky’s view, because in Aristotle’s realism, the mind grasps only the metaphysical essence but not the existence of the object. In Lossky’s intuitivism, the “conditions of direct perception” allow

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