The Black Circle

by Jeff Love

  One may argue that this is a perceptive description of the predicament of the underground man, and to a large extent it is, if one accepts that the underground man is indeed in pursuit of “something greater,” a finality or absolution from the miseries of finite human existence in the underground. If this is so, the underground man becomes the archetype of the nonarchetypal being, the being whose identity is not to have an identity, a being defined by what it is not, an apophatic man to mock the notion of an apophatic god and, thus, the notion of man having become God. For, in this case, man having become God is little else than the man of the mystical tradition who engages in an ecstasy of self-annihilation in that precious moment of mystical union, the unio mystica, or “night in which all cows are black.”

  But Soloviev also has another modern type in mind, the active man. To put this in broader terms, Soloviev provides a critique of the modern bourgeois emancipation narrative as well. This narrative may be expressed best through the secularization thesis made popular by Karl Löwith, who claims that the modern enlightenment merely transforms the Christian notion of advancement into the bourgeois myth of progress.10 Rather than advancing toward spiritual salvation in the afterlife by living a good, Christian life here below, one advances toward the bourgeois variant of salvation: the acquisition of material comfort. Without a unifying ideal—and Soloviev sees in the bourgeois variant of salvation only self-interest writ large—there can be no salvation as an overcoming of our rootedness in selfishness, since my freedom comes at the cost of others and must be defined solely negatively, by my ability not to succumb to limits. The ostensibly positive ideal of comfort is essentially reducible to the negative ideal of unlimited self-assertion.

  Soloviev seeks to counter both the “apophatic man,” a creature of irony and resignation, and the active man, who seeks only his own comfort, by another man; or, better, Soloviev argues that the negative man conceals a positive demand for “full content” (требование полноты содержания). For “in the possession of all of reality, of the fullness of life, lies positive absoluteness.” As to why this positive demand has been abandoned remains muddled. Soloviev seems to claim, quite traditionally, that the modern world has simply lost its way, beguiled, one supposes, by the idols of modern science or capitalism, the possibility of literally becoming a god, which can lead only to dissatisfaction because Western civilization has “asserted infinite striving and the impossibility of its satisfaction” by inculcating a negative ideal of freedom.11

  THE POSITIVE ABSOLUTE

  Having thus expressed the significance of affirming a positive absolute idea or ideal, Soloviev proceeds to develop that idea or ideal by tracing its lineage in both the philosophical and theological traditions. Here Soloviev creates a history of Platonism as a history of the self-revelation of the absolute that reaches its culmination in Soloviev himself as humble prophet of the neglected truth.

  The triadic and Trinitarian narrative Soloviev creates is fascinating. Its basic structure belongs to the “golden age” format whereby an eternal and absolute truth, a truth implicit in an origin, slowly becomes unfolded in time.12 One may identify this narrative with one of its great instantiations in Plato, in which the task of thinking is recollection of the perfection that we have left behind due to our miserable embodiment. The great and epochal difference is the decisive transformation provided by the incarnation of the truth in Christ. In Plato, it is quite clear that return to the hyperouranian realm, the realm of perfection, of absolute truth, is only possible without the body—a most inconvenient fact for the creature whose sad essence is to exist in the material world.13

  Christ transforms the Platonic narrative from one of impossibility (or negativity) into one of positive acquisition whereby the body is suffused with the absolute. The significance of the Incarnation for Soloviev is difficult to overestimate: the Incarnation is the event that transforms history by making the absolute accessible to the embodied individual, in vivid contrast to the Platonic prohibition. If, in other words, Platonic wisdom is essentially one of tragic futility according to which the striving to glimpse the forms in the hyperouranian realm cannot possibly meet with success because it is quite literally not in the nature of things to allow that success, the Incarnation allows for the most powerful act of transformation. One may literally become an embodied god, as unusual as that may seem—at least at first blush.

  What can an embodied absolute possibly be? Soloviev deals with this problem at length. The most technical elements of the lectures originate in his attempt to explain the seemingly contradictory concept of the embodied god or the contingent absolute. His first and most fundamental claim is that revelation is absolutely necessary if one is to be assured of the reality of the absolute principle. Soloviev is surprisingly blunt on this point, claiming that the certainty of the absolute principle’s reality, its existence, can be given only by faith and not deduced by pure reason alone.14 If this is indeed the case, Soloviev’s elaborate arguments for delineating the identity and import of the absolute principle seem to be little more than a complicated form of philosophical pedagogy or, in cruder terms, propaganda in the oldest sense of the term as propaganda fidei.

  These arguments come in a bewildering variety. To keep with Soloviev’s own tendency toward triads, I might arrange these arguments in three groups, the first setting out the historical shape of the absolute as it reveals itself in Christianity, the second setting out its theological structure, and the third explaining why that history is necessary in the first place. Thus, Soloviev sets for himself the usual tasks of the Christian apologist, with a particularly interesting focus on why the absolute principle only comes to its fullest self-expression with Soloviev’s own writing—the lectures are themselves the final revelation of the absolute principle of what, according to Soloviev, was always already there. Soloviev, not Hegel, proclaims the end of history in the explicitation of its fundamental significance.

  Soloviev’s historical account is of interest primarily for the way in which it weaves together three stages of religious development with three elements in the Christian tradition:

  This first main stage is represented by polytheism in the broad sense, which comprises all the mythological religions, or the so-called nature religions. I call this stage natural or immediate revelation. In the second stage of religious development, the divine principle is revealed in contradistinction to nature. It is revealed as the negation of nature, the nothing (the absence) of natural being, the negative freedom from it. I call this stage, which has an essentially pessimistic or ascetic character, negative revelation. Its purest type is represented by Buddhism. Finally, in the third stage, the divine stage, the divine principle is successively revealed in its own content, in that which it is in itself and for itself (whereas previously it was revealed only in what it is not, that is to say, in its other, or in the simple negation of that other, and therefore still in relation to it, but not as it is in itself). This third stage, which I call, in general, positive revelation, consists of several clearly discernible phases, which should be analyzed separately.15

  The first and second stages are intimately related because they both deal with the will. The first stage describes the discovery of the so-called natural will, which is the “exclusive self-assertion of every entity … the inner and outer negation by one entity of all others.” The natural will describes the ostensibly natural imperative of self-preservation, the struggle to assert one’s existence, which cannot be brought to an end, according to Soloviev, even if the need for food and other “lower passions” is satiated. At this level, what Soloviev calls “natural egoism” still prevails. And, in a move that is fully consonant with the Platonic stance Soloviev develops, nature emerges as a “blind external force, alien to human beings, a force of evil and deceit [силой зла и обмана].”16

  If the natural religion Soloviev connects with this view of nature cannot overcome nature and in fact represents a coming to te
rms with nature, the other two kinds of religion he identifies, negative and positive, are both unified by their hostility toward nature, their attempt to overcome nature as the dominant force in our lives. Negative religion denotes a transformation of the will from self-assertion to self-denial. Rather than being the most powerful assertion of one’s existence vis-à-vis all other beings, the notion of will that prevails in negative religion is one of denial as liberation from the entrapment in the natural process of self-assertion. This will is thus a will to self-annihilation or self-immolation; it is the will to suicide that liberates one at last from the chains of natural will or material self-assertion.17

  Like the stage that follows, this negative stage is an attempt to overcome evil, understood precisely as self-assertion and as the inability to overcome self-assertion that seems to be the central claim of natural religion. The crucial element that transforms the situation—and it is well to keep this in mind when we come to Kojève—is negation. The first divinely made act is an act of negation whereby one counters nature. The act is divinely mad because it is an act that seems aimed at one’s own “natural” interests, and it is divine because it arises from what we may call a yearning for the universal in face of the particular. The universal describes exactly this move to negate the particular, for in the negation of the particular—of my will as such—I cannot help but enter into a realm where the particular structure of my actions comes to undermine itself. To act in favor of not acting in favor of my own interests is indeed to act in the name of no interest whatsoever, and this peculiar interest—an interest whose interest is not to have an interest—is an act of self-effacement or annihilation.

  But, as we know, this self-effacement is also an act of liberation from the tyranny of nature, of self-assertion, of what Soloviev calls “evil.” Thus, the first step away from evil toward the good is an act of negation: “This absolute rejection of all finite, limited attributes is already a negative determination of the absolute principle itself. For a consciousness that does not yet possess that principle itself, such a negative determination is necessarily the first step toward positive knowledge of it.”18 Soloviev ascribes this purely negative appreciation of the absolute to Buddhism, which can remain only negative. We find ourselves still within the negative absolutes of the great Dostoevskian heroes; the end of life, true emancipation, is death.

  To put the matter in Platonic terms, this negative eros is not sufficient. Yet what of positive eros? If the positive eros, the accession to the ideas in themselves, is impossible for Plato, it becomes possible for Soloviev, of course, through the agency of Christ. Soloviev couches the essential import of the positive principle in the language of dominion, arguing that the “actual positive freedom of an entity [существа] presupposes dominion, positive force, or power over that from which the entity is free.”19 Hence, Soloviev identifies negative freedom with servitude and positive freedom with mastery, an identification which we will have occasion to address again in the context of Kojève’s major recognition narrative.

  The master is the one who assumes the absolute idea in the guise of Christ. But what exactly does this mean? The structure Soloviev develops, the second part of his exposition, is a striking if obvious synthesis of Platonism and Christianity, drawing from masters in both the Eastern and Western traditions. It is perhaps remarkable that this exposition reaches a high point with a discussion of Augustine, the foremost thinker in the Western Christian tradition that Soloviev otherwise decries.

  TWO ABSOLUTES?

  More triads. Soloviev nests inside his triadic conception of religion a triadic conception of its final element, positive religion. But before I address this triad, I want to return once again (the third time) to the key notion of Christ as the mediating element that allows for an overcoming of Platonic impossibility, the Platonic declaration of the inaccessibility to human understanding of that final view of the hyperouranian realm. From this perspective, it seems quite obvious that negation holds sway in Plato as well, despite the positive doctrine of the forms. For if those forms are, in the final account, not fully accessible to the finite mind, what can they be other than a tantalizing temptation, a variation, indeed, of the predicament of Tantalus, who is capable of perceiving what he cannot possess?

  What kind of mediating element can Christ be? Nothing is more controversial, perhaps, in Christian dogmatic theology. An either/or has ruled responses to this question, based on what nature in Christ is more fundamental: the divine or human? This either/or hints at the profoundly difficult question of how one may possibly live a universal life, a life of divinity. Does one live this life as metaphor, as fiction, or as a “reality”?

  This question is the nodal point that ties Soloviev to Fedorov and, ultimately, to Kojève; it is the question that animates all three. It also allows us to distinguish among them, because their responses are so different: Soloviev retains the notion of a divine absolute and a “divinely human” one (his famous—and problematic—“two absolutes”), whereas Fedorov seeks to create a divine individual no longer subject to death, and Kojève an absolutely finite being that accepts its finitude as an absolute horizon by abandoning the notion of a divine absolute (in Soloviev’s terms).

  Now Soloviev’s response:

  It is clear that Divinity must be a willing person, a living God, for the human personal will to be determined positively. But can Divinity in its absolute nature be a person? This question is obscured by misunderstandings resulting from the one-sidedness of two opposing points of view, both of which contradict the original concept of Divinity as absolute. On the one hand, those who affirm the personhood of Divinity usually affirm at the same time that Divinity is only a person, a certain personal being with such and such attributes. Pantheists rightfully rebel against this position, demonstrating that it implies a limitation of Divinity, deprives it of infinity and absoluteness, and makes it one thing among many. Indeed, it is clear that Divinity, as the absolute, cannot be only a person, only an I, that it is more than a person. But those who protest against this limitation fall into the opposite one-sided position of asserting that Divinity is devoid of personal being, that it is merely an impersonal substance of the all. But if Divinity is substance, that which exists from itself, then, since it contains the all in itself, it must differ from the all or assert its own being. Otherwise, there would be no container, and Divinity, devoid of inner independence, would be not a substance but merely an attribute of the all. Thus, as substance, Divinity must necessarily possess self-determination and self-discernment; it must possess personhood, and consciousness.

  Thus, the truth clearly is that the divine principle is not a person only in the sense that it is not exhausted by a personal determination; it is not only one but also all, not only an individual being but also the all-embracing being, not only existent but also essence. As absolute, the divine principle is subject and substance at the same time.20

  The crucial phrase is the final one: that “the divine principle is subject and substance at the same time.” This phrase originates in the preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology, and, in the words of Kojève, it describes with all possible concision the central idea animating the Hegelian project.21 Such overstatement or generalization offends many commentators as being ridiculously or fancifully reductive, and so it should. How else might one speak of the absolute principle, for is this not the essence of reduction itself, that all becomes one? To be sure, the varieties of reduction may be considerable, but the trope—to use a curious term—that comes to the fore here is one of immense reduction, of the transformation of the life of the individual subject into the life of the all, and the reverse.

  But is this really the case? What is divine about this reduction? And what is pernicious in this sense about reduction? While I do not wish to spend too much time on this issue here, it might be useful to consider what is at stake in the dogma according to which reduction is to be avoided at all costs as a want of subtlety or discrimination.
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br />   For Soloviev, the attachment to multiplicity as such, to sheer variety, is little more than a return to the attitude of natural religion. It is thus the concomitant of self-assertion and the assertion of the particular against all other particulars. The most radical assertion of this kind is that of the absolute individuality of each particular that is, as such, inexhaustible—the particular becomes like an infinite god itself. The grounding impetus of the particular is to differentiate itself from all other particulars; the attachment to individuality must reflect the same impetus. The particular so understood precludes understanding or, at least, precludes full understanding on the assumption or wager that partial understanding is possible as understanding.22 In other words, we think “provisionally” about things because we cannot think finally about them. But this raises the question of whether partial or provisional thought is any kind of thought at all or is merely a rejection of thought in favor of a useful fiction, that of the hallowed particular in itself. What I mean here is the question—of great moment to Kojève, as we shall see—of whether a partial account can have any sense if it refers to no coherent whole. For if a sense is fleeting or changeable, is it sense or merely pseudo sense? Or, if there is no final standard available, how do we distinguish sense from madness or the utter lack of sense?23