The Black Circle

by Jeff Love

  Soloviev has to deny this particular because it prevents or blocks the divine principle entirely. There is no escape from mere natural existence if the particular is not overcome as having some ineffable particularity. Why should one escape from natural existence? What is wrong with natural existence? Soloviev refers to it as evil and carries on throughout the lectures a polemic with nature as being the locus of evil. But to what end? The particular is in fact the locus of evil; it is, as Augustine also suggests, a lure that leads one away from the absolute, from the purity and beauty of the absolute, which is nothing other than the fullest freedom from particularity. But Soloviev is not, of course, that dismissive. The particular may become beautiful, too, and it may become so to the extent that it conforms to or reflects the absolute. If the particular is coveted, so to speak, merely in itself as having “value” only in itself, then for Soloviev it is nothing, or, worse, the obstinate attraction to a nonsensical, contradictory thing. For the corollary of the madman who seeks only his own satisfaction is the particular that lives as it were only for itself.

  Hence, for Soloviev reduction must be understood in a completely different way. It is in fact the reduction of things to their peculiarity, to their “secret lives,” that weakens and corrupts them—they lose touch with the absolute, lose the ostensibly inner connection with the whole that first pulls them out of their abstraction or the contradictory notion of particular cognition. That is to say that if all cognition were in fact particular, there would be no cognition at all. The world in which each makes a demand for its own self at the cost of others—or without regard to others, as if they possessed only a phantasmal existence—would prevail, and no knowledge would be possible. But, again, this notion of knowledge begs the question. As Wittgenstein proved rather convincingly, a private language is not possible; it is indeed a kind of madness, in the terms Kojève employs.24 Likewise, the notion that particulars can in fact come to possess a kind of knowledge is fraught with difficulties, for the same reason.

  For there to be knowledge and mutual cognition (i.e., any cognition at all), there must be something beyond the particular. We may then ask why this something beyond the particular must be absolute. The answer is fairly simple. If one does not have an absolute, all knowing is particular, and if all knowing is particular, there is no knowing at all—at least this is the core of the view that Soloviev defends.

  If this is so, then positive assertion of the absolute would seem to be of the utmost urgency, since the negative absolute cannot in fact constitute knowledge other than via a Socratic maxim like the claim, from the Apology, that Socrates’s wisdom arises from his recognition that he does not and cannot know. The philosopher is then distinguished by his superior knowing only in a negative sense, by the fact that he realizes, unlike the others, that he cannot claim to know—to know absolutely—and, thus, to know anything at all. The philosopher’s superior knowledge stems from a constitutional inability to possess positive knowledge of the whole. All claims to knowledge are thus a form of deception.

  Soloviev sees fundamental weakness in this essentially skeptical position. The thinker must go beyond it and, guided by faith, come to an assertion of a positive form of knowledge. This positive form of knowledge is to be found in Platonism transformed by the possibility of incarnation of the absolute in the individual, a perfect harmony of one and many, by which the individual becomes one with the deity and, in so doing, deifies herself.

  But this deification is not to be confused with a merely individual act whereby some are saved and others are damned. The more searching aspect of Soloviev’s interpretation is to suggest, in a way that recalls (and quite consciously) Gottfried Leibniz, that all beings seek to reflect the absolute principle to the extent of their capacity to do so. Of course, as is typical of these approaches to divinity, the creature in which the absolute principle comes to fullest expression is the human being. Soloviev’s daring is to suggest that this fullest expression is not a limited one but can be as absolute as the principle it reflects; indeed, it must be, or else the promise of the incarnation cannot be fulfilled, for “every determinate being can be, primordially, only an act of self-determination of that which absolutely is” and becomes absolute in the process.25

  This remarkable claim constitutes the focal point of the lectures in lecture 6. Having declared that the absolute can appear absolutely in a conditioned material form, Soloviev moves on to describe how this form, throughout all differences, masks, and apparent errors, is the fundamental form latent in all of human history—and that he is the first to recognize it as such.

  DEIFICATION

  This fundamental form is deification. The notion of deification (θέωσις) has deep roots in the Eastern Christian tradition.26 Soloviev’s repetition of that tradition is interesting insofar as it weaves together traditional Neoplatonic aspects of the tradition with Augustine, thereby revealing Soloviev’s attempt to uncover the one form latent in all appearance. In this respect, Soloviev’s thinking once again takes a triune structure as its basis. His synthesis of different elements in the tradition creates a very intriguing and important central triad: will, reason, and being. He thus brings together not only Platonism and a key thinker of the Christian tradition but also German idealism. Soloviev argues, in effect, that all three kinds of thought can be layered on top of one another like a palimpsest describing an essentially unitary underlying structure. And we may presume that this structure acts as a gloss on the triadic structure Soloviev also applies to his categorization of types of religion, from the natural through the negative to the positive.

  Soloviev describes this fundamental structure as follows:

  In our spirit, we must differentiate between its simple immediate being (esse), its knowledge (scire), and its will (velle). These three acts are identical not only according to their content, insofar as the one who is knows and wills itself. Their unity goes far deeper. Each of them contains the other two in their distinctive character, and consequently, each inwardly already contains the whole fullness of the triune spirit. In fact in the first place, I am, but not simply “am”—I am the one who knows and wills (sum sciens et volens). Consequently, my being as such already contains in itself both knowledge and will. Second, if I know, I know or am conscious of the fact that I am and that I will (scio me esse et velle). Thus, here too, in knowledge as such, or under the form of knowledge, both being and will are contained. Third, and last, I will myself, yet not simply myself, but myself as one who is and knows; I will my being and knowledge (volo me esse et scire). Consequently, the form of the will also contains both being and knowledge. Each of these three fundamental acts of the spirit is completed in itself by the other two and thus becomes individualized, as it were, into full triune being.27

  Soloviev claims that this fundamental structure is, however, merely an analogy, just as the Neoplatonic triad, the so-called three hypostases—the one (τὸ ἕν), intellect (ὁ νοῦς), and the soul (ή ψυχή)—as well as the “classic” (Fichtean) German idealist triad of the absolute subject (das absolute Ich), which contains the empirical I (das Ich) and the Not-I (das Nicht-Ich). Soloviev seems to align both these triads, with being (esse) as the one and the absolute I; knowing (scire) as the intellect or the I; and will (velle) as the soul or the not-I.

  These overlapping conceptual analogies only fit together with some violence, through a fairly extreme deracination of the concepts from their original context. And this may be Soloviev’s point—the absolute principle appears throughout history in approximate triads, but the triadic structure is possible and mirrors the other crucial triadic structure, the Trinity. Whatever we may think of Soloviev’s exactitude, the point is abundantly clear: the world is constructed in triads that embody and thus can lead one back to the absolute in its fullest form. There is no reason to say that the absolute cannot be realized in the particular, since so many particulars have already found shelter in the absolute.28

  Still, the qualifying terms
and the rough harmony of the comparisons is somewhat jarring. If Soloviev is trying to convince us of this unity in diversity, he leaves the more difficult questions as to the origins of that diversity to the side, at least initially. More striking still is the reference to analogy, the old Aristotelian tool whereby one may speak of things one cannot truly know as they are in themselves. The use of analogy would seem to suggest that the absolute principle cannot be known as it is in itself, and, in fact, we are thrown back to Soloviev’s initial declaration of the importance of faith to obtain certainty about the existence of the absolute principle.29

  One cannot help but surmise that there is something akin to an “als ob,” or “as if,” principle at work here that leads to a difficult circularity, perhaps an inevitable one. The circle is this: to know the absolute principle, one has to know it exists, but in fact one cannot know that it exists; one has to assume it in fact does, and so faith anchors thought.30 And this circle refers us in turn back to the problem of the madman who builds a logical structure over an abyss, claiming all the time that that structure is in the fabric of reality and, thus, that we have to accept it as such. That Soloviev is explaining the necessary consequences of an unnecessary positum is an extraordinary aspect of his enterprise in the lectures, and one that neither Fedorov nor Kojève forgot, for both conceive of the absolute not as a distant “given” to be retrieved but solely as a universal project to complete. On the contrary, Soloviev finds himself in the far more difficult position of exhorting us to achieve what is, as a positum, always already there, thus exhorting us to strive for what we already have. Hence, Soloviev needs to explain why it is that we do not see, or have forgotten, what we possess, why we have come to the forgetfulness of the absolute (what Plato explains through myth).

  If we regard Soloviev’s project, then, as one that proposes the necessary implications of an unnecessary positum, the lectures tend to become less persuasive after lecture 6. This is the case because Soloviev spends the balance of the lectures attempting to show why the absolute has not hitherto come to light in the way it has for him, as the prophet of its truth. This terribly common difficulty—it appears to afflict all philosophers who claim that their point in time is somehow privileged, allowing for the final or “synoptic” account of the meaning of all that has come before in philosophy (think both Hegel and Martin Heidegger)—pushes Soloviev to create a further narrative, by now quite a conventional one, of decline and return, with his own time being an appropriate one in which to advocate for such a return.

  SOPHIA

  There is, however, one extremely important concept that Soloviev develops in the subsequent lectures: that of wisdom, or Sophia. As Soloviev suggests, “Wisdom is the idea that God has before Him in His work of creation and that He consequently realizes.” The divine demiurge is now Christ, now each one of us who is called to realize the same project as the proper imitatio Christi. The content of this ideal is ideal or perfect humanity, “eternally contained in the integral divine being, or Christ.” What is this perfect humanity?

  Although a human being as a phenomenon is a temporary, transitory fact, the human being as essence is necessarily eternal and all-embracing. What, then, is an ideal human being? To be actual, such a being must be both one and many and therefore is not merely the universal common essence of all human individuals, taken in abstraction from them. Such a being is universal but also individual, an entity that actually contains all human individuals within itself. Every one of us, every human being, is essentially and actively rooted in and partakes of the universal, or absolute, human being.31

  This is more declaration of a program than it is argument. The problems of “partaking” or “participation” alone are so thorny and dense that Plato himself devoted an entire, and genuinely aporetic, dialogue to it, the Parmenides. Here Soloviev solves those problems largely by reference to Christ. The role of Christ in the lectures—and, of course, in Christianity as a whole—provides him with a handy dogmatic justification for doing so. But this is a curious, if not mistaken, move. The most penetrating thesis of the lectures is that one may realize a universal or absolute principle in a conditioned, relative life; the promise of living infinitely arises from this move, a promise perhaps as seductive as it seems to be potentially incoherent.

  We return again to this simple question: How does the absolute emerge as such in the conditioned? While it is no doubt true to argue that the absolute cannot “appear” in any other way, can the absolute possibly appear as it is in itself, as absolute? The obvious objections are legion. Does Soloviev push us into a more radical position dependent on faith, that is, a position in which one takes it as a dogmatic article of faith that the absolute appears and may appear precisely as the unconditioned in itself, as absolute?

  This is indeed the main argument—that there is no real contradiction in claiming that the absolute may appear in its absoluteness within a thing. The first response is one that Soloviev seems to have anticipated—that the absolute may appear in the conditioned only as an absence, that the only way to come to the absolute is through the negative. The most daring and troubling response given by Soloviev, however, is that the absolute can appear in the conditioned to the extent that the latter attempts to imitate the “being” of the former. Imitation is a project, something one must do to become absolute. Here the absolute is employed to generate a project of striving. How does this striving work out, and why is it not asymptotic, unable to reach its goal? How, in other words, can a finite being—or at least one that has to die—imitate or “comprehend” the unlimited, the infinite? According to Soloviev:

  Divine forces constitute the single, integral, absolutely universal, absolutely individual organism of the living Logos. Likewise, all human elements constitute a similarly integral organism, one both universal and individual, which is the necessary actualization and receptacle of the living Logos. They constitute a universally human organism as the eternal body of God and the eternal soul of the world. Since this later organism, that is, Sophia in its eternal being, necessarily consists of a multiplicity of elements, of which she is the real unity, each of the elements, as a necessary component part of eternal Divine-humanity, must be recognized as eternal in the absolute or world order.32

  Does this passage take us any further? Kojève argues—and it is difficult to counter this argument—that Soloviev does not realize the promise of the Incarnation by creating a divine being that lives in the world. Rather, Soloviev retains the force of imitation, as this passage seems to confirm. The human being is thus always in a secondary position, as imitator, and not really capable of union with the absolute principle on an equal footing.33 The best the human being can do is to subordinate herself fully to the divine principle. But this subordination can never succeed fully; the human being cannot give up her will completely, even if “held in reserve.” Put in simpler, Platonic terms, the human being can do no better that be a simulacrum of the absolute principle, and even an encyclopedic simulacrum remains a simulacrum, liable to succumb to defect or fallible performance.

  The performance aspect of the problem needs emphasis, and it presents severe difficulties for Soloviev. How can a creature living in time—acting, in other words—possibly be the same as an absolute principle, which, as such, must be outside of or prior to time? One may press the argument even further to suggest that time must first be created by the absolute principle. The distinction between the atemporal and the temporal merely repeats other distinctions whose basis is similar (infinite/finite, perfect/imperfect, complete/incomplete, and so on). In all these cases the negative is associated with any being that is not absolute—to be not absolute is indeed to be negative, that is, conditioned, limited, to lack.

  To live in time—and what other life is possible?—is necessarily to be imperfect, to countenance error in the performance or imitation of the absolute. Indeed, life in time, from the perspective of the absolute, is itself an error if the absolute is truly atemporal or prior to tim
e. Kant recognized this problem and thus considered perfect performance of the moral duty, the categorical imperative, ultimately impossible for an imperfect being, that is, a being still essentially rooted in time, in everyday experience, the being Kant referred to as inalienably heteronomous.34 Soloviev, on the contrary, refuses to accept this difficulty but does not offer a persuasive alternative response. He must explain time, history, and thus the discovery of an absolute to which we must return. One ends up in an essentially Kantian position, with an ethical imperative that one must and cannot fully follow because complete performance would require complete extirpation of self-interest—or, in Kantian terms, inclination or propensity (Hang).35 Transformation cannot be merely metaphorical, it seems; transformation must dare to be more radical.

  NIKOLAI FEDOROV AND UNIVERSAL RESURRECTION

  Radical transformation is the solution offered by Nikolai Fedorov, a most unusual thinker whose philosophy of universal resurrection seems completely mad, if not preposterous, to most. The briefest outline invites laughter or disbelief. If philosophy truly is a voyage led by madmen to the verkehrte Welt, the world turned upside down, in Hegel’s words, then one of its most daring captains must be Fedorov. What is it, after all, to proclaim universal resurrection as the end of human being, to proclaim that human life lived to its end is ridiculous, mad, stupid, unless we try as a collectivity to overcome that end, literally and physically, not only for ourselves but also for all who have ever lived? This latter aspect of the pursuit of eternal life is the most forceful, strange, and distinctive aspect of Fedorov’s “project,” his “common cause” or “task” (общее дело). For Fedorov, there really is no middle ground, no compromise that is not first a catastrophe, a turning away from the truth—Christ represents the truth in resurrection.