Each morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the very same minute and the very same second we, in our millions, arise as one. At the very same hour we monomillionedly begin work—and, when we finish it, we do so monomillionedly. And, merging into but one body with multimillioned hands, at the very second designated by The Tables of Hourly Commandments we bring our spoons up to our mouths; at the very same second, likewise, we set out for a walk, or go to an auditorium, or the Hall of Taylor Exercise, or retire to sleep. (177)
The One State forbade romantic love and the free conduct of sexual life, for
isn’t it an absurdity that the State … could allow sexual life without any control whatsoever? Anybody, any time, and as much as one wanted to.… Completely unscientifically, like brutes. And, like brutes, they bred offspring gropingly. Isn’t it laughable—to know horticulture, poultry culture, pisciculture … and yet be unable to reach the last rung of this logical ladder: child culture. (178)
Like Zamiatin, Rand rejected the One State. In the 1930s, having escaped to America, she would author a number of anticollectivist writings of her own, including the “semi-autobiographical” novel, We the Living, and a futuristic novelette called Anthem. These works would portray Rand’s rejection of the intellectual trends during America’s so-called Red Decade, when many writers and artists embraced the promise of collectivism (B. Branden 1986, 95). But Rand’s early works can also be read as a passionate reaction against the dominant philosophic and cultural trends of the Silver Age. Rand would reject the Slavophile and Symbolist denigration of reason and their cultic commitment to the dissolution of self in a collective whole. She would reject the neo-Idealist defense of religion. She would reject Russian Marxism as a legitimating ideology for the newly emerging totalitarian state.
In her rejection of Russian mysticism, altruism, collectivism, and statism, Rand began to identify a philosophic conjunction that was not as apparent to others of her generation. Perhaps this unity was clearer to Rand because she had lived in a laboratory that had enabled her to make such grand inductive generalizations.
But in repudiating these traditions, Rand had absorbed the tendency toward synthesis so prevalent in Russian philosophy. Wherever the young Alissa Rosenbaum had turned, she would have encountered a nondualistic, formal commitment to the dialectic. This mode of inquiry was apparent in Nietzsche’s philosophy, which had influenced the philosophic and cultural movements of the Silver Age. It was also prevalent in the works of the Slavophiles, Solovyov and his successors, the Symbolists, the Russian Marxists, and the neo-Idealists of the religious renaissance. And the most important philosopher of this neo-Idealist tradition was Nicholas Onufrievich Lossky, Rand’s teacher.
2
LOSSKY, THE TEACHER
No study of Rand’s Objectivism would be complete without a consideration of the life and thought of N. O. Lossky, her philosophy professor at Petrograd University. The relationship between these two is of paramount historical importance because it was probably Lossky who introduced Rand to dialectical methods of analysis.
It has been said that Rand read little philosophy in her mature years. But as a student at the university, she would have been required to study many philosophic texts in depth. It is very likely that at no time in her life did Rand read as much philosophy and literature as she did while being educated in Russia. Hence, one cannot discount Lossky’s impact: as Rand’s first philosophy teacher, he laid the basis for a highly integrated view of the philosophic disciplines.
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 He was influenced by Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Solovyov, Külpe, Bergson, and most important, Leibniz.10 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 total
ity 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)
Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical Page 7