Translated by Michael Millerman. Founder of http://MillermanSchool.com - online philosophy and politics courses on Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Dugin, Strauss, and more.

Slavophiles and Westernizers: the discovery of archemodernity

The appearance in the first quarter of the 19th century of Russian conservatives (the so-called “Russian party”: Shishkov, Rastopchin, Glinka, etc.) and Slavophiles especially can be represented in this diagram as an achievement of the “haughty” Eurocentric ellipse expanding its reach to the points of Focus A (Figure 2) and the first intelligible and conscious intuitions of the Russian intellectual and political elite regarding the fact that Russia is a distinctive and original culture and civilization, not just a “European country.”

It is possible to propose a third figure of the hermeneutic ellipse, which will show an extension of modernization going from Focus B down to the populace and at a certain point contacting the hidden Russian Beginning, focus A (Figure 3), which serves as a center of attraction, distorting by its effect the circle and turning it into an ellipse. The Slavophiles were the historical first to reach this point.

Figure 3. The Russian Hermeneutic Ellipse; Structural Image of the Position of Slavophiles

The Slavophiles were the first to record a premonition of the very possibility of Russian philosophy. They did not complete, and even did not really begin the process of its creation, but they asserted the first intuition of the hypothetical Russian hermeneutic circle (marked with a dotted line in figure 3) in the framework of archeomodernity.

The Slavophiles discovered and showed the elliptical character of Russian culture; they approached awareness of archeomodernity and tried to overcome it by turning to a hypothetical “folk tradition,” to Holy Rus’, to the Grand Duchy of Moscow, to peasant life and Russian Orthodoxy.

Synchronously with them and in the same cultural, historical and social context, the phenomenon of archeo-modernity was also revealed at the opposite focus, at point B (Figure 3). The brightest representative of such an autopsy was Peter Chaadaev, a student of the famous conservative philosopher and émigré from France, Joseph de Maistre. Like the Slavophiles, Chaadaev discovered the pathology of the Russian ellipse, keenly grasping the ugliness and grotesque distortion of Russian culture, which is the deep periphery of the West and an historical anomaly. But unlike the Slavophiles, Chaadaev saw a different direction in overcoming this state of culture: complete and absolute integration into the Western paradigm, that is, from the Russian hermeneutic ellipse to the hermeneutic circle of Western European philosophy. Chaadaev suggested clearing archeo-modernity of the archaic focus (A) so that Russian culture would be maximally integrated into European culture. In this way, Chaadaev’s analysis of the soreness and inconsistency of the Russian archaeomodern ellipse as a whole coincided with the symmetrical analysis of Slavophiles, but oppositely evaluated.

Figure 4. Russia’s Ideo-Political Tendencies and the Archeomodern Poles

Figure 5. Philosophical Schools and the Archeomodern Poles

Figure 4 shows the main ideological currents of Russia from the 18th to the early 20th centuries in relation to the poles of the hermeneutic ellipse. They constitute the context in which the first attempts were made to create Russian philosophy proper. Purely philosophical tendencies are presented in Figure 5.

Between the Slavophiles, who were interested in Pole A, and the Westernizers, who concentrated on Pole B (Figure 4), the formation of 19th century Russian culture took place, in which for the first time (if we do not count the Skovoroda’s imitational attempts in the 18th century) the type “Russian philosopher” arises. This “type” expresses the hermeneutic ellipse of archeomodernity, and it is this peculiarity that constitutes a reliable instrument with which we can make the correct deconstruction of Russian philosophy.

Two Russian Archeomodern Thinkers

Let us take a closer look at two thinkers who were contemporaries of each other and to whom it is customary to apply the concept of “Russian philosopher.” They are Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853 - 1900) and Nikolai Fedorovich Fyodorov (1829 - 1903).

Vladimir Solovyov and Nikolai Fyodorov can be regarded as two philosophers, expressing different sides of Russian archeomodernity. Both of them are undoubtedly archaeo-modernists; in their works both modernist (Western) and archaic (actually Russian) elements are thoroughly and inseparably mixed. Obviously, neither thinker reflected clearly on them or realized the incompatibility and heterogeneity of these elements. That is, they did not realize the limits in their philosophizing between “Russian” and “non-Russian.” But at the same time, it can be noted that the Westernization pole (focus B) is more vividly present in Vladimir Solovyov, who spoke as an advocate of Catholicism and the unification of all Christian Churches, while the popular, archaic, irrational, began to make itself felt more in Nikolai Fyodorov.

Moreover, from the point of view of estate origin, Solovyov was a native of the peasants, although later his ancestors followed the spiritual path, and his father, S.M. Solovyov, was an eminent Russian historian, while Fyodorov was the illegitimate son of Count Gagarin. Something initially “Smerdyakovskoye” was in both of them: the Solovyovs made their way from “rags to riches” (from focus A to focus B), and Fyodorov, on the contrary, collapsed “from princes to mud,”¹ into a modest and poor life, named by a false name of a peasant godfather (and not Gagarin), although the family of the real father (in particular, his uncle Konstantin Ivanovich Gagarin) supported him financially at first.

Vladimir Solovyov: On the Margins of European Discourse

In Solovyov’s philosophy, the foci of the Russian archeo-modern hermeneutic ellipse are distinguished quite simply. Located in focus B, the Western European core, are the complex of his liberal ideas, the idea of personality, the fascination with Western European philosophers, and especially Hegel, and as a religious expression (quite in the spirit of de Maistre or Chaadaev) attachment to Catholicism (still historians are not sure whether the philosopher accepted Catholicism as a confession before his death or died Orthodox). Solovyov's ideological commitment to Catholicism is obvious: the programmatic work “Russia and the Universal Church” leaves no doubt.² These elements of Solovyov's conviction can easily be interpreted as the extreme periphery of the European hermeneutic circle.

This peripherality is expressed not simply in the syncretism of Solovyov’s borrowings from diverse sources, although to the extent that Solovyov does, it is simply unthinkable for a truly European thinker: Solovyov appeals simultaneously to rationalism, dialectics, materialism, evolutionism, positivism, scholasticism, and mysticism, and sometimes in its most extreme and dark expressions. Such indifference to the autonomous structure of European philosophical trends, the inability or unwillingness to make a choice and develop one’s thought within a single school or several strictly defined schools, deprives Solovyov of any significance for European philosophers. Solovyov’s interest in a wide range of mutually exclusive European ideas can be recognized as commendable, but his promiscuousness, haste and feverishness in conclusions and generalizations disqualify him as a philosopher in the European sense of the word, marginalize him, and turn into a “eccentric” and “original.”

At the same time, Solovyov’s anachronism, his detachment from the problematic with which later twentieth century European philosophy seriously occupies itself, is striking. One gets the impression that the West European era is flattened with him into some indistinguishable lump, and the problems of the Renaissance, scholasticism, the early modern, Romanticism, German classical philosophy, Kantian and ydmej-Kantian epistemology, early phenomenology, psychology and the latest positivistic and nihilistic tendencies are considered in the same breath. At the same time, he treats with genuine interest, attention, and faith figures obsolete in the West for many centuries, and Neo-Platonism and Hermeticism, which were at the outskirts or even beyond the limits of philosophy in the 19th century.

Solovyov does not grasp the main point in Western European philosophy: its historical nerve, its logic, what Heidegger called Gestell. Western philosophy attracts and repels Solovyov: he gets lost in her labyrinths.

It is not surprising that his teaching did not make a big impression on Western philosophy and did not have a significant impact. De Maistre, Bonald or Cortes expressed in some detail the universality of Catholicism, theocracy and theosophy, while there were plenty of liberal thinkers and humanists, even of the highest quality, in Europe without Solovyov.

The Image of Sophia: Sickness and Insight

But the second side of Vladimir Solovyov’s work was much more original. With good reason it can be attributed to the A focus of our hermeneutic ellipse (Figure 4). It is about the image of Holy Sophia. In the spirit of the medieval, and not at all modern style of thinking, the idea of “Holy Sophia” comes to Solovyov in a “mystical vision” that, in the framework of 19th century rationalism, could only be regarded as exotic, or even insane. The interpretation of this “vision” or “insight” in quasi-rational theories forms the nerve of Solovyov’s theories throughout his life. The exaltation and naivety of these searches sometimes went so far that at one time the philosopher was ready to accept the adventurous occultist and charlatan Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who was simultaneously an agent of influence of the Russian special services, as the “incarnation of Sophia.”

Solovyov’s attitude to Sophia was anything but philosophical, in the understanding of 19th century European philosophy. Rather, it resembled the exalted mysticism of Catholic characters like Heinrich von Suso, who had become so accustomed to contemplation of the “female angel” who appeared to him in the air that he wove floral wreaths for his heavenly beloved. In the 14th century, this was already borderline, but in modernity no “serious” philosopher allowed himself such “eccentricity,” with the exception of charlatans, spiritualists and occultists.

Many other of Solovyov’s manifestations in life were on the verge of direct insanity. Asmus writes about some biographical details of his nature with reference to his friend Trubetskoy:

Trubetskoy testifies that Solovyov had “all sorts of hallucinations, visual and auditory; besides the terrible ones, there were comical ones, and almost all were unusually absurd.” Once, for example, while lying on a sofa in a dark room, he heard a sharp metallic voice in his ear, which said: “I cannot see you because you are so surrounded.” In another case, early in the morning, when Solovyov had just woken up, an oriental man in a turban appeared to him. He said “extraordinary nonsense” about the article about Japan just written by Solovyov (“I was driving along the road, reading about Buddhism; here's Buddhism for you”) and poked him in the stomach with an unusually long umbrella. The vision disappeared, and Solovyov felt severe pain in the liver, which then lasted for three days.

He almost always experienced these and other painful sensations after visions. On that point, the same Trubetskoy once said: “Your visions are simply hallucinations of your diseases.” Solovyov immediately agreed with him. But, as Trubetskoy says, this agreement cannot be interpreted in the sense that Solovyov denied the reality of his visions. In his mouth, these words meant that the disease makes our imagination susceptible to such effects of the spiritual world, to which healthy people remain completely insensitive. Therefore, in such cases, he did not deny the need for treatment. He recognized in hallucinations the phenomena of a subjective and, moreover, sick imagination. But this did not prevent him from believing in the objective cause of the hallucinations, which we imagine and project into external reality through the medium of subjective imagination. In a word, in his hallucinations he recognized mediumistic phenomena. No matter how we interpret spiritual phenomena, whatever our view may be on their cause, one cannot but admit that Solovyov experienced these phenomena very often.³

The remark about Solovyov’s “absurd hallucinations” is extremely expressive: it emphasizes that Solovyov was the victim of a torrent of uncensored attacks by the unconscious rising directly from the archaic core, not only of his personality, but also of Russian culture itself, of which Solovyov was, of course, an expression.

If we disregard the clinical side of Solovyov's inner life, we can try to give his view of Sophia a rationalized form.

Sophia was for Solovyov the key to the interpretation of the world, an instrument of contradictions of consciousness, a route to overcome opposites in various fields. He did not give a clear definition of this figure, and could not give one, since it reflected the structure of his irrational intuition, being a symbol of the universal feminine principle, applied in some situations to the Divine itself. Of course, Solovyov did not invent this image on his own. In the traditions of the Western European mystics, we encounter an appeal to Sophia from Heinrich Suso, Jacob Boehme, Gottfried Arnold, and Goethe; it is present in some places of the Old Testament, and in the patristics. But for modern philosophy and the second half of the 19th century, such a topic looked like a perfect anachronism, which marginalized Solovyov and his teachings even more in the eyes of the representatives of Western philosophy of that time, which was coming to its final conclusions in the style of Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. To argue about Sophia in the era of the clear discovery of the essence of Western philosophy as a growing and total nihilism was, at least, strange and untimely.

The appeal to Sophia, absurd in the context of the Western philosophy contemporary to Solovyov, which, undoubtedly, had a significant influence on him, is perfectly explained by the influence of the A focus of the Russian archeomodern ellipse (Figure 3). This is a natural manifestation of the “strange attractor” of the Russian mentality and Russian culture in their archaic dimension, the voice of the archaic, woven into the discourse of modernity. Putting the irrational concept of Sophia at the center of a (quasi) rational philosophy, Solovyov, in fact, launches the typical underlying mechanism of archeomodern interpretation: he seeks to explain the reasonable through the unreasonable, the logical through the illogical, the orderly and structured through the intuitive, chaotic and eluding all clarity.

Being partly modern and western, in his views Solovyov, in fact, digs deep into the psychological dimensions of Russian culture, plunges into the collective unconscious of the people, submits to the penetrating energies of “numinosity,”⁴ that sacredness, that precedes any theology, theories, cults and religions. It is not by chance that the followers of Solovyov, who created the cultural paradigms of the “Silver Age,” somewhat later will decipher this image in this way, and Blok will openly and unequivocally identify Solovyov’s Sophia with Russia, the Russian soul and the secret national [narodnoy] identity.

Although not a monk or even a regular attendee at religious services, Solovyov remained a virgin throughout his life; virginity, purity, and chastity were at the same time the stem line of his thinking. This is the archaic feature of the radical striving for integrity, completeness, the restored androgyne, the will to which is projected not only on the field of ideas, but also on personal practice (something completely unthinkable in libertarian or even formally moralistic modern society). Solovyov seeks “theurgically” to embody his irrational ideal in life and fate and follows this path with all the fanaticism more characteristic of the shaman who performs the sacred transgression, or the Buddhist monk, than of the rationalist thinker.

In Sophia and sophianism, as a property of Sophia, the properly Russian in Solovyov is revealed as the layer of worldview that expresses the archaic experience of a people who refuses to live in the highly differentiated traumatic structures of the Western modernity and prefer the integrality of a direct and total holistic worldview that precedes the division into strict pairs of mutually exclusive concepts: spiritual-physical, divine-earthly, male-female, rational-emotional, ethical-aesthetic, subjective-objective, etc. Sophianism is the slightly “ennobled” name of direct and pre-rational archaism, rooted deep in the soul, several floors below not only the enlightened rationalism of modernity but also the religio-statist Orthodox logos of the Russian Middle Ages.

In the image of Sophia, Solovyov gives free rein to the archaic intuitions of the Russian unconscious, allowing it to spontaneously and almost without censorship make its way to the deep wellsprings of the popular, ancient element, wholly unconscious and irrational, but striving to express itself, to break out of the oppression of the crookedly established logos of Western elites. This is where the beginning of a properly “Russian philosophy” could have been localized. After having sensed Sophia as an archaic focus that had previously inspired and directed the intuitions of the Slavophiles (who realized it, however, less clearly, vividly and concentratedly), Solovyov could have attempted to lay the foundation of “Russian philosophy” as a Russian circle itself, and not as an archeomodern, pseudomorphic ellipse. This is also how the steps of his followers, Bulgakov, Florensky, and even the poets and artists of the Silver Age, should be interpreted.

Sophiology is the closest experiment in our history to the goal of proving the possibility of Russian philosophy. We can say that on account of this intuition we were closer to the emergence of Russian philosophy, to its actualization, than ever.

But at the same time, Solovyov does not draw all the conclusions from his intuition. In the process of his reflections, he constantly goes astray on Westernism, looks to express his insights with philosophical concepts, judgments and theories completely inconsistent with their archaic nature. Not fully understanding the “luminous dimension” of Russian existence that he himself has discovered, he hastily tries to reconcile it with European theocratic utopias of a completely different nature and character, and, most importantly, that belong to a radically different philosophical circle. Thus, Solovyov remains archeomodern.

Notes:

1. [Translator’s note: This phrase rhymes in Russian.]

2. Vladimir Soloviev, Russia and the Universal Church (London: The Centenary Press, 1948).

3. Asmus A.F., Soloviev: An Attempt at a Philosophical Biography // Questions of philosophy. 1992, no. 8.

4. Otto R. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. London: Oxford University Press, 1958; Jung K.G. Archetype and symbol. Moscow: Renaissance, 1991.