Alexander Lyusy. Virtual Soloviev

Virtual Soloviev
V.S. Soloviev. Full collection op. and letters in 20 tons. Essays. Volume two. 1875-1877 / Responsible ed. A.A.Nosov; comp. A.P. Kozyreva, N.V. Kotreleva; lane from fr. A.P. Kozyreva. - M.: Science, 2000

Alexander Lyusy

Date of publication: October 24, 2000

The soul has within itself the possibility of being; this possibility is will - will, which is not yet desire, will as a possibility, and not as an act. The soul, not desiring existence, not positing it (being is always separate and exclusive), possesses it in possibility; as long as she does not posit it, she can still believe it or not; but as soon as she has made up her mind and posits it, she no longer owns it, she cannot immediately posit and not posit; that is, it does not lose its power absolutely, otherwise it would be contrary to the great principle, but it loses it at the present time; she may not yet posit being, but not in her present state, because in this state she already posits it: here begins the fatal separation of the potential and actual states. In its normal state the Soul was pure possibility, it was a possibility in reality, it did not have these two different states; now she has them, she is divided within herself; it retains its unity and its will over being only potentially; actually it is divided and enslaved.
Vladimir Solovyov . Sofia

I don’t remember such a move in publishing practice. The volume opens with what would be more common to see somewhere in the notes - the section "Unfinished". In the first place here is the highlight of almost the entire enterprise of publishing the complete, twenty-volume, academic collected works of Vladimir Solovyov, that is, the first scientific publication with parallel texts of the philosopher’s fundamental work “Sophia” (La Sophia) written in French. And also, in essence, an unfinished, but fully tested treatise “Philosophical principles of integral knowledge”, in which some ideas of “Sophia” were developed, takes an honorable second place. And this is not an accident, but a characteristic sign of the times, of current Russian existence.

The very process of reading this unusual text, which arose as a result of the second actual, in the flesh, appearance of Sophia to a philosopher in Egypt, is unusual (comments on this matter are probably postponed to one of the subsequent - poetic - volumes of Solovyov’s “complete”; for now, notes are limited purely textual version). "Sophia" appears to consist of four interconnected manuscripts written in different genres: a treatise, a dialogue and a chaotic mediumistic letter, equipped with mysterious drawings in the margins (in connection with which one involuntarily recalls the richly illustrated manuscripts of Pushkin).

The reader is thereby presented not only with the result, but also with the course of the philosopher’s creative process - and not exactly the final, but the intermediate author’s text, and the words and phrases crossed out by the author enclosed in square brackets (and in angle brackets - parts of words that were not completed, restored according to the meaning by the author). Already the graphic appearance of the text gives the publication a flavor of, as they say now, virtuality. And this sharpens the comprehension of one of Solovyov’s main ideas about the potential source of being as such (not only Russian): “[The absolute beginning of being, which cannot be defined either as being or as non-being, must be understood as [freedom] the active possibility of being .]"

If we follow the immutable probabilistic language of Sophia, the absolute beginning of being has three degrees of possibility of manifestation in three worlds. In the first world, the substantial unity sought by the philosopher really exists in the Spirit, is the actual unity of individual beings - if they differ, it is only in order to immediately unite again. Only in possibility does multiplicity and division exist here. In the second world, this unity is thought of as an ideal unity, to which ideal difference corresponds. externally And in the third, it is felt .

The principles that directly determine religious consciousness, according to Solovyov, are the following: the natural spirit of Satan as a negative principle, the natural mind of the Demiurge as an active positive principle and the soul of Sophia, free in its passivity, through which a person “can enter into communication with the Mind of Christ and the Holy Spirit of God , that is why God can only incarnate in man . " Solovyov gives, as he usually does, a triad formula for the successive stages of the action of cosmic forces on the human soul: “1) the reaction of the spirit [against Satan and matter] - mainly among the Hindus. 2) the reaction of the Mind - mainly among the Greeks (philosophy). 3) the reaction of the soul in the proper sense - among the Jews . "

Solovyov's dialectical ontology covers both the micro- and macro-world, reminiscent of the later "Rose of the World" by Daniil Andreev. "Matter - atoms under the influence of Satan. Form: their external relation through the action of the Demiurge. Soul: their concrete unities through the action of Sophia. - The real [positive or feminine] atoms are composed of three elements: the positive or feminine element, which is force attraction - a centripetal force, a force of inertia... a negative, or active, or masculine element, which is a repulsive force, a centrifugal force; a synthetic element, thanks to which two aspirations do not destroy each other, but unite into one elementary being. Attraction, or inertia , is being in itself, or will, wanting ; repulsion is being for another, or perception. Synthesis is being in oneself, or soul " . As far as individual consciousness is concerned, “this is only the eternal content of the soul, established in reality, posited as such. The inner life of the soul has become aroused, awakened through incarnation, and when this goal is achieved, the means become unnecessary. In the same way, we need warehouses in order to learn to read, being able to read, we don't use it anymore . " If active egoism is an anti-divine principle, then passive egoism is the abode of divinity. The Greeks and Romans were so imbued with each other’s ideas that after losing them they were left with nothing, while the Jews turned out to be a people who were super-individualistic in their egoism: “If the Hindus have a soul that remains within itself in its substantiality; if among the Greeks and Romans it begins to receive inspiration from Logos, while still retaining the outlines of the Demiurge - then among Jews the soul begins to receive inspiration from the divine Spirit, from the first hypostasis, while still retaining the outlines of the first natural hypostasis - the Spirit of Chaos, or Satan . "

The random consonance “warehouse”/“fold” makes us recall the endless baroque “fold” of J. Deleuze - the eternal textbook of the individual. The “baroque” cosmological clarification of “Sophia” is also interesting: “Sun spots are the remains of cracks through which the planets escaped. The Sun, weakened in this way, could no longer resist the Demiurge and became his lair; it does not have a clearly defined material core, it completely permeated with ether. One of the planets, the Earth... became the most differentiated, that is, the most organic, and therefore the most capable of perceiving the action of the Soul and becoming its stellar home . "

Against the background of "Sophia", written as an approach to a doctoral dissertation and filled with philosophical self-reflection, "Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge" appear as an earthly - albeit with a mystical inoculation - development of cosmic historiosophical formulas. Whole knowledge is designated here as a synthesis of philosophy with theology and science, in the environment of philosophy itself, realized through the synthesis of mysticism, empiricism and rationalism, which has a purely philosophical character. The concrete bearer of the third, conciliatory world force, after the individualism of Europe that atomizes life, science and art and the monism of the East that destroys human independence, is Russia. By pointing out the tribal properties of the Slavs - giving a living soul to the forms and broken elements of human existence through connection with the whole, divine principle - Solovyov anticipates the ideas of Nikolai Danilevsky. And the clarification that integral, synthetic life is essentially free from any national one-sidedness outlines differences with them.

This work ends with a linguistic study about the greater philosophical nature of the Russian and German languages ​​compared to English and especially French. Indeed, in the first two there are special words to designate “reality” and “actuality,” while the latter identify existence in general with material existence: nothing - literally “not a thing” or “no thing” (and for the French, even more so, “ consciousness" that "conscience" is consience).

Returning to the starting point of our reflections, let me cite the reproach made by Nikolai Nosov in the book “Virtual Psychology” (Moscow: Agraf, 2000) to translators who did not properly interpret the English word virtual, which turned out to be indispensable in various fields. It is incorrect to translate it solely as a synonym for the words “possible”, “potential”, it can also mean “actual”, “real”, “being (something) essentially”; “imaginary” (about focus, image); “having certain physical properties or abilities”; "effective in relation to intrinsic natural qualities or forces"; “capable of exerting influence through such qualities”; "morally virtuous"; “capable of producing a certain effect or result”; “that which exists in essence or in action, although it is absent formally or in reality”; "permitting such existence." "...In Buddhism, as in scholasticism, verbs with the root vrt mean instantaneous unhindered actualization of a mental act in the psyche of a yogi. In Old Slavonic, the verb “believe” meant “boil, seethe,” meaning, in particular, the “boiling” of a spring , that is, this root denotes a created event, generated now, at the moment by someone’s activity.”

As it now turns out, Solovyov’s philosophy is virtual in its entirety and the real depth of this term.