Nikolai Lossky

Russian philosophy 20th century philosophy
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Name: Nikolai Onufriyevich Lossky
Birth: December 6, 1870 (Kreslavka, Russian Empire)
Death: January 24, 1965 (Paris, France)
School/tradition: Intuitionism
Main interests
Notable ideas
Intuitivist-Personalism, gnosiology-Epistemology
Influences	Influenced
Hegel, Wilhelm Windelband, Wilhelm Wundt, Pavel Florensky	Ayn Rand, Vladimir Lossky

Nikolai Onufriyevich Lossky (Russian: Николай Онуфриевич Лосский) (December 6 [O.S. November 24] 1870 – January 24, 1965) was a Russian philosopher, representative of Russian idealism, intuitionism, personalism, ethics and his intuitivism. He was born in the village of Kreslavka, Dinaburg uyezd (region), Vitebsk gubernia (province) of Russian Empire and died from natural causes at a nursing home near Paris. Lossky had four sons, the most famous being the Eastern Orthodox Theologian Vladimir Lossky.

Life

Lossky undertook post-graduate study in Germany under Wilhelm Windelband, Wilhelm Wundt and G. E. Müller, receiving a Master's degree in 1903 and a Doctorate in 1907. Returning to Russia, he became Lecturer and subsequently Assistant Professor of philosophy at St Petersburg. Lossky called for a Russian religious and spiritual reawakening while pointing out post-revolution excesses. At the same time, Lossky survived an elevator accident that nearly killed him, which caused him to convert back to the Russian Orthodox Church under the direction of Father Pavel Florensky. These criticisms and conversion cost Lossky his professorship of philosophy and led to his exile abroad the famed Philosophers' ship (in 1922) from the Soviet Union as a counter-revolutionary.

Lossky was invited to Prague by Tomáš Masaryk and became Professor at the Russian University of Prague at Bratislava, in Czechoslovakia. Lossky was part of a group of ex-Marxists, including Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Mikhail Gershenzon, Peter Berngardovich Struve, Semen L. Frank. Lossky, though a Fabian socialist, contributed to the group's symposium named Vekhi or Signposts. He also helped the Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin with his Social and Cultural Dynamics

In 1947 N.O. Lossky took a position at Piously-Vladimir spiritual academy or Saint Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, a Russian Orthodox seminary, in New York. In 1961, after the death of his son Vladimir, Lossky went to France: the last four years of his life were spent in illness there.

Philosophy

Vekhi

Vekhi ("Landmarks" or "Signposts"), was a collection of seven essays published in Russia in 1909. It was distributed in five editions and elicited over two hundred published rejoinders in two years. The volume reappraising the Russian intelligentsia was a brainchild of the literary historian Mikhail Gershenzon, who edited it and wrote the introduction. Pyotr Struve selected the contributors, five of whom had previously contributed to a 1902 volume, Problems of Idealism, and had attended the 1903 Schaffhausen Conference that laid the foundation for the Union of Liberation. A founder of the Constitutional Democratic (Cadet) Party in 1905, Struve had served in the Second Duma in 1907, then went on to edit the journal Russian Thought. In his essay he argued that the intelligentsia, because it had coalesced in the 1840s under the impact of atheistic socialism, owed its identity to standing apart from the government. Thus, when the government agreed to restructure along constitutional lines in 1905, the intelligentsia proved incapable of acting constructively toward the masses within the new framework.

Bogdan Kistyakovsky discussed the intelligentsia's failure to develop a legal consciousness. Their insufficient respect for law as an ordering force kept courts of law from attaining the respect required in a modern society. Alexander Izgoyev (who, like Gershenzon, had not contributed to the 1902 anti-positivist volume) depicted contemporary university students as morally relativist, content merely to embrace the interests of the long-suffering people. Russian students compared very unfavorably to their French, German, and British counterparts, lacking application and even a sense of fair play. Nikolai Berdyayev, considering the intelligentsia's philosophical position, found utilitarian values had crowded out any interest in pursuing truth. Sergei Bulgakov showed how the intelligentsia had undertaken a heroic struggle for socialism and progress but lost sight of post-Reformation Europe's gains with respect to individual rights and personal freedom.

For Semen Frank, as for Gershenzon and Struve, the intelligentsia's failure of leadership in the 1905 revolution warranted a reappraisal of their fundamental assumptions. His essay emphasized the nihilistic sources of the intelligentsia's utilitarianism: material progress, national education, always viewed as a means to another end. Moreover, he saw Russian Marxists as obsessed by a populist drive to perfect society through redistribution and faulted them for their penchant for dividing all humanity into friends and enemies. Gershenzon asserted, in the book's most controversial sentence, that "so far from dreaming of union with the people we ought to fear the people and bless this government which, with its prisons and bayonets, still protects us from the people's fury."

The essays suggested Russia had reached a milestone and was ready for turning. Five of the contributors had earlier abandoned Marxism under the influence of neo-Kantian concerns over personal freedom and morality. They had participated in the establishment of a liberal political party, but now recoiled at the Cadet Party's recklessness and ineffectiveness in parliamentary politics. A modernist document, Vekhi called for a rethinking of the Enlightenment project of acculturation and proposed exploration of the depths of the self as an alternative to populist and nihilist programs.

Slavic Orthodox Christianity

Part of the series on Eastern Christianity

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Theology Icon Apophaticism - Filioque clause Theosis - Theoria Phronema - Philokalia Praxis - Theotokos Hypostasis - Ousia

Lossky was one of the preeminent Russian neo-idealists of his day. Lossky's Гносеология or gnosiology called Intuitivist-Personalism in part adapted the Hegelian dialectical approach of first addressing a problem in thought in terms of its expression as a duality or dichotomy. Once the problem is expressed as a dichotomy the two opposing ideas are fused in order to transcend the dichotomy. This transition is expressed in the concept of sobornost, or mystical communal union. Lossky also followed and developed his ontological and gnosiological interpretation of objective reality from Christian neoplatonism, in which the object, even being a part of an external world, joins the consciousness of the subject directly. This causing different levels of maturing consciousness over time (reinterpretation). This dynamic retention constitutes the process of learning i.e. reflective differentiation. Consequently the existence of objects can not be completely expressed with logic or words, nor validated with knowledge, due to objects having a supernatural (in a Greek philosophy or Eastern Orthodox understanding of supernatural) component to their make up this is expressed as metaphysics.

One of the main points of Lossky's онтология or ontology is, the world is an organic whole as understood by human consciousness. Intuition is the direct contemplation of objects, and furthermore the assembling of the entire set of cognition from sensory perception into a complete and undivided organic whole i.e. experience. This being consciousness without thought, raw and uninterpreted by the mind. Where re-action is without processing or is outside of comprehension via the mind. Intuition being analogous with instinctual consciousness. Intuition functions without rational or logical thought. Rational or logical thought via the nous then works in reflection as hindsight to organize experience into a comprehensible order i.e. ontology. Intuitive knowledge or Gnosis (pre-processed knowledge or uninterpreted) then being history or memory rather than a determining factor of or during an actual conscious experience. Once knowledge is abstracted from conscious experience it is then stored in an ontological format in the mind (the format itself a priori). The manipulation of memory and or reapplication of memory as knowledge being post-processed knowledge i.e. Epistemology. Сущность (the "essence") expressed as being and or becoming is possible as both the person transcends time and space while being closely connected with the whole world, while in this world.

Influence

In biographical reminiscences recorded by Barbara Branden in the early 1960s, Ayn Rand named Lossky as her primary philosophy teacher at the University of Petrograd or University of St. Petersburg until he was removed from his teaching post by the Soviet regime. However, some of Rand's statements have been called into question.

Quotes

From the introduction of Value and Existence:

Due to the tradition of the Church, Russia had an implicit philosophy, a philosophy that was born of the Neoplatonism of the Church Fathers. This implicit Neo-platonism is the true heritage of Russian thinking.

Selected bibliography

• The Fundamental Doctrines of Psychology from the Point of View of Voluntarism «Фундаментальные Доктрины Психологии с Точки зрения Волюнтаризма»(1903)
• The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge «Обоснование интуитивизма»(1906)
• The World as an Organic Whole «Мир как органическое целое» (1917)
• The Fundamental Problems of Epistemology «Основные вопросы гносеологии» (1919)
• Freedom of Will «Свобода воли»(1927)
• Value and Existence «Ценность и существование»(1931) by Lossky N. O. and John S. Marshall published by George Allen & Unwin LTD, 1935
• Dialectical Materialism in the U.S.S.R. «Диалектический Материализм в СССР» (1934)
• Sensous, Intellectual and Mystical Intuition «Чувственная, интеллектуальная и мистическая интуиция» (1938)
• Intellectual intuition, ideal existence and creative activity «Интеллектуальная интуиция и идеальное бытие, творческая активность» (1941)
• Mystical Intuition «Мистическая интуиция» (1941)
• Evolution and ideal life «Эволюция и идеальное бытие» (1941)
• God and suffering «Бог и всемирное зло» (1941)
• Absolute Good «Условия абсолютного добра»(1944)
• History of Russian Philosophy «История российской Философии »(1951)
• The world as the realization of beauty «Мир как осуществление красоты»(1945)
• Dostoevsky and his Christian Understanding of the World «Достоевский и его христианское мировоззрение»(1953)

See also

Russian philosophy Vladimir Lossky Fyodor Dostoevsky Georgy Chulkov Mikhail Epstein Neoplatonism Ammonius Saccas Plotinus Vladimir Solovyov

Georges Florovsky Sergei Bulgakov John Meyendorff Alexander Schmemann Nikolai Berdyaev Subjective idealism Objective idealism sobornost Philosophers' ship

Phenomenology Chris Matthew Sciabarra

Further Reading

• Shein, Louis J. (1966). N. O. Lossky, 1870-1965: A Russian Philosopher. Russian Review, 25:2, pp. 214-216
• History of Russian Philosophy «История российской Философии »(1951) by N. O. Lossky Publisher: Allen & Unwin, London ASIN: B000H45QTY International Universities Press Inc NY, NY ISBN-13: 978-0823680740 sponsored by Saint Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary
• Sciabarra, Chris Matthew (1995). Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-271-01441-5. 

Boobbyer, Philip, S. L. Frank: The Life and Work of a Russian Philosopher, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995.

Brooks, Jeffrey, "Vekhi and the Vekhi Dispute", in Survey 19(1), pp. 21-50, 1973.

Samuel D. Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Schapiro, Leonard, "The Vekhi Group and the Mystique of Revolution", in Russian Studies, ed. Ellen Dahrendorf, New York: Viking Penguin, 1987.

External links

• Historical Biography (Russian)
• Philosophical Biography (Russian)
• N.O. Lossky's Bio of Berdyaev
• Professor Sciabarra's investigation into Ayn Rand's ties to N.O. Lossky first transcript
• Professor Sciabarra's investigation into Ayn Rand's ties to N.O. Lossky second transcript
• N.O. Lossky about character of Russian people Rus.

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