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The Religious Metaphysics of Vladimir Solovyov PDF

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The Religious Metaphysics of Vladimir Solovyov Translated by Ilya Merlin and Mikhail Pozdniakov The Religious Metaphysics of Vladimir Solovyov “This early text on Solovyov sheds light on the origins of Kojève’s thinking and thus allows an English reader to better understand one of the key figures of European intellectual history.” —Boris Groys, Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University, USA “This short translation by Merlin and Pozdniakov is invaluable for our under- standing of twentieth century philosophy and the role of Alexandre Kojève. This critical explication of Solovyov’s religious metaphysics shows Solovyov’s con- nections to Russian Orthodoxy as well as his profound emphasis on Sophia, or Wisdom, in philosophical and theological terms. We can see the roots of Kojève’s Russian background and certain seeds of the interpretations of Hegel that so profoundly shaped French philosophy.” —Clayton Crockett, Professor and Director of Religious Studies, University of Central Arkansas, USA “Here is a text by a young Kojève on the works of Vladimir Solovyov. This early philosophical piece bares traces discernible throughout his later works. The scope of this text is far reaching: from the impossibility of thinking man and being without recourse to God, the rupture of Christianity, and the isolation of man, who in some regards is bound to divinity itself.” —Juan Pablo Lucchelli, Research Associate, Université Rennes 2, France “In addition to making Kojève’s treatment of Solovyov’s metaphysical system available in English—of value in its own right—the translators offer a minutely observant account of Kojève’s method, offering insight into one of the twentieth century’s most influential philosophers. This volume is all the more significant for its apprehension of the ‘rhetorical peculiarities’ of Kojève’s critical exposition. Philosophy of religion stands to be enriched by such attention to style.” —Jeremy Biles, Assistant Professor, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA “With this long-overdue, and exigent, translation of Kojève’s study, Merlin and Pozdniakov make a major contribution toward restoring an undeniable, if uneasy and conflicted, balance, with regard to the place and role of what Kojève himself called ‘religious metaphysics’(and, more simply, the ‘philosophy of religion’) in the history of twentieth-century thought and one of his most significant figures.” —Gil Anidjar, Professor and Chair, Department of Religion, Columbia University, USA Alexandre Kojève The Religious Metaphysics of Vladimir Solovyov Alexandre Kojève L’École des Hautes Études Paris, France Translated by Ilya Merlin, Mikhail Pozdniakov University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada ISBN 978-3-030-02338-6 ISBN 978-3-030-02339-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02339-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957695 Translation from the French language edition: La métaphysique religieuse de Vladimir Soloviev by Alexandre Kojevnikoff, © Revue d’Historie et de Philosophie Religieuses 1934. All Rights Reserved. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Harvey Loake This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland A cknowledgements We thank the following people for their help during this project: Roland Boer, Aleksey Rutkevich, Aleksey Kozyrev, Michael Gollner, and especially Nina Kousnetzoff, who granted us permission to translate and publish Kojève’s essay. v c ontents 1 Translators’ Introduction 1 2 The Religious Metaphysics of Vladimir Solovyov 15 2.1 The Doctrine of God 20 2.1.1 The Absolute and the Ideal Cosmos 20 2.1.2 The Divine Trinity 27 2.1.3 Théandrie and Σοϕία 30 3 The Doctrine of World 51 Index 79 vii CHAPTER 1 Translators’ Introduction The first word on the essay at hand concerns its style, its method of proceeding. This was the element that most influenced the outcome of our work, involving in its way far more philosophy than one would think. Kojève comes to us from a great linguistic distance. The works of the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov were the source material for the German-language dissertation he completed in Heidelberg under the supervision of Karl Jaspers in 1926.1 This dissertation he adapted into French and published in 1934 and 1935 as the two-part essay La méta- physique religieuse de Vladimir Soloviev while conducting his famous sem- inars on Hegel. The present English-language translation is this series’ fourth term and shares its place with Aleksey Kozyrev’s contemporary Russian translation, published in the collection Атеизм и другие работы in 2007.2 Both do no more than simply continue the work that Kojève had already performed twice over. And if one bears in mind the linguistic form of the philosophical presentation in the main text ahead, the effect of this repeated labor is unmistakable: the translator, the writer-scribe, is drawn closer the philosopher, the mover of concepts, the arranger and inventor of order. Kojève’s essay is at some points supremely awkward. His phrasing is not so much halting or stumbling as abrupt. He guides unevenly. As would be expected of a scholar, he introduces a certain development, arranges its premises, and moves on with the analysis as necessary. However, his advancements seem to deplete rather than expand his range of reference. His premises, for example, though many and various, are © The Author(s) 2018 1 A. Kojève, The Religious Metaphysics of Vladimir Solovyov, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02339-3_1 2 A. KOJÈVE distinctly mobile and rarely unique to their first instance: they reappear time and again, modified for whatever end is currently at play. The total impression is of an analytic reduction, an ascetic decrease describing a movement inwards. His method is therefore not unlike that of mysticism, and bears all the austere rigor of one who has prepared for an intermina- ble progress through the labyrinth. Yet, more than once, his passage is interrupted by breaks and sudden expansions, filled with what may only be called images. That such images are composed with the classical language of analysis—a language which, despite everything we expect from it, is revelatory, concrete, and unfur- tive—is only partly surprising. It should be remembered that the details of this world, those captured so easily in observations made and dropped in passing, form the basic elements of this singularly abstract language, which few have recognized for its sensitivity, its intimacy of precision, or its emotional life. Without such features, the distinct expressiveness of this language would be lost, and yet… “More of a thinker than a writer”—this phrase sums Kojève, though it is unlikely he is considered a writer at all, at least not in the sense of a literary man of letters, someone for whom the pen came as promptly as the book. This changes what we can expect of his relationship to writing. Words and phrases, even conventional words and phrases, are chosen by him for their constructive powers. They are treated as thing- like, tangible, manipulable. And if such words, as signs, for him point elsewhere, then it is always to other words. Constantly inserted phrases such as “that is to say” [c’est à dire] or “in other words” [autrement dit] signal wherever they appear the identity of the preceding with adjacent statements and terminology. Other grammatical features of this work assume this rather direct relationship as well—a relationship so consist- ent that Kojève’s least philosophical moments in this essay are actually noteworthy for its lapse, his rhetoric in such passages being declarative and opaque, his tone conventional and his bearing disconnected. For us, this means that he did not, as other writers, employ this or that style to secure his end, but achieved it, though never to the point of mastery. At times, the essay stutters, the distance between one sentence and the next too large to cross with ease. Kojève expects his reader to be famil- iar with the leap. He is unlike writers whose work tends toward a bal- anced and straightforward prose, with expositions of a consistent length and rhythm. In such works, the milestones are set regularly and with assurance: one can time the movement of themes, reasonably predicting 1 TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION 3 the arrival of an important claim, its evidence, presentation, degree of emphasis, and end. Kojève’s essay in this respect is wild. There are page- long paragraphs, dense and highly technical, adjoined by others whose entirety spans a single sentence. Such is his manner throughout. This, again, is a work less written than pieced together under strain, and we are at least in part allowed to witness how. Cantilevered and suspended, varied in position and height, its passages are the weights and intermedi- ate fixtures setting the lean and aspect of the whole. Indeed, the repeti- tive and circular coincidence of certain terms and turns of phrase shows that another structure persists throughout the essay as a whole, one par- allel to the prescriptive hierarchy he uses to order its major sections. In this sense, his compositional style is highly justified, since it results from his attempts to track multiple parallel evolutions of his argument. His method is closely related to the highly repetitive, transforma- tional style of mathematicians and logicians. While there is some evi- dence of stylistic inability, as is shown in the occasional perfunctory aside or comment, the reasons for his use of language in general are, again, due to the necessities posed by his argument. Chief among these is the need to manage the appearance and distribution of distinctions as they arise. Because Kojève’s aim is the systematic organization of concepts, he writes with a number of constraints in mind: he cannot only introduce and refine the relevant concepts through insight or clarification; he can- not limit the scope of his proofs to accurate definition, scholarly refer- ence, or quotation; and the context of his arguments cannot simply be established initially or after the fact with a statement of general princi- ples. Indeed, all of the above are meaningless without their explicit inter- connection. This is why Kojève contorts the syntax of every individual sentence such that it contains not only its immediate subject, but also its most important systemic counterparts. Ideally, each sentence would contain all the references necessary for its comprehension. Kojève’s spe- cific labor was to force this interconnection into his statements even if it meant straining their coherence to the breaking point. Hence the paren- thetical insertions and extended parataxis so characteristic of his writing, here and elsewhere.3 This explicit use of parallelisms shows him to range deep into the linguistic effects produced by philosophy and places him firmly among others in the dialectical tradition, particularly Kierkegaard and Hegel, whose works, with Solovyov’s, likely served as models. But Kojève’s use of parallelisms is not solely limited to their addi- tive, constructive capabilities: it also acts as a schematic for parsing.

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