Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (10 page)

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 topics
³
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 totality 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: