Nikolay Lossky
Nikolay Onufriyevich Lossky once summed up his entire philosophy in four words: 'all is immanent in all'. He called the system built from that idea intuitive-personalism. It was a way of thinking about reality that put him at odds with the materialists and rationalists of his time. That way of thinking would not stay welcome in the country where he built it. What does a philosopher have to argue, and believe, to be treated as a danger to the state? This documentary traces Lossky's path from a schoolroom in the Russian Empire to lecture halls on two other continents. Along the way, it follows the philosophy he built.
Lossky was born in 1870 in Kreslavka, a town then inside the Russian Empire. His father, Onufry Lossky, carried Belarusian roots and Eastern Orthodox faith into the household, and traced his own grandfather to a Greek-Catholic Uniate priest. His mother, Adelajda Przylenicka, was Polish and Roman Catholic, giving young Lossky two competing religious inheritances before he had chosen either for himself. He rejected both and was expelled from school for propagating atheism.
Germany became the next stage of his education. Lossky undertook postgraduate studies there under Wilhelm Windelband, Wilhelm Wundt and G. E. Müller. He received a master's degree in 1903 and a doctorate in 1907. Returning to Russia, he became a lecturer and later an assistant professor of philosophy in Saint Petersburg. That post would not survive the upheaval that followed.
Lossky called publicly for a Russian religious and spiritual reawakening, and criticized the excesses of the new revolutionary government just as pointedly. Around this same period, an elevator accident nearly killed him. The shock was severe enough to push him back toward the Russian Orthodox Church, under the direction of Fr. Pavel Florensky. That religious turn, paired with his criticism of the regime, cost him his professorship in philosophy. In 1922, Lossky was exiled from the Soviet Union as a counter-revolutionary, placed aboard what became known as the Philosophers' Ship. Prague, not Saint Petersburg, would host his next lecture hall.
Tomáš Masaryk personally invited Lossky to Prague, where he became a professor at the Russian University of Prague, in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. There he joined a circle of former Marxists that included Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Gershenzon, Peter Berngardovich Struve and Semyon Frank. Lossky himself remained a Fabian socialist, yet he contributed to the group's symposium, known as Vekhi or Signposts. He also assisted the Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin with his work Social and Cultural Dynamics.
In 1947, Lossky took a position teaching theology at Saint Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, an Orthodox Christian seminary in Crestwood, New York. In 1961, following the death of his son, the theologian Vladimir Lossky, he moved to France. He spent the last four years of his life there in illness. He died on the 24th of January 1965. What he left behind in his writing still had to explain how a mind could ever grasp an object outside itself.
Lossky called his own theory of knowledge Гносеология, or gnosiology, and gave it the label Intuitivist-Personalism. The method borrowed from Hegel's dialectic. It addressed a philosophical problem first as a dichotomy, then fused the two opposing ideas into a single resolution. Lossky called that fused resolution sobornost, a state of mystical, communal union.
He built his account of reality on Christian neoplatonism drawn from the Patristic Fathers and from Origen. He also drew on the Russian mystics Kireevsky and Khomyakov, alongside the later work of V. Solovyov. Because of this, he argued that most of reality, being uncreated and uncaused, is fundamentally irrational or random. It could not, in his view, be validated through rational means alone. In his account, freedom and love are forms of energy that are themselves uncaused and uncreated. The nous, in Lossky's system, is the focal point of the psyche, the organic connection between consciousness and the material world. That organic connection was only the beginning of an account in which even ordinary objects carried an essence no logic could fully capture.
Gregory Palamas' Orthodox Christian substance theory shaped Lossky's account of objects, which he argued could never be fully captured by logic or language alone. Their existence, he said, carried a supernatural essence, using 'supernatural' in the ancient Greek and Orthodox sense of something uncreated or uncaused. From this base, Lossky argued that neither energy nor potential can exist without a sentient agent behind them. He coined a term for that hidden bearer of existence: the substantive agent. This put him against the Russian Materialists and nihilists of his day. They held that objects have no hidden essence behind their appearance, a position he identified with Positivism.
V. Solovyov made the same case against Positivism in his essay 'Against the Positivists', a text Lossky treated as a cornerstone of Russian philosophy. Solovyov argued that an object's essence, its noumenon, differs from its outward appearance, yet can still carry random characteristics of its own, what he called sumbebekos. Lossky traced the validation of truth, value and existence back to Aristotle's concept of noesis, or immediate apprehension. In his view, an event gains value and existence only because a substantive agent is engaged in it.
Much of Lossky's theology, laid out in his book History of Russian Philosophy, followed the idealism of Origen. Origen taught that all souls pre-existed with their Creator in a perfect, non-material state he called nous. They later fell away to pursue an independent existence apart from God. Because God had given every being absolute free will, Origen held that God would not force any soul to return to him. Instead, God created the material universe and set history in motion, guiding his creations back toward contemplation of his infinite mind. Lossky carried forward the Essence-Energies distinction common to Orthodox Christian theology. He also pursued a reconciliation between Eastern and Western Christianity, built on sobornost, a word that can also be translated as catholic. As he put it in the introduction to his book 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.'
Semen L. Frank, Lossky's close friend, collaborated with him on much of this theory of knowledge. Together they described how memory, once abstracted from experience, becomes what Lossky called epistemological knowledge, stored in the mind in an a priori, ontological format. None of this, in Lossky's system, made room yet for an explanation of free will itself.
Aristotle's idea of uncreated energy anchored one half of Lossky's metaphysical libertarianism. Lossky paired it with Plotinus' notion of uncreated potential, arguing every person carries one or the other. This lined up with the vitalism popular in his day. Lossky, though, followed not vitalism itself but its predecessor, Monadology, and its theory of living forces, or dynamis. He used this to contrast Leibniz's Monadology with Cartesian mind-body dualism, rejecting the dualist idea that mind and body are made of different substances. In his system, Substantive Agents possess potential, dynamis, and can act on the world from that potential.
Lossky offered a vivid example: two electrons might repel each other millions of times and then, on some future occasion, simply fail to do so. Mathematical principles and the hierarchy of values, he argued, are independent of any agent's will, and violating them is unthinkable. Yet those same laws do not destroy an agent's freedom. They only create the structure within which an endless variety of free activity becomes possible. Lossky distinguished two kinds of freedom. Formal freedom was the ability to choose a different manifestation in any given case, and he considered it absolute and impossible to lose. Material freedom was the degree of creative power an agent actually holds. Material freedom, in his account, is unlimited within the Kingdom of God, where members combine their creative force and draw on God's own power. Outside the Kingdom of God, Lossky argued, agents exist in a state of spiritual decline, retaining their formal freedom but very little material freedom to act on it.
A book titled History of Russian Philosophy, in its chapter on the Intuitivists, sets out Lossky's case against determinism on page 260. Determinists, it explains, deny free will because they believe every event has a cause rooted in other events. Lossky countered that events, having only a temporal form, fall away into the past the instant they happen. On their own, they have no power to generate anything. Only what he called supertemporal substantival agents, actual and potential personalities, hold the creative power to bring events into being. Energy itself, in his account, cannot be created or destroyed. Its ultimate source has to be an agent's own dynamistic act of will, drawn from a Neoplatonic interpretation. That argument about free will would travel further than Lossky's own classroom, reaching students who never set foot in Prague or New York.
Ayn Rand later named only one teacher from her years at the University of Petrograd, also known as the University of St. Petersburg. That teacher was Lossky, recalled in biographical reminiscences she recorded in the early 1960s. She recalled studying classical philosophy under him, the only teacher from that period she named at all.
Joseph Papin, a theologian-philosopher, built much of his own scholarship on Lossky's ideas. His 1946 study, Doctrina De Bono Perfecto, Eiusque Systemate N.O. Losskij Personalistico Applicatio, was published in Leiden by E.J. Brill. It was later named among the 100 leading scholarly works of the 20th century. After teaching at the University of Notre Dame, Papin founded the Theology Institute at Villanova University. There he edited the publications of its first six symposia, from 1968 to 1974. Sobornost, Lossky's own term, took center stage in the Institute's sixth volume, published in 1974. That volume was titled The Church and Human Society at the Threshold of the Third Millennium. Papin's own contribution to it was titled 'From Collegiality and Sobornost to Church Unity.' Krister Stendahl, then Dean of Harvard Divinity School, praised Papin's efforts toward Christian unity in strong terms. When Papin died, tributes arrived from theologians, philosophers, poets and dignitaries around the world. They included a message from United States President Ronald Reagan, recorded in a 1983 memorial piece in JEDNOTA.
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Common questions
Who was Nikolay Lossky?
Nikolay Onufriyevich Lossky, also known as N. O. Lossky, was a Russian philosopher and a representative of Russian idealism, intuitionist epistemology, personalism and axiology. He named his own philosophical system intuitive-personalism and was the father of the theologian Vladimir Lossky.
When did Nikolay Lossky die?
Nikolay Lossky died on the 24th of January 1965. He had moved to France in 1961, after the death of his son, and spent the final four years of his life there in illness.
Why was Nikolay Lossky exiled from Russia?
Nikolay Lossky was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1922 as a counter-revolutionary, placed aboard the group of expulsions known as the Philosophers' Ship. His public criticism of post-revolutionary excesses, combined with his return to the Russian Orthodox Church, had already cost him his professorship in philosophy.
What did Nikolay Lossky call his philosophical system?
Nikolay Lossky called his philosophical system intuitive-personalism. He also labeled his theory of knowledge, or gnosiology, Intuitivist-Personalism, built around the idea that all is immanent in all.
Where did Nikolay Lossky teach after leaving Russia?
After his exile, Nikolay Lossky taught in Prague as a professor at the Russian University of Prague, in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. From 1947 he taught theology at Saint Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestwood, New York.
How did Nikolay Lossky influence Ayn Rand?
Ayn Rand studied classical philosophy under Nikolay Lossky at the University of Petrograd, also known as the University of St. Petersburg. In biographical reminiscences recorded in the early 1960s, she named him as the only teacher from that period she recalled.
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7 references cited across the entry
- 4BookHistory of Russian Philosophy "История российской Философии "Nikolay Lossky — International Universities Press Inc — 1951
- 7BookValue and Existence "Ценность и существование"Nikolay Lossky — George Allen & Unwin LTD — 1935