Value and Existence - Livres de poche

VALUE AND EXISTENCE N. O. LOSSKY Professor of Philosophy in the Russian University of Prague and JOHN S. MARSHALL Professor of Philosophy in Albion College PART ONE TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN by SERGEI S. VINOKOOROFF LONDON GEORGE ALLEN UNWIN LTD MUSEUM STREET PREFACE THE problem of value is primarily the problem of the concrete in contemporary philosophy. But paradoxical as it may seem the search for values by most of our philosophers has been a quest in terms of formal essences or abstract criteria. This is due to the fact that our philosophy is usually rooted in the formal side of Aris totles logic, and so it has largely developed in the form of abstract concepts, notions of the mind, and formal essences. Hence by very necessity it has given itself over to the problems of formal logic and subjective episte mology rather than to the sphere of metaphysics. But the Russian mind is primarily metaphysical, and has a tradition that is rooted in the concrete. Its episte mology leads it to the recognition of the possibility of knowing the concrete and thus makes an ontology possible. Both in epistemology and metaphysics this tradition is essentially Christian Neo-Platonism. Of course it is true that Schelling inspired Solovyof and thus caused the rise of a truly native Russian philosophy. But that does not mean that Russian philosophy was ever essentially committed to the thought of Schelling. It has a tradition of its own which was stimulated and brought to life by a similar impulse in Germany. Due to the tradition of the Church Russia had an implicit philosophy, a philosophy that was born of the Neo-Platonism of the Church Fathers. This implicit Neo-Platonism is the true heritage ofRussian thinking. It emerges when the Russian begins 9 Value and Existence to reflect on the problem of reality. That is the reason it is so baffling. When we begin to read Solovyof, Kar savin 5 or Bulgakov we expect a type of thought that is identical with that known to us in Romantic German philosophy. We have an analogous situation in the revival of Neo-Platonism in England during the nineteenth century. That revival is also very difficult for most readers to understand. Many historians of philosophy find the thought of Coleridge and F. D. Maurice singu larly difficult. That is because the thinking stimulated by ScheUing gradually assumed the form of the long tradition of Neo-Platonism found in the seventeenth century poets and the Cambridge Platonists. So the Russian tradition, although stimulated by German thought has gradually become more and more Neo-Platonic. The philosophical reader who first approaches the present work may be prone to suffer from an illusion he may tend to think of the system as Hegelian. It is the same sort of illusion as the reader of Coleridge suffers from when he thinks that Coleridge is a follower of ScheUing. In reality Coleridge uses the terminology of the Post-Kantian school, but actually follows the tradition of Cudworth and the seventeenth-century Platonic poets. So the present book uses German terminology and method, but its theory is essentially Christian Neo-Plato nism. It is not a new development of the Hegelian theory of metaphysics and value. The theory is not Hegelian. From its point of view Hegel suffers from a false type of concreteness. Hegels thought is embodied in the concept of the world as a 10 Preface concrete universal. The concreteuniversal is the whole of reality as concretely interpenetrated. The world is already concrete. Seen as a whole in the full context of its environment every person or every event has a com pletely satisfactory place within the totality. The whole is already perfect. The individual is that which has value. However, the only true individual is the whole. Everything has a positive value when seen as an in evitable part of the perfect whole of things which we call the Absolute...