Abstract
Alexey Losev’s concept of ‘personality’ was developed in his writings from the 1920s, “The Dialectics of Myth” and “The Philosophy of Name”. In his later works (e.g. on the aesthetics of the Renaissance and in his book about Vladimir Soloviev) Losev also understood the ‘personality’ outside of the boundaries of philosophy and theology. For him, the mystical dimension of personality in the end dominates logical and cultural structures of the subject. Losev’s concept of ‘personality’ as a myth, a symbol, rather than an abstract theory was an attack on the European individualism seen as a principle of the self-affirmation of the isolated subject.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
See in particular the discourse on «entering an understanding of God» though the prefix «in» and the transformation of etymology into a natural servant of theology (Kusanskii 1937, p. 168).
In the Dialectic of myth, Losev admits that the «ancient-medieval dialectics» easily outdoes «Fichte, Schelling and Hegel» (Losev 1990, p. 44).
From Losev’s contemporaries, I shall name Ernst Cassirer with his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Most likely, Losev did not know the works of Edmund Husserl’s student Roman Ingarden on Renaissance portraits from the time of their first publication of the 1930s, but the commonality of interest between them, particularly with regard to the problem of personality in the context of phenomenological reduction, is striking.
To refer indirectly to a characterization of Hegel by Vladimir Solov’ëv: “For Hegel, God himself is merely a philosophizing mind that reaches its highest perfection only in in a perfect philosophy; by contrast, Hegel regarded nature in its empirical expressions merely as a skin which is shed by the snake of the absolute dialectics in its movement” (Soloviev, p. 301).
The best example of Losev’s characterisation as a personalist can be found in Ludmila Gogotishvili’s commentaries on Losev. Dialektika mifa, throughout the text.
From the Greek “θαυμα” for miracle. Ludmila Gogotishvili interprets Losev’s understanding of «personality» in this way: «on the one hand, he denies the hypotrophy of the subject in modern European philosophy, on the other hand he accepts the necessity for the absolute self-determination of the personality in eternity, its right to seek existence in a “light being” independently of everything. This, we could say, ‘ontological’ personalism of Losev was first formulated in his letter to his wife Valentina Mikhailovna Loseva sent from Belomorkanal to her camp in the Altai region of 23 February 1932: “In my worldview the ancient cosmos …. is synthesized with Einstein, scholasticism with Neo-Kantianism, the monastery with marriage, the subtlety of Western subjectivism … with Eastern Palamian ontologism…”.
References
Kusanskii, N. (1937). Nikolai Kusanskii. O vozmozhnosti bytii [Nicholas Cusanus, De possest] (trans Losev, A.F.). Moscow: Nauka, 2, 168 ff.
Losev, A. F. (1976). Problema simvola i realisticheskoe iskusstvo [The Problem of the Symbol and Realist Art]. Moscow: Iskusstvo.
Losev, A. F. (1978). Estetika Vozrozhdenia [The Aesthetics of the Renaissance]. Moscow: Mysl’.
Losev, A. F. (1983). Vladimir Soloviev. Moscow: Mysl’.
Losev A. F. (1990). Filosofia imeni [Philosophy of the Name]. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo Universiteta.
Losev, A. F. (1995). Forma, Stil’ Vyrazhenie. Moscow: Mysl’.
Losev, A. F. (2001/1930). Dialektika mifa [Dialectic of myth]. Moscow: Mysl’.
Solov’ëv, V. (1911–1913). Sobranie sochinenij [Collected writings], v. 10. Moscow: Obshchestvennaya pol’za.
Takho-Godi, A. A. (1971). O drevnegrecheskom ponimanii lichnosti na materiale termina soma [On the ancient Greek understanding of personality based on the notion of soma]. In Voprosy klassicheskoi philologii (pp. 273–296). Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo Universiteta.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gusejnov, G. The linguistic aporias of Alexei Losev’s mystical personalism. Stud East Eur Thought 61, 153–164 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-009-9083-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-009-9083-1