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9
For all this, it is not possible to say that Solovyov's theoretical constructions were very successful. Even Prince Evgeny Trubetzkoy, his friend and disciple, is compelled to point out a whole series of great blunders and mistakes in Solovyov's philosophical discussions. His attempt to conStruct an ethic on the three feelings peculiar to men - sympathy, shame, and reverence - was subjected to the sharpest criticism by Prince Trubetzkoy. One cannot even say in explanation that Solovyov allowed himself to be misled by Schopenhauer's example. Schopenhauer in fact built his ethic on the feeling of sympathy - and Solovyov's ethic is distinguished from Schopenhauer's only in that in its foundation he places not only sympathy but shame and reverence as well. But Solovyov knows the weak sides of Schopenhauer's argumentation. In The Justification of the Good he writes, "There is in the world only one strictly ethical fact without which there cannot be any morality and any kind of moral philosophy - the fact, namely, that of human conditions and actions some are approved as worthy while others are censured as unworthy, according to their own relation to the good and the bad, and independently of any other qualities and relations." (It is interesting how very close Solovyov comes to Pelagius. Pelagius also wrote: "omne bonum et malum, quo vel laudabiles vel vituperabiles sumus," etc.; he, too, valued above all else the praise, and feared above all else the censure, of morality!). Not to acknowledge an independent, specific character to purely moral approval or censure means to deny the very possibility of morality or of moral elements in the life of man" (Collected Works, 7:656). This, of course, is an altogether different matter. It is given to morality to praise and to censure men; in its praises there is a good and, as we shall presently see, the highest good, while in its censures there is the worst that can happen to a man. In another passage he explains: "The feeling of pity and sympathy expresses not only the spiritual condition of the person in question but, beyond this, a certain objective truth, namely, the truth of the essential unity or real solidarity of all creatures" (ibid, p. 176). Here again the feeling of sympathy has no independent rights. Only before the supreme tribunal of objective truth which is granted the right to praise and censure ("quo laudabiles vel vituperabiles sumus") does it receive its justification.
This is fully Kantian: morality is autonomous, it has its own principles and laws according to which it judges man and all his feelings, forbidding some and allowing others. Sympathy has obtained approval, which means that it is permitted to dwell in our soul; but had it not obtained it, it would have had to clear off. Moreover, "the good as the ideal norm of the will does not coincide with the good as the object of actual desires" (ibid., p. 131). And this, as we see, is again the Kantian idea about the autonomy of morality, only expressed more artlessly, so that under the traits of Kant are to be seen clearly the traits of Pelagius and Marcion, and even already not of Pelagius and Marcion and their immediate Greek teachers, but of the first teacher who enlightened the first man. When God created the world, everything was "very good." But the cunning serpent, who stared at the tree of the knowledge of good and of evil, "understood" that "a good" is one thing and "the good" something else. That one must hale the divine good before someone's tribunal and there ask for permission and blessing: if the tribunal permits it, then this good will be "the good," but if the tribunal does not permit it, the good becomes "bad." Or, as Solovyov himself says: "Conduct in conformity with this rule (that is, the decision pronounced by the supreme tribunal) leads as a result to self-control, to freedom of the spirit... i.e., to a condition that gives us some higher satisfaction or that represents a moral good" (ibid., p. 109).
A moral good that provides higher satisfaction and the theoretical need without whose satisfaction, as we recall, the value of life becomes doubtful - these are the foundations on which Solovyov's religious philosophy rests. Sympathy, shame, and reverence, even though he speaks of them much and in detail, play only a secondary role with him. Through them are only fulfilled the commandments of that lawgiver and judge whose praise and censure give meaning and value to human existence. Solovyov attributes special significance to shame. He even asserts that God himself suggested to the first man that shame is the beginning of self-perfection and recalls the words addressed to Adam by the Creator: "Who told you that you are naked?" These words, as is known, are in the Book of Genesis, but they really mean something altogether different. Adam was ashamed of his nakedness after he had tasted of the fruits of the tree of knowledge - to put it differently, shame came after the fall into sin, but before the fall into sin it did not exist at all, as, one must suppose, sympathy also did not exist.
In an enigmatic fashion stands that person in whom Solovyov saw his ideal opponent and against whom, if everything does not deceive, his Justification of the Good is also directed - the author of Beyond Good and Evil, who turned out to be far closer to Holy Scripture, even though he wrote Antichrist. "Wherein lies your chief danger?" asks Nietzsche, and he answers, "In sympathy." And later, "What is the most human?" The answer, "To save someone from shame." It is striking to what a degree Solovyov and Tolstoy, who wished to be honest Christians, trusted the serpent and its wisdom, and how Nietzsche, who called himself an Antichrist, was irresistibly drawn to Holy Scripture. Here is one of the greatest and most incomprehensible riddles of the present.
I repeat: there were few who strove as passionately and honestly to find revelation in the Bible as Solovyov, and only rarely did anyone remove himself so far from Holy Scripture as he. He wished to believe in God, and he was prepared to accept God's world; but this was not granted to him. He submitted to the demon dwelling within him, as Socrates once bowed down to his demon. Like Socrates and the whole ancient and modern philosophy that came out of Socrates, he also sees in the readiness obediently to fulfill the commandments of the "alien God" the highest task of mankind. As for Socrates, whom he calls a righteous man (Socrates, to be sure, like Pushkin, perished - nevertheless he was a righteous man!), so for him it seems that the meaning of individual human life consists in fulfilling these commandments not only obediently but reverently.
Again, in The Justification of the Good he writes in regard to the words of the First Letter of John, "Do not love the world or all that is in the world" (2:15): "This is nothing other than the expression of the fundamental principles of asceticism: to protect oneself from the lower nature and to oppose its usurpations." It has already been known for a long time that the fourth gospel and the Letter of John were the chief sources from which the Christianizing philosophers and the philosophizing theologians drew their truths. Fichte, for instance, asserted that all of Christianity comes down to the first verse of the fourth gospel: "In the beginning was the word." Fichte, of course, knew very well without Holy Scripture that in the beginning was the word - he could find this in any Greek philosopher you please. But even the positivist Ernest Renan accepted the first verse of the fourth gospel - Renan who concluded his history of Israel with the famous "prophecy": "Neither Judaism nor Christianity will remain in existence forever. If mankind should long for a superstition, it will fabricate a new one for itself. Judaism and Christianity will disappear. The business of Jewishness will come to an end. The business of the Hellenes, i.e., science, rational civilization, based on experience, remote from charlatanry and from revelation, founded on reason and freedom, will develop endlessly, and if our earth does not fulfill its duties, there will be other earths that will fulfill completely the program of every life: light, reason, truth." Light, reason, truth - is this not the same thing as "in the beginning was the word"? Judaism and Christianity will disappear, but Hellenism will not pass away.
The same Renan writes, in the foreword to the thirteenth edition of his Life of Jesus, with regard to John 4:23 ("But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth") in an even more inspired fashion: "On the day that Jesus pronounced these words he was truly the son of God. He pronounced for the first time the word on which the structure of the eternal religion will rest. He founded a religion that knows no times or terms, that knows no fatherland, a religion that will be confessed by all elevated souls to the end of time. This is already not his religion, this is the religion of mankind, the absolute religion, and if there are dwellers on other planets who are endowed with reason and moral feelings, their religion cannot be other than that which Jesus proclaimed at Jacob's Well."
All these solemn and eloquent discussions - whereby are they distinguished from what Solovyov tells us on hundreds of pages of his Justification of the Good? Also Renan, who prophesied the imminent end of Judaism and Christianity, had "his own gospel." He was honestly and convincedly ready to worship "the Father in spirit and truth," but the same honesty and conscientiousness compelled him to assert that truth must be sought not among the Jews but among the Hellenes. Or, that the truth of the prophets and apostles must be brought before the tribunal of Hellenic reason. What reason justifies (for instance, the above-quoted passages from the fourth gospel and many others from the same gospel, which is separated from the other three because it satisfies the demands of reason most of all) will remain eternally for the earth as well as for all the planets, but what it does not accept will have to be rejected as superstition.
Whence did such a fanatical certainty arise in Renan? Is it proper for a sober historian to lose himself to such an extent and to pontificate in pathetic tones about what will be not only on earth but in the whole universe, not only in visible times but in all times? On what kind of "experience" does he base himself? Can experience really carry us into that boundlessness which Renan seized in his prophecies? "Light, reason, truth" - all this is before experience and not gained from experience. For Renan, to be sure, it was permissible not to know this: he was, after all, a casual guest in philosophy, and he thought, like most scholars, that both the Greeks and Jesus found light and reason and truth in experience and that, consequently, the fourth gospel, which reminds one so much of what the Greeks taught, also came out of experience. But Solovyov ought to have been more careful and not forgotten Plato. Nevertheless, he, who had so little liking for Renan, followed the same way as Renan. The theoretical need and the striving after the moral good made him blind and deaf to everything. The fruits that grew on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil seemed to him that which alone can give value to human life. It will be objected that, after all, in John it is written: "In the beginning was the word," that he speaks about worship "in spirit and in truth," and that "the Johannine writings" form part of the Bible. But the same John is, after all, the author of the Apocalypse, which also can in no way be torn out of Holy Scripture. One will perhaps jump at the last: Biblical criticism disputes the tradition that the fourth gospel and the Apocalypse belong to one author. But this will hardly be of any avail. History is sometimes stronger than historical criticism. And if that person who wrote the fourth gospel was not the author of the Apocalypse, then by the will of fate he became such. Fate imperiously demanded that he who spoke about worship in spirit and in truth, he who proclaimed to the world that in the beginning was the word, that is, he who was the first of the Christians to conceive the idea of merging the "Hellenic song of songs" with Israel's word of God, be condemned to awaken the benumbed, perhaps dead, souls of men through apocalyptic thunder. And so it will remain, no matter what new proofs the historians may find. Of course, Marcion excluded the Apocalypse from "his gospel," as he excluded the Old Testament. Tolstoy did approximately the same thing. The historians, however - Renan, for example - find an excuse and a psychological explanation for the Apocalypse in the fact that it was written in the period of the terrors and cruelties of Nero.
In reality, if the "program of life," as Renan says, is light, reason, and truth, then the Revelation of Saint John, like the revelation of all of Holy Scripture, does not find and cannot find any justification. There, where revelation is, our truth as well as our reason and our light are of no use for anything at all. When reason weakens, when truth dies, when light is extinguished - only then do the words of revelation become intelligible to man. And, vice versa. As long as we have light, reason and truth, we drive revelation away from us. Prophetic inspiration, which by its nature is bound in the closest way to revelation, begins only there and then when all our natural capacities of seeking come to an end.
10
Solovyov to his last days refused to recognize this. "For the philosopher by vocation there is nothing more desirable than intelligent truth or truth that has been tested through thinking; for this reason he loves the very process of thinking as the only method of attaining the desired goal and devotes himself to it without any extraneous apprehensions and fears." ("Theoretical Philosophy," Collected Works, 8:152).
"Intelligent" truth, truth that has been "tested through thinking!" As if it were really so simple and clear. Somewhat further on he explains: "An essential peculiarity of philosophical speculation consists in the striving for unconditioned certainty, which is experienced through free and logical (proceeding to the end) reflection." But, indeed, Renan also strives only for verification and certainty. How frequently he speaks of this. "Only science is pure... Its duty is to demonstrate but not to persuade or convert. Only science seeks pure truth. Only it brings sufficient grounds for truth and introduces rigorous critical methods in its demonstrations." (Renan, Origine du Christianisme, I, XXVIII, Foreword.) To be sure, Renan, as I have already mentioned, does not ponder too much over what "sufficient grounds" or "rigorous critical methods" are. He distinguishes himself in this respect, like many scholars, even first-rate ones, by great naďveté; lie does not even feel the kind of difficulties that are contained here. As an example, I quote his words (from the same foreword): "We reject the supernatural on the same ground that we reject the existence of centaurs: no one has seen them." Larochefoucauld once explained no less confidently (and naively): "With great passions it is the same as with ghosts: all talk about them, but no one has seen them." Very clever, very imposing - no doubt. But "sufficient grounds" and "rigorous critical methods" one cannot find here even with a magnifying glass.
From where does Larochefoucauld know that no one has ever seen great passions or ghosts? Or Renan - centaurs and the supernatural? Have they, perhaps, inquired of all the people who have ever lived? And, then, if someone were to tell them that he has seen them with his own eyes, would they really believe him? It is clear that "seeing" has nothing to do with the matter here. Both Larochefoucauld and Renan know beforehand that there are not and cannot be great passions or ghosts or the supernatural, and from this they conclude that no one could have seen anything of the kind. Grounds not too "sufficient" and methods not too rigorously critical! And this is called "free" investigation... But these were Renan and Larochefoucauld. Solovyov, however, really wished to be a philosopher, and for him it was in no way proper to resort to such lightweight considerations. But, obviously philosophers also are not as preoccupied with "demonstrability" as people generally think, and they also do not price "free" investigation too much. They have other cares!
Solovyov, who, generally speaking, was a reserved man, cannot restrain himself from addressing abusive words to his imaginary theoretical opponents in his essays on theoretical philosophy. He writes, "If to your statement... any self-assured descendant of the second son of Noah would object..." A theoretical controversy - and suddenly insulting words, and of what a kind: descendant of the second son of Noah, i.e., Hamite breed! And this is not a word that has escaped accidentally. In controversies over the "last grounds" there comes a moment when all the so-called proofs are exhausted and one must seek different means for the defense of his truths. And then it turns out that it is not at all a question of certainty, that it is necessary not at all to persuade the man who thinks otherwise but to force him to agreement, and, if persuasion does not work, one must disgrace and defame him. This is the reason why in "Theoretical Philosophy" a place was found for such words as "descendant of the second son of Noah."
The same thing might be said, and is usually said, differently. For example: "A man leads a worthy existence when he subjects his life and his dealings to the moral law and directs them toward unconditionally moral ends." (Solovyov, The National Question in Russia, Foreword.) This is more literary, more calm - but behind it is again hidden the same "Hamite breed." Not for nothing did Solovyov speak so much about shame and did he wish to base his ethic on the feeling of shame. You see that the theory of knowledge, i.e., the doctrine about the certainty of our knowledge, also has to protect its rights by the same means as ethics. If one does not force a man, he will obviously under no circumstances agree finally and forever to accept the "certainties" set up by Solovyov or the norms praised by him.
To be sure, there are people in whom neither abuse nor threats can find any weak spot and whom the promised rewards do not entice: to abuse they respond with abuse, to the promised reward with mockery. Solovyov ought to have known this; after all, he had read Dostoevsky - not only Notes from the Underground but also his last works ("The Gentle One," "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man"), that were written at the time when they were close and went together to the hermitage of Optina Pustyn. Did he perhaps also feel himself reminded of the second son of Noah in regard to Dostoevsky? After all, precisely Dostoevsky, in the works that have been mentioned - and in many others besides - mocks our certainties and self-evidences and even everything "beautiful and exalted." But Solovyov "forgave" Dostoevsky the underground man for the sake of the starets Zossima without noticing, apparently, that the true saint is the eternally disturbed underground man, while the starets Zossima is only an ordinary cheap print - blue eyes, carefully combed beard, and a golden ringlet around his head.
Solovyov was completely in the power of what Harnack called "das Hohelied des Hellenismus." That is why, despite his assurances that he was seeking God, he sought only the truth and the good. As if imitating Tolstoy or Marcion, he wrote, "That will with which we are born, the will of our flesh, is subject to nature, and nature is subject to sin which rules in it. As long as we act only out of ourselves or out of our will, we inevitably act out of sin, as slaves and captives of sin." (The Spiritual Foundations of Life, p. 293.) Or even more strongly: "The barrier that separates from the real good or from God (just so it is written: "from the real good or from God" - does this not sound like Tolstoy?) is the will of man. But by this same will a person can decide not to act out of himself and out of the world, not to do according to his worldly will. A person can decide: I do not desire my own will. Such self-denial or conversion of the human will is its greatest triumph... God does not wish to be an external factor that foists itself upon us involuntarily: God is the inner truth that morally obliges us to recognize it. To believe in God is our moral duty." (ibid., p. 282)
All these are commonplaces of philosophy, all this can be found in Hegel as well as in Schelling and in any representative of German idealism you please. However, even though the German philosophers always endeavored strongly to bring their ideas into connection with Christianity, Solovyov rebelled against them, spoke about a "crisis" of West European thought and sought a new word in Holy Scripture. And suddenly, instead of saying anything new, he repeats the old words and, with even greater persistence than his teachers, emphasizes the dependence of religion on morality and the compelling power (even though it be internal - the difference is not great!) of the truth of revelation. Neither Hegel nor Schelling press so hard: to believe in God is our moral duty. Why "duty"? From where does Solovyov get the fear that a person will not accept God if one does not oblige him, does not bind him, to do so? Is belief in God really a duty? Belief in God is, after all, the great prerogative of man, a gift of heaven, in comparison with which all other gifts appear insignificant or, to put it better, without which life and everything that is in life becomes illusory, almost nonexistent. Can one speak about God as about an ordinary earthly truth which obliges, compels - morally or in some other way? And what then remains of freedom?
It is true that Schelling spoke almost thus. Almost - for Schelling was a great master of his métier and understood with incomparable artistry how to present his philosophical speculation and his morality under the appearance of a "philosophy of revelation." He, of course, also values only the compulsory, the coercing truth. He also, even though he praises freedom, demands of people first of all submissiveness to truth. I shall quote several of his judgments, mainly from that essay which exercised a special influence on Solovyov. It is entitled "On the Essence of Human Freedom." More than anything Schelling, as is proper for a philosopher, hates accident, arbitrariness, and human "selfhood." Of course, in his way, he is right. "Philosophy ought to explain the fact of the world" (Schellings Werke, Auswahl, 3:515). But how explain so long as such things as accident, arbitrariness, and selfhood exist on the earth? For this reason he introduces still another thesis: "An sich zweifelhaft aber ist alles, was ein Sein- und nicht Sein-Könnedes ist" (ibid., p. 626). Once this is established, once we have become convinced that only that indubitably is which (of course, in our understanding) can be - then a broad path is opened up for speculation and coercing truth. Schelling is right to declare: "But chance is impossible, it contradicts reason, as the necessary unity of the whole; and if freedom is not to be saved otherwise than with the total contingency of acts, it is not to be saved at all." That is why "an arbitrary good is as impossible as an arbitrary evil. True freedom is in harmony with a holy necessity... because spirit and heart, bound together only by their own law, voluntarily affirm what is necessary" (ibid., pp. 479, 487).
Why is all this said? Why does Schelling insist so strongly that true freedom harmonizes with holy necessity and summon us to voluntary affirmation of what is necessary? Let him answer these questions with his own words. You will then see immediately what he strives to obtain and, perhaps, understand what Solovyov, who, in accord with the Russian tradition, believed that Schelling had succeeded in constructing a "philosophy of revelation" and in finding a solution, or the beginning of a solution, to the "crisis" of West European thought, strove to obtain. Schelling writes as follows: "The general possibility of evil consists, as shown, in the fact that man, instead of making his selfhood ("Selbstheit") a basis, an organ, can raise it to the ruling principle and the universal will ("Allwillen"), and, on the other hand, can strive to transform the spiritual in him into a means. If the dark principle of selfhood and self-will ("Eigenwillen") in a person is completely permeated by the light and one with it, then God, as the eternal love or the truly existing, is the connection of forces in him" (ibid., p. 486).
For Schelling, just as for Solovyov, God is the "connection of forces." More than anything else he is afraid that this "connection" may be broken up. That is why he takes up arms against selfhood and its self-will. And as always happens in such cases, he slanders selfhood, more correctly, lays the blame on an innocent party. Selfhood, indeed, by no means strives to transform itself into Allwillen ("universal will"). There are strivings of this kind in the world, but they do not touch selfhood. The case is different with self-will (Schelling could have - and this would have been more just - spoken about freedom; but he is struggling and is not in the mood for justice). Selfhood is really self-willed; self-will is its native, primordial element. But self-will has nothing in common with the thirst for unlimited supremacy or dominion. Exactly the opposite: self-will, namely, that self-will which we observe in the living person (i.e., according to Schelling, in selfhood) feels supremacy or dominion as a burden. And if at times it is otherwise, then this, so to speak, is already a later formation, more correctly, a deformation of selfhood. For supremacy other powers strive that are directly opposed to selfhood - what are called general principles and rules. These themselves have no will, and they do not allow any will in others and are unable to bear it. Since the time that people, to please that theoretical need without whose satisfaction the value of life becomes dubious, began to "think," since the time that they began to believe that thinking is the "only method" for the attainment of the highest goals of life - only since that time did the idea of "supremacy" obtain such a fascination and begin to lure men's minds.
Schelling had moments when he apparently began to see clearly, when he felt that the ordinary methods of discovering truth - the subjection of men to the power of rules or principles - cannot lead to "revelation." At times the example of Jacobi whom (especially in his youth) he had criticized so mercilessly infected him. But the spirit of Hegel gained the upper hand over him. He wrote, "The concept is only contemplative and has to do with necessity, while here it is a question of something that lies outside necessity, of something willed" (ibid., p. 706). And even more decisively: "We call a being personal precisely only insofar as it belongs to him to be outside reason, according to his own will" (ibid., p. 637). But these are only flashes of instantaneous light that are as quickly extinguished as they suddenly flare up. In his heart of hearts Schelling was convinced that the philosophy of revelation, like every philosophy, must strive for the universal and the necessary, and that personality finds its justification and its meaning only insofar as it humbly occupies the place pointed out to it in the universal and voluntarily subjects itself to necessity, which precisely for this reason is called holy necessity. In the year 1850 the aged Schelling concluded his address "On the Source of the Eternal Truths" with the same verse of Homer with which Aristotle concludes the twelfth book of his Metaphysics. For the sake of solemnity he quotes it in the original, but I shall give it in translation: "The rule of many is not good; let there be one master."
The idea of "all-unity," which presupposes, of course, the idea of supremacy or dominion, never left Schelling - neither in his youthful years when the philosophy of identity still completely satisfied his "theoretical need" nor in his old age when, in place of the philosophy of identity, the philosophy of revelation appeared. To be sure, the Schelling of the "second period" spoke constantly of God, but it is quite obvious that God is invoked by him only to satiate his theoretical hunger. "One could say," Schelling writes, "that God is just really nothing in Himself; He is nothing but relation and pure relation, for He is only the master... .He is really, so to say, here for no other purpose than to be the master of being" (3:548). He asserts that this is the only definition of God recognized by Christianity. In explanation of his thought he cites the words of Newton: "Deus est vox relativa et ad servos refertur," and further: "Deus est dominatio Dei non in corpus proprium, sed in subditos." In Newton as in Schelling Deus is transformed completely of Himself into Deitas, Dominus - into Dominatio. To be sure, he also quotes the words of Newton that appear to bring us close to the Biblical idea of God, "Deus sine dominio et causis finalibus nihil aliud est quam Fatum et Natura," but he immediately returns to his own thought. "God without dominion ('Herrschaft') or, as I will later express myself, God without magnificence ('Herrlichkeit'), for this is the true and original meaning of the word - God without magnificence would be mere fate and nature... This proposition in any case stands firm... It must be firmly held that God, as He is, is master ('Herr')."
I think that the reader will not complain of me for the numerous quotations from Schelling. If space permitted, one would have to double or triple their number. Schelling exercised an enormous influence on Russian philosophical thought. Among us in Russia all were convinced that with him a new era began, that he renounced the Hegelian dialectic and sought the truth in revelation. But, I repeat once more: Hegel pursued Schelling not only in his lifetime but even after his death. Schelling dreamed of only one thing - to be like Hegel. That is why he sees in God, above all, the sovereign - and even not the sovereign but power; that is why for him Herrschaft ("dominion") is synonymous with Herrlichkeit ("magnificence"), and in God he sees deity. And so it must be: from God nothing can be deduced - God, like the "selfhood" created by Him, is self-willed - but from the conception of deity one can deduce freely and without hindrance. Indeed, in this consists the task of every dialectic, not only the Hegelian: to find the first general conception, from which our whole complex reality then follows in a natural way all by itself. Hegel called this "Selbstbewegung des Begriffs" ("self-movement of the idea or conception"). Schelling mercilessly mocked the Hegelian "self-movement of the idea"; where Hegel showed self-movement, Schelling clearly discerned the hand of the philosopher pushing the idea forward. However, even though Schelling mocked Hegel, he did the same thing that he reproached his enemy for doing. For if there is not "self-movement," no "self-development," how then demonstrate, how explain "the fact of the world," how philosophize? Philosophy, what people customarily understand by philosophy, would become not something impossible but, as it were, unnecessary. Unnecessary, too, is a master over being, as well as Herrschaft ("supremacy" or "dominion"). But for Schelling, as we have just heard, the essence of Herrlichkeit (magnificence) consists in Herrschaft; without Herrschaft he will not allow any Herrlichkeit, that is, without firm law the world is not sweet to him. Why? you will ask. But, indeed, Solovyov has already answered for him: in us there is a theoretical need without whose satisfaction the value of life becomes dubious.
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We see that not individual "selfhoods" strive to place themselves at the peak of the universe and to transform themselves into the Allwillen, the one will for all. Apparently, there is something in the world that sets itself the task of subjecting all living things, all "selfhoods," as the German idealists in their "intentional" language and their faithful disciple Solovyov say. This enigmatic "something" seeks and has always sought dominion and to it the Hellenic sages submitted uncomplainingly and willessly and they saw in this submissiveness the triumph of spirit over matter. "Fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt," said Cicero and Seneca, as if they unwillingly admitted what more refined philosophers preferred to keep to themselves. The ancients apparently felt that they did not at all go forward voluntarily, that an unconquerable, fateful power forcibly drew them somewhere. But they considered it unlawful to talk about this. This would not have been in accord with their conception of philosophical dignity: what kind of a philosopher would one be if he were dragged forcibly like a drunkard to the police station? They preferred to give themselves the appearance of not being dragged but of going themselves by their own desire, and they always repeated that their desire coincided with what fate prepared for them. And this is the meaning of Schelling's words: "True freedom harmonizes with a holy necessity" and "Spirit and heart voluntarily affirm what is necessary" (3:487).
The same meaning lies in Solovyov's assertion: "Man can decide: I do not desire my own will. Such self-denial or conversion of one's will is its highest triumph." As in ethics, so also in the theory of knowledge one concern stands before everything else in Solovyov: to free himself from the living person, to bind him, to paralyze him. He expresses this in the following way: "To forget the subjective center for the sake of the absolute center, completely to devote oneself mentally to the truth itself - this is the only reliable method for finding for the soul its real place: it really depends on the truth and on nothing more."
Like the books of the German idealists, so Solovyov's books are full of assertions of this kind. The truth and the good carry on in him a continuous and merciless struggle against what in scholastic language is called the "empirical subject" but what in Russian means the living person. The whole art, the whole dialectic, is directed toward showing that the right of commanding and ordering is given to the truth and the good, and that human well-being and the meaning of human existence consist in obeying and in fulfilling orders. So the philosophers of antiquity taught, so Schelling and Hegel taught. I assume that it will not be useless for the reader, before we proceed to a discussion of the sovereign rights of the truth and the good that Solovyov defends with such faithful enthusiasm, to listen also to Hegel.
Moral laws are not made and not discovered - "but they exist and nothing more... So they are considered by Sophocles' Antigone as the unwritten and infallible law of the gods:
- Not perhaps now and yesterday, but evermore
It lives, and no one knows whence it came.
They exist... If they had to legitimize themselves before my inspection, then I have already shaken their unwavering essence and consider them as something that is perhaps true but also perhaps not true for me. But the moral disposition consists exactly in persisting fixedly and firmly in what is right and in refraining from all moving, shaking, and retreating in regard to it" (Solovyov, Collected Works, 7:225 - 31, where he also speaks of Sophocles' Antigone and almost repeats Hegel verbatim). I have quoted these words of Hegel deliberately; a paraphrase could never convey the reverential tone and solemn pathos with which they are filled. Not only Solovyov but Schelling himself never succeeded in rising in their philosophical flights to such a "height." Hegel does not reason, he does not argue: "he prays and humbles himself, and he demands imperiously that all should pray and humble themselves along with him. That they should humble themselves before the laws that are justified in advance by the fact that they refuse to justify themselves before anyone, that they refuse even to tell from whence and when they came. Every attempt not only to deny them obedience but even to interrogate them is considered in advance as revolt and mutiny. No less demanding than the laws of morality are the laws of thinking. "While I think, I give up my subjective separateness, immerse myself in the thing and let the thinking do for me as it pleases, and I think badly when I add anything of my own."
Who has instructed whom, whether the truth the good or the good the truth - this remains undecided; but we see from the testimonies of knowledgeable people that have been quoted by me that both the truth and the good have only one concern: to set themselves in front of and at the head of all being. Thus, if one sees in the striving for unlimited dominion the beginning of all evil, as Schelling does, he must seek it not in the individual personality that is in no way implicated in it, but in those highest principles whose worship it is customary to consider worship in spirit and in truth. The individual personality - over this there is no argument - is self-willed. It wishes many and varied things. It wishes one thing today, another thing tomorrow. But it never occurs to it, as is the case with the good or the true of Hegel or of Schelling, to make its wish obligatory for all. On the contrary, it also loves in others above everything in the world that self-will which it values in itself as the first condition of life. But the customary and ancient slander of "selfhood" by the philosophers consisted precisely in the fact that they ascribed to it a striving for dominion when, on the contrary, such a striving is in the nature of that which they always defended and took under their protection - the nature of the rules, of "the eternal laws," of "the unchangeable principles." The principles and rules do not understand and do not recognize self-will - this is so. They do not need it; they in fact do not feel anything: they know neither joy nor sorrow, neither anxiety nor hope. They need only - indeed this "they need" may here be said only metaphorically; they also do not need this - that there be order and firm unchangeability. They are, they exist, and they refuse not only to justify themselves before the living being (they sense with their dead souls that, if it should come to a justification, all would be lost), but they do not even permit the question of justification to be raised. We are - and we are before all of you, the "empirical subjects"; consequently, we will not be brought to trial to you but you to us. So they say in their mute and dead language.
And of this we were witnesses: the best philosophical minds were enticed by the dead speeches of dead beings. "In the beginning was the good and the truth" - it is necessary to humble oneself before them, it is necessary to pray to them. And to tear out of oneself everything that protests and rebels against the rulers who have come who knows whence and from where. This was called and now calls itself philosophy. People think that, if they take the side of the strong - not that they will be pardoned; they also will not be pardoned - they will be together with the rulers, that a segment of power, Herrschaft, will fall to them, and, consequently the light of that Herrlichkeit about which Schelling told us will be poured out on them. And not voluntarily, of course - what living soul would voluntarily go to such a thing? - they nevertheless were enrolled as "servants and day-laborers of the truth" (Fichte spoke exactly thus) and suppressed in themselves and in the world everything that was capable of resisting and battling against the great temptation.
They appear to have reached their goal. We have heard how Solovyov proclaimed that the greatest triumph consists in the renunciation of one's will. Indeed - what a triumph! If one kills the living will in himself, if one renounces his own personality, then the theoretical need will obtain the highest satisfaction, since outside the living person with his changing and capricious wishes there will no longer be anyone to infringe upon the order established from eternity and to disturb the calm self-unfolding of the spirit and the self-movement of the concept. After all, stones or logs will not cry out, triangles and circles will not rise up against the laws foisted upon them who knows by whom and when! If one bewitched men, and in general all living beings, so that they, exactly like stones and triangles, willlessly submitted in all things, how should one not rejoice, triumph, celebrate a victory? How should "das Hohelied des Hellenismus" then not burst out, that song of songs to the "alien god" which Greek "thinking" presented as a gift to cultured humanity?
Now, I think, it is understandable why Pushkin was not a "thinker" for Solovyov and appeared to him as an insufficiently moral person. But then one must admit that the Biblical Job also was not a thinker and that his moral qualities left much to be desired. And, in fact, the Book of Job offended Hellenic education most of all. Solovyov makes almost no mention of it. But it would have been very proper to recall it - even if not to learn something from Job but to put him on trial or to condemn him, as Solovyov condemned Pushkin and Lermontov. After all, there can be no denying: not Job with his "cries~~ was "right," but his friends who brought him their metaphysical consolations were right. "I will show you, hear me; and what I have seen I will declare. What wise men have told and their fathers have not hidden" (Job 15:17 - 18). His friends develop before Job the same thoughts about "selfhood" and "self-will" that we have just heard from Schelling, Hegel, and Solovyov. But Job does not calm down: "As for you, you are plasterers of lies, you are all worthless physicians. 0, that you would keep silent! And it would be your wisdom" (13:4 - 5). Or: "I have heard many such things; you are all sorry comforters" (16:2). "0 earth, cover not my blood, and let my cry have no resting place!" (16:18).
The whole book is one uninterrupted contest between the "cries" of the much-afflicted Job and the "reflections" of his rational friends. The friends, as true thinkers, look not at Job but at the "general." Job, however, does not wish to hear about the "general"; he knows that the general is deaf and dumb - and that it is impossible to speak with it. "But I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to argue my case with God" (13:3). The friends are horrified at Job's words: they are convinced that it is not possible to speak with God and that the Almighty is concerned about the firmness of His power and the unchangeability of His laws but not about the fate of the people created by Him. Perhaps they are convinced that in general God does not know any concerns but that He only rules. That is why they answer, "You who tear yourself in your anger, shall the earth be forsaken for you or the rock be removed from its place?" (18:4). And, indeed, shall rocks really be removed from their place for the sake of Job? And shall necessity renounce its sacred rights? This would truly be the summit of human audacity, this would truly be a "mutiny," a "revolt" of the single human personality against the eternal laws of the all-unity of being!
So Solovyov would also have had to speak with Job - after all, he spoke approximately so in regard to the fate of Lermontov or Pushkin. Or, do you think, before the face of the living Job, he would have "thought" otherwise and suspected that there are cases in which silence becomes the highest wisdom? Perhaps he would not have spoken thus with the living Job; in all probability he would not have. Since, however, in his "philosophy" he strove "to think" as if he himself were not a living person and as if, in general, there were no living people in the world, everything he wrote was, as it were, a repetition of the speeches of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Elihu. Of Job they said that he drinks abuse like water, but of themselves each one of them asserted, "For truly my words are not false; one who is perfect in knowledge is with you" (26:4). Quite like Solovyov spoke with Pushkin and Lermontov.
But the Biblical God, as is known, judged otherwise. At the end of the Book of Job we read, "The Lord spoke to Eliphaz of Teman: My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of Me what is right, as my servant Job has" (42:7). That is, the blameless (otherwise expressed, the "authentic") thinking of Job's friends was rejected by God, like the sacrifice of Cain, but God took notice of Job's "cries."
The Book of Job, in which "cries" triumph over "thinking," in which God recognizes that for the sake of a man the eternal order of nature can be broken and the rocks removed from their place, seemed to the Greeks the most scandalous of all things that a mortal could conceive and say. For them it was an axiom that "the whole is prior to its parts and is presupposed by them." I have, it is true, taken these words from Solovyov's speech on August Comte, (Collected Works, Vol. VIII, p. 233) but the idea does hot belong to him, although he developed it repeatedly on all sorts of occasions. The idea is as old as philosophy itself and was always the cornerstone on which the speculative systems of antiquity as well as of modern times rested. The essence and the meaning of the very concept of "speculation" - of "mental sight" - consists in man training himself to see in himself a part of the single whole and convincing himself that the meaning of his existence, his "destiny," consists in adapting his life to the being of the whole uncomplainingly and even joyously.
A machine has screws, wheels, driving belts, etc. But both the people out of whom the universe arises as well as the individual parts out of which the machine is formed have no meaning in and of themselves. The meaning of their existence lies only in that the "whole" - the machine in the first instance, the world in the latter - should function without impediment and move forward uninterruptedly in the direction established once and for all. Mental sight discloses the "all-unity" (Thales already "saw" that everything is water, nothing but water) - and the idea of the all-unity, the idea of the whole, which unifies in itself an endless number of parts, became the foundation of philosophy and remains such to the present day. "To explain" the universe, to "comprehend" it, means to show that all the parts out of which it is formed - both living persons and soulless objects - have a purely auxiliary significance: they must listen, they must submit, they must obey.
To be sure, Solovyov, like Schelling and Hegel, constantly talks about freedom. But all his freedom comes down, as with the German idealists, to the freedom to obey. The "truth" reserves to itself the exclusive right to decide what is good and what is evil, and it decides in advance that the good consists not at all in what man loves and the evil not in what is repugnant and hateful to him. The good consists in the truth praising a man, the evil in its reproaching him. And man is obliged to see his highest good in the praises of the truth. There can be no talk of the idea that the freedom to decide what is good and what is evil was granted to man himself. Such freedom is denied not only to man but also to God. God, too, is morally obliged to follow the ways pointed out by the good. If God does not submit, if He prefers the frenzy and craziness of Job to the wise and reasonable speeches of his friends, then He is a bad God and one must wait for a new, alien God who, as Marcion taught, will tear men out of the power of the Creator, lead them out of the world created by Him, and give them true life.
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