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10Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences 10 (2013 6) 1450-1460
УДК 101.9
Rival to the Time: a Search for Specific Features of A. F. Losev's Personality
Maxim A. Butin*
Siberian Federal University 79 Svobodny, Krasnoyarsk, 660041 Russia
Received 18.11.2012, received in revised form 24.02.2013, accepted 02.09.2013
There has been modeled a structure of personality of Aleksey Fedorovich Losev, a Russian philosopher. We have tried to apply Losev's developments on theory ofpersonality and myth to the author of this theory and critically consider to what extent the real personality corresponds to his own research on personality.
Keywords: russian philosophy, A. F. Losev, Plato, personality, face (person), subject, object, intellegentia, eidos, mind (nous), spirit, matter, body (corpus), myth, miracle.
To the 120th anniversary of Aleksey Fedorovich Losev
Copyright holder - Aza Alibekovna Takho-Godi
© Siberian Federal University. All rights reserved Corresponding author E-mail address: [email protected]
*
1
It is difficult to write about A. F. Losev. He is an infinite value beyond all the rational speculations. The authors, who write about A. F. Losev, should particularly keenly realize the incommensurability and the subsequent dramatic interrelations between them as authors and the man they write about. One should spiritually correspond and feel the destination to such writer's work. Though this is true to any kind of work but a matter of understanding culture and such precious and unique crystals of spirit as A. F. Losev arising from its ground requires such mental attitude and spiritual power that are unique and exclusive themselves.
To tell in such a way does not mean that one should refuse from one or another methodology of study and rational clarity as a result of its use. But the point is out of any use of some methods and complex of methods in the sphere considered, a sphere of the highest achievements of society, i.e. culture. If it is true that a method is "a form of movement of the very substance" (G. W. F. Hegel), an instrument for study, a method for unique subject matters should be made anew every time. That is why A. F. Losev, to use A. I. Herzen's word, can be measured neither by English, nor by French measure, nor by German philosophy's measure even for an inch. We need a special measure here - Losev's one.
But we could also retort here: for every phenomenon and every person are unique in their ultimate reality, hence one should treat them according to their merits.
All this is true but not every person or phenomenon deserve close attention. And nowadays just reason in its positivistic expansion without any restraint proclaims a formula of depletion of actuality through reflection. No, reflection is always incomplete, and if it occurs, it always follows actuality. After all, it is a fact of actuality, and if it really pretended to deplete
actuality, it should also include the products of its own enlightenment in the sphere of reflexive analysis; it should venture at reflection of reflection and so on and hopelessly so on up to the point of formation of "ephemerae of ephemerae" and writing "diaries of ephemeral butterflies" (Jean Paul).
Denying so "perspective" pastime, one may come to the thought that mind is given to a human not for exercises in subtle reflective affectation but for solution of real problems of life and real problems of being. And the experience of solutions of these problems and questions by geniuses of the humankind, and hence by A. F. Losev, is beneficial: it not only deserves but requires study and comprehension. There are no reasonable alternatives to history of culture in general and history of philosophy in particular.
2
But the unreasonable alternative here is to present the point that history of culture and philosophy is an end in itself. Such an idea deprives the mentioned history of self-consciousness but nourishes it with illusions. History of philosophy, the Russian history of philosophy at least, except for A. F. Losev and two or three names, is entirely like this, with self-consciousness almost docked. So it would be quite unreasonable to ask lots of questions from lots of authors of lots of books on history and philosophy impressive by their optional character of judgments; their judgments are even often true concerning factual matters but they completely exclude connection with an author's personality and actuality. Such books (not their authors) raise a question of sense of their own existence at the readers. They ask not an author but a reader: as for you, why do you need all these "necessity and chance" given in these pages in front of you? Then there come some "interesting interpretations", "new approaches", "original reviews", and "fresh views" - generally,
the answers do not go beyond these. But all these are nothing but a trick and a wrapping for platitude often aware itself as that platitude. It is as if the problem is solved! It is as if one needs just a fresh view to embrace the entirety and bring it to alive and proximate end!
The books raising such questions and people giving such answers directly point at the fact that platitude and unreason may affect even scientia and homo sapiens. And then intensive and even exhausting work of mind may turn out to be a form of unreason and avoidance of cursed and very often damned questions of life. Give up all your misty words, Hypothetic lie,
To the questions damned and cursed, Give us straight reply.1 The orientation to the world, individuality, society in its history and, as a consequence, denial of "simple hypotheses" can bring anyone (even those ones who study at universities) to the conviction that least of all history of culture and philosophy should be a toy for the mind which can possibly be refined and sophisticated in itself but socially infantile, hence infantile in its sophistication and fastidiousness. The thing it chooses as its toy unambiguously displays the extent of its infantility.
3
Reason should be serious and high-spirited even in its games and jokes; otherwise it is not reason at all. A. F. Losev writes: "Time is pain of history". But a relief of pain means a relief of history. A historian's mind is to be courageous, serious and fearless for a historian gives his heart to time - otherwise he is not a historian. Death and Time reign in the world. You should not call them lords.. .2 But this "reign" of Time and Death can be overcome only by draining the cup of suffering to the lees gathering times in eternity.
S. S. Averintsev writes about his teacher A. F. Losev: "It seems that since Vasily Rozanov and Pavel Florensky there has not appeared anyone who dared speak about the subject matters, which are customary to call the abstract ones, with such ultimate frankness. Each word is thick and ponderable; each word has its scent and taste, and, by the way, it is a very strong prose not despite of but due to its angularity and roughness. It is difficult to forget such passages as the description of internal atmosphere around the New-European representation of Cosmos in "The Dialectics of Myth"; they sink into the mind and worries imagination. The emotional tone is apropos here for Losev's matter is history of philosophy not as a painless "filiation of ideas" but as a tragedy. His point is a tragic history of philosophy, not some other one"3. I would let me to give one of such passages about the tragedy of philosophy and philosopher here.
A. F. Losev writes in his "Essays on Ancient Symbolism and Mythology" (1930): "But now let us speak out the other idea - here it is about not the logical content of dialectics but about its extra-logical value. Suppose we have admitted the fact that its antinomics is logically justified. But is it justified in life or at least widely philosophically? What is the explanation of this laughing and behaving rather outrageously self-contradiction of being and everything thinkable? We should think here as follows. The strangeness and queerness of deductions of dialectics entirely depends on that we, who wish to deal with dialectics, indeed, have got into a very strange and extraordinary area. Such area is an area of pure reason. Look at the life. Where can you find pure reason, pure sense, and perfect consciousness here? Everything flies, changes, and becomes opaque, clarified and opaque again. A whole thought is permeated by casual sensations and images. Eidoses of things are so often beclouded by
various external additions. If it is not Plato's "Cave", anyway, it is not anything better in point of clarity and lucidity. Everything is fuzzy and turbid; everything yearns, suffers, and acts; everything is blind, aimless, and irresponsible. Certainly, life is also full of sense, meaning, clarity, light, and purpose. But, in general, being is an indissoluble mass of passions and reason, joys and pains, light and dark. But we have suddenly come to a want to become dialecticians. What does to be a dialectician mean? To be a dialectician means to see all the entirety of life as something undivided. To be a dialectician is to be able to derive every particular and hardly distinguishable moment from that entirety and to be able to bring it back to that entirety. To be a dialectician means to be able to see not only with eyes but with mind, to be pure in mind. Let dialectics also comprise everything out of reason. All the same, it comprises by reason in a mind and for a mind. But where and when do we use pure reason in our life? Where and when are we able to see? Where and when is our thought a pure mirror of being and its inner life pulse? It almost never occurs to us in our life, and we have suddenly come to a wish to become dialecticians. Hereupon, how can it be surprising that our findings in such an "unvital" sphere will appear to be strange, weird, and puzzling? Is not it puzzling to try to live in reason and to speak by reason? Is it not a tightrope-walking to balance in the height of pure reason trying to move away from the brink of abyss as far as possible? Yes, dialectics is puzzling because it is a mind, nous. Philosophy is an acrobatic art for one have to be an equilibrist in life in order to fence oneself off that very "life" and "reality" and in order to make one's thoughts pull together and live their own life. Thus, dialectics is eccentric not more than a philosopher nowadays (in Plato's time, too). And its conclusions are not stranger than a desire to live by one's reason in reason while
life rages and bears malice against every reason and meaning.
But dialectics becomes apprehensible in its antinomic substance. We could see that dialectical propositions are completely antinomic and self-contradictory. Why? Because we retreated from life experience and habits of everyday life and took exclusively ideas of reason. A purely idea of reason is to be contradictory, i.e. to sublate (Aufheben) itself, since we have already sublated it from life and being. It is like a creature able to live only in water, and when it is withdrawn out to the air, it pants and flutters in a desire to return to its home element as soon as possible. It is like a bird caught and put in a narrow cage. A creature born for freedom but put into a jail shivers, struggles and cannot wait until he is able to fly freely in the boundless sunny dome of the sky. And pure ideas of dialectics are those living creatures withdrawn from the element of free air and put into the cage of systematic differentiation. They cannot wait until the moment they are able to plunge into the ocean of life again and live in the absolute unity with it.
This is the vital nerve of dialectical contradictory nature - it lies in deficiency of life and abstractness of philosophy. But what should we do? Here is the sense and tragedy of a philosopher. A philosopher "loves wisdom" and wants to understand life. But life is not only understanding. Therefore, in order to understand life, i.e. as if in order to become closer to it, a philosopher has to go away from it at some distance, sometimes very far and sometimes he has to retreat from it at all. One cannot understand life without living and creating life, otherwise what should a philosopher understand? But one cannot understand life without retreating from it and retirement into eremitical "contemplation of ideas", otherwise when and how can one find time to understand life? This contradiction is an essence of a philosopher. And it is also his
tragedy. It becomes clear, profoundly clear the condition of thought when an affirmation is equal to a negation, for philosophical life is like that and the very life is like that. Certainly, this is a tragedy of culture in general for culture is, first of all, creation of understanding of life.
It is unnatural and awry to dwell in the sphere of abstract ideas and their dialectics, for life is not an idea and it is not only dialectics. But it cannot be helped. Of course, it would be better not to suffer and die. But what can we do?! If a human is destined to live like that so it could be a pure idea and think like that so it could be a completeness of every life aspiration, it cannot be helped. So let us not reproach dialectics because of philosophy of contradiction. In general, philosophy in its essence and life in its essence are like that"4.
4
We would make an inexcusable mistake if we thought that A. F. Losev, who wrote this about philosophy and a philosopher and about life and culture in such a way, made an exception for himself and did not consider his life to be a tragic one, and regarded himself as one of philosophers out of that tragedy of philosophy, the philosophers "who saw a joyful life and laughed at the very death". But the tragedy with all its possible breadth, and even universal breadth, always has some definite inevitability, vastness, and omnipotence of chance realized post factum as suddenness. Therefore every philosopher will always find some contradictions even in simply logical terms of mistakes, mess, and absurdity, etc. whether he realizes or does not realize the tragedy of being: he cannot evade inevitability and in awaiting suddenness he cannot be prepared for it and give a clearly logical and worthy answer. Otherwise it is not inevitability and suddenness and therefore life is not a tragedy at all. However if we have decided to push through into life, come from philosophy
to society and history with philosophy, reach a personality, such "contradictions" should also find social and historical explanation and should be absolutely solved in a progression of unbroken thought. But this is elementary.
However A. F. Losev's tragedy of his philosophical existence in its specific nature was formed not only as a process of various reactions to various influences of life, i.e. excess of pace of destructive influences over the pace of adequate reactions when life, as they call it, "has dabbed". A. F. Losev's tragedy is rather static, stiffened once and for all, combined with a full realization of a tragic personality unable to put up with such a life, an essentially invariable but essentially disgusting life.
This almost quarter-century public silence alone speaks about this constancy in life. And what about the manuscripts which were written in 1918 and could not find their publisher until the philosopher's end of life in May, 1988? And what about the Areopagite's corpus twice translated from Greek and twice lost for a Russian reader? And what about three library disasters happened to A. F. Losev? Twice the library was robbed and looted and once it was even entombed in the bottom of the crater from direct hit of a demolition bomb fallen on the house where A. F. Losev's apartment was. A. F. Losev wrote about his second disaster: "The last hope of return to scientific work has died, for who am I without the library? It would be similar as if Chaliapin lost his voice or Rachmaninoff were without his grand piano. What shall I do, a musician, who has lost his instrument, which can be restored by no means?"
But the most important feature of constancy and hard fixedness of life influences on A. F. Losev was that A. F. Losev had to make creation of understanding of life all alone in cultural vacuum. But this life, this physical life in about ninety-five years, is not like that it could allow A. F. Losev to
form his own school of philosophy. And in this case, this is obvious: the greater philosopher and the longer his life - the deeper and more acute its tragedy.
Yet A. F. Losev had disciples. But either his or their impossibility to speak aloud or to write in public excluded them from the diurnal consciousness of culture. And we do not have to mention the arrangements of life on reasonable basis and active participation in the raise of reason degree of actuality (one never can say that this degree is too high) in the scope corresponding to A. F. Losev's capabilities of mind.
Finally, here are these two senseless alternatives of being of mind emerged for A. F. Losev: either to fold his hands completely or to come to social consciousness in its inevitably transformed forms. A. F. Losev mind could not be inactive and it was also impossible for him to be indifferent to the society. So he consciously had to teeter on the brink of truth and fallacy since 1953 (the year of break of silence in public starting from 1930) until the end of his life. A. F. Losev decided on "deception exalting us" in full awareness of this deception and the fact that it does not exalt his own Losev's mind and personality, - on the contrary, it humiliates them. And afterwards there would certainly appear some "smart alecks" reproaching him for retreat from pure truth, pure mind and for other sins like these. Such pseudo-guardians of truth should be asked: what have they done? And what were they doing when A. F. Losev was bringing the truth in such inevitably distorted forms to the public?
Because there is merely no one who can be on a par with the author of eight-volume "The History of Classical Aesthetics" in Russian history of culture and philosophy. And that is true not just for the Russian antiquity studies but also for all the works in all fields and periods of spiritual culture.
5
For instance, refer to the works by such greatly authoritative historian of the Old Russian literature and culture as Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachov. Academician D. S. Likhachov is a head of the whole school in Russian cultural studies and history and criticism of literature. He is an author of lots of works and a founder of his own school in Russian studies. However all these could not serve as the base of the works even remotely similar to "The History of Ancient Aesthetics" by A. F. Losev in profoundness, detailed elaborations and global comprehension. But Losev had one and a half thousand years of tradition of antiquity studies which is not the same for history of Russian culture and literature. But we should not forget that A. F. Losev worked alone while academic institutes were not able to organize their potential for something similar to what one man was doing.
Meaning is not a function of time though it can be mixed with matter and thus it gets temporal being hence it has its history. Therefore one cannot say that detailed and fundamental, that is perfect works will appear by themselves after fifty or hundred years. Where from will these "works" appear without thinking and labour? In terms of resources, manpower, libraries and other things, the academic science was in a much better position than A. F. Losev. Nobody prevented it from making up for lost time and matching research traditions of antiquity studies as well as history of Russian culture according to the accumulated potential. But one has to condole with the academic science because it has lost socialist competition, the competition under socialism, to A. F. Losev. Undoubtedly, "The History of Classical Aesthetics" has enlarged the difference between meaning potential of antiquity studies and that one of history of Russian culture.
However it seems that I contradict myself -I demand impossible from the academic science
and try to compare what is impossible to be compared and then I lament that the comparison is not worth a row of pins. Still less I would like to reproach the academic science in general and one of its best, sagest, noblest, and most honorable representatives - D. S. Likhachov, in particular. Indeed, it is impossible to demand impossible things. But this shows (now it is a comparison again...) what A. F. Losev is capable of. This fetches out the dazzling light of the meaningful substance represented in his "The History of Ancient Aesthetics".
6
From this point of view, "The History of Classical Aesthetics", like all the other A. F. Losev's works published after 1953, most of all needs not lamentation or laugh, admiration or dislike (one cannot go without them but they should not be senseless and precede realization), but social and historical comprehension.
This work should be considered to be merely primary and elementary in historical and philosophical study even if there are various possible individually psychological and other difficulties ofjust comprehension ofwhat is written and difficulties of reflexive following the author's thought by a reader's one. Unfortunately, history of philosophy is often substituted by formation of some kind of synthesis from the elements of that comprehended thing, which becomes unique in its marketplace spontaneity and narrow-minded optionality. And then all these things are sent to a printing press. The subsequent comparison with an original is almost always not in favour of that so called research. Why should one write about Plato in obscure, approximate and rough was when we can publish Plato himself and read him directly?
But this means that a historical and philosophical research must not be limited by one or another summary of an original read, for
a summary is always poorer than the original epitomized. Why should we be content with the worst?
In a historical and philosophical research, though a reconstruction of meaning is indispensable, it shouldbe exactly a reconstruction, i.e. it should not be as direct and immediate as the very meaning under reconstruction. Therefore, a reconstruction is to define a heart of meaning of an original as well as methods of shift from this focus of meaning to its periphery, i.e. the methods of comprehension of that periphery by that meaning.
But a work of philosophy does not exist in vacuum. It is imprinted in the tradition of meaning, enveloped by that tradition, continues it and thus negates it in its former mode. Accordingly, a historian of philosophy should take pains of comprehension of interaction of the tradition of meaning and a work of philosophy under study.
As well, this tradition of meaning is not the ultimate reality on the ground of which one or other masterpieces of philosophy took root, grew, and flourished. Tradition is made by men and society existing within times. So we should take the context of the whole social and cultural actuality in which one or another spiritual tradition arises and exists.
We can keep to various views on the relation between spiritual tradition and social and historical actuality. For instance, we can think that one or the other of them is primary and determinative in that relation; one of them can be the part of the other and vice versa. But, perhaps, nowadays, at the end of the 20th century, it is impossible to think of them as absolutely autonomous, irrelative and never associated with each other. But if it is so, the features of influence of social and historical actuality on one or another work of philosophy are to be brought to light. According to A. F. Losev, social and historical explanation should be definitive explanation of a
work of philosophy. But then A. F. Losev himself deserves such explanation most of all.
Did critics of A. F. Losev muse upon the sources of his turn to Antiquity? Why does that person have to preach Plato, a thinker who lived twenty-four centuries ago, to venture on disguise in literature and nevertheless to risk his own well-being and life? Why should he get into trouble because of Plato? Well, let Plato endure troubles! Here is one of specific features of social and historical actuality which gave birth to A. F Losev and befell him. A. F. Losev, a son of his 20th century, turns to 5 century B. C. and pays his exploratory attention to Plato though he definitely knows about the future enmity of actuality to him, A. F. Losev, because of that Plato.
Therefore it is important to understand social and historical actuality in its contradiction: it needs comprehension of the previous ages which gives birth to the men who are willing to meet this need of actuality before the deed of self-sacrifice. And that actuality is willing to send the precious crystals of spirit under grindstone, which it has grown with such labours and dedication.
Thus, according to A. F. Losev's methodology, it will be right and adequate to study his creative life and personality as a specific phenomenon of social and historical actuality. And it is silly to reprove a person for one or other kind of mistakes. It is important to understand them as mistakes of the very actuality when a person making mistakes is a part of the whole in that actuality.
It is important to realize those mistakes as a consequence of inability of that actuality to contain really pure light of truth inside and thus content only with one or another cloudy and obscured view of that truth, "meonized eidos". And, by the way, it is also important to understand that A. F. Losev made certain efforts so that a thoughtful reader could find a way to the
full light and pure shine even in that meonized face. Deliberateness and contradictory character of many Losev's statements leave no doubt about entire and adequate Losev's awareness of what comes in a contradictory, cloudy, and deliberate form here.
7
Every person is given to us and important for us (as well as for himself) foremost because of his actuality, i.e. not because of his ruined opportunities and dreams that have not come true, but because of his opportunities and dreams that have come true. This is an old thought spoken out by N. A. Dobrolyubov in relation to works of literature: "The things that an author wanted to tell us are not as important to us as the things that have been brought out by him, even if they it was involuntary and as a consequence of a truthful representation of life facts"5.
But the emphases I would like to put on this problem are considerably different and even opposite to those ones of N. A. Dobrolyubov. N. A. Dobrolyubov grounds his right to judge about actuality on a work of literature without any particular reckoning of some subjective mood, desires, and motives of an author of a work of literature. If an artist is really great, he cannot help conveying actuality in its essence. And N. A. Dobrolyubov is still quite profound to deny author's "volitions" completely, and thus he comes to objective positions. But those "volitions" have their own importance, though secondary ones. N. A. Dobrolyubov orients himself according actuality as "life facts" and he judges about life and facts by a work of literature.
But I would like to turn backward - to judge an author's personality from a work of literature. And though such reorientation brings about some kind of increase of the significance of author's intentions, dreams, hopes, and so on, however, in this case, they are in the background. A work
of literature, a fact of literature is a result of a person's objectification. So we shall not repel a personality from an object, and, moreover, according to A. F. Losev, a personality is an identity and a synthesis of subject and object. And if a work of literature contains a sense of one or another fragment of actuality or the whole actuality, it means that a sense is to be involved in identification of a personality and be included in his entire identification.
Once I was bluntly amazed by ontological capacity and breadth of one short note by N.A. Berdyaev, who was not deep as a writer because of his unsystematic character of writing, and sometimes he was even didactic and banal, but, perhaps, he was with some spark of genius due to that unsystematic character of writing. Namely, once, it seems that it was in his "Self-cognition", Berdyaev quoted something from F. M. Dostoyevsky's "Demons" and added that despite the phrase belonged to Shigalev but still it did not matter. A reader may say: "What nonsense! How can one inscribe F. M. Dostoyevsky's thoughts in long-eared Shigalev's notebook?" What should we say to that? We should not identify Shigalev with Dostoyevsky but we should include Shigalev's thoughts and Shaiglevism into F. M. Dostoyevsky's world outlook.
And, perhaps, it is time to refuse from the ill positivistic manner to esteem only one or other abstract principles directly thrown out of actuality with its unscraped remnants for a world view. Who said that a world view must surely be abstract and theoretical one and have a formal record and any record at all? There is no such thing in life. The elements of a world view under investigation, which form that world view and mingles with each other, are badly perceived or are not realized by subjects of a world view; these elements may be brought to their pure essence on purpose of reasonable clarity. But, firstly, it is important to realize that
it is we who bring that world view to its most possible clarity, not a subject; secondly, when the most possible limit of clarity and pure bases of a world view are achieved, we should define what consequences of those bases are brought about by a subject of a world view and what area a subject could elicit with a part of light given to him according to the bases of his world outlook; videlicet, we should define how and to what extent pure ideas mingled with matter and what "things" have come from that mixing and what matter has been transformed and converted per sample of those ideas.
Hence, it appears that if an author's subject were not completely equal to one or another outlying object and if an author's personality did not go beyond such objectivity which makes an author's body given by Mother Nature, i.e. by father and mother, no writer's work as well, as any other kind of work, would be possible to accomplish.
N. V. Gogol, that very genius and all-time N. V. Gogol, declared very explicitly that he could find every vice of his characters in his own soul. For vice depiction requires not only an abstract ability of abstract and notional reflection. An artist needs to feel and pass through the singularity of a depicted thing and to give it, at least, specific touch of life. Though here the artistic quality of a work of art appears to be problematic, and the way of artist's attitude to a depicted thing in moral terms is quite a different question; that is a question of author's conscience which is, by the way, alive and it is not a calculating machine. But it is clear that in order to represent some filth and outrage truly, even though to condemn and defeat those filth and outrage, it is absolutely necessary to gaze into them, to open one's mind and soul for them and to let filth and outrage in oneself.
And here we should raise a question about specificity of one or another person's world
outlook. Why did F.M. Dostoyevsky exactly produce the consequences out of the bases of his world view causing the prototypes of men killing old women and to prototypes like Pyotr Verkhovensky, the Stavrogins, Versilov, Myshkin or the Karamazovs? Why did the principles of his world outlook in interaction with the actuality lead to such results? While L. N. Tolstoy writing at the same time the results of interaction of world outlook bases with actuality were considerably different.
Apparently, every ordinary man as a man of the largest caliber, a genius, is ontologically limited both in his intellection and in his practical activities (in a less degree - in his caprices and claims, although, in the long run it is not without them): he is able to be neither the abstract mind nor the absolute doer. The nature of initial and primary premises in a personality structure and the kind of field it could turn to the consequences of intellective and subject-practical terms characterizes it as a specific and distinctive from other personalities.
8
Now we will try to approach closer to A. F. Losev. In his time, too, many people did many things: dug deep to the most useful minerals, bandaged the paws of wounded dogs, drank "the bitter", wrote greeting cards, and rode
home-made scooters devised of planks, nails, and big ball-bearings. Well, we can say: they were alive!..
It is obvious that even if A. F. Losev ever bandaged dog's paws and even if he wrote greeting cards to them - those affairs were not of the principal kind determining his life and giving meaning and sense to it. The main thing determining A. F. Losev's life should be sought in his works, for they most essentially filled his life. Herewith, it is not so important how A. F. Losev wanted to appear and speak out as how he has spoken out. It is not so important that because of some reasons, A. F. Losev failed to accomplish the conceived things but the most important thing is what has been done and created by him, though it might be without any special intention to create or it was a respond to very unpleasant and even destructive impact from the outside.
Works of a man or any other field of substantial appearances of a personality to the world and people is an essence and the ultimate reality of a person. If a person has a field of being most adequate to that person, we can ascend or descend to that field through that field of reality only, not through another. There is merely no any other field, and we can judge the personality only by his displays, but to judge essentially means to judge from essential manifestations which are to be somehow set apart from all others.
By H. Heine („Zur Lazarus"). By Vl. S. Soloviyov.
Averintsev, S. S. In Memory of Teacher. - Context - 1990. Moscow, 1990. - P. 4.
Losev, A. F. Essays on Ancient Symbolism and Mythology. - Vol. 1. - Moscow, 1930. - Pp. 539-541.
Dobrolyubov, N. A. When Will a True Day Come? ("On the Eve", I. Turgenev's novel "The Russian Herald", №1, 1860.) -
Dobrolyubov, N. A. Works (in 9 volumes). - Vol. 6. - Moscow, 1963. - P. 97.
References
1. Averintsev, S. S. In Memory of Teacher. Context 1990. Moscow, 1990.
2. Around Losev: Three philosophical and practical meetings.
3. Gogotishvili, L. A. Early Losev. Questions of Philosophy, № 7, 1989.
4. Dobrolyubov, N. A. When Will a True Day Come? ("On the Eve", I. Turgenev's novel "The Russian Herald", № 1, 1860.) Dobrolyubov, N.A. Works (in 9 volumes). Vol. 6. Moscow, 1963.
5. Erofeev, V. The Last Classical Thinker. Losev A. F. A Passion for Dialectics: Philosopher's Contemplation on Literature. Moscow, 1990.
6. Losev, A. F. Vladimir Solovyov. Moscow, 1983.
7. Losev A. F. One of the Greatest Pleasures in Life... Bibliophile's Almanac. Issue № 14. Moscow, 1983. P. 28.
8. Losev, A. F. Essays on Ancient Symbolism and Mythology. Vol. 1. Moscow, 1930. Pp. 539541.
9. Proclus. Elements of Theology. Losev A. F. The History of Ancient Aesthetics. Vol. 3: High Classical Period. Moscow, 1974.
10. Rostovtsev, Y. A. Midnight Vigils. Around Losev: Three philosophical and practical meetings.
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12. Shpet G. G. An Essay on Development of Russian Philosophy. Part 1. Moscow, 1990.
Соперник времени:
в поисках специфики личности А.Ф. Лосева
М.А. Бутин
Сибирский федеральный университет Россия 660041, Красноярск, пр. Свободный, 79
В статье теоретически выстраивается структура личности русского философа Алексея Фёдоровича Лосева. Осуществлена попытка применить лосевские наработки по теории личности и мифу к самому автору этих теорий и критически осмыслить, насколько соответствует реальная личность её собственным исследованиям о личности.
Ключевые слова: русская философия, А.Ф. Лосев, Платон, личность, лик, субъект, объект, интеллигенция, эйдос, ум, дух, материя, тело, миф, чудо.
