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111 Chapter Seven Antinomic Truth (Istina) THE PRINCIPLE OF CONTRADICTION IN RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT The preceding chapters have continually focused on various opposites: good and evil, different types of beauty and various types of truth. This chapter addresses Dostoevsky’s treatment of opposite logical arguments (contradictions ) and places it into a broader intellectual context.1 The formal systematization of relations between opposite elements found its expression in Aristotelian logic, which remained dominant in Western thought for almost two millennia.2 This logic is based on the four laws necessary to avoid contradictions in judgments: the law of identity, the law of noncontradiction, the law of the excluded middle, and the law of sufficient reason. The first three laws of Aristotelian logic constitute the basics of the Western theory of oppositions. According to the law of identity, which is expressed by the formula A = A, the subject of our judgment must be identical to itself and have only one identity. The law of noncontradiction requires that one and the same judgment cannot be simultaneously affirmative and negative, true and false. This law is expressed by the formula A cannot be equal to non-A. According to the principle of the excluded middle, one has either “A” or “not A”; there is no third possibility. Aristotle’s formula and his defense of the law of noncontradiction represent his polemic against the pre-Socratics3 and account for his reputation as the founder of modern science and of scientific philosophy.4 Since his time, science has considered contradictions as obstacles to truth (istina, as described in the previous chapter). Dialecticians, however, did not perceive contradictions as an obstruction. They have found many means for resolving contradictions, of which the Hegelian dialectical “overcoming”/ “out-up lifting ” (German, Aufhebung) is only one possibility. In the introduction, I mentioned Heraclitus’s Logos, the ancient Chinese Tao, and Nicholas of Cusa’s Chapter Seven 112 coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum), all of which deal with antinomies.5 We recall that in Greek, antinomiva is a contradiction between two statements, each of which is reasonable, valid, and legitimate. In Russia, the theory of antinomies was developed by the thinkers of the early twentiethcentury Russian religious renaissance: Sergei Askoldov, Nicholas Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky, George Florovsky, Semyon Frank, Vladimir Lossky, and Evgeny Trubetskoy. Their philosophical views were formed on the one hand by Eastern Orthodox patristics and on the other by the legacy of Dostoevsky, on whose work many of them commented extensively. As noted in the introduction, they were the first to notice that Dostoevsky’s world is full of paradoxes and antinomies. The ideas, expressed by Dostoevsky in literary form in his novels, received philosophical substantiation in their writings. These thinkers were also well read in Western philosophy, especially in German, and knew Kant and Hegel well. Pavel Florensky was the first to draw attention to Kant’s theory of antinomies . In his lecture “Immanuel Kant’s Cosmological Antinomies,” delivered in 1908 and published a year later in Bogoslovskii vestnik (Theological Messenger), Florensky provides an account of his understanding of Kantian antinomies, as well as a criticism of Kant’s approach.6 In Florensky’s view, the very idea of the possibility of antinomies of reason is one of the most fruitful of Kant’s ideas. But in Kant’s presentation of the proofs of the four antinomies he finds a “great number of omissions, lapses, and even real mistakes .”7 In his monumental work The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (1914), Florensky channels Kant’s ideas in a different direction. An accomplished theologian and mathematician, Florensky does not draw a firm line between reason and faith. He claims that antinomies are inherent not so much in the dichotomy of reason and faith but in reason itself. Florensky refutes the principle of self-identity—which lies at the root of Aristotelian logic and Kantian proofs—as a “tautological formula,” a “lifeless, thoughtless, and therefore meaningless equality,” a “completely empty schema of self-affirmation,” and the “blind force of stagnation and self-imprisonment.”8 Instead of the law of self-identity, he advocates the principle of “contradiction” as a fundamental property of truth (istina). In chapter 7 of The Pillar, titled “Contradiction,” Florensky asserts: “A rational formula can be above the attacks of life if and only if it gathers all of life into itself, with all of life’s diversity and all of its present and possible future contradictions,” “if and only if it foresees, so...

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