Chapter I. Love: essence and manifestation
Love Russian-style
In Russia the topic of love has been touched upon, in one way or another, by all philosophers and writers of importance; however, as a system of philosophical views it became most popular at the boundary of the 19th-20th centuries. The way I see it, two factors played a decisive role here. The first factor – the external one – had to do with the fact that in Europe by the late 19th century a conception of love became established among philosophers and psychologists that trumpeted the Eros love, devoid of divine spirituality and other such goodness. This approach was already laid out by S. Kierkegaard and A. Schopenhauer, but it was later exacerbated by F. Nietzsche, N. Hartmann, S. Freud and O. Weininger. Russian philosophers joined ranks in countervailing them from the position of opponents of “sexual love” as they championed a religious, spiritual understanding of love. The second factor, the internal one, was the social situation in Russia, where in practice it was precisely the Western philosophers’ ideas that triumphed in the form of the ruling class’ “sexual psychopathy”, and Russia’s thinkers could not put up with this. Their ideas about love were surprisingly identical to those of 18th-century French philosophers, and even more so to the ideas contained in the Bible.
In a special chapter titled The Philosophy of Love in Russia, the Russian philosopher V. P. Shestakov examines in detail the different views on this topic, singling out two main schools of thought: the philosophical-platonic and the Orthodox-theological. The first school was developed by V. Solovyov, N. Berdyayev, L. Karsavin, Z. Gippius, B. Vysheslavtsev, etc. The second one is linked to the names of P. Florensky, S. Bulgakov, N. Lossky, I. Ilyin.[1] My task here does not include a historiographic review of Russian philosophers’ views on life (this was done by Shestakov himself), therefore I will limit myself to just two names: V. Solovyov and N. Berdyayev, especially since their ideas have much in common, albeit with minor nuances, with the ideas of the other above-mentioned philosophers whom I would all place (unlike Shestakov) in one school: the philosophical-theological. There is no great difference between all of them, since all of them ultimately proceed from God.
Vladimir Solovyov. The “Russian” view on love was presented in concentrated form by the major Russian philosopher-theologian Vladimir Solovyov in a special work titled The meaning of Love (1892), which another philosopher, Nikolai Berdyayev, found comparable to Plato’s Symposium in depth. However, having reflected in his work “the current moment,” Solovyov failed (or perhaps he set no such task for himself) to arrive at an ontological examination of the concept of love, and ultimately what he did was repeat the conclusions of medieval philosophers.
This work gives the impression that the impetus for writing it was provided by German philosophers (Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Walter, etc.), who, according to Solovyov, glorified sexual love as the necessary condition for proliferation of mankind.
Solovyov’s initial methodological mistake is this: he constantly compares man to animal, ascribing to the latter not only life, but also sexual love. He writes: “Both in animals and humans, sexual love is the highest flowering of individual live.”[2] This is the same as saying:
the sexual love of atoms that joins them together in molecules is the highest flowering of their individual lives. By the way, even today there are some “thinkers” around who insist on this kind of nonsense.[3] Ah well, to the God with them. Solovyov’s main point is something else: “So then, sexual love and propagation of the species are found to be in inverse ratio to each other. The more powerful the one is, the weaker is the other.” (21) As if in support of this postulate, Solovyov offers an example showing that a man possessing sexual love in the strongest form can be totally excluded from the propagation process. He goes on to write that animals, of course, don’t have sexual love, thus contradicting his own previous statement; this is why they propagate so strongly. In actual fact, animals propagate only as “strongly” as allowed by their environment and their ability to adapt to it – an old truth described by biologists before Solovyov wrote his work. As for humans, they propagated very poorly precisely during the times when they did not have “sexual love” (in the eras of savagery and barbarianism), but once this kind of love emerged, they started propagating catastrophically strongly. Perhaps the relevant statistical data on this topic were not available in Solovyov’s time. Still, even without such data the conclusion should be obvious, if only based on the growth of the population of Europe, and sufficient to realize the absurdity of Solovyov’s claim.
Solovyov then comes down hard on the nonsensical claim by Walter (a German psychologist) that great people are fruits of strong mutual love. This obvious silliness was for some reason taken very seriously by the Russian philosopher. He insists on proving: “A most powerful love is very frequently unshared and produces not a great posterity, but no posterity whatsoever.” (26) After all, “Singularly powerful love is for the most part unfortunate, and unfortunate love quite often leads to suicide in one form or another.” (Ibid.) Perhaps Solovyov was remembering the sad story of Romeo and Juliet, or more likely Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, but one can remind some happy examples which are likewise plentiful both in life and in books. The problem is, all this has nothing to do with the problem tackled by Solovyov, since a) he failed to define love in general; b) he failed to determine how its strength is measured; c) it is unclear which statistical data he relied on.
Despite all this, he does advance three fundamental postulates: strong love is inseparable; when it is mutual, strong passion leads to a tragic end without producing progeny; happy love, when it is very strong, likewise proves ordinarily fruitless. (29)
His conclusion: “To regard the meaning of sexual love as an expedient for the procreation of children means to recognize this meaning only where such love itself does not exist at all, and where it does exist, it means taking from it any meaning and any justification.” (Ibid.) As for all the rest, they must make this conclusion for themselves: if I came to love someone, God forbid, and produced children, this means that in actual fact I have no life at all, i.e. I am a simple breeder, like animals. Hence the conclusion: the choice is either love or children – there is no third way. A truly unusual conclusion!
The essence of love, according to Solovyov, consists not in children, nor in the good of the lovers, but rather in the eradication of the egoism that is inherent to mankind. He writes: “The meaning of human love, speaking generally, is the justification, and salvation of individuality through the sacrifice of egoism.” (42)
So, an important category is emerging: individuality, personality. This idea is further developed in the following fashion: the meaning of sensual love consists in the assertion both of one’s own individuality and “the other individuality.” Family is understood to be an “exclusive attachment” between persons of different sexes, and it has nothing to do with love. Such is Solovyov’s frame of mind. The question, then, is: how does “human love” overcome man’s egoism, transforming him into a personality, an individuality? Solovyov provides no answer. Nonetheless, his idea is understandable: in the conditions of Tsarist Russia, when the personality was of no importance whatsoever, it was imperative to constantly promote the significance of man precisely as a personality.
It is another matter that Solovyov was mistaken not only in his methodology, but also in his understanding of love-personality, which subsequently led him to more ridiculous conclusions. He raises, on one hand, the arch-important topic of the species and the individual, and on the other hand, the topic of death/immortality of the individual/man. He says that for as long as “the tyranny of the species over the specimen” is triumphant, the specimen serves as a means of continuation of the species. This, in his opinion, is naturally bad. It is particularly easy to trace in the lowest rungs of the organic world. However, Solovyov claims that nature itself at higher stages of its development weakens this law; “in the biological process nature is stirring ever more and more to limit the law of death.” (72) If this is so, shouldn’t man in the course of the historical process repeal this law altogether? (ibid.)
One gets the impression that this philosopher was unfamiliar not only with contemporary research in the area of evolution theory, but also with the second law of thermodynamics (the law of entropy growth) that was widely discussed in all scientific circles during the second half of the 19th century. Solovyov clearly did not understand that the fundamental laws of nature cannot be repealed in principle; they can only be taken into consideration and used in man’s interests, inasmuch as possible. His intention to abolish death amounts to an intention to abolish life, for one does not exist without the other. These are elementary things thoroughly explained by Hegel in his time, but Solovyov apparently paid no attention to Hegel or to any of the other dialecticians. He writes: “Death, speaking generally, is the disintegration of a being, the falling apart of its constituent factors.” (73) Let’s suppose this statement is accurate. But what follows is ridiculous. Solovyov asserts that “it is the separation of the sexes—not eliminated by their external and transient union in the act of generation - it is this separation between male and female elements of the human being which is always in itself a state of disintegration, and the beginning of death.” (ibid.)
Solovyov fails to notice that in order for this “disintegration” to take place, something must first become integrated (joined together); in order for death to occur, something must be born first, i.e. be alive. However, he is only interested in immortality. “Only the human being in his entirety can be immortal,” – asserts the Russian philosopher. A “whole human being” cannot be made through physiological joining, therefore immortality is unattainable. Neither is the family of any help in this matter, writes the philosopher. One need not have the gift of clairvoyance to guess where Solovyov is leading: to God, of course. It is obvious: “That ideal unity towards which our world is aspiring, and which constitutes the end of the cosmic and historical process, cannot be only someone’s subjective understanding (for whose understanding is it then?); truly it is like the external object of Divine love, like his eternal other.” (91)
Today’s Russian cosmists understandably venerate Vladimir Solovyov, not bothering for some reason with such simple questions as: to what purpose does our world aspire to some sort of “ideal unity”? Why is it - this world - the goal of the cosmic and the historic process? What does all this have to do with science? And how in the world is it possible to achieve unity through such postulates as: “The heavenly object of our love is only one, always and for all humans one and the same - the eternal Divine Femininity.” (93) This can be interpreted thusly: God is a woman, we are her children, and in order to achieve unity, we must all turn into women, especially since some men are already actively working on it. Then perhaps we would manage to achieve immortality. By the way, some sort of “scientist” has forecast already that a thousand, or maybe two thousand, years from now only women will be left on Earth.
It is perfectly obvious that Solovyov’s entire conception of love has not an ounce of scientific content, yet it is important nonetheless as a protest of sorts against the love/marriage relations in Russia in the late 19th century. By the way, these same ideas – the condemnation of “sexual carnal love” – were reflected a little earlier in artistic form in Leo Tolstoy’s stories The Death of Ivan Ilyitch and especially in The Kreutzer Sonata.
This sort of criticism crossed over into the 20th century, as evidenced by the views on love held by another Russian philosopher: N. A. Berdyayev.
N. Berdyayev. Nikolai Berdyayev touches on the topic of love in many works, in particular in Letter to the Future Wife of L. Yu. Rapp (1903), the article Metaphysics of Gender and Love (1907), the books The Meaning of Creativity (1916) and Self-knowledge (1949). I will base my analysis on the last two works.[4]
It should be stressed right away that Berdyayev examines love only in the interrelations between man and woman, not as a universal concept; this excuses him from “philosophy”. On this topic he holds forth more like a sociologist who perceives negatively the surrounding bourgeois world, where love is the sole bright spot.
Berdyayev points out with perfect justification that in the human being’s sexual act there is nothing individual, no personality, and this draws him close to the entire animal world. What separates him from that world is love, which is “personal, individual, directed at the one-and-only, unique, irreplaceable person. … Love is always related to the unitary, not the universal” (Self-knowledge, 75-76).
We can see here the idea that the choice of the object of love is not accidental. Embedded in this directedness at the “one-and-only” is a certain predetermination, an image formed in advance that is irreplaceable and unique. “Real love, when the meeting is not accidental, is precisely the meeting of the promised husband and the promised wife” (ibid., 76). This is a very fortunate choice of words: promised husband, promised wife. I don’t know the etymology of the Russian word “suzhenyi”, but it seems to me that it should have originated from the word “sud’ba” (destiny), i.e. he or she is the predestinated one. Berdyayev doesn’t explain why it happens this way. It will be done instead of him in the appropriate place.
The main pathos of Berdyayev’s view of love consists in its incompatibility with family. To him, family is “the conservative force in the world”, since family is “the bourgeoisness of ‘this world’”; it is subject to the laws of society, connected to economy; a system of domination and subordination rules inside it (The Meaning of Creativity, 423-4). All “socialization of love means its suppression.” Therefore “Society ejects love. One who loves in the highest sense of the word is an enemy of society.” (Self-knowledge, 77)
Berdyayev’s reasons for this approach are the same as those of Tolstoy and Solovyov: the quality of the society itself in Russia in their time, even though Berdyayev generalizes and extends his appraisal to all of Europe. It is no accident, he writes, that the world literature always defended and glorified “non-socialized” love. “Non-institutionalized” would be a more correct expression. Of course, on the level of concrete reality (he wrote of bourgeois reality) Berdyayev is correct. However, as a philosopher he should have first sorted out “the theory” (as Hegel did in his time) and then linked it to the concrete practice. The “practice,” though, really was horrible. Berdyayev writes that the family organization is “the grave of love,” that “love is bound more closely, intimately, deeply to death than to birth, and this bond, guessed at by poets of love, is the surety of its eternity. Deep is the oppositeness of love and childbirth. In the act of childbirth love falls apart, everything personal in love dies, a different kind of love triumphs. The seed of love’s decay is inherent already in the sexual act.” (The Meaning of Creativity, 427)
One may ask: who needs this kind of love that leads you to death, and the entire human race in the bargain? Man already has plenty of mortal dangers in the course of his life. Why multiply them through love? Berdyayev gives no answer, of course. Instead, mysticism emerges in his writings.
Berdyayev is apparently the only one among philosophers who contraposed family to marriage, which turns out to be the concentration of love. We read: “The sacrament of marriage is not family, it is not the natural sacrament of childbirth and continuation of species; the sacrament of marriage is the sacrament of joining together in love. Love alone is the sacred sacrament. The sacrament of love is above the law and beyond the law; contained in it is the exit from the species and species’ necessity, in it is beginning of the transformation of nature. Love is not obedience, it is not the carrying of hardships and the burden of “the world”, but rather it is creative daring.” (The Meaning of Creativity, 426)
It follows from this passage that marriage can exist without family, since family is an economic cell, and it is only “indirectly” related to sex. Marriage, accordingly, is a spiritual cell, the only kind in which love can dwell. Considering that marriage as an institution of consolidation of family evolved historically later than the family, even in its monogamous form, it then follows from Berdyayev’s logic that prior to the emergence of marriage love did not exist. It is unclear then why Berdyayev had such a high opinion of Plato’s Symposium, which speaks of nothing but love, although it will become clear a little later. Nonetheless, what is a sacrament? A sacrament is something that is not understood, not known. But what does this have to do with marriage? Berdyayev did not bother to explain why family in the bourgeois state is bad, while marriage is good. Apparently his reasoning is that marriage is outside the boundaries of society – in the heavens, so to say.
From the ethical perspective, one can agree with Berdyayev’s reasoning about divorce. His formulation of the issue itself is interesting here. “The real issue is not the right to divorce, which of course must be recognized, but rather the obligation of divorce when love is over. Continuation of marriage when love is gone is immoral; only love justifies everything, love-Eros and love-pity.” (Self-knowledge, 78) This moral imperative is perfectly justified: when love ends, divorce is not just desirable, but mandatory.
However, having raised the same issue as Solovyov: species – individual – immortality, he repeats Solovyov’s silly pronouncements. He writes: “Sex belongs to the life of the species. Love, on the other hand, belongs to the life of the personality. The prospects of species immortality and personal immortality are opposites” (ibid., 80).
Like Solovyov, Berdyayev failed to figure out the interrelations of sex, love and immortality. Come on, this is elementary: there can be no individual immortality without the species, same as there can be no species immortality without the individual. This follows not just from formal logic, but from the entire history of the organic world’s development, from the regularities of interrelations between philogenesis and ontogenesis that were discovered long before Berdyayev wrote the work quoted here.
Berdyayev’s concluding phrases about love are noteworthy: “It always seemed strange to me when people speak of joys of love. It would be more natural, taking a deeper view of life, to speak of the tragedy of love and the sadness of love. Whenever I saw a happy loving couple, I experienced a deathly sadness. Love, in essence, does not know fulfilled hopes. There are instances of relatively happy family life, but it is a happy mundaneness.” (Self-knowledge, 81-2)
Such was the state of Russian society in the early 20th century, when love did not cause joy, but rather turned into tragedy. Still, there are people around who keep telling tall tales of the great “silver age” of Russia, grieving the demise of Tsarist Russia.
Is there any silver lining at all to Berdyayev’s view of love? It turns out that yes, there is, and, naturally, its beauty is divine. Berdyayev picked up Plato’s joke-legend of androgyny[5] and reproduced it in full earnestness in the following passage: “Androgyny is the final merging of the male and the female in the highest Godlike being, the final triumph over decay and strife, the restoration of God’s image in man. Love is the return to man of the lost maiden – Sophia. Androgyny is the solution of the mystery that in Christ – the Absolute Man – there was no visible sex life, for in His face there was none of that decay which produces our earthly sex life. Through love the alienated female nature reunites with the male nature, the integral image of man is restored.” (The Meaning of Creativity, 436)
This is why he valued so highly Plato’s Symposium. Theology and mysticism prevailed over philosophy in his work; that is just so Russian.
* * *
I discovered, to my surprise, that in contemporary Russia considerable attention is devoted to the topic of love, as evidenced by a large number of publications. The history of philosophy of love is especially well represented, for example in the works of R. G. Apresian, the already-mentioned V. P. Shestakov and a number of other authors. Regrettably, I did not get a chance to read these works (except for two works by Shestakov). I had to content myself with reading just some fragments available in the Internet. It was quite sufficient to satisfy myself that their authors did not go far in their mindset from Solovyov and Berdyayev. Here are three examples to confirm it:
A fragment from a work by S. A. Kamionsky contains this passage: “Amazing! How does love open the eyes, how does it enable man to elevate himself to what is namely human, and turns out to be… Divine! Indeed, in the beloved one sees the image of Christ, while uncovering in oneself the aspiration to become the savior of all mankind!”[6] Exclamation signs throughout, and Christ crops up once again.
Another “innovator”, A.V. Lukianov, a philosopher from Ufa, writes: “Love comes to the rescue; it is, in my understanding, a universal cosmic potency that enables thought to overcome the burdensome dominion of being and thus to return again to the state of ringing freedom, or creative Eros. Love, in other words, is the premise for the spiritual cosmic force to fly apart again. Or one can put it this way: it is precisely love that enables the Universe to start its new revolution, inaugurate a new eon, to prevent time from being the time of this world alone.”[7]
This sort of delirium, consisting of words devoid of conceptual essence, is reproduced in a multitude of works by contemporary Russian “scholars” who are crazy about cosmism. Cosmism has become almost a synonym for Russism. Even Shestakov, whose works really do have scientific value, is not immune to it. In the beginning of this chapter, I quoted Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in connection with his conception of “thinking electrons.” The French thinker, too, writes of cosmic love; he was led to it by his desire to inspire mankind, and he did manage to inspire some people. Shestakov writes: “It seems that this conception is a beautiful justification of the many-centuries-old tradition of philosophical neo-Platonism, which always taught about universal, cosmic love. The idea of the cosmic origin of love is perhaps no less realistic than the theory of life originating from outer space.”[8]
While the theory of life’s origin in the cosmos (using a specific understanding of “life”, to be sure) does have the right to exist, despite the ultra-miniscule probability of it being correct, the idea of the cosmic origin of life can only be championed if one rejects all of science created by mankind. One gets the impression that this is precisely what the ever-growing galaxy of Russian cosmists is busying themselves with. They are clearly mixed up as to which way is forward and which way is backward.
On the other hand, the similarity of contemporary Russian philosophers’ views on love to those held by Solovyov, Berdyayev and other Russian philosophers of the early 20th century bears evidence that the capitalist societies of Russia then and Russia today are in essence no different at all. They are hostile to family, hostile to love; they are in principle anti-human. All that’s left is to set hope on God, on heaven, on the cosmos.
[1] Shestakov. Eschatology and Utopia, 73.
[2] Solovyev. The Meaning of Love, 35.
[3] By the way, the groundlessness of the idea of “animal love” is proven scientifically in the excellent work by the Bulgarian philosopher Kirill Vasilev, in the chapter titled “Do animals love?”. See: Vasilev, Love, 51-67. His book is deserving of more detailed analysis, but, unfortunately, I came across is just as I was about to submit this manuscript to the publisher.
[4] Berdyayev. The Philosophy of Freedom. The Meaning of Creativity; Self-knowledge.
[5] It is known that according to one of Plato’s legends, once upon a time men and women comprised one whole and were called androgynes (in Greek: andr – man, husband; gyne – wife, woman). Zeus split them all in halves, and ever since every half is searching for its other half in order to be joined together in love.
[6] Kamionsky. On Essence of Love (from the book "Philosophy of love"). – Internet.
[7] Lukianov. The Idea of Metacriticism of “Pure” Love.
[8] Shestakov. Eros and Culture.
On Love, Family, and the State
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)