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D,
Here’s a bit from Florensky. You have to get the wider context, but I hope you enjoy it.
I love what he does (or tries to do) with the principle of identity (arguing that its intelligibility requires a corresponding intelligence or personal subject-in-relation) and also how he explains the need for a third element in relations to preclude assimilation of diversities into one undifferentiated whole. I thought it was one weakness of Greg’s thesis that he argued the necessary relationality of reality can be maintained with just ‘two’ subjects. Trinitarians are committed to arguing that no genuine relationality in the world can obtain between two absolute subjects. In truth, Greg’s thesis doesn’t work. The fuller truth would reveal the necessity of three.
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3. The Trinitiarian Relation
Returning to Florensky’s basic argument, a question immediately arises. Just what is Florensky driving at in his last few pages of his letter on doubt, and where is he leading us? Without explicitly labeling his enterprise as such, to our mind, it would appear that Florensky is doing no more than mappying the way to a heuristic solution to the problem of truth and the foundations of certitude. In other words, he seems to be attempting to fashion a feasible solution to his stated problem by trying to determine antecedently what an adequate solution would have to entail in order for it to be both cogent and operative. Florensky states that a valid solution to the problem of truth and its concomitant problem, that of certitude, must account for all the foundations necessary to occasion, at once, full and transparent immediacy and absolute and necessary rationality, that is, to entail the full intelligibility of rational, discursive intuition. In negative terms, this solution must be able to avoid the contrary pitfalls of blind immediacy and empty possibility.
Specifically, Florensky inquires what could possibly be the “finite synthesis of infinity, actuated independently of us,” that could found the rational immediacy necessary for apodictic truth. His answer is clear and readily forthcoming. He avers: Only a Self-Proving and Self-Authenticating Subject can sufficiently fulfill all the necessary conditions needed for this synthesis.
Unfortunately, however, our problems do not end here, as a new problematical issue immediately presents itself to us. If we accept this Self-Proving Subject as the apparent solution to the dual problem of truth and certitude, and embrace it as a “revelation,” to use Florensky’s exact word, how can we do so without clearly violating the first principle of all thought and being, the principle of identity or non-contradiction? How can we affirm as obtaining in this Subject the “infiniteness of the series of founded judgments, systhesized into finite intuition,” and still maintain coherency? In forthright fashion Florensky admits this difficulty, but immediately places it in the perspective of eternity, where all apparent contradictions find their resolution and all opposites coincide. Indeed, it is in the metalogical order of eternity that Florensky tries to find a new foundation for the principle of identity which will allow us to reach that level—even if necessarily inadequate and partial—of insight from where we can legitimately conclude to an Intelligible Unity at the base of the manifest multiplicity found in the universe. In his reflections he clearly departs from and returns to philosophy’s first problem, the question of the One and the Many, but in the process ventures a striking restatement of the problematic in light of man’s disconsolate dissatisfaction before doubt and his equally impellent quest for abiding truth and absolute certainty.
3.1 New Foundations for the Principle of Identity.
Florensky maintains that the principle of identity as traditionally formulated has been given an inferior, rationalistic foundation that needs to be supplanted by a new superior formulation, or at least a more adequate justification, one more truly in accord with the demands of the mind. The common explanation of the principle which states “A is A” is, according to Florensky, “blind in its immediateness.” Its basis lies in exclusion alone. It holds that “A is A,” merely because it absolutely excludes all other entities from itself. As such, Florensky insists, it is “dead as a fact.” If, on the other hand, we are to find a better warrant for its exercise, we must somehow construe it as living act. In this perspective, “A is A” because it affirms itself as non-A, that is, through the dynamic adoption and assimilation of all other than itself.
When Florensky opens his discussion of the principle of identity with the simple and seemingly innocuous question: “How is it possible that every A is A?” one would hardly expect that in a few short verses he would be articulating one of his most penetrating and truly radical philosophical discoveries. Indeed, Florensky’s uncanny insight comes so fast and is so limpidly expressed that many, unless they are truly attentive, may pass it by without notice, not at all attributing any special significance to it. Few may have the sufficient perspicacity to grasp that in the very foundation of the question of how “A is A” possible lies its thought-reverberating answer.
Just to ask this question appears to undermine the principle of identity, because it carries the necessary implication that the principle of identity cannot stand by itself, that is needs the principle of sufficient reason for its support and ultimate justification. More simply expressed, “A is A,” Florensky affirms, only because “A is also non-A,” this other than “A” being the crypto-dynamism and latent sustenance of “A,” that is, the radical condition of the possibility of the affirmation of “A’s” existence. The principle of identity alone in sublime isolation indicates only the surface and external face of being. To know the hidden depths of being, on the other hand, means to activate the principle of sufficient reason, which states that every being has its sufficient reason, and which provides the necessary mechanism for fathoming these reasons. The problematic thus stated, what we actually find here is the intuition-discursion synergy revisited. Reechoing his thoughts concerning the dialectical process which brings us to truth, Florensky writes: “Blind in its givenness, the law of identity can be intelligible in its createdness, in its eternal being-createdness; carnal, dead and deadening in its static-ness, it can be spiritual, alive and life-creating in its dynamic-ness. Contrasted, there, are the principle of identity viewed exclusively from the formal point of view, evincing only an empty and lifeless self-identity, and the same principle taken as a real self-identity, full of content and life, as it were “eternally denying itself and in its very self-abnegation eternally receiving itself.” The profound point Florensky is trying to make is that nothing can stand by itself and be totally independent from the rest of being. Truly to understand a being means to delve into its ground of being.
The principle of identity by itself, that is, considered in abstraction from the principle of sufficient reason, is nothing more than an articulation of the transcendental property of the oneness of being at the level of principle. It says that all being is one with itself. No being can be and not be itself. If it were not itself, it would not be; it would be nothing. But insofar as it is, it is undivided in itself, or, in other words, is simply one. Every “A” not only is “A” but is necessarily “A.” [Tom: he misplaces the ‘necessity’ here, but nevermind that. What he means is clear enough.] It is merely this insight into the nature of being as unity that the principle of identity purports to express. And what it states positively, the principle of noncontradiction only phrases in negative fashion: “A being cannot at the same time and under the same respect be and not be.”
But Florensky cannot content himself with a metaphysical reflection on the essential unity of being that is restricted to a mere affirmation of self-identity. The principle of identity, to express more than mere equality and really evince the dynamic unity of being must, in Florensky’s view, be integrated with the principle of sufficient reason, which underscores the fact that it is the inquiring mind that stands before being. The hunger of the mind for truth remains unsatisfied until it scans the full expanse of being and articulates its coextensive intelligibility, adequating it to itself. In principle understandable, being has its sufficient reason only in being, and its necessary ground. It is this ground, both as a background and an underground, that Florensky’s revised principle of identity tries to take into account and assimilate into its own operations.
All of this, of course, to have any sense and bearing, must be directly applied to the Self-Proving Subject, which has already been seen to be necessary for absolute truth to exist. How does this Subject affirm itself? How does the principle of identity apply in its instance?
In response, Florensky begins with a non-personalist, symbolic explanation of what almost immediately is transformed into an eminently personalist thesis, namely, that the Subject of Truth is the Holy Trinity. He asks that we designate this Subject of Truth as “A.” According to his principle of dynamic identity, however, A can be A if and only if it is also non-A [Tom: He means to say only if A is other than or distinct from A and not A’s logical contradiction per se] which, for the sake of clarity, he in turn labels “B.” In order that B, for its part, enjoy dynamic identity, it also must have its respective non-B. But, then, does this not mean that non-B is simple A? Florensky, to the contrary, postulates that it must be “C.” The question thus arises why there is a need for this third term C. Cannot A and B suffice, each respectively being the “non-A” and the “non-B” for the other? Florensky responds, however, that non-B for B needs C if A and B are to maintain their full, respective realities. Otherwise, they actually are the same and only modally distinct. The lack of a third term, when applied to the Holy Trinity, Florensky maintains, gives rise to the heresy of Modalism and Sabellianism. Indeed, it is the third term that ratifies the dynamic existence of the other two, and serves as the guarantee against their mutual absoption.
Translating this presentation into the personalist terms of “I,” “Thou,” and “He,” Florensky proceeds to offer a series of progressively daring affirmations. In a first formulation, we read that the Subject of Truth is an “I” in relation to a “He” through a “Thou,” that the subjective “I” is made an objective “He” through a “Thou.” In other words, the “I” assimilates its ground, that is, receives its consistency, its being as a living, personal Subject and concomitant objectivization as a “He” only in its relation with a “Thou” who responds and interacts with it. The “he” is nothing other than the “I” revealed. Elaborating further, FLorensky more simply says: “Truth contemplates Itself through Itself in Itself.” And in more theological terms, “Truth is the contemplation of Itself through Another in a Third: Father, Son, and Spiirt.” The net result, Florensky affirms, is that the “Subject of Truth is a relation of Three, indeed, a relation, manifesting itself as a substance, as a relation-substance.” Accordingly, for Florensky the essence of Truth is an “infinite act of Three in Unity,” or more radically still, “one substance in three hypostases.” His point, of course, may seem obscure, but possibly, upon reflection, it is more evident than one might at first think. A truly living Subject must also be viewed in terms of dynamic identity, that is, in relational terms, and specifically in the triadic terms of I-Thou-He, Father-Son-Spirit.
The central point that needs further clarification is why a specifically triadic structure is necessary for the Subject of Truth. Florensky claims that no less than three structural elements can resolve the difficulties at hand for guaranteeing certitude, and that more than three are unnecessary. The former holds true, Florensky suggests, because if there were only two elements they would end up being indistinguishable from one another. If A is A and B, and if B is B and A, then A and B would be the same and not distinct, independent realities. Only C permits one to break out of this circle, since in non-C alone can A find itself as A again.
Although this symbolic explanation may not seem entirely cogent, the profound truth of personalism, however, can be gleaned once A, B, and C are translated into I, Thou, and He. If the I is solely constituted by the Thou, and the Thou by the I, what keeps them from dissolving into one another? Only a third Other, a He or an It, can, as Florensky interjects, ensure the maintenance of their distinct existences, that is, the preservation of a real, dynamic identity between them. Granted that to two lovers, it may seem that they alone exist, it is, nonetheless, rather the outside world beyond their mutual relationship that guarantees that they do not absorb one another and, accordingly, eliminate their dynamic, mutually constituting relationship.
Further, Florensky observes that no more than three terms are needed, since the circle necessary for guaranteeing dynamic identity can be closed with three members. Other members, he adds, can of course exist—and, in reality, do exist—but they are only ancillary to the three essential elements. In the precise terms of trinitarian theology, this means that only the three heuristically required constituents are full hypostases of the Subject of Truth, while all other terms or hypostases are only conditional. They may exist, but need not. As such, Florensky says that they are, at best, only “deified persons” that introduce a new order among the Three Hypostases in relation to themselves. The Three Hypostases, Florensky however maintains, enjoy no order among themselves. This is why the number three, in his opinion, is an apt symbol of eternity.
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Tom
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