and, in Orthodox Christianity, Palamism seek to be the unmediated expression of a single law and hence put the original law at greater risk.20
Having recourse to another of our mental experiments, one has no sense that in any ancient forest and/or hairy incarnation humans could ever have been formed without being creatures of the law of which I am speaking. It preserves the human species. That law is something that restrains us every moment.
Religion: the etymology of the word speaks, I believe, of mindfulness, concern, and piety, and it was formerly known as the Rule. Let us now rehabilitate this old word, whose primary meaning until quite recently, some 300 years ago, was ‘faith, the profession of faith’.
Why do we so formally and superficially call the law of humankind ‘ɛὐλἀβɛια’, a cautious, attentive acumen? Because humans are open, their nature is freedom, and because what people are primarily dealing with, both in themselves and in the world, is indefinable: it is the forest. The forest, an abyss, the forest unexplored and indefinable, the forest that we find again in tobacco (you may recall the ritual tobacco, much stronger than ours, of the American Indians).
The law we have been talking about will need to be compared with Kant’s categorical imperative. I repeat, because for humans there is no other law; because they are faced with substances in which they drown. Matter as the power of the forest, the potency of its materiality: the smoke of tobacco, the wine of Bacchus, narcotics, intoxication, ecstasy. The wood of the forest is the matter from which all else derives; it is not the timber of the carpenter but like passion, the race, the grove of Aphrodite, the smoke, the aroma of tobacco, the inebriation of Bacchus, of Dionysos, the intoxication of coca. The forest, then, is conflagration, the fire of passion. When Aristotle gave primal matter the name of ‘wood’, this was the forest he saw before him, the forest as we shall yet see it.
Notes
The lecture course on Wood (Hyle) was delivered in the Philosophy Faculty of Moscow State University in 1997–8. This publication has been prepared from the surviving notes. I wish to thank everyone who has helped me prepare the text of the lectures for publication: Konstantin Chamorovskii, Anatolii Akhutin, Aleksandr Mikhailovskii, Egor Ovcharenko, Vardan Airapetian, Vladimir Gurkin, Ol’ga Sedakova, and El’fira Sagetdinova. [O.E. Lebedeva]
1 1. See Vladimir Bibikhin, Vitgenshtein: smena aspekta (Moscow: IFTI sv. Fomy, 2005). [Russian editors]
2 2. ‘Great is Russia but there can be no retreat, for behind us lies Moscow.’ A phrase traditionally attributed to a Soviet officer, Vasilii Klochkov, who is thought to have uttered it during fighting by the ‘twenty-eight Panfilov soldiers’ during the 1941–2 battle for Moscow. The source for this is an article by Aleksandr Krivitskii (Krasnaia zvezda, 22 January 1942), and sceptics claim that it was in fact he who coined the phrase. Unlike Hitler, Napoleon did capture Moscow in 1812. [Tr.]
3 3. See ‘ὕλη’ in Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=u(/lh). [Tr.]
4 4. Italian, see https://www.matematicamente.it/storia/Sintini-decifriamo_leonardo.pdf carta 3B foglio 34 2. English, see The Codex Hammer of Leonardo da Vinci, tr. Carlo Pedretti (Florence: Giunti Berbèra, 1987), p. 26 (sheet 3B, folio 34 recto). [Bibikhin, Tr.]
5 5. Philologus, 138, 1994, 1, pp. 24–31. A scholarly journal published since 1846. [Bibikhin] Andrei Lebedev, ‘Orpheus, Parmenides or Empedocles? The Aphrodite Verses in the Naassene Treatise of Hippolytus’ Elenchos’, Philologus, vol. 138, no. 1 (1994), pp. 24–31. See Hippolytus Refutatio omnium haeresium, ed. Miroslav Marcovich (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986), ref. v. 8, l. 43, p. 164 (ll. 225–31) = Hippolytus (Antipope), Refutatio omnium haeresium, ed. Paul Wendland (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1897), p. 97, ll. 2–8. [AM, Tr.]
6 6. Genesis, 3: 1ff. [Russian editors]
7 7. Deletion by the original editors ‘for formal reasons’. [Tr.]
8 8. Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi, ‘Pozhar’, in Sobranie sochinenii, 22 vols (Moscow: Khudozestvennaia literatura, 1982), vol. 10, pp. 25–6. [Bibikhin]
9 9. ‘This poet [René Char] … told me that the uprooting of the human that is taking place there will be the end, unless poetry and thought reach a position of power without violence.’. ‘Der Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger’, in The Heidegger Reader, ed. Günter Figal, tr. Jerome Veith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), supplement 1, [pp. 313–33], p. 325. [Russian editors, Tr.]
10 10. Lebedev, ‘Orpheus, Parmenides or Empedocles?’, p. 31. [AM]
11 11. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, tr. Richard Howard (New York: New Directions, 2013), ch. ‘6 p.m.’. [Tr.]
12 12. Vasilii Belov (1932–2012) was a Soviet and Russian writer, a master of so-called ‘village prose’. See Belov, Kanuny (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1978), part 1, XIV [AM]
13 13. See Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments, ed. J.H. Lesher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), fragment 28; Thales, Texts of Ancient Greek Philosophy, ed. Daniel Graham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 29ff. [AM]
14 14. In 1967, Desmond Morris, a psychologist and television presenter, published a book titled The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal (New York: McGraw-Hill). [Bibikhin]
15 15. It is an incorrect argument that we only have experience of our present-day selves, bare but clothed, and have none of ourselves as naked and hairy beings. The experience of having a hairy body is curiously familiar to us if only because when we are born the boundary between the brow and the head hair is blurred. A smooth covering of hair disappears from the brow after birth. A legacy of earlier hairiness is still present in the sense of shame we feel when naked. That shame is so innate and invariably present that Vladimir Solov’ev based a system of ethics on it. [Bibikhin]
16 16. See William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014). [Tr.]
17 17. See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, tr. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2013). [AM]
18 18. Bernhard Welte (1906–83) was a Professor of Christian religious philosophy in Freiburg. His project was to achieve an understanding of Christian faith through phenomenology and metaphysics. [AM]
19 19. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 2008). See ‘Care, Concern, Solitude’, in Michael Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 35–7. [AM]
20 20. Palamism is a theological current in Eastern Christianity based upon the teachings of Georgii Palamas (c.1296–1359). [AM]
Lecture 2, 9 September 1997
We touched last time on the topic of the law and, without naming it, unceasing prayer. This is the central theme of The Candid Tales of a Pilgrim to His Spiritual Father, or The Way of a Pilgrim.1 Among the collection of literature on asceticism of Hieroschemamonk Feodosiy of Karulia and of his disciple and novice Nikodim was a book titled simply The Pilgrim. Feodosiy was an elder living on the almost sheer cliffs in the south of Mount Athos and died on 2 October 1937. By the early 1980s, Nikodim was himself an extremely aged elder.
It is important for us to understand that prayer must be unceasing and synchronized with breathing and the beating of the heart. Unceasing prayer is considered to be not an act of human beings but a condition of grace. Nobody could stop the bleeding of the woman who had an issue of blood. The wandering of our thoughts, their flow and dissipation cannot be stopped by thought alone. They wander, and in the course of their wandering the desire arises to staunch the flow, but this desire itself is part of their straying. The woman’s bleeding was stopped by the grace of God. What part must be played by the individual? It is essential that we should have faith: we must believe