href="http://www.hesychasm.ru/library/strannik/txt05.htm">http://www.hesychasm.ru/library/strannik/txt05.htm). [Tr.]
10 10. This is one philosophy which is always only too much in evidence. There is another: ‘Why did I prefer vain reputation above all else? … Why did I not love the fair fragrance of the divine prayers and psalms, not bow my head before the bishops? Why did I shun, not the world, but the holiness of the heavenly way of life, angelic philosophy and never-waning glory?’ Archmandrite Mikhail (Kozlov), Zapiski i pis’ma (Moscow: Bogoroditse-Rozhdestvenskii Bobrenev monastyr’ Moskovskoi eparkhii, 1996), p. 53. He signs his letters ‘Makarii Kozlov, a sinful pilgrim’, or just ‘Makarii Kozlov, pilgrim’. [Bibikhin]
11 11. Otkrovennye rasskazy, ‘Prilozhenie (glavnye raznochteniia iz pervogo kazanskogo izdaniia 1881 goda i afonskoi panteleimonovskoi rukopisi No. 50/4/395)’, n.2, ‘Iz vsekh molitv …’. (http://www.hesychasm.ru/library/strannik/txt09.htm). [Tr.]
12 12. The Way of a Pilgrim, p. 246. [Tr.]
13 13. Vladimir Solov’ev (1853–1900) was a great Russian religious philosopher, poet, and mystical writer. See Solov’ev, Sophia, God and a Short Tale About the Antichrist: Also Including At the Dawn of Mist-Shrouded Youth, ed. and tr. Boris Jakim (New York: Semantorn, 2014). [AM]
14 14. Otkrovennye rasskazy, ‘Prilozhenie’, section A 4, ‘Nastavlenie Ignatiia i Kallista’, ‘Vedai i to chto …’. [Tr.]
15 15. Ibid., section B 1, ‘Izrecheniia Isikhiia Presvitera Ierusalimskogo’, part 15, ‘Dolzhno vseuserdno peshchis’ o sokhranii …’. [Tr.]
16 16. Bibikhin’s italics. [Tr.]
17 17. Otkrovennye rasskazy, ‘Prilozhenie’, section B 2, ‘Izrecheniia Filofeia Sinaiskogo’, part 7, ‘Vsiakii chas i vsiakoe mgnovenie …’. [Tr.]
18 18. Psalms, 16: 8. [Tr.]
19 19. See Heidegger, Being and Time. See ‘Angst’, ‘Boredom’, and ‘Fear’, in Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, pp. 15–18. [AM]
20 20. Y.M. Lotman and B.A. Uspensky, The Semiotics of Russian Culture, ed. Ann Shukman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984). [AM]
Lecture 4, 30 September 1997
Something very notable is our widespread, distraught nostalgia for the forest, our hopeless dream of somehow still being able to escape back into it: for example, by concealing upmarket residential estates in its depths. That is about as sensible as trying to get back to nature by swimming or sunbathing on the beach.
The desire to gain a suntan, or to move out of the city, or to agonize about the environment, all point to the fact that our present way of life is manifestly unsustainable, ‘marked’ in the sense of structural linguistics. Ask anyone why it is unsustainable, since when and, most importantly, to what end. One person may say that human life on earth has always been stressful and under threat. Maybe so. That certainly seems to be the case today. For us, all that is noteworthy about this is that the voices around us vehemently assert that ‘today it is clearer than ever before’, or that this or that ‘continues to be crystal clear’, or that humankind needs to do one thing, was wrong to do another thing, will have to pay if it does not do something else, or has really got it coming to it this time. Stress is difficult to bear without talking fearfully. Our definition of the core of human nature as being religion and philosophy, as unceasing mindfulness, and, in response to stress, even more mindfulness, tells us to be wary of all clichés but pay attention to everything people say. What is, is: what is not, is not. We may perhaps even agree that the earth is sick, not because we have made a diagnosis, but simply because that is what a lot of people are saying and there seems to be no great harm in it. Or is there? At all events, science by its very nature will be unable to reach any conclusion about that because it has no experience of diseases of cosmic entities. Well, unless Mars is a precedent.
Let us draw a slightly curious conclusion, probably uncontroversial, but which we shall shortly need. The state of the forest, the terrestrial forest, and of matter, the global forest, the birthplace of humanity, is extreme but indefinable. This unexpectedly brings us back to an old paradox in the history of philosophy: for Aristotle, and effectively also for Plato, matter plainly exists but no less plainly is very elusive; it is important because it occupies a place at the opposite end of the spectrum from something as important as form, eidos, but that is precisely why it is indefinable.
The situation is ‘marked’, and loudly proclaims, demonstrates, that eidos and matter are coupled, but eidos does not magisterially dictate its form to matter merely because matter is elusive and indefinable. Eidos is intertwined with matter in such a way that all matter is predisposed to certain forms and not to others, as if it were already charged with eidos. The eidos of a statue, for example, can be dictated to bronze but hardly to air; a statuette of the human figure might be carved from bone and a bust might be made of marble or clay but hardly of water.
We find this complex interweaving of eidos and matter being considered already in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus, where the place we now expect to find occupied by matter is occupied by χώρα, khora, which is also eidos, only a darker, more complicated and elusive eidos because it is wide enough to accommodate many different concepts of eidos.1 Khora is all-accepting nature which knows no birth or emergence. It is obscure and problematical and, needless to say, also needs to be treated with caution.
At our first approach to Aristotle’s concept of matter, we obtain a result that is reassuringly trivial. There is general agreement that the concept of matter was ‘introduced’ by Aristotle: that is, he heard the word, took the risk of using the term, and was so successful that it has been found useful by everybody since, right up to the present. We are shocked by the use made of materialism in Russia, by the way people of the worst kind wielded it as a weapon and a bludgeon to crush and smash everything. We are reluctant now to use it ourselves, just as we would shrink from picking up an executioner’s axe, even if it was much needed, if it was covered with blood and we knew it had been used for beheadings. Even if it was made of good steel, even if it had been rinsed clean. We would much prefer to take a different axe, and point out that executioners are not the only people who use axes.
Everything we find ourselves ignorantly handling has properties, and these are not just something we attribute to it. We have talked in an earlier lecture series about property and ownership.2 That, however, was about property, and if we now look in more detail we will find that we are short of words to distinguish between what we think of as owned by us and what someone else may think of as owned by them. That is why I said then that the formulation proposed by Yury Lotman and Boris Uspensky, ‘our own/of others’, is incomplete. ‘Our’ Leonardo da Vinci is ours because we have mentioned him, but as I was writing that I was reminded of Pavel Florensky, who thought and felt his way so deeply into substance that he seemed to become immersed in it, as if he were no longer writing about substance but taking down dictation from it.3 For a true artist or musician, the colour or the sound are his own; he himself is the colour and sound, the mood. A craftsman begins by feeling his way into his material, the wood or the clay, and we constantly see that, for those who fail to do so, nothing comes out quite right. The Russian word ‘khaltura’, hack work, is derived from a word meaning a funeral wake (which is also ‘chaltury’ in Polish). A funeral is a hallowed occasion at which all are fed. They may be asked to eat rice, raisins, and honey, kut’ya, food for the dead. Hack work, too, is dead; it is what Heraclitus meant when he said that what was dead should be thrown out even before what was insanitary.4
We can rest content for now with finding that our similes for the forest have one thing in common: they give the lie to the idea that there is such a thing as ‘lifeless nature’. We can never be too sensitive in seeking to understand materia. We should quote so many agreeable cultural clichés that no genuine theoretical physicist will insist there is a boundary between his own science and the humanities.