Kuhn, Koyré, Kojève, Solovyov

Another significant thinker to pass through Tiflis was the prominent Historian of Science, Alexandre Koyré, who was about ten years younger than Pavel Florensky. Koyré began his secondary school studies in Tiflis, completed them at Rostov-on-Don, then moved on to Göttingen where he studied under Husserl and attended David Hilbert's lectures in higher mathematics, and finally settled in France where, amongst his other academic activities in the 1930s, he initiated the revival of Hegelian studies (Left Hegelianism) that was later taken up by another Russian émigré, the self-consciously Faustian Alexandre Kojève [Kojèvnikoff]. Kojève's speculations on 'the end of history' were popularized in America in recent years by Francis Fukuyama, and gained some currency in academic discussions of American foreign policy. Both Koyré and Kojève brought to the fore the important interpretive insight into Hegel as a philosopher of time, Kojève-Hegel even holding that world history was at present nearing completion. (1)

Now, while historical details such as these may seem far removed from the theological themes of Russian Orthodoxy, there is actually a significant connection, even though subliminal. The similarities in Koyré's and Fr. Pavel Florensky's philosophical interests is in fact quite remarkable (the Tiflis factor?), both being concerned to investigate the occult and magic roots of the Platonic and Idealist stream in European philosophy, although they ultimately moved in very different spiritual directions. Charles C. Gillispie observes that Koyré's "major doctoral thesis remains the most considerable and reliable study of Boehme, a lucid book on an obscure writer. Koyré also gathered into a little book four short pieces on Schwenkfeld, Sebastian Franck, Paracelsus, and Valentin Weigel, Boehme's most important sources...Its reissue in 1971 coincided with a revival of the occult that the author would have deplored". Koyré's detailed investigations in the history of Western Science have also uncovered a theological dimension that must be of interest (and concern) to all Christians who cherish the Patristic Holy Tradition. Through Koyré and Kojève certain Slavophile and/or Sophiological motifs even seem to have gained a subtle foothold in the West beyond the bounds of the Russian émigré Orthodox Church. (2)

Alexandre Kojève's dark reading of Hegel was of the secular and Feuerbachian sort "that view Hegel's major accomplishment as having been to show that what had been called the Divine is nothing more than history, that God is a product of man's work"(3). While such a view may at first sight seem to have nothing to do with Russian Orthodoxy, there are cues which suggest that Koyré's and Kojève's interpretation of Hegel, more than just similar, may have actually been significantly influenced by original Moscow Slavophilism and its later distortion, development, and universalization in the so-called 'Sophiology' propounded and propagated by Vladimir Solovyov. Koyré and Kojève may have opted strongly for the very kind of secular Hegel which the Slavophiles and Solovyov rejected, i.e., for Slavophilism secularized, later popularized in America by Francis Fukuyama, as we have noted, and exerting some influence in discussions of foreign policy (although a new wave now tends to Samuel Huntington's theory of the clash of civilizations as the key to relating to Russia, Asia, the Islamic world, etc., contradicting any facile expectation that American values might ever become the planetary 'be all and end all' of history).

"Koyré", Barry Cooper points out, "published two collections of papers on Russian philosophical thought; Kojève published two papers on the same person, V. Solovyov, one in German and the second, four years later. In addition, his thesis at Heidelberg was on Solovyov. The recent study by Guy Planty-Bonjour, Hegel et la pensée philosophique en Russie, 1830-1917(The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 101, 229, and incidental remarks made by Koyré and Kojève in their studies of Russian thought, suggest similarity, if not the direct influence, of Slavophil and materialist readings of Hegel as an atheistic anthropologist or `humanist', in the left-Hegelian or Feuerbachian sense, with their own interpretations"(4). Both Koyré and Kojève were universalists who rejected the relativism of Dilthey's Romantic "expressivist" approach to particularistic world views. For about the last twenty years of his life Kojève worked for the Ministère des Finances et des Affaires Économiques where he attempted to contribute to the actualization of his vision of the Hegelian or secularized Slavophile-Solovyovian End of History and was the author of the compromise formula in the `Kennedy round' of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). (5)

Not only did Alexandre Koyré make a major contribution to the modern History of Science in connection with his specific findings (also in the theological domain), but he played a pivotal role, as the late Dr. Thomas S. Kuhn himself pointed out, in the initiation of the modern Historiography of Science now so commonly associated with T. S. Kuhn's name: "Gradually, and often without entirely realizing they are doing so, historians of science have begun to ask new sorts of questions and to trace different, and often less than cumulative, developmental lines for the sciences...Seen through the works that result, works perhaps best exemplified in the writings of Alexandre Koyré, science does not seem altogether the same enterprise as the one discussed by writers in the older historiographic tradition"(6). Not without this Koyré connection do the Kuhnian "paradigms" become a sort of scientific sobornost' or even an ethnocentrism of normal scientific communities, only transformable by revolutionary application of an 'extraordinary' mode of science when the contradictions accumulate, likened by Kuhn to religious conversion. Not only the Hegelian dialectic is here (with the extraordinary `agony of reflection' which Slavophilism itself preferred to eschew), but also very clear intimations of the Slavophile and Sophiological sociology of knowledge and its way of 'integral rationality' now penetrating the West via Koyré and in conjunction with the keen observations of Kuhn. Andrzej Walicki remarks how the Slavophile, Samarin, drew from Khomyakov and "anticipated to a certain extent--and in a highly mystical guise-- the fundamental theses of the sociology of knowledge"(7).

(1) Charles C. Gillispie on Alexandre Koyré in _Dictionary of Scientific Biography_. Robert Slesinsky, _Fr. Paul Florensky: A Profile_, St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 26(1):3-27(1982). Tom Darby, _The Feast Meditations on Politics and Time_, Toronto / Buffalo / London: University of Toronto Press, 1982.

(2) Robert Slesinsky, op.cit., pp.17-18. Charles C. Gillispie, op. cit., p.485. Yvon Belaval, _Les Recherches Philosophiques D'Alexandre Koyré, Critique 20(207-208): 675-704(Août-Septembre 1964).

(3) Michael S. Roth, _Knowing and History Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France_, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press Press, 1988, p.43.

(4) Barry Cooper, _The End of History: An essay on modern Hegelianism_, Toronto / Buffalo / London: The University of Toronto Press, 1984, pp.359-360, n.54.

(5) Michael S. Roth, op.cit., pp.89,123-124(Dilthey), 135-136(GATT). Barry Cooper, op. cit., pp.63-65(Dilthey), pp.10,352n.17(GATT).

(6) Thomas S. Kuhn, _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, Second Edition, Fourth Impression, 1973, p.3. It is helpful to observe in the dynamics of Kuhn's paradigm-shifting, 'extraordinary' mode of scientific reflection that Platonic, contemplative 'turning about' or epistrophe (conversion) which Koyré's studies indicated as having been diverted from God to Nature in the Scientific Revolution (although Yvon Belaval claims that God later regained the priority in Cartesian science).

(7) Andrzej Walicki, _The Slavophile Controversy History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought_, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, pp.203-205.

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