Table Of ContentThe Religious Metaphysics
of Vladimir Solovyov
Translated by Ilya Merlin and
Mikhail Pozdniakov
The Religious Metaphysics of Vladimir Solovyov
“This early text on Solovyov sheds light on the origins of Kojève’s thinking and
thus allows an English reader to better understand one of the key figures of
European intellectual history.”
—Boris Groys, Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies,
New York University, USA
“This short translation by Merlin and Pozdniakov is invaluable for our under-
standing of twentieth century philosophy and the role of Alexandre Kojève. This
critical explication of Solovyov’s religious metaphysics shows Solovyov’s con-
nections to Russian Orthodoxy as well as his profound emphasis on Sophia, or
Wisdom, in philosophical and theological terms. We can see the roots of Kojève’s
Russian background and certain seeds of the interpretations of Hegel that so
profoundly shaped French philosophy.”
—Clayton Crockett, Professor and Director of Religious Studies, University of
Central Arkansas, USA
“Here is a text by a young Kojève on the works of Vladimir Solovyov. This early
philosophical piece bares traces discernible throughout his later works. The scope
of this text is far reaching: from the impossibility of thinking man and being
without recourse to God, the rupture of Christianity, and the isolation of man,
who in some regards is bound to divinity itself.”
—Juan Pablo Lucchelli, Research Associate, Université Rennes 2, France
“In addition to making Kojève’s treatment of Solovyov’s metaphysical system
available in English—of value in its own right—the translators offer a minutely
observant account of Kojève’s method, offering insight into one of the twentieth
century’s most influential philosophers. This volume is all the more significant
for its apprehension of the ‘rhetorical peculiarities’ of Kojève’s critical exposition.
Philosophy of religion stands to be enriched by such attention to style.”
—Jeremy Biles, Assistant Professor, The School
of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA
“With this long-overdue, and exigent, translation of Kojève’s study, Merlin and
Pozdniakov make a major contribution toward restoring an undeniable, if uneasy
and conflicted, balance, with regard to the place and role of what Kojève himself
called ‘religious metaphysics’(and, more simply, the ‘philosophy of religion’) in
the history of twentieth-century thought and one of his most significant figures.”
—Gil Anidjar, Professor and Chair, Department of Religion,
Columbia University, USA
Alexandre Kojève
The Religious
Metaphysics of
Vladimir Solovyov
Alexandre Kojève
L’École des Hautes Études
Paris, France
Translated by Ilya Merlin, Mikhail Pozdniakov
University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada
ISBN 978-3-030-02338-6 ISBN 978-3-030-02339-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02339-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957695
Translation from the French language edition: La métaphysique religieuse de Vladimir Soloviev
by Alexandre Kojevnikoff, © Revue d’Historie et de Philosophie Religieuses 1934. All Rights
Reserved.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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A
cknowledgements
We thank the following people for their help during this project: Roland
Boer, Aleksey Rutkevich, Aleksey Kozyrev, Michael Gollner, and especially
Nina Kousnetzoff, who granted us permission to translate and publish
Kojève’s essay.
v
c
ontents
1 Translators’ Introduction 1
2 The Religious Metaphysics of Vladimir Solovyov 15
2.1 The Doctrine of God 20
2.1.1 The Absolute and the Ideal Cosmos 20
2.1.2 The Divine Trinity 27
2.1.3 Théandrie and Σοϕία 30
3 The Doctrine of World 51
Index 79
vii
CHAPTER 1
Translators’ Introduction
The first word on the essay at hand concerns its style, its method of
proceeding. This was the element that most influenced the outcome of
our work, involving in its way far more philosophy than one would think.
Kojève comes to us from a great linguistic distance. The works of
the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov were the source material for
the German-language dissertation he completed in Heidelberg under the
supervision of Karl Jaspers in 1926.1 This dissertation he adapted into
French and published in 1934 and 1935 as the two-part essay La méta-
physique religieuse de Vladimir Soloviev while conducting his famous sem-
inars on Hegel. The present English-language translation is this series’
fourth term and shares its place with Aleksey Kozyrev’s contemporary
Russian translation, published in the collection Атеизм и другие работы
in 2007.2 Both do no more than simply continue the work that Kojève
had already performed twice over. And if one bears in mind the linguistic
form of the philosophical presentation in the main text ahead, the effect
of this repeated labor is unmistakable: the translator, the writer-scribe, is
drawn closer the philosopher, the mover of concepts, the arranger and
inventor of order.
Kojève’s essay is at some points supremely awkward. His phrasing
is not so much halting or stumbling as abrupt. He guides unevenly. As
would be expected of a scholar, he introduces a certain development,
arranges its premises, and moves on with the analysis as necessary.
However, his advancements seem to deplete rather than expand his range
of reference. His premises, for example, though many and various, are
© The Author(s) 2018 1
A. Kojève, The Religious Metaphysics of Vladimir Solovyov,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02339-3_1
2 A. KOJÈVE
distinctly mobile and rarely unique to their first instance: they reappear
time and again, modified for whatever end is currently at play. The total
impression is of an analytic reduction, an ascetic decrease describing a
movement inwards. His method is therefore not unlike that of mysticism,
and bears all the austere rigor of one who has prepared for an intermina-
ble progress through the labyrinth.
Yet, more than once, his passage is interrupted by breaks and sudden
expansions, filled with what may only be called images. That such images
are composed with the classical language of analysis—a language which,
despite everything we expect from it, is revelatory, concrete, and unfur-
tive—is only partly surprising. It should be remembered that the details
of this world, those captured so easily in observations made and dropped
in passing, form the basic elements of this singularly abstract language,
which few have recognized for its sensitivity, its intimacy of precision, or
its emotional life. Without such features, the distinct expressiveness of
this language would be lost, and yet…
“More of a thinker than a writer”—this phrase sums Kojève, though
it is unlikely he is considered a writer at all, at least not in the sense of
a literary man of letters, someone for whom the pen came as promptly
as the book. This changes what we can expect of his relationship to
writing. Words and phrases, even conventional words and phrases, are
chosen by him for their constructive powers. They are treated as thing-
like, tangible, manipulable. And if such words, as signs, for him point
elsewhere, then it is always to other words. Constantly inserted phrases
such as “that is to say” [c’est à dire] or “in other words” [autrement dit]
signal wherever they appear the identity of the preceding with adjacent
statements and terminology. Other grammatical features of this work
assume this rather direct relationship as well—a relationship so consist-
ent that Kojève’s least philosophical moments in this essay are actually
noteworthy for its lapse, his rhetoric in such passages being declarative
and opaque, his tone conventional and his bearing disconnected. For us,
this means that he did not, as other writers, employ this or that style to
secure his end, but achieved it, though never to the point of mastery.
At times, the essay stutters, the distance between one sentence and the
next too large to cross with ease. Kojève expects his reader to be famil-
iar with the leap. He is unlike writers whose work tends toward a bal-
anced and straightforward prose, with expositions of a consistent length
and rhythm. In such works, the milestones are set regularly and with
assurance: one can time the movement of themes, reasonably predicting
1 TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION 3
the arrival of an important claim, its evidence, presentation, degree of
emphasis, and end. Kojève’s essay in this respect is wild. There are page-
long paragraphs, dense and highly technical, adjoined by others whose
entirety spans a single sentence. Such is his manner throughout. This,
again, is a work less written than pieced together under strain, and we
are at least in part allowed to witness how. Cantilevered and suspended,
varied in position and height, its passages are the weights and intermedi-
ate fixtures setting the lean and aspect of the whole. Indeed, the repeti-
tive and circular coincidence of certain terms and turns of phrase shows
that another structure persists throughout the essay as a whole, one par-
allel to the prescriptive hierarchy he uses to order its major sections. In
this sense, his compositional style is highly justified, since it results from
his attempts to track multiple parallel evolutions of his argument.
His method is closely related to the highly repetitive, transforma-
tional style of mathematicians and logicians. While there is some evi-
dence of stylistic inability, as is shown in the occasional perfunctory aside
or comment, the reasons for his use of language in general are, again,
due to the necessities posed by his argument. Chief among these is the
need to manage the appearance and distribution of distinctions as they
arise. Because Kojève’s aim is the systematic organization of concepts, he
writes with a number of constraints in mind: he cannot only introduce
and refine the relevant concepts through insight or clarification; he can-
not limit the scope of his proofs to accurate definition, scholarly refer-
ence, or quotation; and the context of his arguments cannot simply be
established initially or after the fact with a statement of general princi-
ples. Indeed, all of the above are meaningless without their explicit inter-
connection. This is why Kojève contorts the syntax of every individual
sentence such that it contains not only its immediate subject, but also
its most important systemic counterparts. Ideally, each sentence would
contain all the references necessary for its comprehension. Kojève’s spe-
cific labor was to force this interconnection into his statements even if it
meant straining their coherence to the breaking point. Hence the paren-
thetical insertions and extended parataxis so characteristic of his writing,
here and elsewhere.3 This explicit use of parallelisms shows him to range
deep into the linguistic effects produced by philosophy and places him
firmly among others in the dialectical tradition, particularly Kierkegaard
and Hegel, whose works, with Solovyov’s, likely served as models.
But Kojève’s use of parallelisms is not solely limited to their addi-
tive, constructive capabilities: it also acts as a schematic for parsing.
