Das Personalitätskonzept Pavel Florenskijs

Rainer Goldt

pp. 145-152

in: Nikolaj Plotnikov (ed), The Discourse of personality in the Russian intellectual tradition, Studies in East European Thought 61, 2009.

Abstract

Pavel Florenskij's (1882–1937/summarily executed in GULAG) conception of the personality is connected to considerations of antinomies. The personality remains trapped in contradictions and gains completion only in relation to the Absolute, whereas the individual, the sociological entity, is metaphysically neutral. Florenskij attempts to link the individual and the personality by means of the concept of substance (ousia). "In man ούσια and ύπόστασις exist together. Ousia (…) posits the Individual and in society endows him with form as a self-sufficient centre. The hypostasis, by contrast, is the personal idea of Man". For Florenskij personality evinces an epistemological analogy to other central terms in his philosophy, in particular Truth and Love as well as to his theory of language and symbols. For him, each personality comprises a distinctive principle growth (a notion evidently taken from the idealistic morphology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) that determines its growth potential.

Cited authors

Florenskij Pavel