Writing a monograph that aims to encompass the core of Pavel Florenskyâs philosophical thought is not the simplest undertaking for any scholar. It requires competence in numerous fields of knowledge, from theoretical and applied sciences to linguistics, art theory, theology and, of course, philosophy. In all of these fields, Florensky had a marked tendency towards the most experimental and avant-garde side of the research. Added to this, many of his texts remain unpublished and are not easily accessible, and his reputation as a prodigiously talented polymath, combined with the interest in his personal life and tragic death, often override the actual knowledge about his thought. As a further complication, his thought is scattered throughout a vast output of heterogeneous writings that were composed over the course of thirty years and, for the most part, never published during his life.
The principal difficulty, however, is that it is very hard to distinguish between Florenskyâs personal commitment and his ideas, his life and his work, his faith and his reason, his theology and spirituality and his philosophy, and also to separate the philosophy from the science, and vice versa. His determination to merge all of these areas creates problems for the scholarâsince âscholarshipâ is pinned precisely on these distinctions and on the clear identification of a field of research. It should therefore come as no surprise that, especially in the English-speaking world, monographs embracing his entire thought are not common, if not completely missing. With its sui generis form, Florenskyâs erudite and encyclopedic work stands out as an endless challenge to any academic frame of reference, and yet it reveals a profound aspect of the Russian philosophical and scientific worldview. For this reason, although any endeavor to classify his philosophy will surely have lacunae, it is still necessary to make the attempt. Even more so, since Florensky is the first to consider his own research as unitary or, as he puts it, âholistic.â
My main objective in this work is to identify Florenskyâs philosophy as a distinct domain that, because it is a dialectical part of Western tradition, is thus capable of confronting that tradition. Despite the difficulties described above, I was assisted by at least one factor: a clue that Florensky has strewn, like a guiding thread, through nearly all his writings. It is the major theme that, from the beginning, he identified in his research: discontinuity. From his early mathematical works on the anomalies of plane curves to the theological antinomies of his best-known book, The Pillar and Ground of Truth (Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny, 1914), and the theories of symbols and names that characterized his later work, discontinuity has always been the cornerstone and apex of his overall research outlook. Using this concept and its two main elements, antinomy and symbol, it becomes easier to navigate across the variegated expanse of Florenskyâs writings and his multiple fields of research.
It has taken me several years of attending conferences, writing articles, developing university courses, and holding valuable discussions with many scholars to try to âget a fix onâ such a complex issue, i.e. the philosophy of discontinuity in Florensky, which ultimately reveals a perspective that is both original and modernâas new today as it was a century ago. This is just my attempt, which by no means claims to be exhaustive or to present the final word on Florenskyâs philosophy. But I hopeâand it is my dearest wishâthat it may at least bring the reader closer to an understanding of Florenskyâs texts, in a manner that does not divert too much attention away from that thought; this is importantâespecially in the case of authors of exceptional depth. And Florensky is, undeniably, precisely that.