The Woods. Vladimir Bibikhin
next time.
A request for papers, on this topic, or more general. A competition is to be announced nationally. Those submitted now will be eligible.
Notes
Conclusion of Lecture 3 of 23 September 1997. [Bibikhin]
1 1. See Timaeus in: Plato, Timaeus. Critias. Cleitophon. Menexenus. Epistles, tr. R.G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library 234 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929). The reference is to pp. 49–51. [AM]
2 2. The reference is to Bibikhin’s lecture series on ‘Property (the Philosophy of Ownership)’, delivered in the Philosophy faculty of Moscow State University over three semesters in spring and autumn 1993 and spring 1994. [Russian editors]
3 3. Pavel Florenskii (1882–1937) was a notable theologian and priest of the Russian Orthodox Church. He was also a philosopher, mathematician, and inventor. [AM]
4 4. See Heraclitus, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary, ed. Charles H. Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), fragment LXXXVIII, p. 69. [AM]
5 5. See Nicholas of Cusa, Learned Ignorance or Docta Ignorantia, tr. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: Arthur Banning, 1985). [AM]
6 6. Plato, Timaeus, 56b. [AM]
7 7. ‘Ἀγɛωμέτρητος μηδɛὶς ɛἰσίτω’ this injunction was said to be engraved on the gates of Plato’s Academy. [AM]
8 8. Vladimir Bibikhin, ‘Tochka (otryvok iz kursa “Pora”). Tochki – Puncta’, in Ezhekvartal’nyi katolicheskii zhurnal, posviashchennyi problemam religii, kul’tury i obshchestva, nos 3–4 (2) (Moscow: IFTI sv. Fomy, 2002), pp. 74–103; see also Bibikhin, Vitgenshtein: smena aspekta. [Russian editors]
9 9. Nikolai Kuzanskii, Sochineniia, 2 vols (Moscow: Mysl’, 1979–80). [Bibikhin]
10 10. See David Hilbert, The Foundations of Geometry (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2016). [AM]
11 11. English-language source not identified. [Tr.]
12 12. Nicolai Hartmann, ‘Zur Lehre vom Eidos bei Platon und Aristoteles’, in Kleinere Schriften (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1957), vol. 2, p. 136. [Russian editors]
13 13. Plato, The Epinomis; or, The Philosopher, Plato in Twelve Volumes, tr. W.R.M. Lamb (London: Heinemann, 1925), vol. 9, 992a. [Tr.]
14 14. Platon, Sochineniia, eds Aleksei Losev and Valentin Asmus, 4 vols (Moscow: Mysl’, 1990), vol. 3 (2), p. 638. [Russian editors, Tr.]
15 15. Nicolai Hartmann, Platos Logik des Seins [Plato’s Logic of Being] (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965), pp. 21–8. [Russian editors, Tr.]
16 16. Ibid., p. 10. ‘Die Theorie des “Timaios” stellt, inhältlich betrachtet, eine Synthese von Atomistik und Ideenlehre dar, wie man sie bei der natürlichen Gegensatzstellung dieser beiden Lehrbegriffe eigentlich für unmöglich halten sollte. Eine gründliche Untersuchung des geschichtlichen Themas, das hier vorliegt, fehlt bis heute noch. Die klassische Geschichtsschreibung der Philosophie in den letzten hundert Jahren hat hier eine jener zahlreichen Lücken, die eine Folge ihres mangelnden philosophischen Problemverständnisses sind.’ Hartmann, ‘Zur Lehre vom Eidos’, p. 136. [AM]
17 17. The reference is to the ancient Greek sorites (paradox), ‘The Heap’. The moment when a handful of elements becomes a ‘heap’ is indeterminate. The paradox is attributed to Eubulides of Miletus. See: Roy A. Sorensen, ‘Sorites Arguments’, in Kim Jaegwon, Ernest Sosa, and Gary S. Rosenkrantz, eds, A Companion to Metaphysics (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009), p. 565. [AM]
18 18. See Plato, Parmenides (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 144a–b. [AM]
Lecture 5, 7 October 1997
I am trying to resolve the riddle set by Plato, of having pure geometrical shape in place of matter. We spend a lot of time trying to guess things. Averintsev once said that Russians may not be particularly sharp-witted, but they are good at guessing.
It would be better if I did not try to guess. Without guesswork, of course, it is difficult to know where you should look, and, more importantly, there may just be no point in looking because it is unlikely you are going to find anything. The real problem with guesswork, though, is that you are more likely to start trying to fit your solution to the answer you want to get. My guess is that Plato gives himself over body and soul to the forest: that is, that he ceases to see himself as separate from the forest and intuits that everything, through the air, water, food, the race, is entirely part of everything else. He ceases to ask himself questions about why everything is just as it is, why the sky is above and the earth below, and becomes intoxicated, like the Pythagoreans and Parmenides, with the suchness of everything, that everything is precisely as it is. Everything he sees, everything he thinks, fuses into an ultimate, reassuring experience, an experience of serenity and peace that everything that is, is just as it is, and that everything that has been was just as it was, and that everything that will be, however it turns out, will be just as it will. This experience is at once moral, an acceptance of all that is, and it is mystical, because it opens a channel to ultimate, final, full divine knowledge at the outer limit. When God at the beginning of Genesis says, ‘Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good,’ and the same is repeated with everything else, that ‘Let there be’ is not design, not engineering. Light is not being given a definition, a specification, a description, to which what appears is to conform. Light already is, since what is said is, ‘Let there be light.’ God himself is taken by the ecstasy of identity.
This merging not only does not lead to any blurring of distinctiveness but, on the contrary, creates a structure of things being identical to themselves, of sameness, of thisness and suchness (immennost’). In other words, we, and we are again guessing here, having been swallowed up by the forest, find ourselves in the realm of logic. But are the foundations of logic identical to those of mathematics? It would be good to find that was the case, but we are suddenly faced with a problem. Wittgenstein warned that there would be difficulties with identity, and the difficulty begins with the trap that there seems to be no problem. I also need to bear in mind the additional problem of how identity relates to unity and unity to number, but when we get down to starting to grapple with this, we find that guesswork is no longer helpful.
Or it is, indeed, distinctly unhelpful in the case of the clue of the Cross. The Cross is the tree. Well, obviously, well-informed people will tell us; indeed, it is also the well-known World Tree of every mythology in the world. So it not only relates to the forest but in fact itself is the forest.
Of all relic discoveries the most impressive was that of the True Cross (the cross upon which Jesus was crucified, found in September 335 or in 326, according to other accounts)…. [Prompted by a dream, Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine, Bibikhin] located the place where the Cross lay buried and had the wood unearthed…. The power of the Cross, the history of the wood, and the story of its discovery became legendary. [In Christian myth this relic of Christ’s death dated back to the mortal origins of humanity. Innumerable cures attested to the authenticity of the Cross, Bibikhin.] Through the symbolism of the Cross early Christian imagery perpetuated, and at the same time transformed, the myths of the World Tree. The sacred drama of Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection participates in the rejuvenating rhythms of the fecund cosmos. Early Christians identified the Cross of Christ as the World Tree, which stood at the centre of cosmic space and stretched from earth to heaven. The Cross was fashioned of wood from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil which grew in the Garden of Eden. Below the tree lies Adam’s buried skull, baptized in Christ’s blood. The bloodied cross-tree gives forth the oil, wheat, grapes, and herbs used to prepare the materials administered in the sacraments that revitalize a fallen world. The Italian Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca later depicted the myth of the True Cross in his frescoes in Arezzo, Italy. They portray the death of Adam, fallen at the foot of the Tree that provides wood for the crucifix on which Jesus is slain. The wood of the cross becomes