Nikolay Lossky
Nikolay Onufriyevich Lossky, also known as N. O. Lossky, was a Russian philosopher, representative of Russian idealism, intuitionist epistemology, personalism, libertarianism, ethics and axiology. He gave his philosophical system the name intuitive-personalism. He spent his working life in St. Petersburg and, after his exile by the Bolsheviks in 1922, in Prague and New York. He was the father of the influential Christian theologian Vladimir Lossky.
Life
Lossky was born in Kreslavka then in the Russian Empire. His father, Onufry Lossky, had Belarusian roots and was an Eastern Orthodox Christian; his mother Adelajda Przylenicka was Polish and Roman Catholic. He was expelled from school for propagating atheism.Lossky undertook postgraduate studies in Germany under Wilhelm Windelband, Wilhelm Wundt and G. E. Müller, receiving a master's degree in 1903 and a doctorate in 1907.
Returning to Russia, he became a lecturer and subsequently assistant professor of philosophy in Saint Petersburg.
Lossky called for a Russian religious and spiritual reawakening while pointing out post-revolution excesses. At the same time, Lossky survived an elevator accident that nearly killed him, which caused him to turn back to the Russian Orthodox Church under the direction of Fr. Pavel Florensky. These criticisms and conversion cost Lossky his professorship of philosophy and led to his exile abroad, on the famed Philosophers' ship from the Soviet Union as a counter-revolutionary.
Lossky was invited to Prague by Tomáš Masaryk and became professor at the Russian University of Prague at Bratislava, in Czechoslovakia. Being part of a group of ex-Marxists, including Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Gershenzon, Peter Berngardovich Struve, Semyon Frank, Lossky, though a Fabian socialist, contributed to the group's symposium named or Signposts. He also helped the Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin with his Social and Cultural Dynamics
In 1947 N. O. Lossky took a position teaching theology at Saint Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, an Orthodox Christian seminary in Crestwood, New York.
In 1961, after the death of his famous son, theologian Vladimir Lossky, N. O. Lossky went to France. The last four years of his life were spent in illness there.
Philosophy
Intuitivism
Lossky was one of the preeminent Russian neo-idealists of his day. Lossky's Гносеология or gnosiology is called Intuitivist-Personalism and had in part adapted the Hegelian dialectical approach of first addressing a problem in thought in terms of its expression as a duality or dichotomy. Once the problem is expressed as a dichotomy the two opposing ideas are fused in order to transcend the dichotomy. This transition is expressed in the concept of sobornost, integrality or mystical communal union. Lossky also followed and developed his ontological and gnosiological interpretation of objective reality from Christian neoplatonism based on the Patristic Fathers. This along with Origen and the works of Russian mystics Kireevsky and Khomyakov and the later works of V. Solovyov among many others. Understanding and comprehension coming from addressing an object, as though part of the external world, something that joins the consciousness of the perceiving subject directly, then becoming memory, intuitionism as the foundation of all noema or processes of consciousness. In that human consciousness comprehends the essence or noumena of an object and the object's external phenomenon which are then assembled into a complete organic whole called experience. Much of an object's defining and understanding in consciousness is not derived discursively but rather intuitively or instinctively as an object has no meaning outside of the whole of existence. Lossky summed up this concept in the term "all is immanent in all". As such much of reality as uncreated or uncaused is irrational, or random and can not be validated rationally. Therefore, consciousness in its interaction with reality operates not strictly as rational much of consciousness operates intuitively. This is intuitively done by the nous. The nous, consciousness or the focal point of the psyche as the "organic connection" to the object and therefore the material world as a whole. The psyche here is the sensory input from the physical body to the inner being, mind or consciousness. This interaction causing different levels of maturing consciousness over time. As a dynamic retention, experience constitutes the process of learning i.e. reflective differentiation.Phenomenology and axiology
Consequently, the existence of objects can not be completely expressed with logic or words, nor validated with knowledge, due to objects having a supernatural essence or substance as their composition. Following an Orthodox Christian substance theory energy and potential do not have ontology without a sentient agent, Lossky coined the term "substantive agent" to validate that matter as well as energy are uncreated in substance, essence. This validation as part of gnosiology or Christian mysticism as opposed to the Russian Materialist and nihilist position that states that objects have no "thing in itself" or no essence, substance behind their phenomenon. Lossky based his intuitivism on gnosiology in that he taught first principles as uncreated or uncaused. Lossky's Axiology was the teaching of first principles dialectically. Russian philosophy based on Soloviev is expressed metaphysically in that the essence of an object can be akin to Noumenon, but it can have random characteristics to its being or essence, characteristically sumbebekos. This is the basis of V Soloviev's arguments against Positivism which are the cornerstone of Russian philosophy contained in Soloviev's "Against the Positivists".The validation of truth, value and existence all being intuitive as expressed by Aristotle's Noesis. Each event having value or existence because of substantive agents being engaged in the event, giving the event value and existence.