Четвертая работа из знаменитого восьмикнижия Лосева "Диалектика художественной формы", представляет собой изложение эстетической теории, созданной автором с "привлечением диалектического метода".

Audacity of the Spirit by A.F. Losev demonstrates the merits of the dialectical method to understand antiquity, history, culture and philosophy. The book is a guide to dialectics for beginners and a major philosopher's summing-up of his reflections to a general audience. It is an English translation from the Russian original Дерзание духа (Politizdat Moskva, 1988), translated by Peter R. Weisensel and Vitali I. Betaneli.

The Monk Andronik, in secular life Aleksei Fedorovich Losev, was born on September 23, 1893, and was named in honor of one of the Kiev-Pecherskii reverend fathers, Aleksii . He died on the memorial day of the Apostles Bartholomew and Barnabas on May 24, 1988.

The life of Aleksei Fedorovich Losev is in many respects a genuine riddle, which we, his contemporaries, will be puzzling over for a long time. "Man as symbol," "man as myth," "a servant of truth," "the last outstanding philosopher of the Russian ‘Silver Age,"’ "the greatest Russian humanist and philosopher of the present era," "an ascetic," "a guardian of intellectual tradition," "a chosen spirit," "a passionate devotee of the dialectic method," "a Russian thinker," "one of the most notable (...) Russian philosophers and philologists of the twentieth century," "a man in whose person Russian philosophical thought revealed such power of talent, such keenness of analysis, and such strength of intuitive speculation" and whose ideas may be called "unquestionably the work of genius"—all these rapturous words of past decades which we have picked at random seem fully to confirm the felicitous destiny of Aleksei Fedorovich Losev, who lived out only four months of his ninety-fifth year, after having completed an eight-volume History of Classical Aesthetics [Istoriia antichnoi estetiki] and the major work Vladimir Solov'ev and His Times [VI. Solov'ev i ego vremia], and having left a list of printed works with more than 460 titles and another whole series of writings awaiting publication—scholarly writings on mythology, logic, mathematics, and medieval dialectics, and even novels. (shrink)

Aleksei Fedorovich Losev did not share the hereditary Russian prejudice that science and philosophy exclude religion . Although he did not leave any specialized works in theology, the history of religion, or the foundations of the Christian worldview, many of his books, lines from letters, and fragments of conversations and, most importantly, his whole way of life and life journey show that all his life he reflected continuously and intensely on themes of the Christian faith and, primarily, of (...) the Orthodox faith that he confessed. Not only did he reflect on them, he lived by them. For Aleksei Fedorovich Christianity was never just an object of knowledge, a preoccupation of the reflective mind, but rather the profound foundation of his relationship with the world and with people. It constituted not only his thought and its foundation, but his very life. Religion, as Aleksei Fedorovich understood it, is first of all a certain kind of life, not just a personal worldview, however religious and mystical it might be. It was not a personal morality, however lofty or religious it might be, nor personal feeling or esthetics, however ardent the feeling might be or however perfectly mystical the esthetics. Religion, in his mind, is the realization of a worldview, the material substance of morality, the real affirmation of feeling; it is the life of the person directed to the persons substantial self-affirmation, to self-affirmation in eternity . In recounting the facts of Aleksei Fedorovichs spiritual biography I shall not follow their chronological order. The basic facts can be found in the works of A.A. Takho-Godi, D. Dzhokhadze, M. Gogotishvili, and others. (shrink)

No sooner had I written these incantational words than I hesitated a bit, as if sensing the skeptical smirks of those who believe that they alone are the true guardians of the legacy of our great contemporary Aleksei Fedorovich Losev-an original thinker who said some things that others could not at the watershed between two epochs. A person who was persecuted for the greater part of his life but was never broken, and who drank from the cup of (...) Gulag "reforging" under the "sun of Stalin's constitution," which proclaimed good for everyone but "especially unto them who are of the household of faith". (shrink)

Aleksei Fedorovich Losev's first work was published in 1916, and his last writings still continue to be published to this day. Over seventy years of a person's active scholarly work could not but contain substantial shifts and distinct periods, although at the same time they could not turn into a series of completely unconnected stages, separated by historical-biographical circumstances and semantically self-contained. The following is an outline of the initial period of Losev's creative work, with brief accompanying (...) biographical information and points of reference to the substantive and stylistic aspects of subsequent periods. It is superfluous to say that this outline in no way claims to give a full portrait of Losev; on the other hand, however, without an analysis of the initial period of his activity, one cannot pose the question of the general foundations of Losev's thought. (shrink)

The long creative career of Aleksei Fedorovich Losev touches on many different spheres, currents, and traditions of world thought. The greater part of this manifold variety is divided between two major domains of culture: philosophy and classical philology, the study of antiquity. But such a division was by no means an insurmountable barrier for Losev. These two domains were linked together by many threads in his world view and in his work. One of the principal links running (...) through the whole of his creative career was the idea or intuition of total-unity [vseedinstvo], which has occupied both philosophers and investigators of antiquity. That this idea came to Losev was far from accidental. Total-unity is one of the dominant intuitions and pervasive themes of Russian religious-philosophical thought. It is at the center of the most important stage of the latter's development, the stage of the metaphysics of total-unity, with which Losev was intimately associated. And one cannot avoid it even now, either in the study of Losev's legacy or in broader reflections on the paths of Russian thought. (shrink)

Originally presented as the author's Habilitationsschrift--Mèunster, 1985.