This paper was part of the opening roundtable celebrating Mikhail Epstein at the Inaugural Conference of the Northwestern University Research Initiative for the Study of Russian Philosophy and Religious Thought which took place at the Northwestern University, April 2023. The roundtable included Caryl Emerson, Alyssa deBlasio, Victoria Juharyan, and the author of this paper, Randall A. Poole.
It is an honor to be part of this panel dedicated to Mikhail Epstein’s work. In my remarks I will focus on just one of his books, Religion after Atheism, which is especially relevant to the theme of our conference.[1] The title of the book has a certain dual meaning. The first is religion after the historical and sociological experience of militant atheism in the Soviet Union. Caryl has just spoken to that. The second meaning is more philosophical and theological: “after atheism” means that atheism can no longer be recognized—not that it ever could be—as an intellectually or philosophically persuasive view of reality, that, in other words, theism is more rational, makes better sense of our understanding of ourselves and of the world, and accords better with modern science. I use “theism” as the opposite of atheism, materialism, or naturalism, to mean that there is more to reality than the natural world in space and time, that the “more” is spiritual, and that the spiritual is ontologically real. Instead of theism, we could use “spiritualism,” which makes a nice binary with materialism or naturalism. I am also happy with saying that theism means belief in God understood as the Absolute: ultimate reality, infinite reason, wisdom, and love.
The more subtle second meaning of “religion after atheism” does not exclude the reasonable option of agnosticism, but I think Mikhail’s view is that atheism itself should be abandoned as a baseless worldview: we have almost no good grounds to believe it, and many good grounds to reject it. He writes, “For me and for my contemporaries, [the] idea of omnipresent and omnipotent reason is no longer only a question of faith; it is an object of a fully rational, well-substantiated predpolozhenie (I will avoid the word ‘proof’)” (309). By “omnipresent and omnipotent reason,” Mikhail means God.
Though Mikhail says he will avoid the term proof, in fact he uses two in his book, though he calls them arguments: the teleological argument, and what he calls the “personalisticheskii” (personalistic) argument. I will concentrate on them, especially the personalistic argument, but let me start with the cosmological argument, which is pertinent to what Mikhail considers the greatest metaphysical mystery, how something can come from nothing (327). I also want to start with it because I think, despite Hume and Kant, it is irrefutable. Mikhail quotes Leibniz’s famous question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (319) The question arises, and arises inevitably, because we recognize that the type of something that exists, the universe and everything in it, is contingent: it exists, but there is nothing about its nature that causes it to exist or that keeps it in existence. Nothing would make more sense, since it is absurd to think that contingent existence is its own cause. Yet there is a universe, a cosmos. Therefore, according to Leibniz, “it follows that there must exist some one entity of metaphysical necessity, that is, there must be an entity whose essence is existence”—an entity (God) on which the universe depends for its existence.[2] As I said, it’s irrefutable: the cosmos exists, therefore so does God. While big-bang cosmology seems to add support to the cosmological argument, it is important to appreciate that a universe that has always existed—the old steady-state theory—is no less contingent than one that has a beginning.
Now to the teleological argument, the argument from design. Mikhail writes that it has acquired new weight with every new step in science (313). One of those steps, a big one, is the anthropic principle: the discovery that the natural laws and basic physical constants of the universe are exquisitely fine-tuned to permit the emergence of life. The odds of everything having aligned by chance are infinitesimal. In the days of William Paley, the teleological argument applied to micro-designs such as the eye. Today it applies to the macro-level of the basic structures of the universe. The “multiverse” idea is an attempt to counter the anthropic principle and its clear theological implications, but the attempt is extremely weak—the multiverse is not a scientific hypothesis let alone a theory, just a speculative idea.
Mikhail writes about another way in which modern science offers support for the teleological argument: new understandings of life. Let me expand a little, following his lead. First it should be appreciated that life itself, even in its most simple forms, is teleological. Life is purpose-driven. That is so fundamental to the nature of life that it suggests a good definition: life is the capacity to thrive, to flourish. Life moves on its own, internally; what is not alive can only be moved, externally. And life moves by its own internal purposes. Initially and at simple levels, the purpose is to stay alive, grow, reproduce. At higher levels the purposes become more complex, with greater degrees of autonomy until, with the emergence of the mind, life acquires the capability of self-determination by the ideals of reason. But it ought to be appreciated that even simple life forms, in their basic autonomy, are qualitatively and radically different than what is not alive. Explaining the leap materialistically seems hopeless.
Life strives to fulfill its purposes using coded information: genes are coded instructions for protein synthesis. Mikhail writes: “DNA as a carrier of information has the same nature as natural and artificial languages, and analogies of the genetic code with rules of grammar or with a computer program are not metaphors but a mathematical fact” (310). The coded information is semantic; genetic codons have specific meanings according to which amino acids are assembled into proteins. More and more, modern science is appreciating that information is as basic to reality as matter and energy, perhaps more basic, and irreducible to them. That demolishes materialism and suggests mind as the “background reality.” For good reason does Mikhail emphasize the metaphysical implications.
Now to the personalistic argument. Mikhail suggests that it is becoming more and more essential for construction of a new philosophical-theological picture of the world (345). There are different versions of the argument, corresponding to different aspects of personhood. Mikhail’s version focuses on subjectivity. It is innovative and important. He begins with Kant’s transcendental method, which holds that objectivity is not an inherent property of the objective world, but rather is ascribed to it by the forms, concepts and categories of reason by which the world is known. According to Kant, the transcendental self or subject is a condition of objective knowledge. Mikhail makes an analogous argument with regard to our inner subjective experiences, experiences such as warmth, color, happiness, sadness, love, hope, and beauty. They too depend on a transcendental self or subject to, in a sense, universalize them; otherwise they would be chaotic individual impressions rather than coherent shared experiences that help to constitute the life of persons. Without the transcendental self or subject, persons would not be able to communicate and understand each other’s inner subjective experiences. At a higher metaphysical level, Mikhail suggests that the very possibility of subjective experience, of being a subject, is a mystery in a world of objects. Therefore, his personalistic argument is that persons and their subjective experiences entail the reality of a Supreme Person or Subject. “Without God,” he writes, “no one could enter into relation with oneself and say of oneself, ‘I’” (351). God is the enabling condition of our subjectivity, which is otherwise inexplicable in a world of objects. I find Mikhail’s version of the personalistic argument highly persuasive.
The argument from personhood, if I may be permitted to call it that, is not strictly one of the classic arguments from natural theology, but it does have a rich history in Russian religious thought, though in a somewhat different form than Mikhail’s subjectivity version. It was advanced by Russian idealists such as Boris Chicherin, Vladimir Soloviev, Sergei and Evgenii Trubetskoi, Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdiaev, and Semyon Frank. Like Mikhail, they believed that personhood itself had metaphysical or theistic implications, and like Mikhail they also typically followed Kant. But rather than subjectivity and subjective experience they emphasized reason and its remarkable dual power: first, the power to recognize or posit absolute ideals (e.g., truth, the good, and beauty); and, second, the power to determine the will according to ideals. Russian philosophers identified the capacity for “ideal self-determination” (as Sergei Trubetskoi called it) as the core of personhood. They believed it defeated naturalism: the absolute ideals of consciousness invalidated positivism, while free will refuted physical determinism, Thus, it entailed a theistic metaphysics.
So far as I know, Vladimir Soloviev was the first Russian philosopher to explicitly make the argument from personhood. He drew on Kant’s moral proof, which derives the metaphysical postulates of immortality and the existence of God from personal self-determination and moral perfectibility. In Lectures on Divine Humanity, Soloviev wrote that the human capacity for “infinite development” (or perfectibility) presupposes an ultimate end toward which it is directed, which he called the positive absolute of all-unity or perfect “fullness of being.” Infinite human striving toward the absolute ideal convinced Soloviev of the ontological reality of the absolute. He formulated this in striking terms: “Thus, belief in oneself, belief in the human person, is at the same time belief in God.”[3]
Following Soloviev, the argument from personhood was advanced by other Russian religious thinkers. Nikolai Berdiaev wrote, “the existence of personality presupposes the existence of God; its value presupposes the supreme value—God.”[4] Another example is Semyon Frank. The title of his last major work captures the personalist approach: Reality and Man: An Essay on the Metaphysics of Human Nature. In it he wrote: “The only completely adequate ‘proof of the existence of God’ is the existence of the human person taken in all its depth and significance as an entity that transcends itself.” This argument was utterly convincing to Frank. He continued: “If the human being is aware of himself as a person, i.e., as a being generically distinct from all external objective existence and transcending it in depth, primacy and significance, if he feels like an exile having no true home in this world—that means that he has a home in another sphere of being,” the sphere, that is, of ultimate reality. “The apprehension of the reality of God is, thus, immanently given in the apprehension of my own being as a person.”[5]
Let me conclude by noting that the subline of our inaugural conference is “the enduring value of Russian philosophy.” A perfect example of that enduring value is the Russian argument from personhood, most recently developed in an exciting new version by Mikhail Epstein.
Image: Mikhail Nesterov, Beyond the Volga, Shepherd Boy, 1922
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[1] Mikhail Epstein, Religiia posle ateizma: Novye vozmozhnosti teologii (Moscow: AST-Press Kniga, 2013). Page references made parenthetically in text.
[2] G. W. Leibniz, “On the Ultimate Origination of Things” (1697), in Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989), 150.
[3] See Vladimir Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, trans. Peter Zouboff, revised and ed. Boris Jakim (Hudson, New York: Lindisfarne Press, 1995), 17, 23.
[4] N. Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, trans. Natalie Duddington (San Rafael, CA: Semantron Press, 2009), 55, as quoted by Ana Siljak, “The Personalism of Nikolai Berdiaev,” in The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought, ed. Caryl Emerson, George Pattison, and Randall A. Poole (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 315.
[5] S. L. Frank, Reality and Man: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Human Nature, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York, NY: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1966), 104, 106 (translation modified).