Florensky: Rationality, Faith, and the Trinity as Truth

The following post by Daniel Schrader-Dobris, a graduating senior philosophy student at USC planning on pursuing an advanced degree in cognitive science or the philosophy and history of science, is the sixth in the series of posts highlighting exemplary work by undergraduates with interests in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought. The NURPRT Forum welcomes any undergraduate student to submit academic writing related to these fields to be considered for publication.

Introduction

Some contemporary thinkers, such as Richard Rorty,¹ believe there is no value to a notion of truth in discourse about knowledge. Though perhaps a shocking proposition to some, according to this particular strain of neo-pragmatist thought, if the concept of ‘truth’ does not make a practical difference in how we justify or critique our beliefs (justification itself being said to be intelligible and useful without the validation of certainty), then there is no reason to hold onto it. All language is understood as material to create models capable of performing desired tasks, and so concepts that do not—or no longer—serve that purpose adequately are recommended for disposal.

However, thinking as such makes truth into a particularly anthropocentric concept. Though imagining he has escaped the long tradition of philosophical and theological assertions of the possibility for absolute correspondence between a proposition and a state-of-affairs, just as these past thinkers did, Rorty’s sense of truth relegates it to the status of mere invention. To Rorty, “the search for objective knowledge is [but] one human project among others,”² and thus truth only acquires a meaning through humanity’s framing of it–i.e., “only through a set of descriptions” relative to historically situated assumptions and goals.³

But if truth is nothing outside its appearance in the proposition, then a state-of-affairs’ primary significance is its relevance (or lack-there-of according to Rorty’s anti-representationalism⁴) to the denoting possibility within language rather than to the real existence of what persists without articulation. Consequently, whether truth is accepted or rejected, the propositional understanding of truth renders it contingent upon the human invention of language.

Luckily, for a remedy to this rather unnecessary limitation on the possibility of thought to think non-linguistic reality, we can turn to the renowned Russian theologian, Pavel Florensky. In his magnum opus, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, Florensky expounds a notion of truth which does not require the human-knower and is always the condition for the production of knowledge rather than vice versa. For the initiate: “Something or Someone extinguishes in me the idea that I am the center of philosophical seeking, and, in place of this idea, I put the idea of the Truth itself.”⁵

With the intention of exploring and critically extending Florensky’s exposition of truth, in the remainder of this essay, I plan to study his explication of rationality, the Trinity, and faith. In particular, I intend to examine his ontology of relational contradiction as opposed to one of relationality in general—ultimately suggesting how a broader ontology should lead to a richer role for reason than the one inscribed by Florensky.

Florensky’s Journey From Doubt to Affirmation

The Pillar and the Ground of the Truth is organized according to twelve letters indirectly addressed to God. In a lengthy second letter, “Doubt,” Florensky offers an understanding of Truth reached via transit from skepticism to affirmation. Though defined in various manners throughout the text, Florensky’s clearest description of Truth is “something so total that it contains everything and therefore something that its name expresses only by convention, partially, symbolically.”⁶

For a seeker of knowledge, the only way one may be said to possess Truth is through certainty: “Certitude appears when we pronounce a necessary judgment and consists in the exclusion of the suspicion that the judgment pronounced will change some time or somewhere.”⁷ According to Florensky, most philosophical notions of certitude rest upon a notion of giveness, that is, an indisputable fact or condition of experience, such as the supposed irreducibility of sense-perception. He goes on to claim that the notion of giveness arises as a product of rationality: The intellectual activity which demands that everything be “isolated from everything else, not mixed with anything else, self-contained, in short, self-identical.”⁸

In Florensky’s view, giveness does not lend itself to a feeling of certitude for two primary reasons. Firstly, because it is a product of rationality, giveness can only express a false identity principle, A = A—a relation which, in a world of ever differentiating factors, is never actual. Secondly, even if you accept that giveness somehow ‘is,’ it does not attain necessity because an ultimate ‘why’ is always absent; therefore, giveness “cannot give certitude.”⁹

Since everything thus far has proved itself inadequate to establish certainty, following Florensky, we are cast into an endless abandon, a nihilism seemingly devoid of reprieve. However, nihilism, ironically, is not without a problematic substance of its own; that is, certain possible experiences may present themselves through the persistence of this endlessly skeptical attitude. Florensky calls one such possibility “probabilism,” the choice to approach Truth as guided by supra-rational feeling and an inner-reasonableness¹⁰—a general coherence not to be confused with rationality.

Though coherence is obviously a necessary condition of rationality, Florensky stresses that rationality achieves this only through tautological identity—an operation that is ultimately indifferent to sensation as such, and can only treat it in identitarian terms. In contrast, the “reasonableness” of probabilism maintains the strength of feeling alongside intellectual exploration. In this experimental state-of-mind, Florensky tells us that Truth appears as “intuition-discursion;” Truth is an infinite synthesis of related parts and each of these parts compose a unified Subject.¹¹ Discursion here refers both to relations between subjects within language, as well as to relations between non-linguistic phenomena.

Now, if Florensky’s formulation of Truth is to be rigorous, not excluding any phenomena from its scope, then it must account for the existence of the law of identity as it appears to rationality. Consequently, in a likely fusion of Russian Orthodoxy and Hegelian metaphysics, Florensky proposes a logic of triadic contradiction in which any given entity’s identity is founded upon both being itself and not-being itself, a dynamic which must maintain three terms if each identity is to be properly distinguished.¹²

This structure can be quasi-formally defined as follows:

A = A ∧ (- A = B ∧ C)

B = B ∧ (- B = C ∧ A)

C = C ∧ (- C = A ∧ B)

Each seemingly tautological instance, e.g., A = A, designates the irreducibility of that facet of reality in respect to the unique series of contradictions defining its relational position. Now, remembering that Truth must both be infinitely discursive and yet one, if the existence of the triad is to be affirmed, it must be given in and through itself. This is accomplished by a person, as an entity defined through the unity of a triad, concretely living Truth through “a system of life-acts” which “affirm that the ousia [essence] of Truth is the Infinite act of Three in Unity,”¹³ otherwise known as the Trinity.

Through this project of “life-acts,” faith comes to mean the project of recognizing oneself as essentially beyond oneself, a certain knowledge of individual existence as dependent upon the self-transcendent order of the Trinity. ‘To know’ under faith is to make use of reason, which is affirmed as a case of ontological relationality, a real and not merely ideal process. This means that reasoning under faith is active participation in relationality, a real communion with God—who is, at least in part, love or the ‘glue’ of the Trinity.¹⁴ In reasoning as such, “the form and the content of the Truth are one.”¹⁵

Critique and Extension

If bare tautology is an artificial artifact of that which is never merely itself, then contradiction is the ghostly double of this facade. To understand why this is the case, we can make a brief detour into the philosopher Giles Deleuze’s critique of representational thought. Rationality, as Florensky rather narrowly defines it, could be approximately mapped onto Deleuze’s notion of common sense: “an organ, a function, a faculty of identification that brings diversity in general to bear upon the form of the Same.”¹⁶ Common sense obscures the difference between how external relations actually interact with a given faculty, such as memory or sensation, through a rational operation that would coordinate them upon the ‘same’ object.

According to Deleuze, the counterpoint to common sense, or rationality, is good sense. Good sense organizes the subjects of the faculties along the same axis by “a rule of universal distribution and a rule universally distributed.”¹⁷ It renders the non-linearity of environmental relations into a logically consistent, arboreal order, doing so at the cost of subordinating the manifold of actual body-world interactions to a much smaller informational field–i.e., that which can be circumscribed according to a unified, static field of anticipations based upon re-presentations of the past.

Deleuze argues that these two faculties of judgment, good sense and common sense, comprise the foundation of representational thinking, together forming a “dogmatic image of thought” that depreciates our understanding of reality—and I would argue Truth—if we mistake the world as really existing only in conformance with the requirements of representation.¹⁸

Florensky, in some ways, unwittingly reiterates both of these biases, thus falling whim to the fallacy conflating the medium of representation with the content it is about.

Common Sense

Firstly, we must grant that Florensky acknowledges the incommensurability between faculties, citing the irreconcilability of memory’s relation to the past with rationality’s attempts to recompose it.¹⁹

Yet, even as Florensky distinguishes the proper objects of our faculties, he still projects the form of the same upon the world by limiting the affirmation of existence to an ontology of contradiction in which the priority of unities over differences is preserved.

Florensky implicitly assumes that the unity of the individual exists as a primary constituent of the world, and so the individual is the final result of a process of individuation which must be explained. Even as the individual is displaced in the Trinity, the individual is still unduly reified as an essential unit from which the relational structure of the Trinity is to be composed. But as the philosopher, Gilbert Simondon, notes:

[If] one supposes that individuation does not only produce the individual—one would attempt to grasp the ontogenesis in the entire progression of its reality, and to know the individual through the individuation, rather than the individuation through the individual.”²⁰

But why should we desire a notion of individuation that does not exclusively pertain to the individual? Well, because as Deleuze demonstrates, there are concrete values that rebuke identity—for instance, pressure and temperature are each examples of relative, constantly fluctuating series that, when measured, only ever amount to a snapshot of a particular intensive arrangement across time.²¹

In an ontology of contradiction, these values are hidden as only signifiers of underlying coherence. The variable relations between intensive signs, such as pressure, do not reflect an underlying adherence of some substantive ‘thing’ adjointed to other ‘things,’ but rather express the coupling of heterogeneous orders of articulation. Pressure is first received as the experience of a sensible-change fundamentally unequal to the rationality retroactively dissecting it into a consistent identity.

Good Sense

Florensky also has some awareness of the bias of good sense—demonstrating this in his critique of the one-sidedness that comes with thinking according to rationality—that is, the partial perspectivism that comes with the linearity of discursive organization.²²

Yet, as already alluded to, Florensky’s ontology of contradiction precisely reiterates the one-sidedness of rationality—and thus the order of good sense—by restricting possible future kinds of order to the production of differences between preconceived unities.

Florensky understands relationality—difference—in terms of concepts and contradictions, and so imagines a historical path of thinkers, from Heraclitus through Nietzsche, who share this insight.²³ But while Heraclitus might be a good fit for this proposed history, Nietzsche can actually be used to demonstrate the insufficiency of identitarian concepts and contradictions to account for a rich notion of change–one in which difference is fully preserved. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche says:

Actually, why do we even assume that “true” and “false” are intrinsically opposed? Isn’t it enough to assume that there are levels of appearance and, as it were, lighter and darker shades and tones of appearance – different valeurs, to use the language of painters?²⁴

Nietzsche is drawing our attention to the reality of the in-between—the in-between which is not between two unities—true and false–but is rather the differential condition for the creation or representation of true and false in the first place. Florensky does not allow for this kind of non-dual propagation of values—that is, for values to exist which do not require cession to the representation-preserving syntax of the antinomy, or paradoxical dyad.²⁵

If the Trinity is only realized explicitly in our knowledge through the expression of a true-false binary corresponding to an inarticulable Truth,²⁶ we are artificially being rendered incapable of expressing the vast manifold of non-binary relations.

In fact, the philosopher and mathematician, Rocco Gangle, emphasizes, in Diagrammatic Immanence, unlike dyads which can only generate more dyads, triads are special because relations with an infinite number of terms may be generated.²⁷

To see why, consider the coordination between terms in a dyad where A is arbitrarily termed the initial object and B the terminal object. If a mediate term, C, is added, then the structure fundamentally changes as A cannot effect B without the intermediary of C. If C or any number of terms are added to the dyad, then they could only appear as subspecies of A or B, as the start of a repetition of the same dyad, or as an entirely new dyad. Contrarily, if a fourth term, D, is added to a triad, then that term is not reducible to any term in the series²⁸ because it serves to introduce a new relational series into the composition (e.g., if C relates to D and D relates to B). Framing a quaternary relation, or larger, according to a dyadic relation, such as true-false, obscures the unique, relational situation the addition of a fourth element causes.

Thus, on the one hand, Florensky correctly champions the triad as foundational to Truth because, without it, the complexity of existence past the confines of monadic and dyadic relations would remain obscure.

On the other, by defining the triad partly in terms of dyadic relations—which is what the true-false problem is—Florensky offers a parochial glimpse into how triadic relationships can model reality. Though Florensky claims there is no order to the Trinity,²⁹ the endless diversity of possible organizations of ideas, that need not invoke the a-temporal order of antinomies, demonstrates the need for the Trinity—and thus Truth—to be structured according to an abstract relational logic capable of accounting for any foreseeable arrangement, including temporal processes. To not fall victim to a blind use of good sense, just as Florensky attempted with the law of identity, the scope of possibilities afforded to linear thinking must be thoroughly accounted for—even though linear thinking can never be exhaustive of all the kinds of possibilities in general.

In summary, Florensky’s inability to recognize that thinking in terms of contradiction is but a particular rational strategy places him firmly within the confines of common and good sense. In doing so, Florensky partially subordinates Truth to the contingency of sapient representation.

Conceptual Rehabilitation

What would a notion of Truth look like that is faithful to the experiential and critical insights of Florensky without the narrowness of his ontology of contradiction?

Firstly, the triadic structure of the Trinity should be reconceived as a global category of organization, one capable of abstractly modeling all kinds of relationality as opposed to only contradiction. The displacement of the subject as dependent upon the Truth or the Trinity is still absolutely achievable through this adjustment, only the correspondence need no longer exclusively be through the coordination of an antimony with its necessary yet ineffable condition.

Rather, turning to semiotics, we have the resources to answer the question of how conceptualization of any object—and truth in particular—is possible in the first place. Considering semiotics is only a kind of triadic relationality, it forces no order upon the Trinity more broadly, but only typifies a possibility for the Trinity’s temporal realization.

To develop this point, consider how Ian James, in his essay Metaphor in Biosemiotics and Deconstruction, describes the way philosopher Charles’ Pierce’s fundamental triad—the object, sign-vehicle, and interpretant—can be used to justify the temporal priority of the object in the semiotic sequence. Briefly summarized, this process involves an object (stimulus) that inspires the creation or use of a sign implicating said object; this sign can then only be used according to some interpretation of the accordance between the given object and its sign.

If this dynamic is thought according to determination over time, then:

The logic at play here is that of strictly temporal semiotic causality and of the flow of that causality along the lines of unilateral determination that run through individual signs (e.g. metaphorical signs but in principle through all signs) and through semiotic chains. This is not a logic according to which semiotic practice is held in a tensive field between representation (logocentrism) and its other (originary différance) but rather one in which real and immanent semiotic chains and relations determine sign-meaning and activity but cannot themselves be determined in return.³⁰

Unilateral determination means that the manifestation of the object to the perceiver is dependent upon the object constraining the intelligible interpretations of said object to a finite space of possibilities. This process holds for both the sign and the interpretant; each are at least partially determined by the object since the object must have already had some constitution that allowed it to be represented at all. Thus, in every concept that is at least minimally determined by an encounter with its object of inquiry, there is a truth of unilateral determination.

Put elsewise, this means that every concept that has sense, regardless of its exact propositional structure, is an expression of situational truths unconfined to the proposition. A fortiori, the use of common sense (rationality) and good sense—which are semiotic processes—express situational truths as well.

Moreover, if we decide to consider temporal events in terms of triadic, semiotic relationships, and accept that humans were enacting semiotic relations before the emergence of speech, and that other organisms have been semiotic creatures for even longer, then semiotic chains in nature must have unilaterally determined the conditions for the existence of semiotic chains in language.

Thus, building off of Florensky’s understanding of faith, reasoning under faith should also be thought of as an affirmation that one’s specific knowledge is necessarily expressive of some features of the originary, unilateral object, as well as in some structural accordance³¹ with the series of relations which conditioned the appearance of said knowledge. Hence, one’s knowledge is explicitly enveloped by and yet envelops Truth.

This means that actual participation in the semiotic process is also the expression of lived Truth in Florensky’s sense, since the form and content of the triadic relation coincide.

Additionally, in order to preserve the reality of difference, identities distinguishable under semiotic analysis can be affirmed on pragmatic bases, such as by determining local affinities, or by distinguishing functions according to some standardized judgment. By doing so, we subvert Florensky’s search for a justification of the reality of identities and instead offer the potential for diverse explanations for how or why we might have conceived—or should conceive—of identity in the first place.

Conclusion

Rorty is right to think our descriptions of the world depend largely upon the assumptions embedded within our historical horizons. But this is not an insoluble problem—rather, it only points to the need to complicate our analysis, to create methods capable of perpetual iteration across distinct vocabularies. This does not mean we require one master language capable of conflating all languages—past and present—into a monstrous conglomerate,³² but only that we must recognize that there are global conditions of interaction, of existence itself, without which language would not be possible. When fashioning new models and ways of thinking, if we lack a concept of truth conceived as independent of, yet also constitutive of propositions, we conceal language’s primordial relation to non-linguistic reality.

Therefore, we should see the value in a return to Florensky. His notion of faith—as certain knowledge of Truth through the displacement of the knower—is an intriguing reframing of our relationship to the world that should be given serious thought in contemporary discourse. However, to preserve his insights in the active process of philosophical and theological development, we must render his concepts consistent with recent developments in thinking.

By replacing contradiction with difference, the antinomy with Piercian semiotics, and the Hegelian interpretation of the Trinity with the generic triad, the role of reason in discerning Truth is granted a broader scope while still preserving the spirit behind Florensky’s work. The further refinement and analysis of concepts such as rationality, faith, and the Trinity—or triadic relations in general—should be a continual project for all those who seek Truth, philosophers and theologians alike.

Richard Rorty and Pascal Engel, What’s the Use of Truth? (Columbia University Press, 2007), 44.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979), 360.
Rorty, Mirror of Nature, 361.
Robert Brandom, Perspectives on Pragmatism (Harvard University Press, 2011), 200.
Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters (Princeton University Press, 2018), 51.
Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 14.
Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 20.
Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 24.
Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 22.
Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 32.
Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 33.
Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 36.
Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 37.
Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 55-56.
Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 106.
Giles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (Columbia University Press, 1990), 78.
Giles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Columbia University Press, 1994), 226.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Columbia University Press, 1994), 167.
19. Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 17.
Gilbert Simondon, The Position of The Problem Of Ontogenesis (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 5.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Columbia University Press, 1994), 222.
Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 119.
Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 115.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 35.
Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 109.
Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 115.
Rocco Gangle, Diagrammatic Immanence (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 115.
The only sense in which D is reducible is abstractly, that is, as a like-instance of mediation as C—in this way, mediated objects are distinguishable from initial or terminal objects.
Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 113.
Ian James, Metaphor in Biosemiotics and Deconstruction, (Oxford Literary Review, 2023), 246.
This is a controversial and complicated point that I lack the space to explicate in detail. Essentially, the incarnation of structure in a logical space is always analogical and never identical to the real structure that conditioned it; however, because a representation is only sensible insofar as it is a translation, and since translations are only efficacious insofar as they are structure-preserving, any operative differences found in the representation embed functional differences from the structure of a pre-existing environment. For instance, diagrams are an instance of this being the case; I quote at length from Gangle’s Diagrammatic Immanence, “Diagrams are always realised within some already given system of relations that serves as an ambient environment for their inscription and selection. Diagrams are made or picked out from among pre-existing structures, which may be relatively abstract or more concrete depending on the case but which must at any rate exist as real systems of relations already instantiated in some differentiated field,” 6.
Rorty, Mirror of Nature, 348-349.