Philosophy S.L. Frank. Semyon Frank: biography life ideas philosophy: with Frank Questions to the text

(1877-1950) - Russian religious philosopher who began as a follower. Member of the cadet party.

In 1892 he graduated from the Faculty of Law of Moscow University. Employee of the journal “Questions of Life” (since 1904), participant in the collection “Milestones” (1909). Since 1911 he has been teaching at St. Petersburg University. In 1912 he was baptized. In 1917 - professor at the Faculty of History and Philosophy at Saratov University. In 1921 he headed the “Academy of Spiritual Culture”.

Participant in meetings of the Religious and Philosophical Society in Memory of Vl. Solovyova. In the fall of 1922 he was expelled from the RSFSR on the “philosophical ship”. Abroad there was support (according to Wikipedia).

ON THE. Berdyaev, S.L. Frank and L.P. Karsavin at the RSHD congress. 1923

Abroad he became one of the organizers of the RSHD. Member of the Religious and Philosophical Academy (1923). Taught at . In 1931 he taught at the University of Berlin, in 1932 he headed the Russian Scientific Institute. Member of the editorial committee.

About him

Major works

The ethics of nihilism. On the characteristics of the moral worldview of the Russian intelligentsia (collection “Vekhi”, 1909)

Subject of knowledge. On the foundations and limits of abstract knowledge (1915)

Crash of the Idols (1924)

The Meaning of Life (1926)

Incomprehensible. Ontological Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (1939)

Semyon Ludvigovich Frank looked like an ancient sage, like a man who came from some distant centuries, of enormous stature. In this photograph (on the stage there is a large portrait of Frank) you see him as a very old man. But he seemed a sage even in his youth. Slow, slow in words, thorough in judgments and thoughts, absolutely imperturbable, and only, as his friend Struve notes, special radiant heads from which light, wisdom, joy and warmth seemed to flow... these eyes are emphasized by all those who knew Seeds of Ludwigovich Frank.

Archpriest Vasily Zenkovsky, a historian of Russian philosophy who died in Paris, wrote that among the thinkers of this generation, Frank was the most philosophical - in the literal sense of the word. It was a powerful philosophical intellect. He was not a publicist, he was not a theologian, although, of course, he had to write sharp journalistic articles and in a number of his books directly addressed theological topics. He was a man of thought, like many classics of world philosophy. He himself jokingly said about himself: “I’ve been dreaming all my life.” This, of course, is not idle dreaming, but deep contemplation. It was as if he was diving deeper into the ocean of thought, into the ocean of abstract schemes, and finally reaching the very bottom of reality.

Semyon Ludvigovich was born in 1877 on Pyatnitskaya, Moscow, and spent his childhood in the alleys between Maroseyka and Pokrovka. His father was a military doctor and lived in Vilnius. As a military doctor, he took part in the defense of Sevastopol and was awarded the Order of Stanislav. He died early, and Frank, strictly speaking, did not remember him. His mother was an intelligent, educated woman. but his grandfather had a special influence on him. The family was Jewish by origin, from the Baltic states. My grandfather was a deeply religious and educated man in his own way. He brilliantly knew the Hebrew language, the Bible, and ancient sacred literature; when he was dying (Semyon was then 14 years old), he made him promise: always study the Scriptures, the Hebrew language and theology. The philosopher later recalls: formally I did not fulfill his behest, but what my heart, my mind, my spiritual quest and, finally, my Christianity were directed towards (he converted to Orthodoxy in 1912) - all this was a natural and organic continuation the lessons I learned from my grandfather.

Since his father died early, his mother got married, and his stepfather became a man of populist sentiments. This was another element of his upbringing. He graduated from the Faculty of Law (at that time the Faculty of Law did not train highly specialized jurists; it was a broadly humanities faculty, where half of the famous people of the late 19th and early 20th centuries studied).

In his youth, like Berdyaev, Bulgakov and Trubetskoy, he became interested in the ideas of social democracy. While still a high school student and later a student, he was interested in Marxism because he was assured that Marxism finally provides a scientific explanation for all social processes. These promises of Marxism seduced not just Frank, but very many, and therefore we should not be surprised that most representatives of Russian religious philosophy went through Marxism in their youth. Frank happily studied “Capital” (at that time only the first volume had been published); he, like any young man with a developed intellect, was attracted by the fact that it was a huge book, that it was written in heavy Hegelian language and that one had to understand it; whoever chewed it, achieved some peaks. I must emphasize that later, having become a fairly prominent sociologist, Frank completely got rid of this philosophy and this sociology, showing their helplessness, unscientific nature, that all these words that were written around and thick volumes actually gave birth to a mouse...

The social problem and social theme remained for a long time in Frank's thoughts and work, one might say, until the end of his days (he died in 1951 in London).

In his youth, he begins to study in some circles, studies the problems of social democracy, then he is arrested, spends some time in prison, and then finds himself deported. But, in the end, in 1890, he broke with the environment of revolutionaries (mainly the Socialist Revolutionaries and Populists), because his thorough scientific thinking was already making itself felt. And he suddenly saw that Marxism did not have that thorough approach to reality that could attract him.

At this time, Frank begins to study (he knew German brilliantly) Kuno Fischer’s multi-volume work “The History of New Philosophy” (by the way, almost all of this work has been translated into Russian). Each enormous volume is dedicated to one philosopher. This is the largest monograph that we have now, in Russian, it was published at the beginning of our century.

Breaking with Marxism, Frank is looking for something else as the basis for his worldview. And here's a strange thing. The breakthrough into some other vision occurred under the influence of Nietzsche, a man who embraced materialism, which even then seemed suspicious to Frank. But Friedrich Nietzsche's anxiety, his rebellion against deadness, philistinism, against the insignificance of the world, in some mysterious way affected the young student, and something like a conversion happened to him, an appeal to the kingdom of the spirit.

In an instant, he suddenly felt that there is another reality that cannot be completely exhausted by the intellect, which decomposes and dismembers everything. And this primary intuition is the whole philosophy of Frank. No wonder one of his books, written right before the war, was called “The Incomprehensible.” This is a very characteristic name. True reality, he says, is something Incomprehensible, in the sense that a person can feel it, always comprehend it, but never fully comprehend it. Man will never be able to fully comprehend the incomprehensible.

In 1900, that is, when he was a little over 20 years old, he was already the author of some works, writing a critical work on Marxism, Marx’s theory of value, and soon completely abandoned his original hobbies and looked for other paths.

In 1908, he got married and worked on a dissertation in which he raised the most important questions in the theory of knowledge. When Frank is published, if you happen to read it, please remember one thing. If in Berdyaev you can read one page, and each of his phrases will be an organism in itself, a whole complete world, if in Berdyaev you can read individual topics, individual paragraphs, and they can be rearranged, then with Frank everything is structured differently. He is a faithful student of Vladimir Solovyov, and it must be said that no one, perhaps, was as close (from a philosophical point of view) to Solovyov as his direct successor in the 20th century - Frank. If you begin to follow the course of his thought, you should not abandon it in the middle - everything with him is strict and harmonious, logically connected, one follows from the other. These are leisurely, attentive observations, and observations, including the very secret of the thinking process.

In 1915, “The Subject of Knowledge” was published, for which he received a master’s degree.

For Western philosophy at that time, the problem of subjective idealism played a huge role. You know that Lenin took up arms against him in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Actually, this is why the book was written, very hastily. Subjective idealism developed at that time in different directions, but mainly along Kantian lines. Lenin wrote that this point of view cannot be refuted, but since it is completely stupid, it must be discarded. Frank saw it differently. He believed that there were serious philosophical and logical arguments against subjective idealism. Subjective idealism comes from the “I”, which stands at the center of the universe. During a dialogue with the world, a person discovers something in himself - something that can be called “you”. But there is something else - what we call “we”.

Like his predecessors, Sergei Trubetskoy and Solovyov, Frank emphasized that human consciousness, human “I” are not cut off from each other. Real knowledge, real being are possible only when contact arises between people, unity arises. We do not live on isolated islands, but we live on a single continent. And this continent, which unites us all, is the last and true object of knowledge. A person learns not only the reflection of his own feelings, but also learns a certain substrate, depth. Later, the German philosopher Paul Tillich, our contemporary, wrote that God is not the sky above us, but the depth of existence. So, Frank said it first.

In 1917, he published a wonderful book (it was later published more than once in foreign languages; Frank was translated into many languages, including Japanese, Czech, Polish, German, English - he himself wrote books in these languages) “The Soul of Man,” where he brilliantly analyzes the question of the unity of spiritual life, which cannot be cut, cannot be divided. This unity concerns not only our “I”, but also the field in which the “I” is located. That is, “I”, then “we” and, finally, some mysterious substrate, which is the incomprehensible.

A revolutionary time is coming. Frank already has a family, he becomes a professor at Moscow University, but there is famine, devastation... I knew people who were his listeners, students. Philosopher and philologist students listened in fascination to his slow speech, when, as they described, one point clearly followed from another, another from a third. But - times were harsh; They quickly passed all the exams, in advance, ahead of schedule, and everyone left. Frank was offered to become the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at Saratov University.

It was the last center of intellectual freedom. Fedotov and some other prominent figures were invited there. But then Semyon Ludvigovich returns to Moscow. In 1922, he and his family lived in a dacha in Pushkino - with his wife and three children. (His son, Victor Frank, became a famous historian and writer abroad.) He went to Moscow for one day, was arrested and, together with his family, was expelled from Russia. He sailed on the same ship on which Berdyaev, Stepun and two hundred other people sailed, who were the beauty and pride of Russian culture and thought.

The European world was quite his own for Frank, since he spoke several languages fluently. He lectured in Berlin and Paris, and worked a lot. He wrote a wonderful book, “The Meaning of Life,” addressed to young people; "The Crash of the Idols", in which he debunked Marxism and many old concepts. Wrote the book “Light in the Darkness”. The book “Spiritual Foundations of Society” was especially important; its topic is still very relevant for us. Frank showed that a society can only be healthy when it has a spiritual substrate. Society of people is not just a phenomenon of the material world, but at the same time a phenomenon of the spiritual world.

In the 1930s, he was deprived of his chair in Germany (under the Nazis), he left for France, and in the end (after the German occupation) was forced to emigrate to London, where he lived in the last post-war years and died. Naturally, we did not write about his death anywhere and, as I already said, neither books nor articles were published. And soon it will be forty years since his death and the first editions will appear.

For those people who are able to appreciate and love the sphere of pure thought, reading Frank's books will be a real pleasure. He remained a contemplator, thorough and slow, until the end of his days. If Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev was an extremely subjective person, he always wrote about his own things, spoke passionately on his own behalf and could cite some moments from his personal life in a philosophical book, then Frank in this regard was a completely different person. He was embarrassed to talk about himself and always spoke only about things outside his scope, and even in his autobiographical notes written in the last years of his life, he still chastely protected his inner spiritual life. And you just need to guess what storms took place in it.

For Frank, the relationship between science and religion was very important. Because he was not only a philosopher, but also a sociologist and a religious scholar. He has one book, small but fundamentally important, called “Religion and Science” (it has been published many times in the West). Since it was published in those years when fierce anti-religious propaganda was carried out, Frank briefly answers the questions posed by the era. “We affirm,” he says, “contrary to the prevailing opinion, that religion and science do not and cannot contradict one another for the simple reason that they talk about completely different things. Contradiction is possible only where two opposing statements are made about the same subject.” A little abstract, but if you think about it, that’s exactly what we’re talking about. He explains his idea with a number of specific examples. A man sits on a train, sits motionless; the neighbor turns to him and says: “Can you sit still?” He says: “Sorry, I’m already sitting motionless.” Which one is right? Of course, the person who says that he sits motionless is right. But the one who reproached him is also right, because he is rushing at high speed - with the train. They speak on different planes. Approaches to the same phenomenon can be so different that it is impossible to put them on the same plane.

Also in relation to science and religion. Here are his words: “Science takes the world as a system of phenomena closed in itself and studies the relationships between these phenomena outside the relationship of the world as a whole, and therefore of each, even the smallest part, to its highest foundation, to its root cause, to its absolute beginning, from from which it originated and on which it rests. Science takes as a working hypothesis that the world is a ready-made closed system. Religion cognizes precisely the relationship of the world, and therefore man, to this absolute fundamental principle of existence, to God, and from this knowledge it derives an understanding of the general meaning of existence, which remains outside the field of view of science. Science, as it were, studies the middle, the intermediate layer or segment of being in its internal structure. Religion cognizes this middle in its relation to the beginning and the end, to the whole of being or to its integral fundamental principle.”

Further, he raises the issue of a miracle, which usually attracted sharp criticism from anti-religious propaganda. He says this: when a person denies a phenomenon that is incomprehensible to him, he already tries in advance to build himself a model of the world. But is there any reason to claim that the model is an exact match of reality? Semyon Ludwigovich Frank relies on the words of St. Augustine, who wrote that religion does not contradict the laws of nature, but the laws known to us. And not all laws are known to us.

As I have already said, he paid especially great attention to the social sciences. And this did not mean that the natural sciences were something of secondary importance for him, but that for him the scientific approach was only a partial approach. Here he says: “He is not a scientist, not a man of science, for whom the whole world is exhausted by the directly visible, to whom it seems that he surveys the whole of reality, that it lies before him in the palm of his hand and that it is very easy and simple to find out everything. On the contrary, only the scientist who feels the mysterious depths of existence, who directly, together with Shakespeare, knows: “There are many things in the world, friend Horace, that our sages never dreamed of.” The knowledge of one's ignorance, expressed in the words of Socrates: “I know only that I know nothing,” is the beginning and constant basis of scientific consciousness. The great Newton, who penetrated into the secret of the structure and movement of the universe, said about himself: “I don’t know how my descendants recognize me, but to myself I seem to be a little boy who, on the shore of a boundless ocean, collects individual shells thrown ashore by the waves, at the same time how the ocean itself and its depths remain incomprehensible to me as before.”

In 1939, his book “The Incomprehensible, or Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion” was published. Several books that later developed this topic were published posthumously: “Reality and Man”, theological reflections “God is with us” - a deep and brilliant substantiation of Christian Hope and Faith. In addition, many of his small works were published. One of them was devoted to the ontological proof of the existence of God, to the fact that man has in his direct experience a connection with this great mystery of existence.

He also had polemical works: “Beyond Right and Left.” He was one of the first Christian thinkers to show the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, but emphasized that Freud, having discovered the unconscious, did not know at all what to do with it. He did not possess any reasonable theory, but used the remnants of the old vulgar materialism - this prevented him from creating a real, genuine theory of culture.

Thus, a variety of themes permeate Frank's work. I don’t know whether his book “The Meaning of Life” will be published in Russia (very important for young people), I would very much like to, but in any case it has now been republished in Belgium at the Center of Eastern Christianity.

His political position was principled. When, at the end of the war, Berdyaev, as a sign of solidarity with the warring Russia, wanted to accept Soviet citizenship and involuntarily became carried away by the calls of those who came from the Soviet Union and said that now we will have freedom, now everything will be fine with us, Frank was indignant . I knew people who received the task of attracting emigrants. One hierarch whom I knew, in general a noble man, went to Paris with a whole bag of Russian soil: he threw it from the balcony, emigrants caught it with tears, took Soviet passports and went straight to the camps. This was a tragedy for many people. Some wanted to believe, others did not want to believe, it was suspicious: those who left disappeared, as if they had sunk into the water, all kinds of information stopped coming from them. But the moment was... joyful - victory was approaching. Frank and Berdyaev had an acute disagreement about this; Frank wrote to Berdyaev that he had succumbed to influence and thought that everything was fine there, behind the cordon, but he, Frank, did not believe in it, believed that tyranny continued its work, despite victory of the people. And we know that Frank was right.

In addition to Berdyaev, he was very close to Pyotr Berngardovich Struve, one of the prominent political and public figures in Russia in those years. Struve published a brilliant and content-rich magazine, Russian Thought, which was, naturally, closed in 1917. Frank led the philosophical section in it. Now issues of this magazine are appearing in used bookstores, I think it is a wonderful read.

Now a few excerpts from Frank's works to give you an idea of his style of thinking. This is how he talks about the attitude in society towards freedom and how we should enjoy the fruits of civilization: “There were societies based on slave labor. In fact, in every society there are people reduced to a slave state, but then they are not participants and figures in public life, and in their person society contains a certain dead sediment; no discipline, no severe fragmentation can replace the spontaneous source of strength flowing from depths of the human spirit. The most severe military and state discipline can only regulate and direct social unity, and not create it, create free will. Any attempt to paralyze the public will, insofar as it is generally feasible, leading to man’s loss of his being as the image of God, thereby leads to paralysis and deadening of life, to the decomposition and death of society. Any despotism can exist at all only insofar as it is partial, and, for its part, relies on freedom. Any dictatorship is strong and viable only insofar as it itself is created by free moral will. That is why socialism in its basic socio-philosophical plan: to replace the entire individual will with a collective will, to put the collective in the place of the individual, or to blind and glue people into one continuous body of masses is a meaningless idea that violates the basic and irremovable principle of society and can only lead to paralysis and the decomposition of society. It is based on an insane and blasphemous dream that a person, for the sake of planning and orderliness of his economy and the fair distribution of economic goods, is able to renounce his freedom, his “I” and become entirely, without a trace, a cog in the social machine, an impersonal medium of action of general forces. In fact, it cannot lead to anything other than unbridled tyranny, despotic power and dull passivity or bestial rebellion of the subjects.” This is what Frank wrote about half a century ago.

And finally, in his philosophy, Frank showed that the religious worldview, Christianity, is by no means something irrational. Nowadays it often happens that a person, having turned to the Christian faith, thinks that for this he must throw overboard his thinking, his logic, his reason. And people like Vladimir Solovyov, Sergei Trubetskoy or Semyon Frank show that the powerful work of the mind not only does not undermine the foundations of the religious worldview, but, on the contrary, gives it comprehension, and sometimes even justification. Of course, the deepest justification for Frank was his experience, the deep experience of comprehending reality as a whole, the deep experience of contact with the divine, as with something that can never be defined by human language. But he passed this experience, common to all humanity, to all Christianity, through the crystallizing gates of reason and was able to talk about it not only in the language of poetry, in the language of mysticism, but also in the transparent, clear language of a sage-philosopher. And he remained a sage not only on the pages of his books, but also in his appearance - a calm, clear, unperturbed, happy man, despite the sorrowful pages of his life (exile, wandering around Europe), despite all the bitterness of our century... He walked along to him and looked like a burning candle that is not shaken by the wind.

He was always straight. And his wife (I remember, she was still alive and spoke on Western radio) said that he (in his youth, when they met) struck her with this enlightened wisdom. And when you turn to his writings, I would like you to feel the spirit of this enlightened wisdom behind these chiseled, unhurried structures. It was characteristic not only of Semyon Ludvigovich Frank himself - it was characteristic in general of that stream of thinking that we call the Russian religious and philosophical revival. And I must say that this flow was not only not inferior to Western searches in this direction, but in many ways, as I already told you about this, in many ways superior to it. Because all these individuals that we talked about, and many who remained unwittingly outside our field of vision, were major figures. They were not just university professors poring over their papers - they were figures as if carved from stone, figures of which any civilization in any era can be proud.

FRANK, SEMYON LYUDVIGOVICH(1877–1950), Russian philosopher. Born January 16 (28), 1877 in Moscow. He studied at the Faculty of Law of Moscow University, studied philosophy and social sciences at universities in Germany. He went from “legal Marxism” to idealism and metaphysics. Frank's first significant work was Subject of knowledge(1915, master's thesis). In his doctoral dissertation Soul of man(1917) attempted to create a new approach in psychology, consistently criticizing the empiricism of “scientific” psychology and pointing out the “dead end” of psychological subjectivism. The mental life of a person, according to Frank, is an integral, dynamic world that has the fullness of reality and a special organization, not reducible to any “external” factors and not secondary in any sense. In the inner experience of the individual, which is never psychologically closed (“I” always presupposes “you” and “we”), absolute spiritual being is revealed and the soul meets God as the “ultimate depth of reality.”

In 1922 Frank was expelled from Russia. Lived in Germany (until 1937), France (until 1945) and then in England. Among Frank's most significant works are Living knowledge (1923), The collapse of idols (1924), Meaning of life (1926), Spiritual foundations of society (1930), Incomprehensible (1939).

Frank considered himself to belong “to the old, but not yet obsolete sect of Platonists.” He highly valued the system of Nicholas of Cusa. The metaphysics of unity of Vl.S. Solovyov had a significant influence on him. Frank proceeds from the intuition of the total unity of being: “Being is a total unity in which everything particular exists and is conceivable precisely through its connection with something else.” All-unity has an absolute meaning, since it includes the relationship between God and the world. “Even the concept of God is no exception... He is not conceivable without a relationship to what is his creation.” However, rational comprehension, and especially the explanation of absolute unity, is impossible in principle, and the philosopher introduces the concept of “metalogicality” as a primary intuition capable of a holistic comprehension of reality. Frank distinguishes this “primary knowledge” obtained in such a “metalological” way from “abstract” knowledge expressed in logical concepts, judgments and inferences. Knowledge of the second kind is absolutely necessary, it introduces a person to the world of ideas, the world of ideal entities and, what is especially important, is ultimately based on “primary”, intuitive (metalological) knowledge.

Endowed with the gift of intuition and capable of “living” (metalological) knowledge, a person feels with particular strength the deep irrationality of existence. “The unknown and the beyond are given to us precisely in this character of unknown and ungivenness with the same obviousness... as the content of direct experience.” The irrationalistic theme, clearly stated already in Subject of knowledge, becomes the lead in Frank's book Incomprehensible. “The knowable world is surrounded on all sides by a dark abyss of the incomprehensible,” the philosopher asserted, reflecting on the “terrible obviousness” with which the insignificance of human knowledge is revealed in relation to spatial and temporal infinity and, accordingly, the “incomprehensibility” of the world. Nevertheless, the thinker believed that there are grounds for metaphysical optimism, and they are associated primarily with the idea of God-manhood. Man is not alone, the divine “light in the darkness” gives him hope, faith and understanding of his own destiny. and becomes the basis for serving the cause of religious and moral transformation of the natural and historical existence of man.

Famous sages Pernatyev Yuri Sergeevich

Semyon Ludwigovich Frank (1877 - 1950)

Semyon Ludwigovich Frank

(1877 – 1950)

Russian philosopher. Main works: “The subject of knowledge. On the foundations and limits of abstract knowledge"; “The human soul (an introduction to philosophical psychology)”; “Essay on the methodology of social sciences”; “Spiritual foundations of society”; “Unfathomable. Ontological introduction to philosophy and religion"; "God is with us".

Semyon Frank belonged to those philosophers who were able to sense modernity surprisingly vividly and at the same time illuminate the “eternal problems of existence” in a new way. This constant immersion of the Russian philosopher “in the eternal” and vigilance for everything transient and momentary was noted by many contemporaries. Frank, like some other representatives of the Russian religious and philosophical renaissance, in his spiritual quest traveled from Marxism to idealism and finally to “Christian realism,” in which he saw the divine basis and religious value of all things.

Semyon Ludwigovich Frank was born in Moscow on January 28, 1877 into an intelligent family of a Jewish doctor who moved to Russia during the Polish uprising of 1863. For impeccable service during the Russian-Turkish War, his father, Ludwig Semenovich, was awarded the Order of St. Stanislav and awarded the title of nobility. However, he died early, when Semyon was barely five years old. After his death, his mother, Rozalia Moiseevna, moved to her father, M. M. Rossiyansky, one of the founders of the Jewish community in Moscow in the 60s. He taught his grandson the Hebrew language, read the Bible with him, and talked a lot about the history of the Jewish people and the history of Europe. “I have always understood my Christianity,” as Frank later recalled, “as a layering on an Old Testament basis, as a natural development of the religious life of my childhood.”

The second teacher who influenced Frank was his stepfather V.I. Zak, whom Frank’s mother married in 1891. He was a man who spent his youth in a revolutionary populist environment. He introduced Frank to the ideological world of populist socialism and political radicalism. The first “serious” book that Frank read, on Zach’s advice, was “What is Progress” by Mikhailovsky. It was followed by works by Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, Lavrov.

In 1892 the family moved to Nizhny Novgorod. In the senior classes of the Nizhny Novgorod gymnasium, Frank joined a Marxist circle and became close to a group of radical intelligentsia. The ideas of Marxism turned out to be so infectious that Frank remained under their influence for the first two years after entering the law faculty of Moscow University in 1894. During this period, he almost did not attend lectures, but he developed active “revolutionary activity” and even engaged in agitation among the workers. Soon, however, the young supporter of social democracy became disillusioned with Marxist ideas, because, in his words, he “felt irritated by hasty categorical judgments and the ignorance hidden behind them.”

In 1898, Frank received a certificate of completion of eight semesters, and decided to postpone state exams for a year in order to better prepare for them. In 1899, after student unrest at the university, he was expelled for two years without the right to reside in university cities. Frank first went to visit his relatives in Nizhny Novgorod, and in the fall to Berlin, where he attended lectures on political economy and philosophy. In Berlin, he wrote his first book, “Marx’s Theory of Value and Its Significance. A critical study”, directed against Marx’s theory of value. Later this book was published in Moscow.

In the spring of 1901, 24-year-old Frank returned to Russia and, having passed the state exam in Kazan, received a candidate's degree. From that time on, “years of wanderings” began in his life. Earning his living mainly by translations, Semyon often traveled abroad, mainly to Stuttgart and Paris, where the famous Russian publicist and philosopher P. Struve published the magazine “Liberation.” As a delegate, Frank also took part in the first congress of the constitutional democratic party; after moving to St. Petersburg, together with Struve, he edited the political weekly Polar Star, collaborating along with N. Berdyaev and S. Bulgakov in the magazines “New Way” and “Questions of Life” " Work in the journal “Russian Thought,” one of the best in pre-revolutionary Russia, was also of no small importance for the young philosopher. Here Frank published articles that were later published in the form of collections “Philosophy and Life” and “Living Knowledge”.

Collaborating with prominent Russian religious philosophers, reflecting on his path to religion, Frank gradually began to feel the roots of the Christian faith in himself, which predetermined his baptism. After the Manifesto of 1905, in which Nicholas II announced “civil liberties,” Frank no longer saw any moral obstacles to his, a Jew, converting to Orthodoxy. He chose K. Ageev, master of the Kyiv Theological Academy, known for his liberalism and religious tolerance, as his confessor.

Frank began his teaching career relatively late, already over thirty. He was prompted to change his outward lifestyle by the need to seek a more sustainable means of livelihood. In July 1908, Semyon Lyudvigovich married Tatyana Sergeevna Bartseva, a student at the Higher Evening Courses at the M. Stayunova Women's Gymnasium, where the 33-year-old teacher lectured on social psychology. As he later noted, “in my life, the era of youth, learning, ideological ferment and searching for my own internal and external path has ended. I finally chose scientific and philosophical creativity as my calling.”

In 1912, Frank became a private assistant professor at St. Petersburg University, and a year later he was sent to Germany to complete work on his first serious essay, “The Subject of Knowledge,” which brought the author wide fame. The book was presented as a master's thesis, which Frank successfully defended in May 1916. The continuation of this work was to be the work “The Soul of Man,” which the author intended to present as a doctoral dissertation. But the revolutionary events of 1917 prevented the implementation of this plan. Due to difficulties that arose in terms of continuing his scientific studies, Frank had to accept the offer of the Ministry of Public Education to become dean and ordinary professor of the Saratov Faculty of History and Philosophy. However, even in this provincial city, working conditions turned out to be unfavorable due to the civil war, which forced Frank to return to Moscow again. In the city of his childhood and youth, at the beginning of 1921, he was elected a member of the “Philosophical University” and, together with N. Berdyaev, took an active part in the creation of the Academy of Spiritual Culture, where, as a dean, he gave public lectures on philosophical, cultural and religious topics that had significant It was a great success among the listeners. During the same period, Frank published the books “Essay on the Methodology of the Social Sciences” and “Introduction to Philosophy.”

Meanwhile, the political situation in Russia was heating up. In the summer of 1922, prominent scientists and writers from several large university cities, including Frank, were arrested and then expelled from the country. Until 1937, he lived with his family in Germany and took an active part in the Russian Scientific Institute and the Religious and Philosophical Academy founded by N. Berdyaev. In 1924, the academy moved to Paris, but Frank continued for several years to give lectures at the University of Berlin, which later formed the basis of two books, “The Crash of Idols” and “The Meaning of Life.” They became, according to Frank, “the result of many years of studying social science, which began in early youth... And that instructive in its tragedy experience that we have all had over the past decades.”

Since the late 20s, Semyon Lyudvigovich’s interest in social problems has noticeably weakened, and issues of ontology and metaphysics of human existence have come to the fore. From 1931 to 1932, he gave a series of lectures on the history of Russian thought and literature at the University of Berlin at the Department of Slavic Philology, often traveling at the same time with public readings to Czechoslovakia, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, and the Baltic states. In 1934 he was a participant in the World Philosophical Congress in Prague.

After the Nazis came to power, Frank was removed from teaching and even faced the threat of arrest. These reasons prompted him to emigrate from Germany. However, even in France, where Semyon Ludvigovich moved with his wife, life was not easy. This was perhaps the most difficult period for creativity and simply physical existence. Only deep faith supported the philosopher, helping to overcome all the hardships of the war years, which he wrote about in 1941: “In the horrific massacre, in the chaos and inhumanity that now reigns in the world, the one who first begins to forgive will ultimately win. This means: God will win.”

Despite the hardships, Frank managed to finish his most fundamental work during these years, “The Incomprehensible. Ontological Introduction to Philosophy and Religion”, recognized by critics as the most profound philosophical study of the twentieth century.

In October 1945, having received permission to enter Great Britain, Semyon Ludvigovich and his wife came to London, where until his death he lived in the house of his daughter Natalya in one of the outskirts of the British capital. Natalya Semyonovna's husband died during the war, and she raised two children alone. In the same family lived the son of Semyon Ludvigovich Alexey, who was seriously wounded at the front.

During these years, Frank completed his last philosophical works “Reality and Man”, “Metaphysics of Human Existence”, “Light in Darkness. Experience of Christian Ethics and Sociology”, published posthumously.

In August 1950, Semyon Lyudvigovich became seriously ill, doctors diagnosed him with lung cancer. The philosopher's physical suffering lasted four months. And it was at this time that he experienced serious religious experiences, which he perceived as unity with God. On December 10, 1950, Frank died.

Despite the difficult life trials that befell Semyon Ludwigovich Frank, he was always an optimist and believed that sooner or later a new era would come, to the approach of which he contributed with his philosophy: “An era whose entire creativity was based on the denial of higher spiritual values that nourished the human spirit must be replaced by an era whose free creativity is entirely strengthened by the rooting of the human spirit in the highest spiritual principle.”

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Frank Semyon Ludvigovich (1877-1950)

Russian philosopher and psychologist.

He paid great attention to the study of human spiritual activity, arguing that psychology should remain, first of all, a science about the soul, and not about mental processes. The most significant psychological work was F.’s essay “The Soul of Man” (1917). The main idea of this work is the desire to return the concept of the soul to psychology instead of the concept of mental phenomena, which, from his point of view, do not have independent meaning and therefore cannot be the subject of science. He believed that the basis of psychology is and should be philosophy, and not natural science, since it does not study the real processes of objective existence in their causal or other natural patterns, but gives “general logical explanations of the ideal nature and structure of the mental world and its ideal relationship to other objects of existence." By soul he understands “the general generic nature of the world of mental existence, as a qualitatively unique integral unity.”

Of great importance is the fact that F. in his work distinguished such concepts as mental life, soul and consciousness. In anomalous cases, he emphasizes, mental life seems to overflow its banks and flood consciousness; it is in these states that one can give some characterization of mental life as a state of distracted attention, in which objects and vague experiences associated with them are combined.

Coming to virtually the same conclusions as psychoanalysis, F. wrote that under a thin layer of hardened forms of rational culture smolders the heat of great passions, dark and light, which both in the life of an individual and in the life of the people as a whole can break through the dam and come out, destroying everything in its path, leading to aggression, rebellion and anarchy. Thus, from F.’s point of view, the main content of the soul is blind, chaotic, irrational mental life. At the same time, he proves that in play and in art a person spills out this vague, unconscious mental life and thereby complements the narrow circle of conscious experiences.

The theory of knowledge developed by F., as well as his understanding of the essence of the soul, is largely based on Leibniz's monadology. F. wrote that pure reason is super-individual and super-personal, and therefore cognition occurs not only and not so much on the basis of contact with the outside world, but by developing from within. At its periphery, the soul comes into contact with the objective side of existence and thus becomes the bearer of knowledge about the external world. However, through its internal channels the soul connects with pure reason and is thus filled not with relative concepts, but with pure objective knowledge.

Of all the psychologists of the first half of the twentieth century, F. most fully and accurately reflected the influence of religious philosophy, which originates in the position of Solovyov, on psychology. At the same time, his concept fully reflected both the advantages and disadvantages of such a position.

Semyon Ludwigovich Frank (1877-1950), Russian philosopher, religious thinker and psychologist. Participant in the collections “Problems of Idealism” (1902), “Milestones” (1909) and “From the Depths” (1918).

In 1922 Frank was expelled from Soviet Russia. Lived in Germany (until 1937), France (until 1945) and then in England. Among Frank's most significant works are Living Knowledge (1923), The Crash of Idols (1924), The Meaning of Life (1926), The Spiritual Foundations of Society (1930), The Incomprehensible (1939).

Like his predecessors, Sergei Trubetskoy and Solovyov, Frank emphasized that human consciousness, human “I” are not cut off from each other. Real knowledge, real being are possible only when contact arises between people, unity arises. We do not live on isolated islands, but on a single continent. And this continent, which unites us all, is the last and true object of knowledge. A person learns not only the reflection of his own feelings, but also learns a certain substrate, depth. Later, the German philosopher Paul Tillich wrote that God is not the sky above us, but the depth of existence. However, Frank said it first.

In 1917, Frank published the book “The Soul of Man,” which was subsequently published more than once in foreign languages. Frank has been translated into many languages, including Japanese, Czech, Polish; German, English - naturally, he himself wrote books in these languages. This book brilliantly analyzes the question of the unity of spiritual life, which cannot be cut, cannot be divided. This unity concerns not only our “I”, but also the field in which those “I”s to which we are turned are located. That is, “I”, then “we” and, finally, some mysterious substrate, which is the incomprehensible.

Frank had a negative attitude towards collectivism, which crushes the individual. Any dictatorship is contrary to freedom, and divine unity cannot exist without freedom, it is free.

S.L. Frank - “philosophical psychology” and absorbed most of the typical features of Russian spiritual psychology (Frank S.L., 1917). S.L. Frank, who set himself the task of “promoting... the restoration of the rights of psychology in the old, literal and precise meaning of the word,” believes that modern psychology in most cases is not a doctrine of the soul as a certain sphere of some internal reality, separated and opposed to the sensual. the objective world of nature, but is physiology - the doctrine “about the laws of so-called “mental phenomena”, divorced from their internal soil and considered as phenomena of the external objective world.” Because of this, “three quarters of the so-called empirical psychology and an even larger part of the so-called “experimental” psychology is not pure psychology, but either psychophysics and psychophysiology, or ... the study of phenomena, although not physical, but at the same time not mental " (Ibid. P.3).

According to Frank, true knowledge of the human soul is possible only through the combination of “religious intuition” (which allows one to “experience” the soul) and scientific or abstract knowledge (which is “the only form of publicly accessible and generally binding objectivity”). At the same time, the possibility of experimental knowledge of the soul as some kind of holistic, unified essence is especially emphasized, and not just as a multitude of individual mental phenomena (the Russian scientist calls this point of view psychic atomism) or only as manifestations of this soul, and not its essence. And by the concept of “soul” he understands only “the general nature of mental life,” regardless of how we think about this nature.

In accordance with the theses of Frank’s concept analyzed above, he also built a theoretical and methodological platform for “philosophical psychology.” Its tasks are:

knowledge not of individual, isolated, isolated mental phenomena, but of the nature of the “soul” by the method of introspection, which is understood as “immanent clarification of the self-conscious inner life of the subject in its generic... essence” (P.29);

determining the place of the “soul” in the general system of concepts, its relations to other areas of existence. And in this case (with this understanding of the tasks of philosophical psychology) it differs from real ones, incl. natural sciences, as well as from disciplines engaged in the knowledge of “the kingdom of Logos or ideal being” (logic, ethics, aesthetics, religious philosophy, etc.), since the goal is not the knowledge of God or the knowledge of the world, but the comprehension of being, revealed in self-knowledge. The object of philosophical psychology is man as a “concrete bearer of reality” (pp. 29-30).

Elsewhere, Frank clarifies his own understanding of mental life, again emphasizing its integrity: “Our mental life is not a mechanical mosaic of some kind of mental pebbles called sensations, ideas, etc., not a pile of mental grains of sand raked by someone, but some unity, something primary-continuous and whole, so that when we use the word “I”, this word corresponds not to some vague and arbitrary concept, but to a clearly conscious (albeit difficult to define) fact

Now let us dwell on the main, in our opinion, provisions developed by Frank as one of the representatives of theological psychology, and which distinguish his approach from others, primarily natural science and materialism.

1. Frank recognizes mental life as a special world, not reducible only to material-objective existence and delimited from the objective world. Moreover, mental life is not only a real fact from the point of view of objective consciousness. This peculiar world exists and exists as what it is in the sense “in which and what it is for itself.” And it is precisely in this understanding of its independence and independence that the spiritual world has its own conditions of life, “meaningless and impossible in another plane of existence, but the only natural and real ones in itself” (pp. 55-56).

2. The main features of mental life are recognized:

Its non-extension or, more precisely, non-spatiality, because for images as elements of mental life, extension is not the form of their existence, but only “a simple formless, immediate and indefinable internal quality” (p. 95).

Timelessness of mental life. Since the area of the psyche is “the area of experience, of directly subjective existence” (p. 90), then, in its essence, experience is devoid of measurable duration and is not localized in time. And only when a person begins to think about experience, replacing its “inexpressible immediate nature with its image in the objective world” (p. 96), can we talk about determining the time of experience.

Immeasurability as one of the main differences between mental life and the objective world, due, respectively, to its first two features.

“Continuity, unity, formlessness of unity” of mental life (p. 96). Soul life is neither a definite plurality nor a definite unity. It is only “a material intended and capable of becoming both true unity and true multiplicity, but precisely only formless material for both” (p. 98).

The unlimitedness of mental life, the absence of a limited and definite volume. At the same time, “it has no boundaries, not because it embraces infinity, but because its positive content in its extreme parts in some elusive way “comes to naught”, without any boundaries or outlines” (p. 102) .

We can say that all these features only from different sides characterize the essential feature of the mental world - its uncertainty and formlessness, which actually distinguishes it from everything objective and logically determined.

1) the soul as an emerging unity, i.e. as the beginning of “activity or life” (p. 165);

2) the soul as a bearer of knowledge emanating from the “incomprehensible depths of existence” and concentrating in the individual consciousness (p. 190);

3) soul as the unity of spiritual life (i.e., the objective and subjective aspects of mental life), which acts as a form and stage of consciousness.

In other words, what is outlined here is, as it were, the evolution of a person’s inner life, when (1) from pure mental life as the lowest state (where there is neither subject nor object, there is no distinction between “I” and “not-I”, but there is only pure and universal potency - the formless community of the spiritual element), (2) through the isolation of the contents of objective consciousness from mental life and the formation of the world opposing it - “personal self-consciousness of the individual “I” (p. 218) (state of self-consciousness), (3) to the highest state of spiritual life, where the opposition between subject and object, “I” and “not-I”, internal and external being is significantly modified (compared to the previous state), for example, “I” recognizes itself as “only a partial radiation of the absolute unity of life and a spirit that rises above the opposition between subject and object and above the opposition between different subjects" (p. 129).

Thus, at the last stage there occurs, as it were, an actualization, the realization of that “embryonic state”, the originality of which was in pure mental life (p. 129).

Essentially, S.L. Frank in his “philosophical psychology”, generalizing many ideas of his time (James, Bergson) and relying on the starting points of Russian religious and philosophical thought (understanding of consciousness, interpretation of the relationship between faith and knowledge, refraction of epistemology through the prism of ontology, recognition of the importance of the individual and the personal principle in the evolution of mental life, etc.), proposed a program of “new psychology,” which, in his opinion, was a way out of the opposition between materialistically and idealistically oriented psychological systems.

And in this sense, the ultimate task of spiritual psychology is to create favorable soil for the “true direction of the science of the spirit,” implying a situation when, instead of “the psychology of man-animals, the psychology of man is the image of God” (p. 439), in our opinion, completely was implemented by S.L. Frank, although he does not mention God in a single line of his work.

4. Organizational design of domestic spiritual psychology. Speaking about spiritual psychology in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. As an independent direction of psychological thought, we meant not only the presence of holistic, fairly logical and, in a certain paradigm, well-founded concepts or theoretical constructs. It is necessary, in addition, to indicate that this direction was formalized and organizationally. Thus, the existing St. Petersburg Philosophical Society largely promoted the work of this direction, although its doors were also open to representatives of other approaches to the nature of the inner world of man. Moreover, the Theological Academies also served as a kind of school within which religious and psychological ideas were tested. Thus, many graduates of academies wrote works for the degree of candidate or master of theology on psychological topics, for example, at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy in 1894, out of 42 graduates, 10 wrote works on psychological and philosophical issues (Report on the state ..., 1895 . Issue 2. P. 361), and in 1903, among the topics of dissertations, we find works with such topics as: “The development of pessimistic views in Russian life and literature of the 2nd half of the 19th century as a consequence of the impoverishment of faith (religious-psychological essay)", "Leibniz's doctrine of the connection between the soul and the body and a critical assessment of this doctrine from a Christian point of view"; There are works that study the phenomena of “moral sanity”, “freedom of conscience” and others, which now we could fully attribute to psychological problems (Ibid. p. 519).

Moreover, in the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, for example, there was a special Student Psychological Society, the chairman of which was V.S. Serebrennikov, extraordinary professor in the psychology department of the academy. More than 70 people participated in its work, and it had from 10 to 12 meetings per year. How much attention was paid to the activities of the society is evidenced by the fact that the rector of the academy attended meetings; moreover, “the useful activities of the society, witnessed by the Most Reverend Rector, attracted the merciful attention of the Most Reverend Bishop. At the request of the chairman of the society... V.S. Serebrennikov... Rector presented to His Eminence the rules of the society's activities, asking for the archpastoral blessing for the continued existence of the society, on the grounds expressed in the rules" (Ibid. p. 521). A positive decision was received. The resolution on the document on the activities of the Psychological Society read: “1903. January 4. Blessed. M.A.” (Ibid. p. 521). It should be noted that the clergy actively participated in scientific psychological events themselves. For example, members and guests of the 2nd All-Russian Congress on Educational Psychology were teachers from theological seminaries in Kaluga, St. Petersburg, Tver, and Saratov.

Thus, the development of spiritual psychology could only proceed incrementally, especially since everything was conducive to this: there were research centers; there were young followers of famous and serious thinkers; the list of journals publishing works by representatives of spiritual psychology expanded; there were a number of fruitful ideas and approaches. Moreover, constant communication at scientific meetings and sessions of the Moscow Psychological Society, the Religious and Philosophical Assembly in St. Petersburg and other scientific meetings contributed to the adjustment, clarification, and critical re-evaluation of conceptual constructs.

However, with the beginning of revolutionary transformations in Russia, and even more so after the victory of the October Revolution, the fate of spiritual psychology changed significantly...

While still a high school student, Frank became interested in Marxism and took an active part in the activities of Marxist circles. In 1894, after graduating from high school, he entered the law faculty of Moscow University, but left it in 1896 without passing the exams. In 1899 S.L. Frank was arrested for revolutionary activities and expelled from Moscow. That same year he went to Germany, where he continued his studies in Heidelberg and Munich. During these years, Frank moved away from Marxism and became one of the consistent critics of this teaching, which was reflected in the book “Marx’s Theory of Value and Its Significance” (1900).

In 1901 S.L. Frank received the right to take and passed the exams for the university course, returned to Russia and began literary and philosophical activity. He took part in the famous collection "Problems of Idealism" (1902), "Milestones" (1909), edited the weekly journals "Polar Star" and "Freedom of Culture" (1905-1906), and from 1907 headed the philosophical department in the magazine "Russian Thought". Since 1905, Frank has been an active participant in the activities of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Cadets).

In 1911 S.L. Frank passed his master's exams and took the position of private assistant professor at St. Petersburg University. In the spring of 1913 - summer of 1914. he was on a scientific trip to Germany. Upon his return, in 1915, Frank's first major philosophical work was published - "The Subject of Knowledge. On the Foundations and Limits of Abstract Knowledge", which served as the basis for his master's thesis. Soon, in 1917, another book was published - “The Soul of Man. An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Mental Life.” With these books S.L. Frank became famous as an interesting and original philosopher.

During the years of the revolution, in 1917-1921. S.L. Frank was dean and professor of the Faculty of History and Philosophy at Saratov University. Returning to Moscow, he began teaching at Moscow University and took part in the creation and activities of the Philosophical Institute and the Academy of Spiritual Culture. In 1922, together with other Russian philosophers, publicists, writers S.L. Frank was expelled from Soviet Russia on the infamous "philosophical ship".

In exile, he settled in Berlin, was one of the founders of the Russian Scientific Institute, and lectured at the Religious and Philosophical Academy and at the University of Berlin. During these years, his books “Spiritual Foundations of Society”, “The Crash of Idols”, “The Meaning of Life” were published.

In 1937, fearing Nazi persecution of Jews, Frank moved to France, and from 1945 to England. During these years, he wrote and published the works “The Incomprehensible”, “God With Us. Three Reflections”, “Light in the Darkness”, “Reality and Man. Metaphysics of Human Existence”, in which he finally formulated the principles of his philosophical system. S.L. died Frank on December 10, 1950 and was buried near London.

The entire philosophical system of S.L. Frank is based on the philosophy of unity, the founder of which is considered to be V.S. Soloviev. In addition, the ideological sources of Frank's philosophy were the teachings of Plato and Nicholas of Cusa.

According to the recognition of the largest researcher of Russian philosophical thought, Rev. V.V. Zenkovsky, in the works of S.L. Frank, we have “a very harmonious, well-thought-out system... Logic, epistemology, metaphysics, anthropology, ethics - developed by him... very deeply.” And it is no coincidence that V.V. Zenkovsky wrote that “in terms of the strength of Frank’s philosophical vision, one can without hesitation call him the most outstanding Russian philosopher in general.” And the main merit of S.L. Frank is that he introduced a serious rational element into the Russian religious and philosophical tradition, combining independent rational thought with traditional religious faith. And therefore S.L. Frank managed to rationally express the super-rational essence of reality, to provide a reliable logical-gnoseological foundation for the metaphysics of unity.

According to S.L. Frank, unity constitutes the basis and essence of world existence: “There is nothing in the world and nothing is conceivable that could exist in itself, without any connection with anything else. Being is unity in which everything particular is and is conceivable precisely and only through its connection with something else." Even God is the main, but part of all-unity: “God, as the absolute fundamental principle or first principle, is all-unity, without which nothing is conceivable at all.” At the same time, God and the world are also a unity: “If the world, in comparison with God, is something “completely different,” then this otherness itself stems from God and is grounded in God... The world is not something identical or homogeneous with God, but it cannot to be something completely different and foreign to God.” And the main category that unites God with the world in unity is God-manhood: “Along with God-manhood, as an inseparably fused unity - and through its mediation - the God-dimensionality, theocossism of the world is simultaneously revealed to us.”

As a result, S.L. Frank comes to the conclusion that unity “permeates all that exists, is present, as such, in the smallest segment of reality... Everything concretely existing is rooted in being, as unity, and is saturated with its juices... Creative unconditional being is the dark maternal womb, in which it first arises and from which everything that we call the objective world originates."

So, all-unity predetermines the “primordial unity” of being, and, in turn, being is a super-rational all-unity.

Considering the structure of existence, S.L. Frank distinguishes three types, or three forms of being. The first form is “reality” (or “empirical reality”. By “reality” Frank understood what “truly exists”, the totality of material and spiritual phenomena of the world. Another form is “ideal being”, including “ideal essences”, other than “specifically existing “things” localized in space and time - precisely in the sense of superspatial and supertemporal unity." Thus, "ideal being" is Plato's "eidos", the "form" of real things existing in the "empirical reality." And finally, the third form of being is "reality." "Reality" is, in a way, the highest form of being, including both "reality" and "ideal being": "All reality, everything that we include into the composition of world existence, we are forced to contrast the broader concept of reality, which includes, in addition to reality, also supra-temporal, “ideal” being." Consequently, according to S. L. Frank, consciousness (which he considers “reality”) is not opposes being, but is included in being.

Being super-rational, being cannot be known using only simple logic or simple empirical experience. Therefore, Frank distinguishes between different types of knowledge. “Subject” (sensual, empirical) knowledge serves as a way of knowing “empirical reality.” “Abstract knowledge” (“intellectual contemplation”) allows one to understand the logical connections between the elements of reality, and thus penetrate into the world of “ideal existence.” Abstract knowledge brings into unity and into a system the data of experience, but this unity is rational and static and, as such, is only a “pale hint” of the true All-Unity.

Therefore, in addition to the “objective” and “abstract”, a person has, as S.L. wrote. Frank, “a special, and, moreover, primary, type of knowledge, which can be called living knowledge, or knowledge-life.” It is “living knowledge”, in which a person super-rationally merges with the object, empathizes with being, and it is possible to comprehend the true unity of the world: “In this spiritual attitude, the cognizable is not presented to us from the outside, as different from ourselves, but is somehow merged with our life itself. "And our thought is born and acts somehow from the depths of the most revealing reality, takes place in its very element. What we experience as our life, as if by itself, reveals itself to us - opens to our thought, which is inseparably present in this life." - wrote S.L. Franc. Thus, “living knowledge” does not fit into the framework of ordinary logic, but is “meta-logic”, which is capable of expressing the “metalological unity” of the world, or unity. From Frank’s point of view, “living knowledge”, as “meta-logic”, is essentially close to “intuitionism”, developed in the philosophy of N.O. Lossky. It is not for nothing that Frank accepts Lossky’s intuitionism as the only theory of knowledge that provides a way out of the impasse of the self-isolation of consciousness. After all, it was the theory of intuitionism that recognized that the subject and object of knowledge are in a unity that embraces them, and consciousness does not oppose being, but is included in being.

However, the knowledge of the unity of the world also has its limits. In the book "The Incomprehensible" S.L. Frank formulates a very important idea for his philosophy about the presence of the “Incomprehensible” in the All-Unity. Frank makes the distinction between “Incomprehensible to us” and “Incomprehensible in its own existence.” Through the most subtle analysis, he shows that at the bottom of all layers of existence - the external world, the world of self-consciousness and the timeless world of ideas - lies the inescapable irrational remnant of the real mystery of existence that surrounds us and within us. This “incomprehensible” permeates all of reality, testifies to itself everywhere and shines through all objects as a “manifest mystery.” But for Frank, the existence of the “Incomprehensible” in total unity is not a reason to deny the possibility of knowledge: “The Incomprehensible is not “night” in which “all cats are gray” and in the face of which the clear and distinct perception of the “daytime” visible appearance of the world would lose all meaning "The incomprehensible is, on the contrary, that unapproachable Light from which, on the one hand, the very “daytime,” everyday visibility of the world flows and in the face of which this ordinary “lightness” of the world itself turns out to be nothing but something dark, impenetrable, irrational.” Therefore, Frank states that “The Incomprehensible is comprehended through the comprehension of its incomprehensibility.”

Essentially, “The Incomprehensible” by S.L. Franca is the Absolute Deity of apophatic (negative) theology. In Frank's interpretation, the Absolute Incomprehensible is more than being. It is “potentiality” and “freedom”, it is what gives rise to being (Frank uses the word “to be able” as a noun to express the real potential of being).

At the same time, Frank's philosophical concept was not without contradictions. For example, V.V. Zenkovsky noted that S.L. Frank was not even successful in posing the problem of theodicy (justification of God), in particular, in the question of the essence of evil. In Frank's concept of unity, the world is brought too close to God, which is why it actually lacks the idea of creation. Consequently, Frank's philosophical system, despite its religious and philosophical essence, is in some contradiction with traditional Christian doctrine. However, S.L. himself was aware of this fact. Frank, the task of introducing rational knowledge into Christian doctrine, from the point of view of Orthodoxy, is quite unconventional. On this occasion S.L. Frank wrote that he did not deal specifically with theological problems, but followed the classical tradition, in which philosophy was at once independent, religious, and fruitful.