Notes:

a) At the end of his address, Solzhenitsyn returns to the need for a “turn”, for a “major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance”. This “watershed” or “turn” will take place, he thinks, not in the usual course of history, but at “a new height” or “a new level”. This “new level” is the gigantomachia. The first part of the turn must be made from history to it.

b) But within the gigantomachia, the turn must be completed by a crossing over to Plato’s child ‘holding to both’. The logic of the giants and the gods must be left behind for the third position where both are possible together: “where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages [as advocated by the Olympic gods], but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era” [as advocated by the titanic giants].

Notes:

a) The gigantomachia has three powers or shapes or ontologies; but it has only two logics. The giants and the gods present mirror images of the logic of the other: each side believes, as Plato says, that “real existence belongs only to [it] … and what those others allege to be true reality they call not real being”. In similar fashion, Solzhenitsyn here contrasts “our spiritual life” to both “east” and “west” which are “terifying” in “the similarity of the disease afflicting” them.

b) The “split in the world is less terrifying” partly because this split, as “the space of the door“, can also be healing. The split needs to be followed back to origin where it is grounded in the gigantomachia. Once ‘there’, an essentially different power/shape/ontology can be cultivated. “The circle–is it closed? And is there really no way out? And is there only one thing left for us to do, to wait without taking action? Maybe something will happen by itself? It will never happen as long as we daily acknowledge, extol, and strengthen–and do not sever ourselves from–the most perceptible of its aspects: Lies. (…) And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. (…) This opens a breach in the imaginary encirclement caused by our inaction. It is the easiest thing to do for us, but the most devastating for the lies. Because when a person renounces lies this cuts short their existence. Like an infection, they can exist only in a living organism.” (Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, “Live not by lies“, February 18, 1974)

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Notes:

a) “Expansion” is the principle of both the giants and the gods. Both want to expand indefinitely at the expense of the other. What Solzhenitsyn terms “spiritual development” takes place, by contrast, through the acknowledgement of limits and boundaries and the subsequent refusal of “expansion”.

b) Our spiritual life can and should be “integral”, exactly and only because origin is first of all “integral” and “complete”.

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Notes:

a) Solzhenitsyn observes that “we are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey”. He is referring to the mistake that was made in “the turn introduced by the Renaissance (…) [when] we recoiled from the spirit and embraced all that is material, excessively and incommensurately.” But was this a beginning in historical time? How so? Did a beginning in history result in an essentially different history thereafter? Or are beginnings not in history, but somehow before and below history where the gigantomachia rages?

b) ‘Self-restraint” means the acceptance of limitations. Limitations can be positive because enabling the “Supreme Entity” at origin to be “Complete” – and therefore essentially plural. ‘Complete’ entails having all of one’s parts (so that an entity lacking parts could never be ‘complete’ or ‘incomplete’). But at origin, ‘having parts’ entails an essential plurality that is at home there.

c) Essential limitation is positive in a further important sense. What Solzhenitsyn calls the “calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness” is itself limited. A new beginning departing from such “calamity” is possible at any moment.

d) Essential limitation is “the space of the door” and it is this space which enables essential transformation.

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Notes:

a) Solzhenitsyn opposes “responsibility”, “limitations” and “sacrifice” to “boundless freedom” and “total emancipation”. In terms of the gigantomachia, he rejects the boundless and total claims made by the giants and the gods for themselves and against the other, in favor of the child’s notion of a belonging-together of “both” at origin. Were the two not peacefully bounded there, they could not be two and they could not hold together – which is exactly the claim of the giants and of the gods.

b) At origin, it is “limitation” which allows first the two to be two and which enables them to relate to each other there in peace. “Limitation” can be therefore be positive and enabling in our worlds of concern exactly and only because it is positive and enabling at origin.

c) The limits and borders in the gigantomachia and, consequently, in history constitute “the space of the door“.

d) Solzhenitsyn specifies one of the essential aspects of limitation in “Live not by lies“: “The circle–is it closed? And is there really no way out? And is there only one thing left for us to do, to wait without taking action? Maybe something will happen by itself? It will never happen as long as we daily acknowledge, extol, and strengthen–and do not sever ourselves from–the most perceptible of its aspects: Lies. (…) And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. (…) This opens a breach in the imaginary encirclement caused by our inaction. It is the easiest thing to do for us, but the most devastating for the lies. Because when a person renounces lies this cuts short their existence. Like an infection, they can exist only in a living organism.” Limitation is here seen in a dual perspective, both of which depend upon limitation having an ontological foundation. Objectively, the hold of lies should not and cannot prevail because it contradictes what is real and true. Subjectively, we are called and empowered by this basis in the real to oppose this hold. Solzhenitsyn long maintained that he would live to see a non-communist Russia. He has done so in a kind of existential argument for his claims.

e) Limitation plays an essential role in Heidegger’s work as well, particularly in sections 65, 74 and 75 of SZ. A discussion of these sections will be added to Gegantomachia in the near future.

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Notes

a) Since Solzhenitsyn’s view is that our problems have their origin in the gigantomachia, he notes that “the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundation of thought”, at “the basis“. If repair is possible, a retreat must be made back to this basis where another root might be cultivated and another foundation exposed. But how is this to be done? How do we start and carry through such an enterprise? How are we to begin again?

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Notes

a) “Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtle and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention”.. Compare Plato’s description of the giants in the gigantomachia: they “drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands, for they lay hold upon every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch. They define reality as the same thing as body, and as soon as one of the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word.” (Sophist 246)

b) Solzhenitsyn says that the West “embraced all that is material, excessively and incommensurately“. Gigantically, we might say.

c) Solzhenitsyn uses the terms ‘way of thinking’ and ‘world’ as inherently and fundamentally plural. Earlier in A World Split Apart he says, for example, “that these worlds are not evolving toward each other and that neither one can be transformed into the other without violence.” In the passage above, he refers to “The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide”. This guiding ‘way of thinking’ replaced the opposite way of the Middle Ages which had seen the “repression of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one”. World is always one world among other possible worlds; a way of thinking is always one possible way among other possible ways.

d) Solzhenitsyn uses the word “turn” here to describe a peculiar action whereby one fundamental determination of world and thought is refused in favor of another. Where the Middle Ages had seen “repression of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one”, the Renaissance “recoiled from the spirit and embraced all that is material”. Heidegger also uses the term ‘turn’ (ie, Kehre) to describe this eigentümliche action at origin which defines human being in two ways. First, only humans witness the gigantomachia and know the freedom of according, always and everywhere, with one of its shapes. Second, through such according with one of the shapes in the agonistic struggle of the gigantomachia, human beings define the nature of their thought and world.

e) If worlds and ways of thought are inherently plural, the place of their transformation must be between worlds and between ways of thought. This is what Eliot terms “World not world” and why he follows San Juan in recommending “Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought”.

f) This “place” between worlds and between ways of thought is Beckett’s “the space of the door“:
unheard footfalls only sound
till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other
then no sound
then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither
unspeakable home (Neither)

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Notes:

a) The “physical” (giants) and “spiritual” (gods) “fight of cosmic proportions” is the gigantomahia. Of course “it has already started”, since it takes place in a “time” of its own which is without beginning and without end. Plato calls the battle “interminable“.

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Notes:

a) Solzhenitsyn is concerned to describe “world powers” which have to do with the “stand” of the whole “Earth”. These multiple world powers with ontological import constitute the gigantomachia. Since these world powers are constitutional, they are “profound” and their shapes are “manifold”.

b) Solzhenitsyn is particularly concerned to describe those seemingly opposed forms of the gigantomachia
which are “split” and whose “profound and … alienating” manifestations are “rifts” which “are more numerous than one can see at first glance.” These are the giants and the gods and and the “manifold” effects of their “interminable battle” throughout the world.

c) Solzhenitsyn cites “the illusion according to which danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces.” Where the danger is constitutional and concerns first principle, it can only be reinforced, not obviated, by the attempt to form some of compromise solution on the basis of what has actually gone wrong – allegiance to a certain logic at origin. Much of Solzhenitsyn’s address is given over to the description of this logic. (For the question of ‘ontology’ vs ‘logic’, see notes c) and d) of Live not by lies.)

d) It will be important to observe what rival “power” or fundamental logic Solzhenitsyn suggests over against the powers of the “split”. How is one to find it and to participate in its difficult shape?

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a) This is, of course, exactly the view that George Bush continually touts in regard to Iraq and to the Arab world generally.

b) Solzhenitsyn maintains that the problem with such a view lies in the fact that it “is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds.” Where and when is “the essence of other worlds”? How does one get there? What is to be done there?

c) The great difficulty faced by Solzhenitsyn is that he wants to describe not what is seen, but how we see. Ie, he wants to describe exactly what is not seen, what is behind our seeing.

d) More, the problem of our seeing, something that would seem to be a matter only of optics or perhaps of epistemology, is in fact a matter of ontology. Our seeing is shaped by exactly that logic of fundamental split whose roots go down to essence or origin: “the persisting blindness of superiority” depends upon a fundamental split between what is above and what is below. It is this “split” of the two (world from essence, how we see from the possibilities (plural) of seeing) which underlies our delusions that there is nothing essential to be considered in our lives, that what we see may be accepted without consideration of how we see, that how we see is not open to a range of possibilities.

The World Split Apart segments continue here. Further consideration in A World Split Apart of the above and the below is to be found here.