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This is the first book-length translation into English of the work of the Russian philosopher Vladimir Bibikhin (1938–2004). Bibikhin is recognized by many (myself included) as the most important Soviet/Russian thinker of the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1990s, his public lecture courses enjoyed immense popularity, the lecture hall was packed, and almost every course was later published as a solid philosophical treatise. Within some fifteen years, Bibikhin created an impressive oeuvre on the scale of a philosophical encyclopaedia. This work was ‘marked’ (to use his term) and remarkable for many reasons, including a virtuoso Russian style, freely flowing in unpredictable directions to express an original thought, to connect a foreign word to a Russian word, a metaphysical formula to the spirit of the times and to the lived experience of contemporary politics and everyday life. Bibikhin’s was a free, original philosophy of genius which, nevertheless, was based on great erudition, some bibliographical research, and, as is clear with hindsight, was moving towards becoming systematic.

Bibikhin did not have a conventional academic career, and always characterized himself as a bit of a radical or rebel. In high school, he wrote something subversive in an informal school ‘wall’ newsletter, got a negative personal reference from the school principal, and for that reason failed to be admitted to the department of philosophy of Moscow State University. Instead, he served his time in the Soviet Army (from which most university students were exempted), then joined the department of foreign languages and spent his early life learning, with great proficiency, an impressive number of them: German, English, French, ancient Greek, Latin, and even Sanskrit. These studies, during which he met and studied under Andrey Zaliznyak, subsequently a renowned Soviet linguist, enabled him to develop an original hermeneutic theory of language, which he summarized in his dissertation (1977) and in his book The Language of Philosophy (1992). In the late 1960s, when a period of political freedom in the Soviet Union came to an end, as did the enthusiasm for Marxist doctrine, Bibikhin increasingly turned to religion and the Russian religious tradition, supported in this by that great survivor from early twentieth-century Russian philosophy, Alexey Losev, at that time better known as an authority on classical Greek culture. He befriended such key Russian Orthodox intellectuals of the late Soviet period as Sergey Horuzhy and Sergey Averintsev, both open-minded and interested in the high culture of Western Europe. In the 1970s and 1980s, Bibikhin worked at translating numerous philosophical texts, from Aristotle and Nicholas of Cusa, to Heidegger, Arendt, and even Derrida. He developed his own virtuoso style of hermeneutic translation, seeking to make foreign thought, faithfully translated, as intelligible and organically Russian as possible.

Most of his translations of twentieth-century non-Marxist authors, as well as critical digests of their work, were published in a limited number of copies for ‘special use’, under restricted access. As Bibikhin himself explains, the communist authorities were considering whether to switch their ideology from Marxism to something more realistic and nationally orientated (as their heirs eventually did in the 2000s). They therefore engaged intellectuals to critically review European and American non-Marxist philosophy (which ironically helped convert these intellectuals to liberal or conservative ideas).¹ Only during Perestroika in the USSR (1985–91), during a reform of university teaching in the humanities, did Bibikhin, who at that time was best known as a Heidegger specialist, begin teaching at the philosophy department of Moscow State University. This soon ended, in 1993, because of a conflict with the more positivistically minded senior members of the department, and also Bibikhin’s scatter-gun manner of teaching and researching. From then on and for most of the 1990s, Bibikhin did not have a university post. He obtained a position at the research-orientated Institute of Philosophy, and would just come to Moscow State University, since access to the building was then open, and teach in a lecture hall which happened to be unoccupied. He usually attracted a full house of students from all over the city. It was at this time that Bibikhin produced most of his numerous books, because he fully wrote his lectures out in advance and then read them to his audience. He spoke in a detached manner, in a rather high-pitched voice, creating the impression of a medium through whom the lecture was transmitting itself. It gradually became evident that the linguist and philosophical autodidact, who at first appeared simply to be rephrasing Heidegger, was actually an original philosopher in the process of creating his own philosophical system. He lectured on the world, the Renaissance, property, time, Wittgenstein, truth, wood, energy, and many other subjects. Importantly, Bibikhin was not a religious zealot remote from everyday life. His lectures were well spiced with irony and mundane examples. He drove a car (a rare thing at that time in the USSR for an academic), built his own wooden house in the country, married late for a second time, and was the father of four young children. Sadly, he contracted a cancer which killed him at the relatively early age of sixty-six.

To summarize Bibikhin’s ideas without tracing their organic development and historical context is inevitably to do him a disservice. I must, however, follow the rules of foreword writing and attempt to do so. Bibikhin was extraordinarily well read, but I see him as influenced primarily by two philosophers: Martin Heidegger and Alexey Losev. Both were approximately contemporary, both were conservatives cherishing the classics above all else, but the former achieved fame while the latter was barely allowed to survive by the Soviet authorities, and concealed himself behind volumes on ‘classical aesthetics’. In his thirties, Bibikhin worked as Losev’s secretary (in 1970–2), and this left its mark on his style and attitudes, even though he rarely quotes his former boss (apart from in his early The Language of Philosophy and in a special autobiographical book dedicated to his conversations with Losev). As for Heidegger, Bibikhin became interested in his work, as, belatedly, did many other Soviet intellectuals, in the mid-1970s, when the German philosopher of ‘being’ was all but banned in the USSR.² Bibikhin became one of Heidegger’s first Russian translators, with his rendering of Being and Time (1996) as a crowning achievement. This was after the fall of the Soviet system, at which time Heidegger became fashionable. When Bibikhin first started lecturing towards the end of the 1980s (late in life), the philosophical establishment had formed a stereotypical image of him as a ‘Russian Heidegger’. This was gradually seen not to be the case: if some of Bibikhin’s Russian concepts are close to Heidegger’s (‘the world’, ‘the event’), others are not. For one thing, Bibikhin is not particularly interested in ‘being’, ‘death’, or ‘anguish’. He most readily takes from Heidegger everything related to event, particularly, the term ‘other onset’ from the Introduction to Metaphysics,³ which became the title of one of Bibikhin’s own books, devoted to the historical destiny of contemporary Russia. The entire tonality of Bibikhin’s thought is different, however. In contrast to the ultra-serious and edifying ontological prose of Heidegger, I see his philosophy as centred rather on aesthetics, or, more precisely, on the aesthetic interpretation of phenomenology. This is a direct effect of Losev’s teaching. Losev, after being politically persecuted for his philosophical work, camouflaged it under a multi-volume History of Classical Aesthetics. There was method behind this choice of disguise. For Losev, symbolic expression was the indispensable culmination of ontology. In retrospect, it seems clear that he had much more influence on Bibikhin than did Heidegger (whom Bibikhin read only as a mature adult). Bibikhin’s notes on his conversations with Losev were published during his lifetime, with discussion of topics such as the primacy of aesthetics, the holistic act of linguistic utterance, the role of etymologies, the value of harsh authoritarian systems from a philosophical point of view, and the philosophical relevance of colour. These topics later featured in Bibikhin’s own oeuvre.

Subjectively, there was a third figure of major importance for Bibikhin, and that was Ludwig Wittgenstein. However, in my view this is less a case of following a tradition and more a case of an interpretation, and idiosyncratic reading, of the Vienna–Cambridge philosopher in an existential-phenomenological context. Bibikhin read Wittgenstein in his own way, disregarding most of the reception history and context of Anglo-American neopositivism. Wittgenstein is important for Bibikhin as a philosopher of intuition, of the this-ness of things, and of the inaccessible, aesthetic self-showing of the world. Wittgenstein’s ‘aspect change’, a sudden Gestalt switch, is understood as the formula of a phenomenological event close to a conversion.

This said, Bibikhin’s system of thought boils down to the following. There is an event, the ‘lightning’, which suddenly reveals the world in a new light and mobilizes the living being for near-to-impossible achievements. (In contrast to Heidegger, death is barely mentioned.) The event is thus a pure, festive effect whose ontological content consists primarily of unravelling and separating the contrasting aspects of being (the regular and the chaotic, the light and the matter, the masculine and the feminine). The event ‘captivates’ humans, entrances them, and forms a mission that gives them meaning. The event of captivation is not under our conscious control. We only become conscious of it retrospectively, which gives a special role, in the process of knowledge, to attention: the moment we notice something is the moment when our relation to the world, our mission, is decided. Captivation also allows the human being to capture things and lands, which grounds ‘property’. Property, however, works both ways: things captivate people who capture them. (Before there was private property, there had already been property as such, where a thing opened itself up to a human in its uniqueness and its essential possibilities.) ‘Energy’, which the contemporary world exploits and longs for, comes from the capacity for a standstill, or an idle celebration (the ‘energy of rest’). Against Modern activism, Bibikhin values careful attention to the event, which must come before any serious activity.

The event is, however, not all there is. It plays out the contrasting poles of the world which, taken together, constitute what he calls the ‘automaton’ of the world (Aristotelian spontaneity or the Leibnizian machine of machines) and equates it with ‘Sophia’, the central concept of Russian religious philosophy. Being rather critical of Russian religious philosophy, and particularly of its recent, nationalistically motivated, resurrection in Russia, Bibikhin nevertheless accepts and esteems Sophia: in Orthodoxy, a force of facticity and plurality in God. The rhythmic automaton of the world is Sophia, because it is a way of gripping contraries together, and because it is, and should be, beyond human control or calculation.

Both Sophia and the event have, for us, two faces: the freedom that inspires enthusiasm, and the iron, authoritarian law that governs the essentials. Bibikhin is consistently attentive to, and sympathetic towards, the phenomena of law, discipline, and grammar, which he derives from the ‘harshness’ (zhestkost’) of the event’s imperativeness. He therefore values the Western culture of ‘early discipline’ (rightly understanding that the difference of Western culture from Russian is its respect for law) and contrasts it with an anarchic unpreparedness but attentiveness to an event, which he attributes to Russian culture. However, even in the Russian and similar cultures, there are ‘harsh’ phenomena, such as krepost’ (a system of peasant serfdom) or, later, ‘totalitarianism’, which Bibikhin understands, neutrally, as a society with an unusual level of regulation and control. Thus, in the present book also, the irrational element of ‘the forest’, or matter, a phenomenological form of being, not a thingly substance (a reading which reminds us of Losev’s Neoplatonic ‘meon’), only makes sense in interaction with the harsh, iron formatting of the gene-based ‘eidos’.

What does this all mean in the present historical context? Bibikhin started his public teaching, and most of his writing, in a revolutionary period when the Soviet Union was undergoing democratic reforms, before collapsing and heading into a period of neoliberal changes led by a weakened state. This revolutionary situation created a space of freedom for new ideas and initiatives, and hunger for new, unofficial and non-Marxist, philosophy. (Marx and Lenin are barely mentioned in Bibikhin’s writings.) This is the window of historical opportunity which provided Bibikhin with his platform and his mission. But the ideological content of the revolution and the reforms was an alloy: liberal and democratic ideas were mixed, often in the same media and books, with a conservative and even traditionalist message. This is reflected in Bibikhin’s thought: without ever designating his ideological stance, it is clear that, politically, he is navigating somewhere between liberalism and conservatism. Property (in things and industries) and energy (of oil and of creative labour), even if they are deduced back to their onto-aesthetic origins, are the words of the day, a concern of the new economy and new lifestyle. The interest in Wittgenstein (and, in the present book, in Darwin) reflects Bibikhin’s deep empathy with Western rationalism. There are, however, obvious conservative elements too. Bibikhin writes The Law of Russian History and, later, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law, in which he discusses and essentializes a specifically Russian historical trajectory and destiny. Orthodox religion, understood in a philosophical way as a religion of an absent God beyond rational discourse, is very present in his writings, particularly in the present book, where the Cross becomes an epitome of the forest. Bibikhin also shares Heidegger’s disdain for activism. Conservative, and typical of the time in Russia, are his views on gender (where he values a contrast between a marked masculinity and marked femininity).

Bibikhin’s main interest was in German philosophy, but he also knew and cherished the contemporary French tradition. He read, and even translated, Jacques Derrida, arguing against some of his interpretations. His strategy of writing books in the form of lecture courses targeted at a wide audience may have been a conscious emulation of the strategy of such great French public intellectuals as Lacan and Derrida.

Accordingly, when Bibikhin addresses the current moment, he refers to it, in awe, as a ‘revolution’ or ‘renaissance’. Reminiscences of Peter the Great’s reforms, or of the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries, help him understand a time of changes in Russia. It is always the extreme effort, the openness of freedom (beyond traditional morality), and festive colour that open everything up. In the Italian Renaissance, erroneously thought by some conservatives (including Losev) to be the beginning of a nihilistic sceptical age, ‘the human essence reduced itself, in philosophical and poetic anthropology, to a few simple traits: selfless love, tireless activity (mostly of the higher faculties of the soul), informed attention to the world.’⁴ Extreme ambition was characteristic of that age: ‘Dante reports […] that the task of his great poem was nothing less than to “lead the living out of their misery to the condition of happiness.”’⁵ It is the scale of the ambition that is important.

However, in every case there comes a default, or a breakdown (sryv) after the event, mostly due to the hubris of human subjects who put all their faith in themselves and disregard the pressures of history, which leads to an avalanche of violence. The description is reminiscent of the German ‘conservative revolution’, only this time combining the liberal and conservative elements.

Bibikhin himself was a ‘Renaissance Man’, with unbelievable energy and willpower (in the 1990s, he produced two book-length lecture courses each year), and an anarchic disdain for convention. The first impression he made was of a slightly lunatic intellectual with a posture of exaggerated humility. This was wrong on both accounts. As mentioned, he was not just a professional translator but also a competent manual worker. And he displayed impressive personal ambition and originality in his philosophical projects.

When we read Bibikhin’s book today, we will probably appreciate his genius, but we need also to be aware of the historical distance, short as it still is. We need to remember that Soviet culture was isolated from Western culture to a greater degree than the ‘normal’ isolation of different cultures such as British and French. American, British, and French books were available, but:

 only to a closed academic elite

 there was a long delay before they became known

 only intellectual blockbusters were available, not routine intellectual discussion.

Libraries had very restricted collections of Western literature on the social sciences and humanities, and the access to some of that was further restricted for ideological reasons. In the 1970s, Bibikhin worked at INION, the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Scholarly Information on the Social Sciences. This institution engaged, as mentioned above, in digesting Western literature in the social sciences and humanities, in Russian, by trusted experts, in very small print runs and accompanied by ideological criticism. Bibikhin thus had privileged access to Western scholarship, though he regretted that he heard of Heidegger so very late. His experience at INION put him and his colleagues in the curious position of disengaged observers (which corresponded to his philosophical notion of the ‘energy of rest’). This gave them an odd, decentred, outsider view of twentieth-century Western culture. It is hardly surprising that certain interpretations (like Bibikhin’s reading of Wittgenstein) seem often really quite strange. He studied the reception literature only afterwards: the first encounter of Russian thinkers with Western thought was without critical context.

Conversely, the West knew very little about Russian intellectual life. There was a discrepancy not just in the scholarship, but also in the general approach of critically thinking intellectuals, which was libertarian (anarchic/conservative) in Russia, and ethical, rights-orientated, and left-leaning in the West.

After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the situation did not change overnight and, lacking the Internet, Bibikhin in the 1990s was still proceeding in a bibliographical vacuum, with limited knowledge of intellectual concerns outside Russia. This did not prevent him from addressing the theme of environmental, biological philosophy in the present book. As you may see, many references in the book come from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. This might seem unprofessional, but we need to bear in mind the situation and genre of the work, the fact that Bibikhin did not live to prepare it for printing, and to see that he did, nevertheless, get some key things in contemporary biology right.

Let me turn to the present book in more detail. There is little point in rehashing a work in a foreword, but perhaps a few words about Bibikhin’s methodology, implicit assumptions, and conclusions here will be apposite. This volume contains one of his most coherent, extensive, and wideranging lecture courses, and includes most of his concepts and philosophical preoccupations. That is why it was singled out for translation.

Bibikhin’s book has in fact two subjects, one logically following from the other. The first one, as announced in the title, is the concept of matter, ‘materia’, or in Greek, hyle. Because the word derives etymologically from wood or timber, Bibikhin enacts a phenomenological reconstruction of the notion by referring it not to an inanimate stuff that we master, but to the element of woods that surround and even entrance us. We are captivated by the forest, but we have learned to carve a space for form within it. We return to intoxication with the forest when, for instance, we smoke and drink. Thus, Aristotelian ‘matter’ does not exist by default but is an important, substantial element of the world.

[F]or humans there is no other law; because they are faced with substances in which they drown. Matter as the power of the forest, the potency of its materiality: the smoke of tobacco, the wine of Bacchus, narcotics, intoxication, ecstasy. The wood of the forest is the matter from which all else derives; it is not the timber of the carpenter but like passion, the race, the grove of Aphrodite, the smoke, the aroma of tobacco, the inebriation of Bacchus, of Dionysos, the intoxication of coca. The forest, then, is conflagration, the fire of passion. (This edition, p. 16)

Thus, matter is primarily living matter, which allows Bibikhin to spend most of the book discussing the essence and evolution of life, again from the phenomenological point of view. The phenomenology is backed, first, by a lengthy hermeneutic reading of Aristotle’s The History of Animals, which takes seriously, in a philosophical way, Aristotle’s descriptions of animal life, which have normally been treated as irrelevant mistakes. Secondly, Bibikhin reads some classical literature in evolutionary biology (Darwin, Tinbergen, Lorenz, Dawkins, as well as the great Russian evolutionary thinker Lev Berg).

The main questions Bibikhin poses here concern the reasons for the emergence of sexual reproduction, and, related to it, the reasons for the dual nature of life, split between the self-reproducing genes and the proteins. Bibikhin brilliantly summarizes the complex biological findings into a dualistic picture of the world, torn between strict repetition (the form) and free plasticity (of the matter), in the same way that the matter itself is relatively segregated into the light and the particles.

Sexual reproduction, says Bibikhin, has an aesthetic explanation. It is a mechanism of inducing polar contrasts, which is not necessary per se for the preservation of an organism, but turns life into a complex and interesting gamble. The need for sexual activity, again, entrances animals, puts them into a state of what Bibikhin calls, with a Greek word, ‘amekhania’, loss of mind and of the capacity to move. But the condition is a clear-cut contrast, and the result, a strict law of repetition. When we then go into structural matters, we see a cruel, ‘harsh’ law of form, which governs the protein being and imposes a discipline, which then repeats itself in the law of instinct at the behavioural level (examples of birds and ants as captivated by cosmic tasks). There is thus a form found within matter itself (if we count life as an extended forest), and, moreover, I would suggest, based on Bibikhin’s argument, a certain dialectic of trance and law. Form imposes itself on matter under the condition of a hypnotic amekhania, through a fascinating game of contrasts.

Again, this argument is not only backed by extended exegetic exercises but also illuminated by strokes of subtle observation and virtuoso interpretations. In addition, it has an ethical aspect pertaining to what Bibikhin calls the ‘automaton’ of life, its spontaneous energy. No need to meddle with this automaton, let it work while it works; there is a need only to fine-tune it and to respect the iron laws which it at times imposes. However, the automaton, alias Sophia, captivates humans and sets before them a task of extreme and ambitious effort. The book was written at a time of violent primitive accumulation of capital in post-Soviet Russia, and while feeling no great empathy with its protagonists, Bibikhin nevertheless tried to do them justice.

Captivation and capture, captivation by capture, wit and wiliness are the only thing that works. Someone who can captivate and be captivated, capture the world and be captured by the world. [Darwinian] [a]daptation is essentially capturing the world in both these senses, and not necessarily only here on earth but also more widely. (This edition, p. 309)

This book by Bibikhin is perhaps his most overtly theological. Despite being a devout Orthodox Christian, he usually avoids explicitly speaking of God in his philosophy, treating him as something ‘unapproachable’, but here he makes an exception and actually discusses religion at some length. The forest, with its trance, is a site of natural religion, of a devout attitude to the mystery of life; it is also the site of the Cross, which was made of wood. The law of nature is, the author says, an immediate form in which grace is manifest. Life is sanctified and sanctioned by energy, of which a human ethical effort, a ‘yes’ to the world, is a part. The Russian word ‘saint’ (svyatoy) has a telling pre-Christian etymology of phallic tumescence.

One could say that Bibikhin’s book is a lengthy commentary on Baudelaire’s ‘Nature is a temple where the pilasters/ Speak sometimes in their mystic languages.’⁶ However, when finally considering God, Bibikhin says, after Feuerbach, that he is simply the human him/herself, but taken as the hidden Other in the human being.

By way of short commentary, I think that this book was partly an attempt to repeat and surpass the gesture of Heidegger, who in 1929–30, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,⁷ decided to ground his existential phenomenology in biology, but ended up reasserting a sharp divide between humans and animals which Bibikhin here, in contrast, seeks to undermine. The phenomenological conversion of matter, from a thing to environment, methodologically reminds us of Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of the elements.⁸ The task of addressing the natural sciences from a philosophical point of view is extremely important, particularly now, with positivism on the rise in the life sciences. There are not that many authors who have done this. However, Bibikhin does not refer to the most famous of them, Henri Bergson. Sometimes his argument comes close to Bergson’s élan vital, to his serious consideration of the rational nature of instinct. Bergson, however, does not yet know genetics and does not make an aesthetic argument. The lack of engagement with Heidegger or Bergson, like the rudimentary nature of some of the notes, has to do with the fact that Bibikhin died early and, as I mentioned, did not have time to prepare the manuscript for publication.

This volume is the first book-length edition of Bibikhin to appear in English. I think we chose one of his best works for translation. It contributes to our understanding of the meaning of life: a fascinating spectacle set up in a cosmic amphitheatre for the potential audience of humans and gods-in-humans. It sets itself the ethical task of rehabilitating the scale of human ambition as a sanctioning instance of being. It contains an important discussion of genetic Darwinism and natural selection in the spirit of Continental philosophy.

In all this, it may leave a foreign impression on the English-speaking reader, not only because of its impressionistic methodology and ethical pathos (common in both contemporary Russian and French philosophy), but also because of its conservatism and the extent to which it is embedded in twentieth-century Russian thought. I think this is a ‘great book’, in terms of its ambition, of the richness of its content, of its brilliant style, and of the popularity of its author at the time of its public delivery. Even though written recently, it must be seen both as a contribution to current debates and as a monument of its own time and space, on which it bestows the sanction of memory, and even a certain grandeur.

Artemy Magun

Department of Sociology and Philosophy,

European University at St Petersburg, Russia

1 1. Vladimir Bibikhin, ‘Dlia sluzhebnogo pol’zovania’ [‘Restricted’], in: Drugoe Nachalo (SPb: Nauka, 2003), pp. 181–207.

2 2. Ibid.

3 3. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 2nd edition, tr. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

4 4. Bibikhin, Novyi Renessans (Moscow: Nauka, 1998), p. 321.

5 5. Ibid., quoting Dante, Letters, pp. 15, 39.

6 6. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Correspondences’, in Selected Poems, tr. Joanna Richardson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 43.

7 7. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, tr. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

8 8. Gaston Bachelard, Psychoanalysis of Fire, tr. Alan C.M. Ross (New York: Beacon Press, 1987); and Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, tr. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas: Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1999).