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Abstract:

The article argues that in his philosophy of music A.F. Losev considers pure music as a phenomenon of the reunion of “coincidentia oppositorum” — an organically given antinomic wholeness of God and the world, being and consciousness. From the body of early Losev texts on music (“Two Perceptions of the World. (From Impressions After La Traviata)”, “On the Musical Perception of Love and Nature. For the 35th Anniversary of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden”, “On Scriabin’s Philosophical Worldview”, “Philosophical Commentary on Richard Wagner’s Dramas”), only “An Essay on Music” (1920) is selected for analysis. The choice of this text is due to the fact that it not only precedes but is also partially used in the book “Music as a Subject of Logic” (1927), where Losev’s philosophy of music of the 1920s is fully developed. It is shown that in “An Essay on Music” the author consciously oriented himself towards Symbolist poetics in depicting pure musical existence “in the images and concepts” of the human mind. This orientation was directly conditioned by the “antinomic” nature of Russian Symbolism, that is, its coherence with the antinomic essence of music that A.F. Losev postulated in his philosophy of music. In “The Musical Myth”, which is an integral part of “An Essay on Music” and at the same time of the book “Music as a Subject of Logic”, A.F. Losev employs “the poetics of contradictions” not only to describe the creative process or music itself. It concludes that by recreating the image of Eternal Femininity and Eternal Music in a style that fully corresponds to the antinomic poetics of Russian Symbolism, the thinker resorts to the poetics of antinomies as a distinctive method of their interpretation. However, such musical hermeneutics, in turn, helps to uncover the internal antinomy of the symbolist poetics itself.