Authors

Discussion

When the polymath Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) experienced a personal crisis that led him to turn from science to religion, he became disillusioned with the Enlightenment view of the universality of rational thought and began to appeal to its alternatives: “primitive” (or “mythical”) and “four-dimensional” (related to the notion of the fourth spatial dimension) forms of thinking. To my knowledge, the historical connection between these two influential fin-de-siècle ideas — mythical and four-dimensional thinking — has not been studied or even remarked upon. But their juxtaposition was neither arbitrary nor unique to Florensky, and investigating it may help us to better understand their origins. In my paper, I will argue that the convergence of these ideas was a natural product of the intellectual equipment of the time, and outline the contours of their common genealogy, rooted in nineteenth-century psychologism and cemented by the idea of mental evolution. I will therefore endeavour to make some adjustments to existing accounts of their currency in the cultures of Russian and European modernism, insofar as it was prompted by a taste for disrupting received views of reason and rationality.