The Psalmist says, ‘What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him?’ It is no exaggeration to say that this question, of all the questions people have asked, is the most important or one of the most important. Our place in the world, our hopes and our deeds are based on how we answer this question. No matter where we go, no matter what we do, it is impossible to free ourselves from it.

In recent times, however, the belief has spread that one can free oneself from this question by simply abandoning it; that it should not be asked; that all discussion of ‘meaning’, ‘significance’, and ‘true essence’ is meaningless, because all these things exist only in the human mind and are therefore ghostly. The man of science (and this is his usual belief) refuses self-cognition, and refuses it not because of the weakness of his powers or the unsuitability of his methods, which would still be good, but because he sees no point in it.

Sad as it may seem, the scientist studies the subtleties of the external world, covering his soul with an impenetrable veil. From the times when bright sages learnt about themselves and things, we have come to the times when dark minds, closed to all light, not knowing and not wanting to know themselves, learn the world’s abyss — and find in it the same darkness they see within themselves. In our sundown  age, the word ‘scientist’ means ‘dark man’; a man who does not know himself. Hence the godlessness and pessimism of the men of science, hence their indifference to poetry — the last glimmer of truth about man…

So: what is man? Let us take up this question, realising that there can be no definitive answer to it; that cognition of a thing is possible only by looking at it from the outside, and we cannot get out of ourselves; that any definitions of ours will be conditional, because they concern our inner world — an area which no one has seen with his eyes; which is given to our senses and our thought only in the form of a continuous, almost inseparable stream of experiences, from which the thinking mind, driven by the thirst to divide in order to understand, picks out separate parts.

What do we see when we look inside ourselves? A nest of irreconcilable contradictions. Rays from the dark depths; a struggle of forces; a unity shaken by eternal inner strife. One thing is certain: the circumstances of external life have no decisive influence on us. Man is not a ‘product of the environment’. The environment beats and grinds him as a wave grinds a stone, but it cannot inspire his thoughts, impose feelings. ‘Enlightenment’ is not the bringing of light and content into a dark and empty room, but the illumination of the environment originally present there. (All this, of course, I am speaking of a highly elevated, strong and original, i. e., quite free from external influences, personality. After all, personal development does not consist in accepting the influences of others, but in assimilating everything that the external world offers to thought and feeling, to free oneself from it and to be quite oneself.) These thoughts, these feelings come from the inner layers of our nature; from the depths, not from the outer world.

In these deep layers each successive epoch sees its own. The Greeks and Romans found in man the reason; Christianity, above all, the soul; the society of consumption of goods notices in him only the sex.

The ancient idea of man as a ‘pure reason’, i. e. as something that can be fully expressed by means of logic and grammar, which was lost after the victory of Christianity, came back into force by the 18th century. Man seemed transparent, completely clear and predictable; life, however, shows that man is more than logic and grammar, is not exhausted by them, and is not fully expressed.

The question of the soul is a question of Christianity. If we accept that the soul is that timid, fearful, childlike, sensitive, prophetic thing that looks at the world through our eyes, then Christianity is the religion of the soul. It has discovered it; it is all about it and for it.  Antiquity knew in man only the reason, armed with feelings. Either reason or madness: there could be nothing else in man. ‘And what becomes of him who abhors reason?’, asked Plato. The Church saw the soul in man and dethroned the reason and the senses that served it. This predetermined the events that followed: for a long time, right up to the revolt of the reason during the Renaissance and to the revolt of the feelings in our days.

Reason, sex, soul… Even if these beginnings are conventional, they are useful and necessary; by means of them we divide the continuous stream of experience mentioned above into separate parts, accessible to observation. What, then, do we see?

The mind is probably the most external and serving human faculty. Its business is to communicate with the outer world and to interpret the wonders and mysteries of the inner world (if only it is able to notice them, which is not always the case). Where the mind directs its efforts exclusively to the external, we see science; where it is exclusively concerned with the internal, we see religion. The mind, like a balloon, floats on the edge of two worlds, both of which are unattainable for it, both of which it only observes from the outside.

The importance of this serving ability is greatly overestimated in our days. An entire philosophy (or rather, an entire practical understanding of life; our time has no philosophy) is built on the notion of man as a thinking being with nothing to do but think. Further on, a split begins among the mind-worshippers: some attribute to the mind autonomy and freedom, and others — enslavement by instinct. Entire utopian worldviews were built on the position of complete rationality, cognisability, transparency of man. It is only necessary to free him (from the ‘fetters’ of religion, morality, social order), and he will never harm anyone. The socialist utopia is replaced by a liberal one; but man, no matter how much we liberate and feed him, does not want to become higher or more moral, except that he refrains from too obvious evil deeds, fearing the law.

Reflecting on this, Western thought has come to a new conclusion: the human mind is unnecessary wings given to a creature unable to fly. It does not free man from the power of irrational motives, but only teaches to hide them; but hidden, they determine all our actions. Under the influence of Freud, the chief, the strongest of these latent impulses is considered to be the call of sex. Even in spirituality his followers see an improved and purified eroticism. Against this assertion it may be said that there is only part of the truth in it. Spirit and Eros are indeed connected, but in a different order. Erotica is a reduced, simplified form of spirituality.

I think this needs clarification. To the question: ‘What is erotic?’ we can answer: ‘That beautiful which is not moral’. The erotic has very little to do with procreation; it is not from the ‘be fruitful, and multiply’ imprinted in the flesh. The erotic is the fruit of the work of the spirit (or, let us say, of the higher faculties) on obscure feeling; the animation of the formless, the impersonal; the work of aesthetics on material that knows no aesthetics.

We may put it this way: the experience of sex is the refraction in the atmosphere of the spirit of rays coming from a distant and alien area. The experiences of sex are entirely alien to the mind and are perceived by it either as the demands of animal nature, over which our higher faculties have no power, or as the fruits of the labour of our higher faculties over this primitive nature. The mind may accept or reject these mysterious rays from the deep; it may seek their meaning; but its passion for dialectic finds no nourishment in them. The pure, free mind is that which has purged itself of all influences from the deep, including the experiences of sex, and has confined itself to the world of numbers. The greater its attainments on this path, the more it closes itself within the limits of the provable, the further it is from its soil and the greater the danger it is exposed to.

So, as we reflect on the experiences of sex, we see that their source is not where it is usually found. They are not all ‘of the flesh’. There is something stronger, deeper and more primal in them than the simple desire for pleasure (hidden by Someone behind the pleasure of procreation). If I say that these experiences, taken at sufficient depth, are spiritual, that would be a stretch. However, there is, there is something in the love breeze that comes from a depth greater than that at which ‘procreation’ and ‘lust for pleasure’ nestle. This is why, incidentally, Rozanov’s writings are so sick in the part that touches on questions of sex. They are spiritless and loveless. The breeze of love — ghosts, shadows, swirling images — has nothing to do with ‘fertility and fecundity’ or the simplest lust. Rozanov did not feel it.

And we can say that the languor of the sex hides the languor of the spirit, its longing for the infinite. For ‘that coal which can be kindled all your life’, as Svidrigailov said, is, after all, a pocket substitute for striving for the infinite and eternal. And again recalling Dostoevsky: ‘Where is beauty for most people? In Sodom!’ What is beauty? The ideal. And where the ideal is, one does not speak of animal impulses; there is something deeper and more essential; something that animals and animal-like men do not have.

There is, however, a power in man which looks at the mind with a smile; with wonder at the games of the sex; with compassion at the hunger of the body; which cannot reason, but understands without reasoning; this power is the mysterious soul, a quiet stranger familiar to everyone from birth to death. (Not to everyone, however. Our mind is not only strong, but also loud; in some people it drowns out with its speeches the quiet babble of the soul.)

What is this ‘soul’, how does it differ from the ‘reason’ and ‘sex’ we have already found in man? First of all, we can say that it is the power of understanding without reasoning. Understanding without words is the faculty of the soul; understanding by evidence is the faculty of reason. The soul is beyond dialectics; the truths of the heart are seen, not proved.

However, it remains to be seen whether our mind is intended to build or to listen — first of all, to the voice of the soul. All the achievements of building thought, with the exception of geometry and related sciences, are not only not eternal, but too short-lived. What is left of the Hellenes but the Socratic art of doubt? What is left of the opulent buildings of European philosophy? All these ornate gates to truth have long since been destroyed. Apart from geometry only poetry and wisdom live long — because they strive to build nothing and are more silent than they speak.

The real mind — the one that is not a repository of knowledge — is first of all the ability to listen to your soul.

What is the difference between mind and ‘soul’? To better understand the difference between them, let us ask ourselves: what cannot be judged by the mind, and what cannot be judged by the soul? The mind cannot judge the beautiful; the soul cannot judge the sensible, in other words, what can be confirmed or refuted by evidence. The soul, as I have said, is outside the dialectic. In its realm, truths are not proved but seen. Sensitivity, attention and concentration are more important for the soul than flexibility and strength so needed by the mind.

Moral judgements belong to the soul; the mind may or may not accept them for execution, but it itself, if I may say so, has no legislative power in the field of the moral. But this does not mean that thinking is extra-moral or immoral. Thinking knows its own, mental conscience. Thinking well (but not ‘thinking about good’) is moral; bad thinking, which does not follow the rules of truth-seeking, is reprehensible. Of course, we can also say this: a strong mind is a moral mind, i. e. a mind that voluntarily and willingly follows the dictates of intellectual conscience.

Since we are again talking about the mind, it should be said that with careful observation of this ability, at first glance unified, breaks down into two independent abilities: seeing and reasoning. The first, like a ray of light in the darkness, illuminates the parts of the picture existing independently of it; about such a mind is usually said: ‘deep’. The second is the power of construction and proof, which has no connexion with reality, strictly speaking, and can be applied for the sake of asserting both truth and falsehood. Of this mind it is commonly said: ‘sharp’. The mental life is fruitful where sharpness of mind is backed by depth. Depth without sharpness is poetry; sharpness without depth is sophistry.d strength, which are so necessary for the mind.

So, having examined man as he opens to the gaze, we have found in him reason, we have found passion, we have found a mysterious depth whose rays pass through the misty layers of passion and through the clear blue of reason — and so reach the surface, that side of man which faces the world and which is called ‘personality’. Our inner world is layered, and not all its layers are equally accessible to the eye. Each epoch, looking into the human depth, sees in it its own. Seeing the mind, exclaims: ‘here is man!’ but man is not here. Seeing passion, it exclaims: ‘here is man!’, but man is not here.

The point seems to be that man is neither mind nor passion, but he who makes use of mind and plays with passion, but does not dissolve in them without remainder. What is he, then? Pure power; the possibility of everything; constrained freedom; constant impermanence; something living on the other side of words and hardly expressible in words… ‘That’s poetry’, you will say. But poetry exists to express the inexpressible.

What should we call this pure power? I think, this force, for which the world is not a master, but a material and a playground, should be called the soul. It is deeper than everything that is in us; it is older than everything that is in us. It dwells deeper than the mind — a superficial but necessary force; deeper than the obscure area of the sex… There, in the far depths, shimmers with an intimate, unreflected light the secret core, the essence of man, our inner luminary: the soul.

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