4 Solovyov and sophiology In the same spirit as Comenius, Solovyov defines sophiology as an effort to synthesize the three sources or domains of knowledge about God, man and nature. True wisdom can consist only in the synthesis of empiricism, rationalism and mysticism (Solovyov 2008). Western currents of thought have attempted to unify knowledge by reducing all other cognitive principles to one of the three. Solovyov wittily demonstrates how each of these attempts have ended up by undermining their own foundations. Empiricists who tried to reduce everything to matter and perception at last came to contest the very existence of matter. Rationalists intended to reduce everything to mind and spirit and came to deny the existence of a thinking entity. Likewise the mystics – relying solely on revelation and God, underestimating reason and regarding the world as a delusion – shall lose God and divine revelation in the end, too, because they have no means to get out from the labyrinth of subjective feeling in which they wander. Solovyov calls the three one-sided types of philosophy abnormal because they attempt to deny some part of human nature and natural experience. They usually result from the pathologically one-sided constitution of an individual or a culture or from power seeking. A traditional example is the church thesis that philosophy should not be an equal sibling, but the maidservant of theology. Although thinking has its own procedures and own criteria of truth, and when they have to be twisted in order to come to some prescribed dogma, it means chopping at the vital roots of rationality. Obscurantism, so closely tied to the history of the church, resulted from attempts to curtail free thinking dogmatically. Another more recent example is sociobiology. It attempts to explain away the whole sphere of human moral and aesthetical intuitions by reducing them to natural selection and recombination of genes. Moral concepts, it is said, are genetically fixated patterns of behavior that maximize survival and the propagation of one’s own genes when living within ape-like troops. Likewise the experience of beauty. Beauty and dignity as an independent dimension of human existence thus vanishes like an empty gimmick, which is but a function of physical survival. Such opinion then indeed contributes to the brutalisation of man and the application of the rule of the jungle in human society (social darwinism). Each of the three domains has its own criteria of correctness to fulfill. Empirical science for correct observation and classification of data (reproducibility, falsifiability, predictive and explanatory power); rational philosophy for creating concepts and theories (systematicity, consistency, parsimony); and praxis of mysticism, too, has its requirements (moral purification, unselfishness, sacrifice) and criteria that have been applied for millennia to tell genuine spiritual inspiration apart from self-deceit. Among them are signs pertaining to the actual form and circumstances of the revelation, as well as intersubjectivity, and last but not least, it can be distinguished by its beneficial fruits that bring peace, concord and the ennoblement of life. 46 (10) Emil Páleš
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