Background
Lopatin, Lev Mikhailovich was born on June 1, 1855 in Moscow, cf: 21 March 1920, Moscow.
Idealist: neo-Leibnizian personalist
Lopatin, Lev Mikhailovich was born on June 1, 1855 in Moscow, cf: 21 March 1920, Moscow.
Graduated from University of Moscow in 1879.
Professor at Moscow University until his death. Editor of Voprosy Filosofii i Psikhologii. Chairman of the Moscow Psychological Society from 1899 until 1917 when it was closed.
Friend of Vladimir Solov’ev. Follower of Leibnitz. His ideas of creative causality were similar to those developed later by Henri Bergson.
Main publications:(1886-1891) Polozhitel'nye zadachifilosofii [The Positive Tasks of Philosophy], 2 vols. Moscow.(1911) Filosofskie kharakteristiki i rechi [ Philosophical Characterizations and Addresses], Moscow (one essay is translated by A. Bakshy as The philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev’, Mind, 25 (1916): pp. 426-60, 1916).(1913) ‘Monizm i pliuralizm’. Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii, 6(116) (brief translated extracts included in Louis J. Shein (ed.). Readings in Russian Philosophical Thought, The Hague: Mouton, pp. 158-74, 1968).Secondary literature:Zenkovsky, V. V. (1953) A History of Russian Philosophy, trans. George L. Kline, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, vol. 2. pp. 645-57.
All religions persuade people to rely on outside authority, thus preventing them to become self-reliant.
Lopatin, a friend from childhood of the religious philosopher Solov’ev, was not only a leading Russian neo-Leibnizian, but a pioneer of Russian psychology. He was President of the Moscow Psychological Society from 1899 until its suppression in 1917, and editor of Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii [Problems of Philosophy and Psychology], An eccentric and unworldly figure, he perished during the famine attending the postrevolutionary civil war.
According to Lopatin’s ‘spiritualistic’ metaphysics, every phenomenon, whether physical or psychical, is the manifestation of an inner, supratemporal, spiritual force. All material effects and properties are secondary and derivative.
Matter and its laws are themselves the result of a primary creative causality. Lopatin rejected the notion of a transcendent soul. The soul is substantial, and being immanent in psychical phenomena is directly intuited in our inner experience.
Despite its immanence, the soul’s awareness of time shows that it is supratemporal, and therefore indestructible, since destruction is an event in time.
Lopatin steered a path between Hegel’s absolute monism and the more recent metaphysical pluralism which he identified with William James among others. In his view, the manifest interconnectedness of things and the uniformity of nature pointed to an essential prior unity, and he advanced a vital monism recognizing ‘unity in multiplicity and multiplicity in unity’: that is. the reality of both God and the multiplicity of separate beings.
Lopatin saw free human creative action as gradually establishing a moral order in the world, and saw the possibility of ‘radical moral upheavals’, or moral creativity, as the key to the nature of the human spirit. Zenkovsky accordingly characterized his philosophy as ‘ethical personalism’.