Publication Details

Abstract

The paper is concerned with problems of knowledge in the intuitive realism of N. O. Losskij, but it also takes into consideration those starting points and opinions of his that influenced his followers in Slovakia in the period of the so called Slovak State and immediately afterwards. Losskij lays stress on empirical and realistic attitudes in the theory of knowledge and he confronts his own standpoints with ideas of classical empiricism and subjective idealism. The author of the paper uses some aspects of this confrontation to explain Losskij’s attitudes. She concentrates on Losskij’s conception of experience showing how its extending by supersensory experience enables him to give reasons for a mystic experience as the highest form of knowledge. Experience has a passive character in intuitive realism and it appears exclusively as the experience of our intuition, not as the experience of practical transformation of the object. Losskij’s conclusions overemphasize the subjective aspect of sensual cognition: at first he puts the subjective-idealistic content into the concept of perception, then he exposes its insufficiency and at last he seeks to overcome the effects of subjectivism by curtailing the role of sense-experience. The aim of this reduction is the identification of sense-experience with supersensory perception. The way of transgressing the frontiers of sense-experience not by means of reason, but by means of mystical intuition is, in intuitive realism, chosen as a means of surmounting the limitations of classical empiricism. Thus Losskij’s theory assumed extremely irrationalistic character.