Pavel Yushin's Report at the Seminar of the Center for the History of Ideas and Sociology of Knowledge

On February 7, Pavel Yushin presented a paper «On One Source of Pavel Florensky's Scientific Imagination: A Commentary on “Imaginaries in Geometry”» at the research seminar of the Center for the History of Ideas and Sociology of Knowledge (IGITI).

Pavel Florensky's scientific and philosophical work is replete with eccentric ideas the sources of which are still unclear. This paper traces the history of one such idea, which was most explicitly formulated in the last paragraph of his «Imaginaries in Geometry» (1922) and concerned the possibility of penetrating the transcendental «other world» (identified by Florensky with the world of Platonic ideas, the Dantean Empyrean, and the Kingdom of God) through a strange procedure of turning inside out. Appealing to the special theory of relativity, Florensky wrote that «we can visualize» how, at speeds greater than the speed of light, the physical body could «fall through the surface [...] and turn inside out». «So far», he added, «we imagine the increase of velocities as the only means for this process [...] but we have no evidence of the impossibility of any other means». That same year, at the beginning of «Iconostasis» (1922), he briefly tried to conceptualize the same process while analyzing the temporal structure of dreams. The key to these well-known speculations can be found in the engraved cover of the journal «Makovets» (№3, 1923), produced by Vladimir Favorsky in collaboration with Florensky a year later. This image not only illustrates the thought experiment that occupied Florensky in the early 1920s but also points to its thematic source.