Conceptualising Discontinuity: Pavel Florenskii’s Preryvnost’ as a Universal Paradigm of Knowledge

Abstract

Discontinuity (preryvnost’ / прерывность) is a pivotal concept in Pavel Florenskii’s philosophy and theory of knowledge. He utilises it in many fields and subjects: mathematics, physics, semiotics, aesthetics, theology, and literature. Florenskii’s universe is a “discontinuous double” in which an earthly and natural state of things is opposed to an upper-world that is ruled by different geometrical laws and is knowable only by abstraction. In between there is always a threshold (a symbol, an “icon”) that connects the two. The general intent of this article is, on the one hand, to give an indication of the main directions of the concept of discontinuity within Florenskii’s works and, on the other hand, to highlight its relevance for a “philosophy of culture” and for a “philosophy of the symbolic forms”, but also – as Florenskii puts it – for a specific understanding of the “Russian mind”. The article also devotes a section to the literary aspects of Florenskii’s concept of discontinuity (less explored by Florenskii scholarship and perhaps by the author himself), which involve among other things a reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and an original and ambitious attempt of interpreting physical space in Dante’s Divine Comedy.