Palamism, Humboldtianism, and Magicism in Pavel Florensky’s Philosophy of Language

Abstract

This article analyzes the evolution of Pavel Florensky’s teachings about language from the end of the 1910s to the early 1920s in the context of the two lines of influence (Humboldtian–Potebnian and Palamite) on the basis of which this teaching developed. In his reasoning about language, Florensky, proceeding from intuition, declares that there is a rigid connection between the word’s sound/phoneme; its morpheme, etymon, and sememe (the given here and now meaning); and its denotate. According to Florensky, this points to the magicism of the word as such. At the beginning of the 1910s, Florensky, having become a participant in the name-glorifying debates, also adhered to the line presupposing a rigid connection between the word’s sound (the name, which is applied to God), its meaning, and its denotate. All these lines converged in Florensky’s thoughts on the nature of language in the late 1910s and the early 1920s. He turned again to the Humboldtian–Potebnian language scheme but rethought it, speaking of the intentionally charged sememe as the word’s inner form. In texts written in the late 1910s and the early 1920s, we single out two aspects of the understanding of the magicism of the word which were key for Florensky, namely the aspect revealed in the discourse of the independent and autonomous existence of words and names and the aspect presupposing the intentionally willed moment in the phenomenon of the magicism of the word.