The problem of androgynous ideal of a human being in V.V. Rozanov’s philosophy of sex

Philosophy

Abstract

The purpose of this article is a philosophical and anthropological analysis of the ideal of androgyne in V.V. Rozanov’s metaphysics of sex. The main focus is on the comparison of the destructive and constructive forms of the androgyne in his philosophy. According to the philosopher, destructive forms include people of «moonlight» or «third sex», who are considered the founders of New Testament Christianity, denying the life of the flesh. Constructive forms are the natural androgyny of a child and the androgyny of a married couple, which reveals itself in love, dynamics, mutual complementarity of a man and a woman. The paper draws parallels between N.A. Berdyaev’s and V.V. Rozanov’s concepts of androgyne, which are antipodal in terms of direction of thought but have common meanings. It is concluded that the similarity between the concepts lies in the understanding of gender as a dynamic and metaphysical principle that penetrates through not only the bodily but also the spiritual life of a person, and therefore cannot be rejected. The concepts are also similar in that they draw a boundary between the androgyne and the hermaphrodite, of which the former is the ideal of the human wholeness, while the latter is an unsuccessful attempt to achieve it. The differences between these philosophers consist in the priority of spiritual love in Berdyaev’s system and worldly, bodily love in Rozanov’s, as well as in a different understanding of the process of an androgyne being generated in a person, which, in Berdyaev’s conception, is individual and arises in each of the persons who are in love with each other, while, according to Rozanov, it is exclusively achievable in couples. The paper also pays attention to Rozanov’s own theology, which renews the Old Testament family ideals, offering the concept of God as a «sexual» being and proposing to consider the act of love within marriage as a sacred mystery that unites a person with God in co-creation. The study allows us to rethink the modern problems of gender self-determination of a person, returning to the metaphysical foundations of the Russian philosophy of gender, the main task of which was the synthesis of the spiritual and bodily principles in a person.