Personality and the World: Semyon Frank’s final lecture course

Abstract

This publication brings to light Semyon Ludwigovich Frank’s final lecture course which he delivered before the students of the Religious and Philosophical Academy in Paris in May 1939 under the title Personality and the World (the main problem of worldview). The original text is divided into three lectures. The lecture notes are now kept in the personal fund of S.L. Frank at the Bakhmeteff Archive (Columbia University, USA). In the introduction and notes they have provided, the publishers give a description of the manuscript, thereby establishing its date and the place in holds within the general canon of Frank’s works. One of the main goals Frank contemplated in this lecture course was achieving the awareness of what he called the ‘unworldliness’ of a human individual who, while existing within the world, is no immediate extension of it, which would entail the denial of personal freedom. The true vocation of a human being is to attend the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. The ideas developed in the surviving lecture notes are consonant with Frank’s philosophical views as we know them and offer a clear example of his method of ‘antinomic monodualism’ as applied to the understanding of personality and of being as such. Among the published writings of Frank these lectures show the greatest affinity with such works as A Light in Darkness, The Problem of ‘Christian Socialism’ and The Heresy of Utopianism.