L’arte come estensione della scienza

Il «sogno» di Florenskij

Abstract

At the beginning of one of his best-known works, Iconostasis (Ikonostas, 1922), Pavel Florensky takes the example of dreams which, both in their activity and content, have a reversed time and space compared to those of waking life. This idea becomes a strong epistemic basis that Florensky employs to explain his personal paradigm of discontinuous science. In the same years (1918-1924), he also developed a philosophical theory of art that was based on the same concepts. Florensky sees art as an extension of science, that is, as a possibility of grasping in a scientific way that which the Galilean and Newtonian space-time model is unable to consider. Through the example of dream, this article aims to explain the true meaning of art which, according to Florensky, goes far beyond a question of autonomous truth of taste – which he never really considers – to finally arrive at a superior scientific truth, which Florensky names «original atomism» and «authentic realism». The latter reveal, within a multi-perspective paradigm, a more complex reality than we normally take into consideration.