What do Immanuel Kant and Pablo Picasso have in common? What sounds like the beginning of a bad academic joke was a serious question for the Russian philosopher-theologian Sergii Bulgakov (1871-1944). For the affinities between the twentieth-century artist and the eighteenth-century philosopher were, for him, substantial. Indeed, readers of Bulgakov’s The Tragedy of Philosophy—recently published in translation by Angelico Press—might consider the description of Kant as a ‘cubist’ and of his philosophy as a ‘cubism’, one of the book’s more outlandish and perplexing claims. Nor is it a claim that Bulgakov makes only once. In Tragedy, Kant’s epistemology is described as ‘subjective-cubistic’,11 Sergii Bulgakov, Tragedy of Philosophy, trans. Stephen Churchyard (New York: Angelico Press, 2020), 32, note 10. in response to Kant’s conviction that the unity of perceptions does not arise from objects themselves, but is instead imparted by the understanding to experience.22 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 134. Later in the same work, Bulgakov simply inserts the exclamation ‘cubism!’ into a citation from Kant’s own text on the unifying role of the understanding. These are the only two instances in Tragedy where Kant’s alleged cubism is asserted. They are marginal and gnomic assertions, and give an indication of the perplexities that await the intrepid reader. But they nonetheless gesture toward the abiding concern of this work. For Kant’s ‘cubism’ has to do with his approach to unity, and particularly his view of the understanding as imparting unity to experience, rather than the unity of things being received by the understanding from the perceived objects themselves. Bulgakov has more to say on Kant’s ‘cubism’ elsewhere. The characterisation of Kant as a cubist pre-dates the extended discussion of the latter’s philosophy in Tragedy by a few years, first appearing in a 1914 article on the works of Pablo Picasso, published under the title ‘The Corpse of Beauty’.33 ‘Trup krasoty’ [The Corpse of Beauty], in Sergii Bulgakov, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, vol. 2, ed. I. B. Rodnianskaia (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), 527-45. Here Bulgakov claims that the parallel between Kant and Picasso has been noted elsewhere, and he is likely referring to another 1914 article on Picasso, this time by Nikolai Berdiaev.44 Rodnianskaia is the source of this connection. Cf. her notes in Sochineniia, vol. 2, 719. As for Bulgakov, what is at stake for Berdiaev in defining a ‘cubist’ philosophy is its approach to unity, and particularly the unity that both Bulgakov and Berdiaev claim for the world independently of reason. Berdiaev understands a cubist philosophy as one which sunders the unity of the world: ‘cubism is possible in philosophy also. Thus the critical genealogy ends in its latter stages with the slicing up and scattering of being’.55 Nikolai Berdiaev, ‘Pikasso’, first published in Sofiia 3 (1914). Available at http://www.picasso-pablo.ru/library/berdyaev-picasso.html (in Russian). (Accessed 28 September 2020). Bulgakov will describe cubism in similar—albeit more graphic—terms, as a decomposition of organic, living unity. ‘Putrefaction, the smell of rotting flesh and of the disintegrating physical plane are perfectly palpable’ when viewing Picasso’s portraits, whilst in cubism as a whole ‘everything, even living things become matter, become composite, and Bulgakov, The artist and the philosopher in of the living unity of things and in of the of the a to the of a and a of the of into an of But is one more is to the in the of Picasso, the artist is in with the by the artist an with the artist in a particularly with the of the world the artist is to that of the flesh which is the of the What Bulgakov to is that artist and are by a of the the unity of For the of the the of to the and the artist the that is in matter, the of in its this that is what it is to is but Sergii Bulgakov, The trans. B. to the unity of this world is to its unity with the world of what Bulgakov The of Picasso in a of his living as Thus they the of rotting the between the and the artist is the and the philosopher to They two of two to of the from the of this for in it is not from but from not in the of experience, but with the in and Sergii Bulgakov, and to The trans. and the philosopher to from the world and to it unity on it from The Bulgakov in Tragedy, to a world of of his own as Bulgakov, Tragedy, The the world from and is to a of its unity. 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