Hessen, Sergei Iosifovich (1887–1950)

Sergei Hessen, a disciple of Rickert, has been described as ’the most brilliant and philosophically gifted’ representative of Neo-Kantian transcendentalism in Russia on the eve of the Revolution. A co-editor of the St Petersburg-based philosophical journal Logos, he represented a distinctively Westernizing trend, critical in many respects of the openly metaphysical religious idealism of the ‘religious-philosophical renaissance’ in Russia. However, he readily acknowledged the existence of an ineradicable metaphysical need in human beings and stressed the metaphysical relevance of his philosophy of moral and cultural values. B.V. Iakovenko attributed to him a pronounced ‘ontological aspiration’ and Hessen’s philosophical evolution led him beyond ’pure anthropologism’, towards a religiously tinged Platonism.

Like many Russian philosophers, Hessen concentrated on philosophical problems which had direct relevance for practice. His main fields were philosophical pedagogy, which he defined as ’applied philosophy’, and political philosophy, with particular emphasis on philosophy of law. Like many other Russian philosophers, he was forced to emigrate, moving from one country to another, which did not help his professional career. Nevertheless, his work Osnovy pedagogiki (Foundations of Pedagogy) (published in Berlin, 1923) was translated into many languages and won him international recognition as the main author of the ‘pedagogy of culture’. His original conception of ‘rule-of-law socialism’ (which deserves to be regarded as the last link in the legal philosophy of Russian liberalism) was much less known, and the manuscripts of his two books on political philosophy perished in the Warsaw uprising of 1944. Still, the UNESCO Committee on the Philosophic Basis of Human Rights invited him to contribute to the preparation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. His article for UNESCO, together with his writings on political philosophy published posthumously in Italy, were a Russian contribution to the philosophy of human rights in modern, liberal democratic states.