Russian philosophy

2. Major themes in Russian philosophy

The main impetus of Russian philosophy has always been towards the future, as its representatives strained to discern the features of the ‘new man’ (the term favoured by the left from the 1860s, with the addition of the adjective ‘Soviet’ after 1917), or the ‘integral personality’, as Slavophiles and neo-idealists preferred to describe the individual who would one day be free from the cognitive and moral defects that had hitherto prevented mankind from realizing its potential. The nature of these flaws and the specifications of the regenerated human being were the subject of bitter disputes between rival movements. Even on the left, models of the ‘new man’ varied widely, from the narrow rationalist who was the ideal of the ‘nihilists’ of the 1860s (see Nihilism, Russian; Russian Materialism: ‘the 1860s’) and subsequently of Lenin and Plekhanov, to Bakunin’s eternal rebel, who would embody the spontaneous spirit of freedom in defiance of all established authorities and orders. At the end of the nineteenth century, in the cultural ferment produced by new movements in philosophy and the arts emanating from the West, radical thinkers began en masse to renounce their predominantly rationalist models of the individual and society (see Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance). Nietzsche’s Superman had a pervasive influence on the ensuing ‘revaluation of values’, undertaken with the aim of formulating moral and social ideals that would embrace the manysidedness of human creativity (see Nietzsche: impact on Russian thought). Some radical philosophers (such as Berdiaev and Frank), in the process of moving from Marxism to neo-idealism, sought to reconcile Nietzsche’s aesthetic immoralism with Christian ethics, while the ‘Empiriocriticist’ group of Bolsheviks attempted to inject Russian Marxist philosophy with an element of heroic voluntarism by synthesizing it with Nietzschean self-affirmation and the pragmatism of Ernst Mach (see Russian Empiriocriticism). Nietzschean influences combined with the mechanistic scientism of Soviet Marxism in the Soviet model of the ‘new man’ (whose qualities Lysenko’s genetics suggested could be inherited by successive generations). In the post-Stalin ‘thaw’ some Soviet philosophers, including Il’enkov and Mamardashvili, began a critical rereading of Marx’s texts from an anthropocentric standpoint which emphasized the unpredictable and limitless potential of human consciousness (see Marxist philosophy, Russian and Soviet).

This open-ended view of progress (officially encouraged in the Gorbachev period) is uncommon in Russian philosophy, where epistemological scepticism is more often to be encountered in uneasy combinations with eschatological faith. Like other rootless groups, Russian intellectuals were drawn to compensating certainties that seemed capable of resisting their corrosive critique. The radical humanism of much Russian thought placed it at the forefront of the developing critical insistence on the context-dependent nature of truth; but many thinkers who attacked the claims of systems and dogmas to encompass and explain the experience and creative needs of living individuals in specific historical contexts, nevertheless retained a belief in a final, ideal state of being in which the fragmentation of knowledge would be overcome and all human purposes would coincide: a condition for whose principles some looked to science, others to religious revelation. The nihilists, who rejected metaphysics and all that could not be proven by rational and empirical methods, fervently believed that progress would inevitably lead to the restoration of a natural state of harmony between the individual and society. The empiriocriticist movement within Russian Marxism opposed the idolatry of formulas with the claim that experience and practice were the sole criteria of truth, but the group’s leading philosopher, Bogdanov, looked forward to a metascience that would unify the fragmented world of knowledge by reducing ‘all the discontinuities of our experience to a principle of continuity’, predicting that under communism, when all would share the same modes of organizing experience, the phenomenon of individuals with separate mental worlds would cease to exist. Solov’ëv’s pervasive influence on subsequent Russian religious idealism owed much to the charms of his vision of ‘integral knowledge’ and ‘integral life’ in an ‘integral society’. Religious and socialist motifs were combined in some visions of an earthly paradise, such as Bulgakov’s ‘Christian Socialism’, or Gorkii’s and Lunarcharskii’s creed of ‘God-building’, which called for worship of the collective humanity of the socialist future. In the revolutionary ferment of the first two decades of the twentieth century many religious and radical philosophers, together with Symbolist writers and poets, envisaged the leap to the harmonious future in apocalyptic terms: the novelist and critic Merezhkovskii prophesied the coming of a ‘New Christianity’ which would unite Christian faith with pagan self-affirmation in a morality beyond good and evil (see Nietzsche: impact on Russian thought §1; Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance §§3–4). In the aftermath of 1917 some thinkers (notably Berdiaev and members of the Eurasian movement) found consolation in apocalyptic fantasies of a new light from the East shining on the ruins of European culture.

Herzen memorably ascribed such doctrinaire utopianism to the Russian tendency to march ‘in fearless ranks to the very limit and beyond it, in step with the dialectic, but out of step with the truth’. The most original and subversive Russian thinker, he was the first of a significant minority who directed the iconoclastic thrust of Russian philosophy against all forms, without exception, of messianic faith. Contending that there was no basis in experience for the belief in a purposeful universe on which the great optimistic systems of the nineteenth century were built, he urged his contemporaries to adapt their categories to the flow of life, to accept (and even welcome) the dominant role of contingency in human existence, on the grounds that individual freedom and responsibility were possible only in an unprogrammed world. Herzen’s critique of the claims of metaphysical systems to predict or regulate the course of history was echoed by the ‘subjective sociology’ developed by Mikhailovskii and Lavrov in opposition to the deterministic scientism of the dominant Russian radical tradition. Tolstoi pointed to the chanciness of life and history in order to demonstrate the inadequacy of all attempts to formulate general rules for human societies; Dostoevskii confronted the systematizers with the lived experience of human freedom as the ability to be unpredictable; in their symposium of 1909 (frequently cited in the West as a pioneering analysis of the psychology of political utopianism) the neo-idealists of the Signposts movement explored the ways in which obsession with an ideal future impoverishes and distorts perception of the historical present (see Signposts movement).

Under the Soviet system a few representatives of this anti-utopian tradition ingeniously evaded the pressure on philosophers (backed up by the doctrine of the ‘partyness’ of truth – see Partiinost’) to endorse the official myths of utopia in power. The history of the novel form was the vehicle for Bakhtin’s reflections on the ‘unfinalizability’ of human existence (see Bakhtin, M.M.); similar insights were expressed by the cultural-historical school of psychology established by Vygotskii, who drew on Marx to counter the mechanistic determinism of Soviet Marxist philosophy with a view of consciousness as a cultural artefact capable of self-transcendence and self-renewal. In the 1960s Soviet psychologists and philosophers such as Il’enkov helped to revive an interest in ethics with their emphasis on the individual as the centre of moral agency, while in its historical studies of culture as a system of semiotic signs, the Moscow-Tartu school brought a richly documented and undoctrinaire approach to important moral and political topics.

The insights of some of these individuals and movements into the attractions and delusions of utopian thought are lent added conviction by their own often spectacularly unsuccessful efforts to overcome what Nietzsche called ‘the craving for metaphysical comfort’. Tolstoi was torn all his life beween his pluralist vision and his need for dogmatic moral certainties, while Dostoevskii in his last years preached an astonishingly crude variety of religio-political messianism. The humanism of some later religious philosophers (including the Signposts authors Berdiaev and Bulgakov) is hard to reconcile with their eschatological impatience.