Russian philosophy

1. The development of Russian philosophy

What Berdiaev called the ‘Russian Idea’ – the eschatological quest that is the most distinctive feature of Russian philosophy – can be explained in terms of Russian history. The Mongol yoke from the twelfth to the fourteenth century cut Russia off from Byzantium (from which it had received Christianity) and from Europe: it had no part in the ferment of the Renaissance. Its rise as a unified state under the Moscow Tsardom followed closely on the fall of the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, and the emerging sense of Russian national identity incorporated a messianic element in the form of the monk Philotheus’ theory of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’, successor to Rome and Constantinople as guardian of Christ’s truth in its purity (see Medieval philosophy, Russian). ‘There will not be a fourth’, ran the prophecy: the Russian Empire would last until the end of the world. Russian thought remained dominated by the Greek patristic tradition until the eighteenth century, when the Kievan thinker Skovoroda (sometimes described as Russia’s first philosopher) developed a religious vision based on a synthesis of ancient and patristic thought. He had no following; by the mid-century Russia’s intellectual centre was St Petersburg, where Catherine the Great, building on the achievements of her predecessor Peter, sought to promote a Western secular culture among the educated elite with the aid of French Enlightenment ideas. But representatives of the ‘Russian Enlightenment’ were severely punished when they dared to cite the philosophes’ concepts of rationality and justice in criticism of the political status quo (see Enlightenment, Russian). The persecution of advanced ideas (which served to strengthen the nascent intelligentsia’s self-image as the cultural and moral leaders of their society) reached its height under Nicolas I (1825–55), when philosophy departments were closed in the universities, and thought went underground. Western ideas were the subject of intense debate in small informal circles of students, writers and critics, the most famous of which in Moscow and St Petersburg furnished the philosophical education of such intellectual leaders as the future socialists Herzen and Bakunin, the novelist and liberal Ivan Turgenev, the literary critic Belinskii (from whose ‘social criticism’ Soviet Socialist Realism claimed descent), and the future Slavophile religious philosophers Kireevskii and Khomiakov (see Slavophilism). As a critic has noted: ‘In the West there is theology and there is philosophy; Russian thought, however, is a third concept’; one which (in the tsarist intellectual underground as in its Soviet successor) embraced novelists, poets, critics, religious and political thinkers – all bound together by their commitment to the goals of freedom and justice.

In the 1830s these beleaguered individuals encountered German Idealism: an event of decisive significance for the future development of Russian thought. The teleological structures of idealist thought provided Russian intellectuals with a redemptive interpretation of their conflicts and struggles as a necessary stage in the dialectical movement of history towards a transcendent state of harmony. Idealism (notably in its Hegelian forms: see Hegelianism, Russian) left its mark on the vocabulary of subsequent Russian philosophy, but its principal legacy was the belief, shared by the vast majority of Russian thinkers, that an ‘integral worldview’, a coherent and unified vision of the historical process and its goal, was the essential framework both for personal moral development and social theorizing. The question of history’s goal became a matter for intense debate among the intelligentsia with the publication in 1836 of Chaadaev’s ‘Philosophical Letter’, which posed Russia’s relationship to the West as a central philosophical problem, maintaining that Russia’s historical separation from the culture of Western Christianity precluded its participation in the movement of history towards the establishment of a universal Christian society. Chaadaev’s version of the march of progress was much indebted to French Catholic conservatism, while the nationalist riposte to his ideas drew heavily on the Romantics’ critique of the Age of Reason and Schelling’s organic conception of nationhood: the Slavophiles held that Western culture was in a state of terminal moral and social decline, suffering from an excess of rationalism, which had led to social atomization and the fragmentation of the individual psyche (see Chaadaev, P.I.; Schellingianism, Russian). These divisions could be healed only by religious faith in its purest form, Russian Orthodoxy, whose spirit of organic ‘togetherness’, uncontaminated by Western rationalism, they presented as a model for Russian society and a beacon for mankind. They thereby laid the foundations of a distinctively Russian tradition of cultural and religious messianism which includes Dostoevskii’s political writings, the Pan-Slavist and Eurasian movements (see Dostoevskii, F.M.; Pan-Slavism and Eurasian movement), and the apocalyptic vision of Berdiaev, whose philosophy was highly popular among the Soviet underground.

Secular and Westernist thinkers tended to be scarcely less messianic in their response to Chaadaev’s pessimism. The first philosophers of Russian liberalism (see Liberalism, Russian) interpreted their country’s past and future development in the light of Hegel’s doctrine of the necessary movement of all human societies towards the incarnation of Reason in the modern constitutional state, while the Russian radical tradition was shaped successively by the eschatological visions of the French utopian socialists, the Young Hegelians and Karl Marx. Herzen defined the distinctive characteristic of Russian radical thought as the ‘implacable spirit of negation’ with which, unrestrained by the European’s deference to the past, it applied itself to the task of freeing mankind from the transcendent authorities invented by religion and philosophy; and the radical populist tradition that he founded argued that the ‘privilege of backwardness’, by permitting Russia to learn both from the achievements and the mistakes of the West, had placed it in the vanguard of mankind’s movement towards liberty.

Russian religious philosophers tended to see themselves as prophets, pointing the way to the regeneration of human societies through the spiritual transformation of individuals. Vladimir Solov’ëv (regarded by many Russians as their greatest philosopher) believed that his country’s mission was to bring into being the Kingdom of God on Earth in the form of a liberal theocracy, which would integrate knowledge and social practice and unite the human race under the spiritual rule of the Pope and the secular rule of the Russian tsar. His metaphysics of ‘All-Unity’ was a dominant force in the revival of religious and idealist philosophy in Russia in the early twentieth century, inspiring an entire generation of thinkers who sought to reinterpret Christian dogma in ways that emphasized the links of spiritual culture and religious faith with institutional and social reform, and progress in all other aspects of human endeavour. Among them were leading Russian émigré philosophers after 1917, such as Semën Frank, Bulgakov (who sought to create a new culture in which Orthodox Christianity would infuse every area of Russian life), Berdiaev (who was strongly influenced by the messianic motifs in Solov’ëv), and Hessen, who offered a Neo-Kantian and Westernist interpretation of the notion of ‘All-Unity’. A number of émigré philosophers (notably Il’in and Vysheslavtsev) interpreted Bolshevism as the expression of a spiritual crisis in modern industrialized cultures. Many blamed the Russian Revolution on infection from a culturally bankrupt West which (echoing the Slavophiles, Dostoevskii and Leont’ev) they presented as corrupted by rationalism, positivism, atheism and self-centred individualism (although few have gone as far as the fiercely polemical Losev who, up until his death in the Soviet Union in 1988, maintained that electric light expressed the spiritual emptiness of ‘Americanism and machine-production’). Most maintained a historiosophical optimism throughout the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century, which Berdiaev saw as a precondition for messianic regeneration, while Hessen believed that religious and cultural values would emerge triumphant from the carnage in a dialectical Aufhebung.