Neo-Kantianism, Russian

6. The journal Logos

A Russian edition of the international journal Logos began in 1910 under the responsible editorship of Sergei Hessen (1887–1950) and Fëdor Stepun (1884–1965). In 1911 Boris Iakovenko (1884–1948) was added. Hessen studied in Heidelberg and Freiburg with among others Windelband and Rickert, under whom he wrote a notable dissertation. After returning to Russia he taught in St Petersburg and Tomsk. Subsequently after the Bolshevik Revolution he taught in Prague and Warsaw. Although later in emigration he wrote on pedagogy and philosophy of law his early writings reveal a strong debt to the Baden School. He argued that in the natural sciences to subsume a particular natural event under a general law, thereby illuminating it in a causal sequence, is to understand it. The individual or historical event too is marked with necessity even though the degree of generality appears markedly different in historical and scientific explanations. To understand an event in history is to understand it in its concreteness, its individuality but also its necessity no less than in the natural sciences.

Stepun studied in Heidelberg under Windelband under whom he wrote a slim dissertation on Solov’ëv. Shortly after the Revolution he briefly served as cultural director at a state theatre in Moscow. Later he taught sociology at Dresden University and from 1946 in Munich. His early affiliation with Neo-Kantianism consists chiefly in his view that philosophy must examine all cultural fields, distinguishing in them a ’transcendental-formal element’ from that which is merely contingent. This formal element is a manifestation of the absolute and as such is what gives cultural ’creations’ their universality and necessity. Unfortunately Stepun failed to develop these thoughts more precisely or fully.

After 1917 Iakovenko first lived in Italy and then Berlin and Prague. Despite his many writings he devoted little attention to enunciating his own position either in detail or rigorously. In short he held to an absolute monism but proclaimed transcendental philosophy to be the intellectual path to the Absolute. In it philosophy has attained a self-consciousness. The next and last step for philosophy is to return to the original unity revealed in mythology. When philosophy has come full circle it will then be critical and rational.