Neo-Kantianism, Russian

7. The last Russian Neo-Kantians

Vasilii Sezeman (1884–1963) was born in Finland and studied in St Petersburg. After graduation from the university there he went abroad to Marburg and Berlin for further study. Returning to Russia he taught during the First World War in Petrograd and later in Saratov. In the early 1920s he lived briefly in Berlin and then in Lithuania, where he taught philosophy at the Universities of Kaunas and Vilnius. During this later period his major writings were composed in German, although a few years prior to his death he published a Lithuanian translation of Aristotle’s De Anima. Particularly interested in bestowing a transcendental significance on the concept of evolution without falling into psychologism, Sezeman held that knowledge at any particular time is incapable of seizing the transcendent object. Absolute knowledge remains the ideal, but it itself is inseparable from the path leading to the latter. Each stage in the advance of knowledge functions as a constitutive element in this ideal. As truth is a regulative idea there are no absolute, self-evident truths; all propositions are subject to evolution including the categories or seemingly ultimate elements of knowledge. Sezeman thus rejects interpreting the thing-in-itself as some causative transcendent reality and views it instead as an ideal, self-contained system.

Aleksandr Veideman (1879–?) published in Latvia in 1927 the only attempt at a systematization in Russian Neo-Kantianism which nevertheless stands as the ’swan song’ of the movement. Situating himself between Kant and Hegel, Veideman faulted the former for limiting himself to the possibility of mathematical and scientific knowledge, not knowledge in general. Had Kant done so he would have affirmed that all being is created by thought dialectically. As thought here is conceived to be a logical not individual process, solipsism is averted. The impetus for creative cognition receives its answer in ethical striving. Aesthetics represents the field wherein the finite is raised to an ideal.

As in the parallel German movement concern with the historical Kant was greatest during the early years of the respective protagonists and gradually diminished. In some cases this was simply a matter of an evolving thought-process, whereas in others external events surely played a decisive role. Vvedenskii distanced himself from the intricacies of Kant’s ’First Critique’, seeking an independent and ’easier proof of philosophical Criticism’. Chelpanov, witnessing the consolidation of Marxism in Russia in the 1920s, sought above all to defend moderation and the toleration of competing viewpoints in philosophy. To this end he emphasized his own hostility and that of Marx to transcendent metaphysical explanation. Lapshin, increasingly isolated in Prague, turned ever more towards studies of Russian culture. As the years turned into decades Sezeman, perhaps alone among the Neo-Kantians in the Russian diaspora, continued working without thematic abatement on problems traditionally conceived as philosophical, keeping abreast of the latest developments.