Neo-Kantianism, Russian

5. Transitional Neo-Kantians

Several notable Russian intellectuals early in their respective careers abandoned Marxism and briefly adopted a Neo-Kantian position before moving on to another, usually more idealistic philosophy. Perhaps best known among these was Nikolai Berdiaev (1874–1948). Although acknowledging the primacy of practical reason in one of his earliest publications from 1900, he nevertheless saw this as a psychological truth. Berdiaev held Kant’s atemporal postulates of practical reason to be ’temporary postulates of people of a specific socio-psychological formation’. At a different time other interests could predominate leading to a different set of postulates. However, Berdiaev came to the view that there were unalterable moral values which, while atemporal, were in the course of history expounded by different classes. Along these lines he attempted to combine Kantian idealism with a lingering sympathy for Marxian sociology.

Pëtr Struve (1870–1944), a dynamic personality in Russian politics as well as intellectual history, came to Neo-Kantianism largely out of dissatisfaction with the account of freedom and necessity in Marxian philosophy of history. During his Neo-Kantian phase he retained a belief in the validity of a thorough-going determinism for the phenomenal realm while asserting that freedom, conceived as indeterminism, was a ’reality’ in the activity of the human individual.

In his first published article from 1907 on Hume and Kant, Gustav Shpet (1879–1937) sided with the Baden-school outlook that while the validity of the law of causality was undemonstrable, we must believe in it for the sake of cognition. Within a few years, however, he abandoned Neo-Kantianism altogether, drawing close to Husserlian phenomenology.