It can be claimed, with some genuine surprise on the part of my critics, that despite my double preoccupation with the Russian phenomenon' in general and in its particulars, on the one hand, and with general philosophy (primarily Western) on the other, I have not been paying enough attention to Russian philosophy as I should have, either in this Russian section or elsewhere, that is, in none of my specifically philosophical sections. It is worth mentioning that there must be a reason why Bertrand Russell does not mention Russian philosophy at all, in his monumental History of Western Philosophy, which used to be one of my most important guides to philosophy when I was growing up. In this entry I intend to make a brief round trip to Russian philosophy and hopefully clarify some puzzling sticking points.
I shall begin with a reminder that Russian literature, particularly starting with Pushkin, is second to none in its penchant for philosophical contemplation. Russian writers and poets have always been known for their intense philosophizing, although this feature of Russian literature is by no means unique, if we think of such great literary philosophers of the West as Goethe, Schiller, and Byron, to name just these three, among too many others to mention them all. It is true, of course, that great Russian literature as such is relatively young (beginning to flourish only in the nineteenth century), and the same, even to a far greater extent, goes for all Russian philosophy.
It is safe to say that until the end of the nineteenth century Russia had no tradition of professional philosophy at all. The earliest consistent efforts at political philosophy were made by the Russian Russophiles, resisting the efforts of the so-called Russian Westernizers to convince their compatriots that they were backward and ignorant slobs who needed Europe’s mentorship to pull them out of their semi-Asiatic ditch. Such contempt for their country deeply insulted their intellectual opponents, who saw Europe not as an enlightened teacher offering a benign solution to Russia’s congenital problems, but as a hostile force bent on taking her down at the slightest such opportunity.
Such was the thrust of Nikolai Danilevsky’s politico-philosophical work Russia and Europe, first appearing in 1869---in installments in a journal---and later published as a book. It fell on ready soil. Russia was quite apprehensive of the West already, and deeply resentful of its materialistic outlook and capitalist beginnings. Dostoyevsky was of course a major force of the anti-Western anxiety. Another major anti-Western political thinker of the time was Konstantin Leontiev, the author of The Orient, Russia, and Slavdom (1885-86), who advocated Russia’s Eastern orientation and a rejection of the decaying and slowly dying West. All this was in harmony with the cult of Russia’s great hero-saint Prince Alexander Nevsky, who famously allied himself with the Mongols in the thirteenth century, to defeat the threat from the West.
Although both Danilevsky’s and Leontiev’s works are clear-cut cases of politico-philosophical nonfiction, it is the 1874 work of Vladimir Solovyev Crisis of Western Philosophy, where he attacks Western positivism, which is considered the first properly philosophical work of a properly defined Russian philosopher. We are going to have a separate entry on Solovyev coming next, but here we shall simply note that the first formally recognized Russian philosopher (Solovyev) was born in 1853, which makes Russian philosophy a very-very late bloomer indeed.
Apart from Solovyev, we’ll have a separate entry on another Russian philosopher of note: Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948). For obvious reasons, we are not including in our consideration such pre-Solovyevian thinkers as Mikhail Bakunin (he is the subject of several of my social, rather than philosophical entries) and other anarchists, or any of the Marxists notably including Plekhanov and Lenin and none of the Soviet era Marxist-Leninist philosophers. On the other hand, the obvious choice of Lev Shestov takes us to the Tikkun Olam and other sections. Having omitted most others, I will however briefly touch on the following four names, making very brief comments on all of them.---
Vasili Vasilievich Rozanov (1856-1919) was a literary critic and publicist, aside from being a philosopher. He was the first to see Dostoyevsky as a philosopher, profoundly influencing all subsequent Dostoyevskyan scholarship. As a philosopher he stood apart from all mainstream literary philosophical currents in Russia of his time. He was obsessed with erotic imagery and symbolism in his writings and was severely criticized for this obsession. It was his peculiar (and, I must say, highly commendable) belief that in order to arrive at the closest approximation of understanding of any subject, one was required to look at it from “1000 different (and necessarily conflicting!) perspectives.” He was known, rather scandalously, for expressing one opinion about current political events under his own name, and totally opposite opinions of the same events, writing under different pennames in other publications. He was raising very serious ethical-religious problems, such as Christianity and metaphysics, eroticism and metaphysics, Christian Orthodoxy and nihilism, and saw the only solution of their contradictions not in one party overcoming the other one, but in discovering their deep connection as different reactions of the same human nature to different experiences, and the key to tackling their seemingly irreconcilable contradictions was to understand the sources of their antagonism and to learn the mechanics of their subliminal interaction.
Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov/Malinovsky (1873-1928) was a physician and an experimental scientist (obsessed with the idea of blood transfusion as a means of human rejuvenation). He was also an economist, a Bolshevik politician, one of the translators of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital into Russian, and a science fiction writer. In addition to all these, he made himself a name as a philosopher, or rather anti-philosopher, if I may put it this way. As a philosophe,r he rejected the traditional understanding of philosophy, introducing instead a philosophy of action, based on the understanding of truth as the organizing form of collective experience, turning dialectics into an “organizational process” of creative transformation of being. (Here we can sense a strong influence of Marx’s philosophy of mutual interaction of mind and matter.) Aside from this humble improvement on philosophy, Bogdanov ventured into the totally new field of tectology (the word coined by him), where he proposed a merger of all social, biological and physical sciences by treating them as systems of relationships and seeking out the organizational principles underlying all systems. His ideas anticipated the age of cybernetics, and Norbert Wiener, known as the father of cybernetics, had acknowledged his "cybernetic" inspiration from the 1928 German translation of Bogdanov’s book Tectology.
The last two notable philosophers, considered here together, are Sergei Nikolayevich Bulgakov (1871-1944) /not to be confused with the great writer Mikhail Bulgakov!/ and Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky (1882-1937). Both were theologians first, and philosophers second, and this explains the commonness of their general ethical principles, rooted in religious mysticism and Christian Orthodox ethics. There were slight differences between them as well. Bulgakov started his life as a Marxist, but, being an honest thinker, he soon found himself in an intellectual conflict with Marxism, and discovered Kantian idealism much more to his liking. His next step was to wholeheartedly accept religious philosophy of Vladimir Solovyev, and, in this sense, although highly acclaimed, he looks to me like a derivative thinker.
Florensky, aside from being a priest, theologian and religious philosopher, was a notable mathematician and physicist. His mystical religious ideas were strange, and stranger still, were fed by his knowledge of science. He earnestly questioned Copernican astronomy, declaring that the earth’s movement in the solar system was not a hard scientific fact; and having acquainted himself with Einstein’s magic formula, believed that there existed a real world of God hidden from us by the physical barrier of the speed of light: any body capable of breaking this barrier would be able to reach the world beyond. Needless to say, he was harshly criticized by his fellow Orthodox theologians, and perhaps the only reason why today he is treated kindly, rather than as an odious heretic, may be his martyrdom in 1937 at the hands of the Soviet power.
This concludes our brief journey into the “parallel universe” of Russian philosophy in general, and next we shall be taking a closer look at its two most famous representatives in particular, namely, Vladimir Solovyev and Nikolai Berdyaev.
I shall begin with a reminder that Russian literature, particularly starting with Pushkin, is second to none in its penchant for philosophical contemplation. Russian writers and poets have always been known for their intense philosophizing, although this feature of Russian literature is by no means unique, if we think of such great literary philosophers of the West as Goethe, Schiller, and Byron, to name just these three, among too many others to mention them all. It is true, of course, that great Russian literature as such is relatively young (beginning to flourish only in the nineteenth century), and the same, even to a far greater extent, goes for all Russian philosophy.
It is safe to say that until the end of the nineteenth century Russia had no tradition of professional philosophy at all. The earliest consistent efforts at political philosophy were made by the Russian Russophiles, resisting the efforts of the so-called Russian Westernizers to convince their compatriots that they were backward and ignorant slobs who needed Europe’s mentorship to pull them out of their semi-Asiatic ditch. Such contempt for their country deeply insulted their intellectual opponents, who saw Europe not as an enlightened teacher offering a benign solution to Russia’s congenital problems, but as a hostile force bent on taking her down at the slightest such opportunity.
Such was the thrust of Nikolai Danilevsky’s politico-philosophical work Russia and Europe, first appearing in 1869---in installments in a journal---and later published as a book. It fell on ready soil. Russia was quite apprehensive of the West already, and deeply resentful of its materialistic outlook and capitalist beginnings. Dostoyevsky was of course a major force of the anti-Western anxiety. Another major anti-Western political thinker of the time was Konstantin Leontiev, the author of The Orient, Russia, and Slavdom (1885-86), who advocated Russia’s Eastern orientation and a rejection of the decaying and slowly dying West. All this was in harmony with the cult of Russia’s great hero-saint Prince Alexander Nevsky, who famously allied himself with the Mongols in the thirteenth century, to defeat the threat from the West.
Although both Danilevsky’s and Leontiev’s works are clear-cut cases of politico-philosophical nonfiction, it is the 1874 work of Vladimir Solovyev Crisis of Western Philosophy, where he attacks Western positivism, which is considered the first properly philosophical work of a properly defined Russian philosopher. We are going to have a separate entry on Solovyev coming next, but here we shall simply note that the first formally recognized Russian philosopher (Solovyev) was born in 1853, which makes Russian philosophy a very-very late bloomer indeed.
Apart from Solovyev, we’ll have a separate entry on another Russian philosopher of note: Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948). For obvious reasons, we are not including in our consideration such pre-Solovyevian thinkers as Mikhail Bakunin (he is the subject of several of my social, rather than philosophical entries) and other anarchists, or any of the Marxists notably including Plekhanov and Lenin and none of the Soviet era Marxist-Leninist philosophers. On the other hand, the obvious choice of Lev Shestov takes us to the Tikkun Olam and other sections. Having omitted most others, I will however briefly touch on the following four names, making very brief comments on all of them.---
Vasili Vasilievich Rozanov (1856-1919) was a literary critic and publicist, aside from being a philosopher. He was the first to see Dostoyevsky as a philosopher, profoundly influencing all subsequent Dostoyevskyan scholarship. As a philosopher he stood apart from all mainstream literary philosophical currents in Russia of his time. He was obsessed with erotic imagery and symbolism in his writings and was severely criticized for this obsession. It was his peculiar (and, I must say, highly commendable) belief that in order to arrive at the closest approximation of understanding of any subject, one was required to look at it from “1000 different (and necessarily conflicting!) perspectives.” He was known, rather scandalously, for expressing one opinion about current political events under his own name, and totally opposite opinions of the same events, writing under different pennames in other publications. He was raising very serious ethical-religious problems, such as Christianity and metaphysics, eroticism and metaphysics, Christian Orthodoxy and nihilism, and saw the only solution of their contradictions not in one party overcoming the other one, but in discovering their deep connection as different reactions of the same human nature to different experiences, and the key to tackling their seemingly irreconcilable contradictions was to understand the sources of their antagonism and to learn the mechanics of their subliminal interaction.
Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov/Malinovsky (1873-1928) was a physician and an experimental scientist (obsessed with the idea of blood transfusion as a means of human rejuvenation). He was also an economist, a Bolshevik politician, one of the translators of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital into Russian, and a science fiction writer. In addition to all these, he made himself a name as a philosopher, or rather anti-philosopher, if I may put it this way. As a philosophe,r he rejected the traditional understanding of philosophy, introducing instead a philosophy of action, based on the understanding of truth as the organizing form of collective experience, turning dialectics into an “organizational process” of creative transformation of being. (Here we can sense a strong influence of Marx’s philosophy of mutual interaction of mind and matter.) Aside from this humble improvement on philosophy, Bogdanov ventured into the totally new field of tectology (the word coined by him), where he proposed a merger of all social, biological and physical sciences by treating them as systems of relationships and seeking out the organizational principles underlying all systems. His ideas anticipated the age of cybernetics, and Norbert Wiener, known as the father of cybernetics, had acknowledged his "cybernetic" inspiration from the 1928 German translation of Bogdanov’s book Tectology.
The last two notable philosophers, considered here together, are Sergei Nikolayevich Bulgakov (1871-1944) /not to be confused with the great writer Mikhail Bulgakov!/ and Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky (1882-1937). Both were theologians first, and philosophers second, and this explains the commonness of their general ethical principles, rooted in religious mysticism and Christian Orthodox ethics. There were slight differences between them as well. Bulgakov started his life as a Marxist, but, being an honest thinker, he soon found himself in an intellectual conflict with Marxism, and discovered Kantian idealism much more to his liking. His next step was to wholeheartedly accept religious philosophy of Vladimir Solovyev, and, in this sense, although highly acclaimed, he looks to me like a derivative thinker.
Florensky, aside from being a priest, theologian and religious philosopher, was a notable mathematician and physicist. His mystical religious ideas were strange, and stranger still, were fed by his knowledge of science. He earnestly questioned Copernican astronomy, declaring that the earth’s movement in the solar system was not a hard scientific fact; and having acquainted himself with Einstein’s magic formula, believed that there existed a real world of God hidden from us by the physical barrier of the speed of light: any body capable of breaking this barrier would be able to reach the world beyond. Needless to say, he was harshly criticized by his fellow Orthodox theologians, and perhaps the only reason why today he is treated kindly, rather than as an odious heretic, may be his martyrdom in 1937 at the hands of the Soviet power.
This concludes our brief journey into the “parallel universe” of Russian philosophy in general, and next we shall be taking a closer look at its two most famous representatives in particular, namely, Vladimir Solovyev and Nikolai Berdyaev.
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