Debate
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The latest debate concerns Motherland A Philosophical History of Russia . Motherland aimed to pin down the unique qualities of Russian culture through a survey of the history of Russian philosophy. Comparisons with other cultures were inevitable along the way, as was an interface with Russian politics, but the main focus was on ‘the Russian way’.
A German website www.philosophie.de , surely for obvious reasons of Germany’s own cultural history, chided me for resurrecting a national tradition ‘that would have delighted Herder’. But to argue that there is something wrong with showing the Russian tradition to be still closely linked to its origins in German Romanticism, is to deny the nature of the subject. One might wish Russia to be different, but one can’t just ignore the differences, nor deny that the national element is strong. Its continuing Romanticism, which entails a set of national and spiritual beliefs, is the chief characteristic of Russian self-reflection and anyone examining the tradition has to be aware of what Pyotr Lavrov established in the 1860s: that Russia, as seen by Russian thinkers, is an ethical category. Motherland should have been called The Good Man in Russia and I hope any future edition will revert to this title.
In my view the tradition of ‘the good man’ endured through the practice of Communism in Russia and partly fused with it, despite the depersonalising aspects of Leninist ideology. The ‘good man’ was central to Russian Populism, which Marxism-Leninism absorbed as well as eclipsed. The anonymous commentator on www.philosophie.de is all the more disturbed by this contention, again surely for thoroughly understandable German reasons. ‘Not everything that can be compared is comparable, and when too much blood sticks to an idea one should take care not simply to line it up with other moral ideas.’ Of course the equation of Soviet Communism with Nazism is one that many people are tempted to make. On the other hand, there are also plenty of us who see in this Soviet Communism which went disastrously wrong Russian humanitarian impulses like communitarianism and selflessness which were decent. I remain convinced that since the main task of Russian philosophy is to define Russia as an ethical category, this is the path the sympathetic intellectual historial has to go down, blood or not. To explain a national phenomenon is not to condone it or chose it for oneself.
Motherland shows how Russian philosophers since the early nineteenth century used Western, and in particular German philosophy, in search of self-definition. Above all Hegel brought this quest for self-knowledge into focus, while Hegel’s contemporary Schelling made it possible to talk about Russian spiritual attitudes.
The importance of Hegel used to be explained exclusively in the West in terms of his relationship to Marx and Lenin, but that was by far not the extent, or even in my view the most important aspect, of his influence. It is not the dialectical materialism of an aberrant Marxist century but Russian religious Idealism which is unthinkable without Hegel and Schelling. Foreign romanticism helped create in Russia an idealism which retained its overt religious character in contrast to the German systems which were more cerebral and psychological.
The first important nineteenth-century Russian philosopher-theologian, Aleksei Khomiakov, took a major step along the path to self-definition when he insisted that Hegel’s interest – see The Phenomenology of Spirit (1806) - in the development of the individual in a complex and dynamic society, at the risk of a transitional period of painful social alienation, was alien to Russian philosophy. Further, the whole tradition of Cartesian individualism, whereby the discerning subject was responsible for the pursuit of truth (a tradition which for this purpose Hegel could be counted as part of), was alien. Khomiakov suggested that a Russian philosopher confronted with the philosophy of the cogito would have to ask how something as important as truth could be the work of a mere individual, detached from his fellow men. Either the truth is something in which we all share, or by definition claims to it are in error. This objection can obviously be refuted, but the point to understand is why it was raised.
The scene of philosophizing in Russia was never clearly marked off from political and social theory. Reason suggested not so much a tool for getting at objective truth as a means to define and hold together the community. The reason defined by Western philosophers was potentially important in a country which, because of the deep inequalities embedded in its social structure, was always on the brink of social chaos. If, as Hegel suggested, progress meant that simple community would be left behind as the basis for modern social organisation, then perhaps Russia should also look to reason in its place. Philosophy in Russia always offered itself as the source of some unifying principle that might help the nation avoid chaos and it did this either as ‘community’ or as ‘reason’. The risk with the Western model, according to the critic Vissarion Belinsky in 1839, was that the suprapersonal authority of Hegelian reason applied to the question of social order in Russia could turn in an instant into an excuse for inhumanity, given Russian political conditions. Belinsky’s argument was picked up by Dostoevsky and given to Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov. Moreover what Belinsky warned against seems to have been exactly what happened eighty years later when Lenin bent the ‘scientific’ reasoning of Marxism to totalitarian Russian ends.
It’s my view that Belinsky’s warning laid down a marker for one of the most important features of religious idealism in Russia, even though Belinsky himself was a secular thinker. This was a resistance to all attempts to pin down the truth of human interaction conceptually – a resistance which would normally mean defeat for philosophy as such. This resistance, which entailed a separation of logical from emotional truth in Khomiakov’s contemporary Ivan Kireevsky, and something similar in the Populist Mikhailovsky, continued to be marked in such twentieth-century thinkers as Berdyaev and Semyon Frank, and was radically present in the work of Lev Shestov. For Berdyaev istina, as it were the truth of pure reason, was not pravda, the world of practical reason. In Frank the truth issue was tamed by the existence of an orderly God, who could guarantee the rightness of its instantiations. Neverthleless a pantheistic God defined with the help of Spinoza and Goethe allowed Frank to insist on a truth of ‘becoming’ which effectively kept truth concepts open and unfinished. In the later twentieth century it’s interesting evidence of the enduring Russian ethical-epistemological tradition that one can find insistence on ‘the fluid concept’ both in official Marxist-Leninist philosophy and in underground philosophy opposed to it, for instance in the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin, a man who presented himself as a literary theorist but was much more besides. I call this insistence on the unfinished concept the Russian tradition of philosophical anarchism. That it endured over two centuries, in both mystical and secular thought, I take to be evidence of what I call ‘The Long Tradition’, dateable from around 1815. Did it end in 1991? It’s too soon to say. The significance of the first date is that it marks when Russia began to define itself in respect of The French Revolution, to which the Hegelian philosophy of spirit was also a response.
Russia’s nineteenth-century pursuit of the good man through philosophy more readily suggested the world of Plato than the world of modern Western philosophy. The questions of ‘how to live?’ and ‘what is a good man? were not put with great sophistication but they had that freshness which also made the Russian novel seductive.
If I had to pick out one feature of the Russian tradition that best characterized it I would settle for the double-edged antagonism against ‘individualism’ which rejected the Cartesian tradition in epistemology and the utilitarian tradition in ethics. In these philosophical attitudes lie the roots of a deeply-held desire to travel a different modern path from the West.
What is incidentally fascinating for a Western reader today is to see how with postmodernism Continental philosophy has itself come to adopt a quasi-mystical and anti-Cartesian position, which seems to have more in common with the Russian tradition than the rational Western tradition did. Western thought has become hugely critical of ‘reason’ and the Englightenment project and the individualism they seem to engender, but it has arrived at this position belatedly compared with Russia.
In my view the postmodern move into inconclusiveness – I’m thinking of Derrida here - has not been a productive development for philosophy in the West, but one has to understand it for historical reasons ie. the Second World War and Holocaust, followed by the collapse of Marxism. Similarly one has to understand the Russian dislike of reason, which grew out of the threat of authoritarianism and injustice.
All these points I take further in Motherland.