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Russian Ontologism: An Overview

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Abstract

Russian philosophy underwent many phases: Westernism, Slavophilism, nihilism, pre-revolutionary religious philosophy, and dialectical materialism or Soviet philosophy. At first sight, each one of these phases seems antithetical to the preceding one. Yet, they all appear to have in common a certain negative attitude towards the subjectivism of Kantianism and German Idealism. In contrast to the latter, Russian philosophy typically displays a tendency towards ontologism, which is generally defined as the view that there is such a thing as being in itself, i.e., being independent of cognition, and that this being is to some extent knowable. We discern, in these otherwise diametrically opposed movements, an underlying ontologism that constitutes a common thread running in a straight line through the history of Russian philosophy. In this article, I provide an overview of Russian ontologism.

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Notes

  1. Chernyshevsky uses the word “illiuzionizm” (illusionism) in “Kharakter chelovecheskogo znaniia” (“The Character of Human Knowledge,” 1885) to refer to Kantianism and subjective idealism. See Chernyshevsky (1906, p. 3).

  2. The Russian word “meonism” is formed from the Greek μὴ ὄν (mè on), which means non-being. Meonism is thus the theory according to which nothing truly exists, which is the antithesis of ontologism.

  3. I here adopt Hegel’s definition of “idealism” in Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie as the view that “the object is the product of the subject” (das Objekt als Produkt des Subjekts) (Hegel 1801, p. 60). I thus understand “German Idealism” as the attempt—made mostly by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—to prove this hypothesis.

  4. See also § 22, where Masaryk says that the “philosophy of Kant and Fichte had little direct influence in Russia” (Masaryk 1913a, § 22).

  5. On ontologism in Shpet, see Bourgeot (2021).

  6. See also Ralph Tyler Flewelling, who writes: “Theistic metaphysics was most highly developed through such philosophers as Solovyov, Bulgakov, Lossky, and the Princes Trubetskoi. The contrasting dialectical materialism grew from Marxism and neo-Marxism under the hand of Lenin and Stalin, now infallible philosophers of Sovietism. Both of these contrasting systems started from a naïve ontologism related to basic intuitions of existence and metaphysical, since any theory of knowledge must make some assumptions concerning reality, whether or not it recognizes them. Thus we find the true basis for the sharpest contradictions known to philosophy” (Flewelling 1955, p. 342). I could also add here that Andrzej Walicki considered “philosophical ontologism” to be “so typical of the Russian religious-philosophical renaissance” (Walicki 2015, p. 649).

  7. Goethe is often mistakenly thought to be merely a poet and a novelist, but he was also a naturalist and a philosophical thinker. In his own eyes, his most important contributions were those that he made in the field of the natural sciences. In his article on the scientific method entitled “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt” (“The Experiment as a Medium Between Object and Subject,” 1793), he criticized the idealist theory of knowledge (Goethe 1989).

  8. On Belinsky’s “obsession with reality,” see Mervaud (1993).

  9. On this, see Zenkovsky (1948, p. 241).

  10. “Rechʹ, proiznesennaia pered zashchitoi dissertatsii na stepenʹ magistra” (1844).

  11. In his 1799 open letter to Fichte, F. H. Jacobi criticizes Fichte’s rejection of the thing in itself and claims that his idealism is in fact a “nihilismus” (Jacobi 1799, p. 39).

  12. On Pisarev’s ontological realism, see also Masaryk (1913b, §§ 107–109).

  13. In some places, Fichte refers to his own philosophy as an “ideal-realism.” He writes, for instance, that the “Wissenschaftslehre […] is a critical idealism that can also be called a real-idealism or an ideal-realism” (Fichte 1802, p. 269). But, in Fichte’s ideal-realism both the ideal and the “real” are produced by and contained in the self. He also writes that “the ideal and the real grounds are one and the same, and that this interaction between the self and non-self is at the same time an interaction of the self with itself” (Fichte 1802, p. 268). This is certainly not the case with Lossky. So, Lossky’s ideal-realism should by no means be confused with that of Fichte.

  14. On the relation between Italian ontologism (esp. Rosmini) and Russian ontologism (esp. Solovyov, Trubetzkoy, and Ern), see Kita (2021).

  15. On Frank’s ontologism, see Obolevitch (2021).

  16. On Bukharin’s ontologism, see Soboleva (2021).

  17. On Deborin’s ontologism, see Oittinen (2021).

  18. As Teresa Obolevitch says, “Soloviev’s view presented a kind of ‘religious materialism,’ distinct from ‘false’ or ‘vulgar materialism’” (Obolevitch 2019, p. 76).

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    Frédéric Tremblay

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Tremblay, F. Russian Ontologism: An Overview. Stud East Eur Thought 73, 123–140 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-020-09387-x

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