Abstract
Russian thought has long been a hybrid of native and imported forms—or more accurately, native values were first conceptualized and systematized according to Western European categories. This essay considers select entries in the Handbook (primarily those discussing Hegel, Solovyov, Tolstoy, and twentieth-century prose writers) not from the perspective of “pure” or abstract philosophy, arguably a Western achievement, but in the context of three traditional Russian virtues: tselostnost’ [wholeness], lichnost’ [personhood], and organichnost’ [organicity]. Each of these virtues, or values, is paradoxical, easily misconstrued, and easily abused. The essay ends speculatively on two studies: the personalist implications of Paul Contino’s exploration of “incarnational realism” in Dostoevsky, and Iain McGilchrist’s work on left- and right-hemispheres of the brain as contexts for the place of Russian thought in the larger world.
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Notes
The state slowly usurped this churchly version of Enlightenment, culminating in the cannily eloquent, imitative, and repressive reign of Catherine II.
Forster acknowledges that Berlin overestimates the philosophical depth of Herzen, too casually dismisses Bakunin, and (understandably, as a Jewish intellectual working in England in the post-World War II period) was “ambivalent about Germany” as intellectual stimulation for Russian thought (Forster 2021, pp. 782–783).
Inspired by the visionary Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, the mature Lotman conceived of the semiosphere as a holistic “universe of the mind,” an accessible noosphere that optimally could dissolve the opposition between culture and nature (Avtonomova 2021, pp. 741–742).
The essay reconstructs Grot’s personalist philosophy, a form of “spiritual anthropology based on thought and feeling,” which accords gracefully with Grot’s ever-responsive person. For him, being “in flux” was not a hindrance to identity but its most reliable linchpin (Medzhibovskaya 2021, pp. 527–528).
My appreciation of humanism and its connection, in the European and Russian intellectual traditions, to religious and personalist philosophy is deeply indebted to Randall Poole. For an elegant summary of his argument that distinguishes between humanistic and antihumanist forms of religion, as well as lays out the rational grounds for theistic belief, see Poole 2019.
The Slavophiles Aleksei Khomiakov and Ivan Kireevsky deployed two nouns built off tsel-, the root for “whole.” Tsel’nost’ was the more philosophical and epistemological, as in the ideal of integral reason, integral knowledge, the higher unity of reason and faith. The noun tselostnost’, with its nuances of bodily recuperation and health, has been tied to an even larger ambition, “Russian philosophy’s enduring preoccupation with the essential, original wholeness of the universe, an ideal state from which the world has fallen and which man seeks to regain” (Mayer-Rieckh 2011, p. 3). For extensive treatment of this concept, see Mayer-Rieckh 2011 and Hahn 2022.
Motroshilova insists that Solovyov has a coherent integral system, but one not reducible to a single principle or strategy; instead, she provides a chart of the four “dimensions of his thought”: cosmological, practical, anthropological, theological (Motroshilova 2021, p. 164).
In Hegel’s thought as Ilyin reads it, a “bare particular” is abstract, whereas a “differentiated and developing existing whole of thought” is concrete (Grier 2021, p. 321).
Love, an accomplished Kojève scholar, draws on Kojève’s Lectures on Hegel from the 1930s to press home this mournful fact of Hegel’s totalitarian potential.
Against Isaiah Berlin’s Germanophobia noted by Forster, Steiner is careful to point out the debt owed by Tolstoy to German philosophy, especially the Aufklärung, and Tolstoy’s continual return to Kant.
In addition to the literary device of a virtuous inner voice that speaks up in a dying consciousness—the wounded Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, the mortally ill Ivan Ilyich, the merchant Vasily Brekhunov freezing to death—Tolstoy also deploys the occasional embodied angelic double who confronts a sinful fallen person and tries to enlighten him or her through reasonable everyday dialogic exchange, as in Tolstoy’s folk dramatization “Aggei” (1886) or his 1909 dramatic sketch Proezzhii i krestyanin [The Traveller and the Peasant]. For a translation of the latter, see Tolstoy 1998, pp. 217–225.
Bakhtin’s idea of unity-in-process, inspired by Russian physiologists, has been eloquently grounded by cell biologists and naturalists in the West; see, for example, Goodenough and Deacon (2006).
The polymath Losev, mathematician, theorist of music, and classicist, was openminded and eclectic as a theorist, embracing the creations of Alexander Scriabin as well as the latest developments in jazz (Takho-Godi and Zenkin 2021, pp. 683–685).
See Khagi 2021 on the relation between Florensky’s Romantic Symbolism and Osip Mandelstam’s “Silentium” and all-unity [vseedinstvo].
In her inquiry into the potentials (and pitfalls) of mimesis, Petrovsky provocatively links the “analytic anthropologist” Valery Podoroga (1946–2020) with early Russian Formalism as well as with Sergei Eisenstein’s filmmaking.
For a recent wide-ranging application of Florensky’s spatial philosophy of the icon (its allocentric or Other-centered perspective) to verbal art, specifically Dostoevsky’s, see Stuchebrukhov 2021.
The very word for “universe,” vselennaia, is derived from the old church Slavonic verbal form v”selen” [inhabited, populated], the same root as in selo [village, settlement].
Each of these writers professed a different degree of commitment to the Soviet experiment. Sholokhov was a trustworthy true believer and rewarded by the regime; Shalamov (at the other extreme) spent two decades in various gulags and refused to follow Solzhenitsyn’s example in “spiritualizing” the experience; Platonov, whose political loyalties were of excruciating complexity, devised a literary voice able to combine both faith and horror.
See Epstein 2019 and Epstein 2022. The 2019 volume covers Soviet Marxism, neorationalism and structuralism, philosophies of personality, and culturology. The 2022 book covers non-Marxist thought, including Eurasianism, religious philosophy, cosmism, postmodernism, and concludes with a meditation on ideocracy.
Letter to N. A. Lyubimov of June 11, 1879, in Dostoevskii 1972–1990, vol. 30, I: 68.
Contino 2020, especially the Prologue and Ch. Two, “Beauty and Re-formation” (pp. 29–32). Contino has written a thoroughly—but not exclusively—Christological study of The Brothers Karamazovs from a Catholic perspective that, inspired by Bakhtin, is also grounded in philosophical personalism.
McGilchrist 2019, especially the sections on brain asymmetry and the nature of attention in Ch. 1, pp. 25–29, and Chaps. 2 and 3 on art, music, and creativity as right-brain strengths. McGilchrist, an Oxford psychiatrist and philosopher of culture, draws heavily on evolutionary physiology as well as clinical research in brain pathology.
McGilchrist draws largely, but not exclusively, from research on higher mammals. As he repeatedly points out, all animals have bodies to feed and thus, to survive, must both analyze and control particulars—a bird must recognize an edible grain and concentrate on the pecking of it—and, at the same time, be constantly aware of the larger environment, full of predators, through acts of synthesis.
Part Two of the book, “How the Brain has Shaped our World,” implies the “our” of mainstream Western European thought. McGilchrist traces the agon between the cerebral hemispheres chronologically through the conventional periods (Antiquity, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romanticism, the Modern era).
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Emerson, C. Impromptu reflections on The Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought, edited by Marina F. Bykova, Michael N. Forster, Lina Steiner. Stud East Eur Thought 75, 747–759 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-022-09512-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-022-09512-y