Abstract
Early in his career, Valentin Asmus gave a polemical lecture on Descartes’s dialectics, and during the “Thaw” he published a book on René Descartes’s life and scientific work. Asmus was the guardian of classical philosophical culture in the worst of times, when it was attacked by ideologically biased and semi-literate “Red professors.” They proclaimed Descartes founder of “modern idealism” and of a “mechanical worldview” hostile to dialectics. Asmus responded by arguing that Descartes had contributed much to the development of the dialectic and materialist view of the world—this was the only possible way to rehabilitate Descartes’s philosophical legacy from ideological accusations. In his 1956 book, Asmus gave an overview of Descartes’s philosophy as a whole. He was fluent in the philosophical techniques of Marxist histmat (short for “historical materialism”); at the same time, the portrait he draws of Descartes clearly shows the Kantian way of thinking, which Asmus learned from the schoolroom in the pre-revolutionary period.
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Notes
As Piama Gaidenko (2001, p. 81) recalls, “Valentin Ferdinandovich was for many of us who studied under him the bearer of that very cultural tradition—interrupted for many decades—of which, without people like him, we would know only from books.” Nelli Motroshilova (2001, p. 55) echoes her: “V.F. Asmus has become for me the embodiment of a rare and therefore especially precious, yet not completely interrupted connection with the history of national universities.”
A derogatory diminutive for “parallel.”
It seems that Furshchik was referring to Natorp’s habilitation work, Descartes’ Theory of Knowledge. Studies in the Prehistory of Criticism. It portrayed Descartes as Kant’s forerunner and the cogito as transcendental apperception.
“Valentin Ferdinandovich gladly showed them to students and was sincerely disappointed when, through the fault of the printers, the portrait of his favorite philosopher was poor in the published book” (Blok and Fedosova 2001, p. 129).
“Per naturam enim, generaliter spectatam, nihil nunc aliud quam vel Deum, ipsum, vel rerum creatarum coordinationem a Deo institutam intelligo” (Descartes 1904, p. 80). Spinoza calls God himself natura naturans, and referred to the ordered network of created things as natura naturata.
“Even as a philosophical supreme cause, the God of Descartes was a stillborn God. He could not possibly live because, as Descartes had conceived him, he was the God of Christianity reduced to the condition of philosophical principle, in short, an infelicitous hybrid of religious faith and of rational thought” (Gilson 1941, p. 89).
Valentin Valentinovich Asmus (born 1950), now mitered archpriest, teaches at the Moscow Theological Academy.
“For the avant-garde, appropriation equals plagiarism. From the avant-garde artist’s perspective, articulating a vision of the future with words and images taken from the past means infecting that future with the legacy of the past. In the context of socialist realism, appropriation is seen as a legitimate artistic practice” (Groys 2013, pp. 14–15).
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Maksim Maidansky’s work on this article was supported by the Russian Science Foundation under grant No. 19-18-00100.
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Maidansky, A., Maidansky, M. Saving philosopher Descartes: Valentin Asmus as a guardian of culture. Stud East Eur Thought 75, 599–612 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-023-09554-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-023-09554-w