Philosophy, from the earliest times, has been not merely an affair of the schools, or of disputation between a handful of learned men. It has been an integral part of the life of the community.
B. Russell
Abstract
The role of philosophy in Russian (Soviet and post-Soviet) society over the past 100 years is considered. A century in this case is not only a generally accepted important key measure of world history but also the anniversary of the first national state research center in the field of philosophy, the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, celebrated in 2021. In the general methodological introduction, the author focuses on the place of philosophy in the system of social division of labor. The 100-year history of the academic institution, counted by the author from the establishment of the Institute of Scientific Philosophy in 1921 under the leadership of G.G. Shpet, is further subdivided into four stages: the 1920s, the victory of Lenin’s ideas and the formation of an independent Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism; the 1930s–early 1950s, criticism of “Menshevik idealism” and the subordination of philosophy to the goals of party–political ideology; the 1960s–1980s, a humanistic turn of Soviet philosophy, at the origins of which were A.A. Zinov’ev and E.V. Il’enkov; and the post-Soviet period, philosophical pluralism and the loss of common orientations.
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Notes
According to A.V. Lebedev, who investigated the question of the emergence of the term philosophy, “Pythagoras did not invent the words philosophy and cosmos themselves (just as he did not invent the word harmony), but he invented their new, God-seeking, life-building, and teleological semantics, which Plato later assimilated” [5].
A number of important episodes of Soviet philosophy, such as the struggle against “Menshevik idealism” in the early 1930s or the criticism in the Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1944 of the erroneous views set forth in the third volume of the history of philosophy, cannot be understood if we consider only theoretical arguments, not reaching the personal interests behind them in the struggle for power [8, p. 16].
For more details on the history of the RAS Institute of Philosophy, see [9].
There, in particular, he headed the compilation of the Dictionary of Artistic Terminology, until in 1929, as part of the imposition of Marxist uniformity, he was removed from this work as well, the project itself was closed, and a little later the entire State Academy of Artistic Sciences was closed. For information about the life path and work of G.G. Shpet, one of the most prominent Russian philosophers, see [11].
The document “Program Statement of the 28th Congress of the CPSU ‘Towards Humane, Democratic Socialism,’” adopted at the last Soviet congress of the CPSU, which was the last attempt to raise the social ideal of the Sixties to the level of state ideology, became in fact the last breath before death [21, pp. 255–295, 378–387].
The initiative came from the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, which in 1988 decided to publish the book series “From the History of Russian Philosophy” as an appendix to the journal Voprosy Filosofii (Problems of Philosophy) and made the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences responsible for this. The initiative was quickly picked up and expanded to a large-scale cultural social movement, in which Russian religious philosophy became an important component of the struggle against Marxism and for the return of the country to its original Orthodox and Eastern Christian spiritual roots. I specially note this circumstance in order to emphasize the following: public consciousness, first of all, the philosophers themselves and the philosophically oriented intellectual environment were ready for such an ideological turn [19].
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Translated by B. Alekseev
RAS Academician Abdusalam Abdulkerimovich Guseinov is Scientific Supervisor of the RAS Institute of Philosophy.
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Guseinov, A.A. Philosophy and Society (The 100th Anniversary of the RAS Institute of Philosophy (1921–2021)). Her. Russ. Acad. Sci. 91, 501–513 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1019331621040134
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1019331621040134