Philosophical Searches for the Meaning of Life

Abstract

Soviet ideology holds that Marxism constitutes the master science whose basic philosophical premises should guide all scientific research and be applicable to the natural as well as to the social sciences, to art, and any scholarship whatsover. Given this view of marxism as the all-pervading integrative science, it was predictable that the rehabilitation of genetics and related sciences would have immediate consequences for the whole state of Marxist philosophy in the Soviet Union. In the natural sciences the conflict over the concept of two sciences, a Marxist and a bourgeois one, was a battle that appeared to have dealt a fatal blow to the science of genetics in Russia and which cost the lives of many brilliant scientists. The discoveries of twentieth-century physics — the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics — cast doubt on the Marxist view of the primacy of matter in the universe. Under Stalin these theories were officially rejected and declared to be ‘bourgeois metaphysical idealism’, and even ‘fascist racialism’, because of the genetic bars on inherited traits.

This is an expanded and updated version of this author’s ‘The Search for the Meaning of Life in the Soviet Union’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, vol.18, nos. 2 & 3 (1974), pp. 69–95.