Russian Philosophy

I have had occasion to explain to colleagues and students that they really do need to engage with works they disagree with. The important thing about doing that is that you get to work out why you disagree and hence start to understand your own position a bit more, even if you still cannot agree with the author.

I suspect that, on the same basis, it is often a good idea to read about and engage with ideas you know nothing about a priori. There is, after all, a whole world out there of serious thinking of whom I have heard nothing, or very little, and know less about. Somewhere an idea might be lurking which will turn out to be the keystone of my own world view. I have just not encountered it yet.

In that spirit, I picked up Copleston’s Russian Philosophy. So far as I can tell this was first published in 1986, so the complications caused, I am sure, to Russian thought by the collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union were not matters of consideration. But the reading of the book suggests that Russian thought is very different from my own traditions.

Copleston starts with a brief history of Russia from the early days through to the Revolution. This is necessary because philosophy, after all, occurs against a social, political, and cultural background. Russian philosophy, in particular, seems to have been always in tension between ‘Westernisers’ and ‘Slavophiles’. It is probably a mistake to draw these two camps too precisely, but essentially the first thought that the wholesale importation of European ideas, culture, and scientific and technological advances were vital to Russian advance and flourishing. The Slavophiles, while not necessarily rejecting Western influence totally, thought that there was something unique that Russia could and should offer the world, from her own experience.

The latter position also included the significant influence of the Orthodox Church. This too developed separately from the Western, Roman Catholic tradition. A problem here seems to have been the relative lack of development of theology in the Russian Orthodox Church, and the identification of that Church with the state. Lack of engagement with the Orthodox faith, or criticism of it, could be equated with treason against the state.

Independent strands of thought were slower to emerge in Russian than in the West. The earliest thinkers were, perhaps, from the reign of Catherine the Great (r. 1762 – 1796), who was herself German. Western influences, which had been introduced by Peter the Great (r. 1682 – 1725), but German idealism was one of the main philosophies that Russian thinkers had to deal with.

Various ideas floated around, which had to match Western thought with the Russian situation. Russia developed in a different way to the west, with an intellectual elite of educated landowners and aristocracy, and the bulk of the population, who were peasants and, often, serfs. There were various concepts around which rather idealised the view of the peasant and the Russian village as a community and these led to some rather ineffectual, idealistic, efforts to reach out to the peasants by young members of the elite. They tended to fail when the idealists found that the peasants were only really interested in obtaining more land.

Russian thinkers often ran foul of the authorities. The Tsar and his bureaucracy were fairly vigilant in policing acceptable and unacceptable thinking. A fair number of thinkers landed up in Siberia, where they could continue to think and write in fairly comfortable conditions (at least as far as Siberia can be) but removed from the elite capitals of Moscow and St Petersburg.

Copleston traces Russian thought not only through philosophers but others, in particular, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, who were not thoroughgoing thinkers but authors who created worlds (of some bearing on reality, of course) and could use characters to comment on the ‘human condition’ and, in particular, on problems of faith and evil. Dostoevsky, of course, is famous for some of the scenes in his fiction where, for example, characters argue that nothing in the world and no life beyond it is worth the suffering of a child, and also for the scene of the ‘Great Inquisitor’ questioning human nature and freedom. These scenes are now part of world literature and recur in later thinking.

It is of course impossible to ignore the influence of Marxism on Russia. There were plenty of Marxists around before the Revolution, of course, and Lenin was among them as a more political operator than political philosopher. The problem was that Marx’s view of history was that the revolution would only arise when the workers were established as a class, which could only occur when there was a capitalist system and bourgeoisie which could be used by the workers to bring about the Communist system. This did not happen in Russia, although by the time of the Revolution there was an emerging middle class and working class. Lenin rather short-circuited the development envisaged by Marx.

As Copleston notes, the Revolution replaced one autocratic system with another one, perhaps worse. While some things might have improved, the Marxist – Leninist – Stalinist system not only exiled people to Siberia but put them in gulags and shot them. Stalin became the ultimate authority when Marxist orthodoxy was at stake, and he was hardly a philosopher. Things eased a bit after Stalin’s death but not a great deal. Non-Marxist philosophers could be engaged with, but only to show their shortcomings with respect to Marxist orthodoxy.

Lenin exiled around a hundred thinkers and theologians after the Revolution and they brought some aspects of Russian thought, and Orthodox theology, to the west, where such ideas have had some interest. Now, of course, in Russia another rather autocratic state has taken shape, and again the church seems to be in its pocket. The original criticisms of the Russian Orthodox Church, that it was too interested in the state and power rather than the plight of the peasants and serfs could well be becoming pertinent again.