Russian philosophy the philosophy produced by Russian thinkers, both in Russia and in the countries to which they emigrated, from the mideighteenth century to the present. There was no Renaissance in Russia, but in the early eighteenth century Peter the Great, in opening a ‘window to the West,’ opened Russia up to Western philosophical influences. The beginnings of Russian speculation date from that period, in the dialogues, fables, and poems of the anti-Enlightenment thinker Gregory Skovoroda (1722–94) and in the social tracts, metaphysical treatises, and poems of the Enlightenment thinker Alexander Radishchev (1749–1802).
Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century the most original and forceful Russian thinkers stood outside the academy. Since then, both in Russia and in Western exile, a number of the most important Russian philosophers – including Berdyaev and Lev Shestov (1866– 1938) – have been university professors. The nineteenth-century thinkers, though universityeducated, lacked advanced degrees. The only university professor among them, Peter Lavrov (1823–1900), taught mathematics and science rather than philosophy (during the 1850s). If we compare Russian philosophy to German philosophy of this period, with its galaxy of university professors – Wolff, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Dilthey – the contrast is sharp. However, if we compare Russian philosophy to English or French philosophy, the contrast fades. No professors of philosophy appear in the line from Francis Bacon through Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Bentham, and J. S. Mill, to Spencer. And in France Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Rousseau, and Comte were all non-professors. True to their non-professional, even ‘amateur’ status, Russian philosophers until the late nineteenth century paid little attention to the more technical disciplines: logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. They focused instead on philosophical anthropology, ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of history, and philosophy of religion. In Russia, more than in any other Western cultural tradition, speculation, fiction, and poetry have been linked. On the one hand, major novelists such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and major poets such as Pasternak and Brodsky, have engaged in wide-ranging philosophical reflection. On the other hand, philosophers such as Skovoroda, Alexei Khomyakov (1804–60), and Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900) were gifted poets, while thinkers such as Herzen, Konstantin Leontyev (1831–91), and the anti-Leninist Marxist Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) made their literary mark with novels, short stories, and memoirs. Such Russian thinkers as Vasily Rozanov (1856–1919) and Shestov, although they wrote no belles lettres, were celebrated in literary circles for their sparkling essayistic and aphoristic styles. Certain preoccupations of nineteenth-century Russian thinkers – especially Pyotr Chaadaev (1794–1856) during the 1820s and 1830s, the Slavophiles and Westernizers during the 1840s and 1850s, and the Populists during the 1860s and 1870s – might appear to be distinctive but in fact were not. The controversial questions of Russia’s relation to Western Europe and of Russia’s ‘special path’ to modernity have their counterparts in the reflections of thinkers in Spain (‘Spain and Europe’), Germany (the Sonderweg – a term of which the Russian osobyi put’ is a translation), and Poland (‘the Polish Question’).
The content of Russian philosophy may be characterized in general terms as tending toward utopianism, maximalism, moralism, and soteriology. To take the last point first: Hegelianism was received in Russia in the 1830s not only as an allembracing philosophical system but also as a vehicle of secular salvation. In the 1860s Darwinism was similarly received, as was Marxism in the 1890s. Utopianism appears at the historical and sociopolitical level in two of Solovyov’s characteristic doctrines: his early ‘free theocracy,’ in which the spiritual authority of the Roman pope was to be united with the secular authority of the Russian tsar; and his later ecumenical project of reuniting the Eastern (Russian Orthodox) and Western (Roman Catholic) churches in a single ‘universal [vselenskaia] church’ that would also incorporate the ‘Protestant principle’ of free philosophical and theological inquiry. Maximalism appears at the individual and religious level in Shestov’s claim that God, for whom alone ‘all things are possible,’ can cause what has happened not to have happened and, in particular, can restore irrecoverable human loss, such as that associated with disease, deformity, madness, and death. Maximalism and moralism are united at the cosmic and ‘scientific-technological’ level in Nikolai Fyodorov’s (1829–1903) insistence on the overriding moral obligation of all men (‘the sons’) to join the common cause of restoring life to ‘the fathers,’ those who gave them life rather than, as sanctioned by the ‘theory of progress,’ pushing them, figuratively if not literally, into the grave.
Certain doctrinal emphases and assumptions link Russian thinkers from widely separated points on the political and ideological spectrum: (1) Russian philosophers were nearly unanimous in dismissing the notorious Cartesian- Humean ‘problem of other minds’ as a nonproblem. Their convictions about human community and conciliarity (sobornost’), whether religious or secular, were too powerful to permit Russian thinkers to raise serious doubts as to whether their moaning and bleeding neighbor was ‘really’ in pain. (2) Most Russian thinkers – the Westernizers were a partial exception – viewed key Western philosophical positions and formulations, from the Socratic ‘know thyself’ to the Cartesian cogito, as overly individualistic and overly intellectualistic, as failing to take into account the wholeness of the human person. (3) Both such anti-Marxists as Herzen (with his ‘philosophy of the act’) and Fyodorov (with his ‘projective’ common task) and the early Russian Marxists were in agreement about the unacceptability of the ‘Western’ dichotomy between thought and action. But when they stressed the unity of theory and practice, a key question remained: Who is to shape this unity? And what is its form? The threadbare Marxist- Leninist ‘philosophy’ of the Stalin years paid lip service to the freedom involved in forging such a unity. Stalin in fact imposed crushing restraints upon both thought and action. Since 1982, works by and about the previously abused or neglected religious and speculative thinkers of Russia’s past have been widely republished and eagerly discussed. This applies to Fyodorov, Solovyov, Leontyev, Rozanov, Berdyaev, Shestov, and the Husserlian Shpet, among others. See also BAKUNIN, BERDYAEV, HERZEN, LENIN , PLEKHANOV , RUSSIAN NIHILISM , SO — LOVYO. G.L.K.