Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (7 page)

Russian philosophy throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was considered suspect by the government. In fact, philosophy as a separate discipline was banned from the Russian university curriculum for considerable periods. And until 1889, only the study of certain Platonic and Aristotelian texts was permitted (ibid.).

The lack of formal philosophical instruction led to the genesis of informal intellectual groups during the 1830s. Many university students studied German metaphysics and French social
theory
in such group settings. They rejected the view of
philosophy
as pure contemplation and saw it as a tool in
the struggle for
truth
,
justice
, and
freedom
. The whole notion of philosophy as a strictly theoretical discipline is alien to
Russian
culture.
Marxists
would later emphasize the
unity
of theory and
practice
, but such a social commitment has always been deeply ingrained in the Russian psyche (Copleston 1986, 1). As Kline (1967) explains: “The Russian intelligentsia subordinated theoretical truth (
istina
) to practical truth-justice (
pravda
). Russian thinkers were engaged in the ‘quest for truth-justice’ (
iskaniye pravdy
)” (258).

This integration of the theoretical and the practical suggests a
dialectical
theme in
Russian philosophy
. In the 1840s, Russian intellectuals were deeply influenced by the Idealism of
Schelling
, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. In particular, Hegel’s impact on Russian intellectual life was immeasurable. Even Hegel’s dialectical
language
found a home in Russia. Hegel stressed
Aufhebung
, a process in which one evolutionary state is transcended and abolished, while being simultaneously absorbed and preserved in the motion of the succeeding state. In Russian, the Hegelian
Aufhebung
is captured by the term
snyatiye
, which connotes “sublation,” “cancellation,” the “raising to a higher level,” and “preservation” (Edie, Scanlan, and Zeldin 1965, xii). The Hegelian domination of Russian philosophy set the stage for a Marxist infusion in the 1890s and beyond.

THE SLAVOPHILES

The movement toward dialectical
transcendence
of opposites is manifested especially in the 1840s in
Khomyakov’s
critique of Western
religion
. Alexey Khomyakov embraced the
Slavophile
devotion to Orthodox
Christianity
and personal mystical experience. He viewed Russian Orthodoxy, with its Byzantine roots, as the reconciliation of Catholicism and Protestantism. N. O. Lossky, Rand’s teacher and author of the indispensable
History of Russian Philosophy
, explains that for Khomyakov, “the
rationalism
of Catholicism which established unity without freedom gave rise, as a reaction against it, to another form of rationalism—Protestantism which realizes freedom without unity” (1951, 37). Khomyakov saw the necessity for a
communal
, conciliar unity that transcended the Catholic emphasis on the
individual
judgment of the pope and the Protestant emphasis on the individual judgment of the believer.
⁷
Russian Orthodoxy bound the Church and the state much more closely than was the case in the West. It was the original organic union, in Khomyakov’s view, a freedom-in-unity and a unity-in-freedom.

The whole theme of transcending opposites is both a Kantian and Hegelian inheritance.
Lossky
(1951) explains: “Many
Russian philosophers
in dealing with the essential problems of world interpretation like to have recourse to antinomies; i.e., like to express the
truth
by means of two mutually contradictory judgements, and then seek ways of reconciling the
contradiction
” (190). This Hegelian streak in
Russian philosophy
made a deep impact on both
Slavophiles
and Westenizers, and even on those thinkers who turned to materialism and positivism (134).

Ivan Kireevsky
followed in this dialectical tradition. He was among the first of the Slavophiles to trace the “intimate
internal
relations in the world” (Lossky 1951, 21). Kireevsky rejected Western
dualism
and its inherent fragmentation of spirit, science, state, society, and family. He strove “for wholeness of the internal and external mode of life” (24).

But in celebrating the holistic worldview of Eastern Orthodoxy and Russian culture, Kireevsky did not reject the Western Hegelian and Aristotelian traditions. Surprisingly, whereas some critics have derided Hegelian
dialectics
as a violation of the Aristotelian law of contradiction, Kireevsky argued that the genuine Aristotelian spirit “reappeared with Hegel.” Kireevsky saw
Aristotle
’s basic views as identical with Hegel’s. Hegel’s system was “as Aristotle himself would have constructed, if he had been born in our time.” Especially in his celebration of
reason
as the “sole arbiter of truth,” and in his emphasis on the relational and logical connections between concepts, Hegel had, in Kireevsky’s view, carried on the Aristotelian project.
⁸

Following the Hegelian model, Kireevsky departed from the one-sidedness of the Slavophile tradition. The typical Slavophile appealed to the Russian national character and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, arguing that Russian culture must avoid the influence of the Western secular enlightenment. The Westernizers, by contrast, advocated that Russia assimilate European science and commit itself to secular reason. Kireevsky aimed for integral knowledge, a wholeness in the human spirit, a
synthesis
of the two worldviews and a transcendence of the gap between reason and
faith
. Isolated from each other, the Slavophile and the Westernizer presented incomplete perspectives. For Kireevsky,
unity
was of prime importance.

Such unity was also expressed in Kireevsky’s elaboration of
Khomyakov’s
concept of
sobornost
’, a doctrine accepted in varying forms by most Russian philosophers. Lossky (1951) explained that
sobornost
’ involved “
the combination of
freedom
and unity of many persons on the basis of their common love for the same absolute values
” (41). In Kireevsky’s view, “The wholeness of society, combined with the personal independence and the
individual
diversity of the citizens, is possible only on the condition of a free subordination of separate persons to absolute values and in their free creativeness founded on love of the whole, love of the Church, love of their nation and State, and so on” (Lossky 1951, 26).

The struggle against dualism and fragmentation is manifested in the ontological and ethical theories of other
Russian
philosophers in the nineteenth century, such as
Nicholas N. Strakhov
,
Nicholas G. Chernyshevsky
, and
Nicholas F. Fedorov
.
⁹
Like Kireevsky, the Slavophile Strakhov viewed the world as a “harmonious organic whole.” His book,
The World as a Whole
conceptualizes the parts as constituents of the totality, even as the totality constitutes the parts. The parts submit to one another; they “serve each other, informing one whole” with “man” at the center (Lossky 1951, 72).

Rejecting the mysticism and
altruism
of the
Slavophiles
, Chernyshevsky embraced a materialist, atheistic, and democratic socialist world view that greatly influenced Lenin. He valued the Hegelian
dialectical
method and proposed an organic union of spiritual and material dimensions (Shein 1973, 223). His ethics is a form of psychological
egoism
, where each person always acts selfishly. In his novel
What is to be done?
Chernyshevsky’s main character, Lopuhov, states: “I am not a man to make sacrifices. And indeed there are no such things. One acts in the way that one finds most pleasant.”
¹⁰
But for Chernyshevsky, each person’s happiness and self-interest coincides with the common good, and hence, there is no conflict between the individual and society. His ethical ideal approaches a secularized
sobornost
’.

Fedorov utilized the Hegelian category of “relatedness” in his conception of mankind as a constituted whole. He criticized Western positivism for its “separation of theoretical and practical reason” (Edie, Scanlan, and Zeldin 1965, 30). Like Chernyshevsky, however, Fedorov attempted to eliminate the distinction between egoism and altruism. Whereas egoists live only for themselves, and altruists only for others, Fedorov argued that this was a false dichotomy. He envisioned a moral world in which each individual lived with and for others.

THE IMPACT OF VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV

Vladimir
Solovyov
was the first and most original of Russia’s systematic
philosophers
. Like Leibniz, he exhibited a genius for absorbing and synthesizing the contributions of many varied thinkers and traditions (Zenkovsky 1953, 484–85). From Hegel, Solovyov learned to use a formal dialectical method. He was also influenced by the mystic Slavophiles, as well as by Fichte, Kant,
Schelling
, Schopenhauer, and Spinoza. Having received his doctorate from St. Petersburg University, Solovyov proceeded to develop an organic
synthesis
of religion,
philosophy
, and science. His impact was widespread; he influenced nearly every Russian thinker who succeeded
him, including Trubetskoy, Frank,
Bulgakov
, Berdyaev, and Lossky. Each of these thinkers elaborated on Solovyov’s doctrine of intellectual intuition.

In 1874, Solovyov wrote
The Crisis of Western Philosophy
.
He criticized
positivism
and the empiricist-rationalist dichotomy. Empiricists, according to Solovyov, have embraced a form of sensualism that reduces everything to simple and subjective sense-experience. In the end, empiricism dissolves into subjectivism. So, too, positivism excludes metaphysics and “cuts itself off from reality.” Rationalism, by contrast, identifies being with pure thought (Copleston 1986, 220). Thus each tradition fails to grasp the integrated nature of real being. Frederick Copleston argues that, in Solovyov’s view, “we cannot understand reality without sense-experience, and we cannot understand it without ideas or concepts and the rational discernment of relations. What is needed is a synthesis of complementary
truths
, of distinct principles” (213).

Lossky (1951) grasped that this Solovyovian synthesis was at root, profoundly Hegelian:

The final results of empiricism and of rationalism are somewhat similar: empiricism leaves us with nothing but appearances, without an object of which they are appearances and without a subject to whom they appear; rationalism ends with pure thought; i.e., [quoting Solovyov:] “thought without a thinker and without anything to think of.” Neither in
experience
nor in thought does man transcend his subjective relation to the object and become aware of the object as an existent, that is, as something which is more than his sensation or his thought. Neither experience nor thought can, then, lead to truth, since truth means that which is—i.e., existence. [Quoting Solovyov:] “But only the whole exists.
Truth, then, is the whole
[emphasis added]. And if truth be the whole, then that which is not the whole—i.e., every particular thing, being or event taken separately from the whole—is not truth, because in its separateness it does not even exist: it exists with all and in all. Truth then is all in its unity or as one.” (96)

Solovyov
’s synthesis of experience and reason, empiricism and rationalism, echoes Hegel’s dictum, “The True is the whole” as expressed in
The Phenomenology of Spirit
(Hegel [1807] 1977, 11). For Solovyov, as for Hegel, no particular thing can be grasped if it is cut off from the totality, which gives it meaning. And yet Solovyov rejected Hegel’s metaphysics for its one-sided rationalism.
¹¹
Solovyov argued that by dichotomizing experience and reason, practice and theory, Western
philosophy
embraces alternatives that are equally one-sided and partial. Both experience and reason are essential
to the comprehension of objective reality. Experience provides the sensory data for knowledge, as reason apprehends relations. But in uniting experience and reason, Solovyov embraced a third means of knowledge, exemplified in faith and mystical
intuition
.

Like Kant, Solovyov attempted to reconcile
science
and
religion
. He sought to unite the true, the good, the beautiful, the philosophical, and the theological. Recognizing that no philosopher could escape from examining his own premises, Solovyov attempted to achieve a synoptic grasp of reality. Lossky (1951) explained that Solovyov gave clear expression to the “characteristic features of Russian philosophical thought—the search for an exhaustive knowledge of reality as a whole and the concreteness of metaphysical conceptions” (95).

Following in the footsteps of his
Slavophile
ancestors, Solovyov saw religion as providing this synoptic “total
unity
.” Each branch of philosophy echoes this unity. In metaphysics, the world is conceived as an organic whole. In
ethics
, Solovyov attacked both moral subjectivism and social
realism
. The subjectivist stresses the realization of individual good, and the social realist views the individual’s moral will as subordinate to society’s institutions. Solovyov integrated the essential moral will of the individual with the necessity of social life. As morality is both public and private, politics bridges the gap between individual and social good. In the perfect, ideal society, a Slavophile messianism will achieve a free theocracy that unites all people.

That such a system might deteriorate into
totalitarianism
was one of the chief objections raised by the Russian Hegelian philosopher,
B. N. Chicherin
.
¹²
But Chicherin accepted Solovyov’s universalist aim to transcend both rationalism and empiricism. Deeply influenced by Hegel, Chicherin argued that dialectical logic is ontological; the laws of reason are then identical with the laws of being. Like Solovyov, Chicherin was highly critical of the dichotomy of reason and experience. He advocated their integrated unity.