What is Russian Philosophy and Why is it Still Important? A Conversation with Russia’s Kultura Magazine
Adults and children at Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo credit: P. Grenier
This conversation between the Russian newspaper Kultura and Paul Grenier was originally published, in Russian, under the title, “Russia Shouldn’t Waste Time Knocking on a Locked Door,” (Kultura, April 28, 2022, 8 – 9). The conversation was led by Kultura editor and correspondent Tikhon Sysoev.
Kultura: Russian philosophy is regularly accused of being ‘derivative.’ Russian philosophers, it is said, have borrowed their conceptual apparatus from the West and have then made use of that apparatus to treat of the problems of the day. To what extent do you find such a view warranted?
GRENIER: I have heard this accusation against Russian philosophy many times, going all the way back to my university and graduate school days. The Slavophiles, allegedly, were simply drawing from Schelling and other German idealists. Vladimir Solovyov’s philosophy draws on Kant and Hegel, and, of course, Plato. No one would deny that such influences were there, and that they were big. Undoubtedly Pisarev, Chernyvshevski, Dobroliubov, and the Marxists throughout the Soviet period, borrowed from Western, often Enlightenment, sources, from Western utilitarian and materialist thought, to say nothing of the important influence of Feuerbach.
There is something nonetheless odd to me about this characteristically Russian inferiority complex about its tradition, a tradition which is so obviously, to me, something sui generis. All of philosophy is a conversation with its past – for whom, and for which country, is that generalization not true? When I read John Locke, who preceded Kant, I am still surprised at the extent to which such a reading reveals how unoriginal many of Kant’s ideas really were. They are already right there in Locke’s boring epistemology.
It seems clear that even among such secondary Russian thinkers as Pisarev and Chernyshevsky, despite their Western orientation in many respects, that they are still distinctly Russian. It is not true that they only cared about providing good boots for the bare-footed peasants and didn’t give a fig about [the great Russian poet Alexander] Pushkin. They rejected leaving aesthetics to some abstract, ‘ideal’ plane separated off in the clouds from the material world. V. V. Zenkovsky has argued that, in this respect, at least, they shared something with Vladimir Solovyov, whose aesthetic theory insisted on beauty as the interpenetration of the material and the spiritual. What we see here, then, in all of these thinkers is the characteristically Russian concern with unity or, in Solovyov’s terms, ‘all-unity’.[1]
For me personally, the zenith of Russian philosophical thought is to be found in, firstly, Dostoevsky, but also in Solovyov, Fr. S. Bulgakov, and, in general, in that whole theological-philosophical school, of whom there are many representatives.
Kultura: Why this school of Russian thought in particular? What about it strikes you as more valuable than the others?
GRENIER: My answer can only be a very partial one, but first of all because, as distinct from nearly all of Western thought since the time of Rousseau, what we find in the case of all of these thinkers is actually still philosophy in a living form. The foremost interpreter today of liberal modernity, Pierre Manent, has noted that the Western liberal tradition made philosophy as such no longer possible. The liberal tradition consigned to the past any notion that the study of man is on the one hand, the study of a mystery, and yet it is also, on the other hand, the study of something given. For the tradition, man has a given nature, a given orientation. Once all that has been consigned to the past, to ‘pre-modernity,’ then, according to Manent -- and I wholly agree with him here -- there is no longer a subject matter for philosophy. In Russian thought of this tradition, philosophy, by contrast, is still alive, it is still possible.
Kultura: Why, in contrast to the West, have there been so few scholarly (‘scientific’) philosophers in Russia? Russian philosophy often has a journalistic or literary quality. Why do you think Russian philosophers are so often drawn toward such less “scientific” genres as these?
GRENIER: I have to say that my favorite work of Russian philosophy is Solovyov’s Three Conversations: War, Progress and the End of History. The literary quality of the conversations is very high, and it is just a delight to read in every respect. When I was in graduate school at Columbia, a group of friends got together to read it aloud, each of us taking a part – just for fun, in our spare time. It was obviously Solovyov’s intent, in writing in this style, to make his ideas accessible, and read, by a circle that goes beyond academic circles. Of course the same can be said for Plato’s dialogues …
Kultura: But doesn’t this very accessibility reveal something ‘defective’ and secondary in such works? I am speaking here, of course, not about Plato, whose works were produced for a different public and under completely different conditions.
GRENIER: Someone once said that Plato’s Republic, if written for the first time today as a Ph.D. thesis at any American philosophy department, that it would be immediately rejected as speculative and wholly unscientific. (Presumably, today, the student would also be blacklisted and expelled from the department for holding such ‘right-wing’ views.)
It seems to me that the stylistic possibilities open to someone attempting to describe what is acknowledged to be a mystery must necessarily differ from the stylistic possibilities open to the description of a fully knowable mechanism. Thought which first reduces things to what is simple, is able to subsequently describe with exactness (‘scientifically’) this reduction. Thought which does not engage in this initial reduction, but remains open to the whole, must find some other methodology by which to proceed.
I find myself returning to the concept of all-unity (integrity, wholeness). If it is correct to say that philosophical reason attempts to understand what some thing or some being is -- and to understand it in a way that embraces the phenomenon as a whole -- then the literary methodology is, at least in some cases, clearly more adequate to that task than the alternative. Kant tells us that we must not treat any person merely as an object. That is excellent, and it is also ‘true,’ up to a point, but the form of the concept so expressed is inadequate to its substance.
Dostoevsky’s Demons tells us, so to speak, the same thing, but in a form that reaches the whole: our intellect, our emotions, our soul and body, and in a way that leaves something imprinted on our memory for as long as we live.
Kultura: Many have pointed to the enormous, perhaps even the excessive attention Russian philosophical thought accords to religious problems. An equivalent attention to such questions has not been characteristic of Western thought. Why, from your perspective, has Russian thought focused to such an extent on these seemingly not strictly philosophical questions? Why were Russian thinkers so uninterested, for example, in questions of the theory of knowledge (epistemology) – a topic which has been central to the Western tradition?
GRENIER: To me, everything that is most distinctively Russian in Russian thought, as well as what is most valuable, is also religious thought. Another way of saying the same thing is that Russian thought is not reducible to liberalism, or to the kind of Protestantism which thinks that the world, and reason, and nature, are wholly autonomous things – autonomous in the sense of being intelligible without any reference to Being or, if you prefer, to a becoming that is oriented vertically (as opposed to a becoming that is merely historical or biological).
As regards epistemology, it is true of course that this is not a subject which has attracted much attention among the best Russian philosophers. Of the thinkers I personally find interesting, Nicholas Lossky has devoted much attention to the subject, but it has been too long since I have read him to say anything helpful, except to add that I think Lossky is unfairly neglected. He is an original and courageous thinker; he is humane; and, despite what his critics claimed, he was also a Christian philosopher, however unorthodox.
At the same time, at least as regards the tradition of Western thought that traces from Bacon to Locke to Kant, the Western style of epistemology is oriented not to understand what is, it is oriented to gaining power over things. The French philosopher Simone Weil saw this with great clarity, and her love for ancient Greek thought and culture stemmed in large part from her perception that for them, contemplation was a kind of prayerful attention first and foremost. I see a direct line, in respect to the inner logic of their approaches, between Weil and the Sophianic thought of Solovyov and Sergei Bulgakov. It is an area I am still exploring and learning about, I am by no means an expert about any of this, but intuitively, I think that here is the most promising starting point for a rebirth of philosophy for tomorrow.
The Philosophers (painting by M. Nesterov depicting Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov)
Kultura: We have already talked about some concepts and methods that are specific to Russian philosophical thought. What about the problemаtic field? Several times you have mentioned the concept of ‘all-unity’ (vse-edinstvo). How did this concept influence the development of problems related to the social or political structure, aesthetics and ethics in Russian philosophy? Why didn’t something like all-unity” become an ideal thought form in the West?
GRENIER: I probably can’t do justice to all parts of this interesting question, given its breadth. I will attempt, instead, to address the question about ‘all-unity’ as it relates to the political question. The crisis of modern politics is tied up in the first instance with a crisis of authority. Already Hannah Arendt noticed this crisis in her essay, “What is Authority,” written in 1958. It goes without saying, I suppose, that the weakening, and, finally, the collapse of authority, is inseparable from the critique leveled by Nietzsche against Platonism, and, by the same token, against the Christian Platonic tradition.
Solovyov -- who is, of course, far more of a Platonic thinker than he was any sort of liberal -- had only a partial familiarity with Nietzsche; and yet all the same Solovyov’s Justification of the Good is aimed, even explicitly, against and in response to Nietzsche, as well as against secularized Western civilization in all of its forms, notably including the liberal utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. The ‘Good,’ for Solovyov, is what is authoritative; and political power, in order to be legitimate political power, cannot base its authority in anything but service to the Good as such; and the Good is from God. Political order, for Solovyov, is ‘free theocracy’.
This same theme of teokratia is taken up again by Fr. Sergei Bulgakov after the 1917 revolution. A close friend of mine is writing a book on this very topic, and I am drawing directly from his work here when I note that, for Bulgakov, the ideal regime type was one whose formal characteristics depend on a standard of truth (logos) that is external to itself (i.e., external to the regime). Authority, in a political order of this type, must be seen to rest in some person whose ‘personal’ authority is, by definition, seen to be derived from what is above that political figure: its authority is derived from ‘what is above this world.’ Such a figure, for Russia, was the czar. At the same time, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Bulgakov realized that history would not turn back, the possibility for such an arrangement had therefore passed. This passing of the older (czarist) order held for Bulgakov, therefore, a tragic meaning, because its death represented the death of the sacred as such – and not only for Russia, but for Europe and the West altogether. It represented the death of the sacred as something that is integrated into the life of the world, at least insofar as the sacred is connected with Christ and Christianity.
In a sense, what we see in Bulgakov is an anticipation of Heidegger, and an echo of Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead – and we have killed him.’ There is no return to political authority so long as we continue to kill the sacred, or to consider it a merely private matter (such that everyone has their own private ‘absolute’ which has ‘absolute value’ -- but only for me, as an individual!).
All-unity gets expressed here in the form of an inner relationship between the realm of the political and the realm of the sacred. It is a theme which has been the leitmotif of much Russian philosophy and thought.
Kultura: You have been a student of Russian philosophical thought for many years, although Russian, as far as I understand, is not your native language. What seemed to you the most difficult in Russian philosophy?
GRENIER: When I first started, at a young age, to read Dostoevsky, it was strange, in the sense that his world had nothing in common with the world that surrounded me in suburban California; but I nonetheless felt at home with it. Years later, when, as a young man, I first started sitting around kitchen tables with Russian friends, in what was then still Leningrad, until 2 or 3 a.m. -- something that was still possible under communism in a way that has tended to disappear under capitalism -- and experiencing that characteristic sense of being part of the ‘collective’ (in the colloquial Russian sense, not the bureaucratic one), i.e., of belonging to this small group of friends for which the whole was primary, and the parts secondary, it didn’t feel alien to me; it felt like something that should always already have been there. It was Western individualism that began to feel strange to me. I became for the first time aware that, in the United States, we were walking around as if inside hard shells. People in the West, I suddenly realized, are lonely on an ontological level.
One concept that I have, to be honest, somewhat struggled with, is one associated with Dostoevsky studies: namely, the concept of незавершимость, or ‘non-finalizability.’ In other words, the idea that some person can never be taken to be wholly known, cannot be reduced to some final judgment – for example, ‘we [think that we] know so-and-so is an SOB, and always will be.’ The difficulty here is not an intellectual, but a spiritual one.
Kultura: How might the Russian philosophical heritage be useful for the modern Western world, given the problems and crises that it faces?
GRENIER: It is unlikely that the West, in any institutional sense, is capable of learning something from a civilization that runs on principles different from its own. Russia should therefore not waste time thinking about what it can bring to the West, or in knocking on a locked door. On the level of conversations between people, of course, it is a quite different matter. I hope that such conversations can be maintained, and even expanded. But ideas, left only on paper, or in books and articles, will certainly not change anything -- neither in the West, nor anywhere else.
At the same time, were Russians to take more seriously their own philosophical-theological heritage, there is every possibility for Russia to become a positive example of a humane, non-technocratic mode of being in the world. I would be overjoyed to see this someday happen. The alternative appears to be a post-human global technocracy, one from which none of us will be able to escape.
NOTES
[1] For an excellent, though as yet unfinished, monograph on the concept of ‘unity’ (tselostnost’) in Russian thought, see Gordon Hahn, Tselostnost’ In Russian Thought, Culture, and Politics. Gordon is no doubt correct when he writes that the Russian word tselostnost’ connotes something more than ‘unity.’ It also includes such concepts as integrity, integrality, monism, and similar terms. Hahn’s manuscript fleshes out the various manifestations of this concept across a wide range of cultural and political phenomena. He points, in his introduction, to the idea of simfonia in Church-state relations, Dostoevskii’s Russian universalism, Nikolai Berdyaev’s “world soul” and Solovyov’s ‘all-unity’ or the vseedinstvo of creation. In the Russian version of this interview, printed by Kultura, I mistakenly translated tselostnost’ as ‘all-unity.’ The correct Russian translation of the term ‘all-unity,’ which is Solovyov’s, is of course vse-edinstvo. The error was my own.