Lecture 10. The problems of Russian and Kazakh philosophy

1. Basic values of the Kazakh philosophy.

2. Profound communication as the basis of the Kazakhs’ traditional worldview.

3. The Kazakh Enlightenment philosophy.

 

In the context of the modern problems of the humanitarian sphere many cultures started to show more active interest to their ethnic past, to those historic sources, which belong to the traditional forms of morality. In the large the adreesing to the ethnic experience, to the traditional spiritual values of nation has always been one of the necessary conditions of the intellectual, constructive successes of the growing new generation. Like all the cultural – historical paradigms the Kazakh philosophic thought has passed the complicated way of establishment from the ancient primordial forms of thinking to the quite mature modern philosophic conceptions. Centuries – old history and actualization of the basic moral values in the historic process were the bases for establishment of such fundamental ethical notions in the ethnic worldview as good and evil, love and hatred, nobleness and meanness etc.

Moral – ethical orientation of the worldview universal phenomenon of the ancient turks and the Kazakh society of the midlle ages is unquestionable. The medieval turkic thinker Al-Farabi in his philosophic system profoundly worked out such ethical categories as happiness, humanism, moral purification, spiritual perfection etc. These notions obtain their diverse philosophic interpretation on the next stages of the pholosophic thought development on the Kazakh land in the Yussuf Balasaguni’s, Mahmoud Kashgari’s, Ahmed Yugneki’s, Hoja Ahmed Yassui’s doctrines, Kazakh biis’, rhetors’, akyns’, zhyraus’ teachings as well, till Abay Kunanbayev’s and Shakarim Kudayberdiyev’s doctrines.

Philosophy has its own place in the spiritual culture of any people being the quintessense of its holistic worldview. It is necessary to mention that during centuries the sufism and its religious system of values made a noticeable sway on the national philosophy. Because the Sufi thinkers tried to find the latent of a man’s puport of life. Defining a man as the most universal being, the sufis pay their main attention to the self – analysis, self – observation, intuitive comprehension of the truth.

The great thinkers of the Kazakh steppe Abay and Shakarim tried to solve the problems of the moral perfection of a man by the humanization of the social – ethnical space. In the Kazakh thinkers’ of the XX century opinion a man is not be born morally deprived naturally, but his negative qualities are formed in social space. That is why Abay puts forward as a chief concept of his doctrine the ethical principle "Adam bol!" (Be a human!), and for Shakarim the conscience is the main ethical category in his conception of a man’s spiritual perfection. Conscience as an important notion in his worldview is the main regulator of the interpersonal relations.

The great Kazakh scientist, orientalist, historian, ethnographer, geographer, folklorist, educator, democrat. In his short life Shokan Ualikhanov left many valuable works dedicated to social and political structure, history, geography, ethnography and folklore of the peoples of Kazakhstan and Central Asia. He was the first who provided the information that Balkhash and Alakol once represented a single water surface, and on the special flow of wind from Dzungaria gate. After a review of the work "Khan zharlygyna" Shokan researched the work of K. Zhalairi "Jami-al-tavarikh" translated the main sections from this document to the Russian language, and compiled a dictionary of oriental terms, based on them.

He wrote a work entitled "Genealogy of the Kazakhs", based on the works of Abulgazy "Shaibani-name", "Shezhre-and -turk", the theoretical value of which is high. Shokan considered the work "Jami-at-tavarikh" as an unique historical work, a collection of historical legends of Kazakhs in XV-XVI-XVII centuries. Later studying the books "Babur-name", "Tarikh-i-Rashidi" he appropriately used the information obtained therefrom, in his writings. Until the end of his life he was considered as an employee of the General Staff and the Asian Department. Disease progressed and Shokan Ualikhanov died in the village Koshentogan, Tezek settlement, at the foot of the Altynemel ridge.

The works of Shokan Ualikhanov, which have made a significant contribution to the various branches of science of its time, are highly appreciated at all times.

Abay Kunanbayev - poet and philosopher. Hegel wrote that philosophy is an epoch grasped in thought. However, to grasp in thought the era, it must be a thinker in the highest sense of the word. Abay Kunanbayev was among one of these thinkers in the second half of 19th century in Kazakhstan.

In this case, under thinker we do not mean someone who works as a monk locked in a narrow cell, delving into ancient manuscripts and trying to fish out some important laws of social development. Despite that Abay belonged to the elite of Kazakh society, he never fenced himself from the disaster and needs ofordinary people. On the contrary, as a philosopher, he lived with what his people lived, shared with them their pain and deprivation. Joys were little, but how he could live and enjoy himself? Abay's feat, in fact his whole life was a real feat and only about the interest of his people, their pain reflected on his big heart, the heart of philosopher and person.

Wealth and cattle did not concern him. As a thinker and patriot of his homeland, his heart was crying blood, as he knew all the needs and hopes of his people in order to be satisfied with surroundings.

Communication with exiled Russian social democrats, E.P.Mihoelisom, N.Dolgopolovym and S.Grossom, gave impetus to his potential abilities. Abay's treatment of Russian literature, which experienced creativeimpulse at that time, was natural, where poetic in Eastern tradition was treated very high.

Morality and languages take paramount part at Abay's universal system. He considered that language opens a window into the vast world. Humanity and liberality oblige learn languages of other nations, as only in this way for human-thinker can feel a connection with the geniuses of the spiritual world.

There are dozens of definitions of man. Certainly, the most acceptable usually relies on scientific: representative of the genus homosapiens. However, is it always that every man justifies such a flattering definition? It is says, that, person is that and that, but sometimes it represented that every definition is not accurate, as some people born to manage and others to obey. They are majority, but Abay as peak of mountain rises high above drab existence of reality of his time.

Abay did not become a follower of German philosophers, despite that he learned their works, for instance, Feurbach's anthropological materialism. On the contrast, he considered the anatomical structure of the human bodies and its organs not as a product of nature, but as a result of the creative activity of God, his wisdom and love to humans. On the other hand, such worldview position did not prevent him to represent a man as unique and high product of his philosophy.

Abay absorbed much of that carried the eastern and Arab culture: the Quran, the thousand and one nights. He was familiar with the works of Ferdowsi, Nizami, Saadi and Navoi, studied the works of Aristotle, Socrates, Spinoza and Spencer.

Poetry of Pushkin, Lermontov, Goethe, Byron and Schiller was extremely congenial to him. As well as he wanted to be introduce his people with top of the world spirit. In his translation into Kazakh languages Abay subtly conveyed the spirit of poems and adapted them into the outlook of his fellow tribesmen.

Within 20 years Abay bloomed as versatile genius. He won extraordinary authority and popularity which were unknown in steppe before. He was surrounded by Akyns (oral improvising poets), singers, composers and young talented people, socio-philosophical and literary schools being established.

Abay's moral and ethical views were not just a figment of his imagination over the observation of life and social system of Kazakhs. Abay thoroughly studied the works of ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, as well as works of German philosophers of modern times like Kant, Hegel and Feuerbach.

Ethical and aesthetic problems, despite their importance could not be resolved without reference to the decision of the more common questions of philosophy. One of such issue was the question of a common basis of existence and cognition, God and man.

Wise Abay used to love to repeat the words of the Prophet Muhammad: "A good man is one that benefits the people" ["Gakliya" - "Words of edification", the thirty-eighth word] these words can be applied to him but not anyone else.

The essay "Gakliya"("Words of edification") or "Kara soz" (“Book of words”), take a special place in the Abay's art. Under these name combined forty five "Words" - small, carefully crafted, artistic, stylistic completed fragments. The term "penalty" (Black) in combination with the term "Soz" ("The Word") is extremely polysemous. This symbolize sadness, prose, unlike rhymed speech and text. As well as it means something significant, important and paramount in the Turkic tradition.

“Book of words” it is also direct appeal to the readers, like conversation and open talk, unique work “of observation of the cold mind and sorrowful heart markings” and philosophy of life of individual on the background of destiny.

“Book of words” by genre similar to what in Genghis Khan’s tradition called "Bilik" –is a precise expression, a story about life example, having the shape of the sample.

The name “Book of words” or “Words of edification” of Abay, inaccurately transfers the meaning of the philosopher. In European tradition, “Book of words” belongs to the genre of aphorisms and maxims. In fact, it is confession – extremely deep and responsible genre, which requires integrity and sincerity from the writer, in other way, we are facing with “nakedness of soul” of man, poet and philosopher.

Forty five “Words of edification” is the philosophical reflection of the poet about life problems and deeply sad “face to face” conversation with his audience. Addressing to them, the poet ask himself: maybe “Should I rule the people?”, “Should I multiply knowledge?”, “Should I do religious rites? or “Should I educate the children?”.

Finally, in this way Abay explains his decision to write down “own thoughts”: “Paper and ink from now on will be my consolation…Maybe someone will like some of my word and he will rewrite it for himself or just remember. If not, then my words, as it says, will stay with me [First word].

Many lines from the “Book of words” became immortal: “Man born crying and grieves when he leaves” [Fourth word]; “Man becomes intellectual, remembering the words of the wises” [Nineteenth word]; “He who seeks praise from loved ones, I am sure he will achieve it, praising and lifting up himself to heaven”[Twenty first word]; “Scientist and philosopher are the pride of humanity. They are those who have more senses and mind. We do not invent science, it appears as a result of our feelings, observation and thoughts about the creation around us and organized world for us” [Word forty third].

On the behalf of Socrates Abay in the “Book of words” said about what he thought thoroughly before, disputing with Aristotle, the philosopher says: “Certainly, you will agree, that the top creation of the creator is a man. However, does not the creator give him five senses, being confident in their necessities for man? Do you find that a man has random organs?

For example, we have eyes to see. If they were not existed, could we enjoy the beauty of the world? Eyes are gentle and there are eyelids to keep them. They open and close when it necessary from a wind and mote, whereas eyebrows withdraw sweats trickling down from forehead. If ears were not existed, people would not be able to hear noise, rattling, would not be able to guard against rustling or cry and would not have enjoyed the sounds of songs or tunes. If a nose does not smell, people would not able stretch incense and turn away from stench. He would not care. Finally, if a person would not have palate and tongue, he would be able to recognize sweetness or bitterness of food. Is that all bad for human?

Eyes and nose are located not far from mouth to man to see purity and could smell a food. However, other necessary to person holes, which spew out waste from body and located away from the head. “Could it be possible to say that it’s all random manifestation of the mind of the creator?” [Wordtwentyseventh]

If only in science everything was so clear, so that to know with confidence in which direction to go and what to do. When we are in trouble, we can always rely on a help of wise, we just need to turn to him: “Once power, mind and heart argued, who among them is necessary to person. After they found out that cannot reach the agreement, they turned to Science for help. As I said, get together let heart guide you! If this happens and all of you gather in one person, so he will become righteous. Dust from the soles of his feet will heal the blinds. Harmony and purity of life is the main meaning of the great world. If you won’t be able to unite, then I will give preference to the heart – the king of human life, thus Science resolve the dispute” [Word seventeenth].

“Words of edification” is like conclusion and result of life. “Lived I good life up until now, but when we can already see the end of the path, when the soul exhausted and tired. I am convinced that my good intentions being ineffective in the vanity and frailty of human life.

“I am truly dead, despite that I am exist. I cannot understand the reason: whether weak disappointment to relatives, whether in the rejection of himself or something else. In appearance I am quite healthy, as dead inside. Even if laugh I do not feel joy. No matter what I tell you, if I laugh - all this as not mine, but someone else”.

“I do not understand how do I treat my nation: do I dislike or love them? – If I loved them, without any doubt I would agree its morals and among other characters found out even one to be proud of. My love would not allow the faith to go out, as if my people have such qualities inherent of great people. However, I do not have that faith”, – draws a line Abay.

Nine years passed before Abay wrote forty-five “Words-talks”, and expressed in them innermost thoughts, aspirations, mournful complaints indifferent to the poet’s voice contemporaries. “Life is lived – I argued, fought, judged, having only troubles and exhausted on them, tired and convinced in aimlessness of everything done”.

Abay Kunanbayev is the great poet, writer, public figure, founder of modern Kazakh literature, reformer of culture in the spirit of rapprochement with Russian and European culture on the basis of enlightened Islam.

Shakarim Kudaiberdiev-philosopher and thinker, scholar and poet. Shakarim knew very well the works of the Russian and foreign poets and writers and absorbed the spirit of the folk poetry from childhood. He loved very much works by Lev Tolstoi, Alexander Pushkin and Byron. He studied the works of scientists and philosophers from Democritus to Newton. In the “Three Truths” work, which Shakarim had been creating for 30 years, he enters into an argument with Darwin and Rousseau and gets delighted by Archimedes and Plato. This book became a priceless heirloom, which represents the pinnacle of philosophical thought in Kazakhstan in the 19th and the early 20th centuries. Shakarim introduced the concept of “Science of conscience”. A magnificent connoisseur of Abai’s creative life, the successor of his traditions, he was deeply imbued with his conceptual ideas, developing them, enriching the vocabulary of philosophical category of the “science of conscience”. In all his works the problem of conscience was becoming the main theme.

The knowledge of the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish languages opened him the world of classical oriental poetry by Ferdowsi, Nizami, Fuzuli, Hafez. The pinnacle of the translation creativity of Shakarim was the “Leili and Majnun” poem, written explanation of the eastern parables. The poem went beyond the scope of the translated works. Scientists, researchers and professionals believe that it is the original and independent work. The story was adapted for the Kazakh reader. The lyrical narrative was interwoven with the Kazakh ballad in terms of its lyrical rhythm. A beautiful, melodic language, apt epithets, metaphors, a fascinating storyline made this poem a masterpiece of lyric poetry with an epic scale.

By autumn of 1931 the campaign of the Soviet government to confiscate property of prosperous farmers had come to an end. The collectivisation of agriculture in the Semipalatinsk region, and indeed everywhere, turned into cattle plague and famine. By this time Shakarim, renouncing the world, became increasingly reclusive and spent most of his time in his winter quarters. The new government had eliminated the educated, respectable people who could be leaders of the steppe. Having exterminated the most prominent, influential people and the elders, the new Soviet regime also destroyed the most enlightened, educated members of the nation, those who are popularly called “the salt of the earth”.

Numerous complaints revealed to him the injustice of the world. Neither his mind, nor heart could accept the colonial policy of the tsarist government. According to historians Shakarim was at the center of social and political events that are closely related to the activities of Alikhan Bukeykhanov.

Required reading:

1. Balasagun J. Kutti bilik. – Almaty: Jazuchy, 1986. – 416 p.

2. Abay, “Book of word”.Almaty, 1992.

3. Margulan, A. Main stages of life and activities of Ch. Valikhanov, Selected work, Nauka, 1986.

4. Essay on the life and activities of Ch. Valikhanov// Ch. Valikhanov, collection of works in five volumes, Alma-Ata, 1984, p. 9-79.

5. Valihanov, C.H., Collected works in 5 volumes. Alma-Ata. 1961-1964.

1. ValikhanovCh, The traces of Shamanism among the Kirghiz // Ch.Valikhanov. Selected works. M., 1986.

2. Traditional world outlook of Turks in South Siberia. Space and Time. Novosibirsk, 1988.

3. Abdildin Zh., Abdildina R. "The Great steppe and the world outlook of traditional Kazakh"/ Eurasian Community: Economy, Politics, Security. 1997, 13, pp. 13-14.

4. Alpamys-Batyr. The Kazakh heroic epos is retold by A. Seidimbekov. Alma-Ata, 1981.

5. Al-Farabi. Historical-philosophical Works. Almaty, 1985.

6. Kljachtorny S.G., Sultanov T.I. Kazakhstan: the annals of three millennia. Alma-Ata, 1992.

Optional reading:

1. Garrone, P. 1999. “Baksylyk: A Muslim Declination of Shamanism”, Isim Newsletter 4: 99, 15.

2. Yesim Garifolla, 2003. Past in the present (the experience of philosophical prose). - Almaty.

3. Kendirbaeva, G., Folklore and Folklorism in Kazakhstan // Asian Folklore Studies’ 53: 97-123.

1. Imangaliev A.I. Kazakh horse. – Almaty, 1976.

2. AyazbekovaS.Sh, Cultural and Philosophical Analysis of Music in the Picture of the World of the Kazkhs. Almaty, 2004.

3. Radlov, V.V. Turkish Epics and Causasus. Moscow, 2009.

4. Ethnic and religious identity of youth in Kazakhstan. Main results of the survey of the Republican. - Astana, 2007.

5. Aytaliev A. Ulttanu (Oku kurali). - Almaty: Aris, 2000.

6. Shakarim and Kayum. Foliant, 2009. Astana,

1. Features and main themes of Russian philosophical thought.

2. Slavophilism and Westernism.

3. Russian religious philosophy

 

Russian thought is best approached without fixed preconceptions about the nature and proper boundaries of philosophy. Conditions of extreme political oppression and economic backwardness are not conducive to the flowering of philosophy as a purely theoretical discipline; academic philosophy was hence a latecomer on the Russian scene, and those (such as the Neo-Kantians of the end of the nineteenth century) who devoted themselves to questions of ontology and epistemology were widely condemned for their failure to address the country’s pressing social problems.

Since Peter the Great’s project of Westernization, Russian philosophy has been primarily the creation of writers and critics who derived their ideals and values from European sources and focused on ethics, social theory and the philosophy of history, in the belief that (as Marx put it in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’) philosophers had hitherto merely interpreted the world: the task was now to change it.

What Berdiaev called the ‘Russian Idea’ – the eschatological quest that is the most distinctive feature of Russian philosophy – can be explained in terms of Russian history. The Mongol yoke from the twelfth to the fourteenth century cut Russia off from Byzantium (from which it had received Christianity) and from Europe: it had no part in the ferment of the Renaissance.

Its rise as a unified state under the Moscow Tsardom followed closely on the fall of the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, and the emerging sense of Russian national identity incorporated a messianic element in the form of the monk Philotheus’ theory of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’, successor to Rome and Constantinople as guardian of Christ’s truth in its purity. ‘There will not be a fourth’, ran the prophecy: the Russian Empire would last until the end of the world.

Russian thought remained dominated by the Greek patristic tradition until the eighteenth century, when the Kievan thinker G. Skovoroda (sometimes described as Russia’s first philosopher) developed a religious vision based on a synthesis of ancient and patristic thought. He had no following; by the mid-century Russia’s intellectual centre was St Petersburg, where Catherine the Great, building on the achievements of her predecessor Peter, sought to promote a Western secular culture among the educated elite with the aid of French Enlightenment ideas.

But representatives of the ‘Russian Enlightenment’ were severely punished when they dared to cite the philosophes’ concepts of rationality and justice in criticism of the political status quo. The persecution of advanced ideas (which served to strengthen the nascent intelligentsia’s self-image as the cultural and moral leaders of their society) reached its height under Nicolas I (1825–55), when philosophy departments were closed in the universities, and thought went underground.

Western ideas were the subject of intense debate in small informal circles of students, writers and critics, the most famous of which in Moscow and St Petersburg furnished the philosophical education of such intellectual leaders as the future socialists N. Herzen and M. Bakunin, the novelist and liberal I. Turgenev, the literary critic V. Belinskii (from whose ‘social criticism’ Soviet Socialist Realism claimed descent), and the future Slavophile religious philosophers I. Kireevskii and A. Khomiakov.

As a critic has noted: ‘In the West there is theology and there is philosophy; Russian thought, however, is a third concept’; one which (in the tsarist intellectual underground as in its Soviet successor) embraced novelists, poets, critics, religious and political thinkers – all bound together by their commitment to the goals of freedom and justice.

The question of history’s goal became a matter for intense debate among the intelligentsia with the publication in 1836 of P. Chaadaev’s ‘Philosophical Letter’, which posed Russia’s relationship to the West as a central philosophical problem, maintaining that Russia’s historical separation from the culture of Western Christianity precluded its participation in the movement of history towards the establishment of a universal Christian society.

Secular and Westernist thinkers tended to be scarcely less messianic in their response to Chaadaev’s pessimism.

The first philosophers of Russian liberalism interpreted their country’s past and future development in the light of Hegel’s doctrine of the necessary movement of all human societies towards the incarnation of Reason in the modern constitutional state, while the Russian radical tradition was shaped successively by the eschatological visions of the French utopian socialists, the Young Hegelians and K. Marx.

Herzen defined the distinctive characteristic of Russian radical thought as the ‘implacable spirit of negation’ with which, unrestrained by the European’s deference to the past, it applied itself to the task of freeing mankind from the transcendent authorities invented by religion and philosophy; and the radical populist tradition that he founded argued that the ‘privilege of backwardness’, by permitting Russia to learn both from the achievements and the mistakes of the West, had placed it in the vanguard of mankind’s movement towards liberty.

Russian religious philosophers tended to see themselves as prophets, pointing the way to the regeneration of human societies through the spiritual transformation of individuals.

Vladimir Soloviov (regarded by many Russians as their greatest philosopher) believed that his country’s mission was to bring into being the Kingdom of God on Earth in the form of a liberal theocracy, which would integrate knowledge and social practice and unite the human race under the spiritual rule of the Pope and the secular rule of the Russian tsar.

His metaphysics of ‘All-Unity’ was a dominant force in the revival of religious and idealist philosophy in Russia in the early twentieth century, inspiring an entire generation of thinkers who sought to reinterpret Christian dogma in ways that emphasized the links of spiritual culture and religious faith with institutional and social reform, and progress in all other aspects of human endeavour.

Among them were leading Russian émigré philosophers after 1917, such as S. Frank, M.Bulgakov (who sought to create a new culture in which Orthodox Christianity would infuse every area of Russian life), N. Berdiaev (who was strongly influenced by the messianic motifs in Solov’ëv), and Hessen, who offered a Neo-Kantian and Westernist interpretation of the notion of ‘All-Unity’.

A number of émigré philosophers (notably Iliin and Vysheslavtsev) interpreted Bolshevism as the expression of a spiritual crisis in modern industrialized cultures.

Many blamed the Russian Revolution on infection from a culturally bankrupt West which (echoing the Slavophiles, Dostoevskii and K. Leontiev) they presented as corrupted by rationalism, positivism, atheism and self-centred individualism (although few have gone as far as the fiercely polemical Losev who, up until his death in the Soviet Union in 1988, maintained that electric light expressed the spiritual emptiness of ‘Americanism and machine-production’).

Most maintained a historiosophical optimism throughout the catastrophes of the first half of the 20^th century, which Berdiaev saw as a precondition for messianic regeneration, while Hessen believed that religious and cultural values would emerge triumphant from the carnage in a dialectical Aufhebung.

Some radical philosophers (such as N. Berdiaev and S. Frank), in the process of moving from Marxism to neo-idealism, sought to reconcile Nietzsche’s aesthetic immoralism with Christian ethics, while the ‘Empiriocriticist’ group of Bolsheviks attempted to inject Russian Marxist philosophy with an element of heroic voluntarism by synthesizing it with Nietzschean self-affirmation and the pragmatism of Ernst Mach. Nietzschean influences combined with the mechanistic scientism of Soviet Marxism in the Soviet model of the ‘new man’ (whose qualities Lysenko’s genetics suggested could be inherited by successive generations).

In the post-Stalin ‘thaw’ some Soviet philosophers, including E. Ilienkov and M. Mamardashvili, began a critical rereading of Marx’s texts from an anthropocentric standpoint which emphasized the unpredictable and limitless potential of human consciousness.

The nihilists, who rejected metaphysics and all that could not be proven by rational and empirical methods, fervently believed that progress would inevitably lead to the restoration of a natural state of harmony between the individual and society.

The empiriocriticist movement within Russian Marxism opposed the idolatry of formulas with the claim that experience and practice were the sole criteria of truth, but the group’s leading philosopher, A. Bogdanov, looked forward to a metascience that would unify the fragmented world of knowledge by reducing ‘all the discontinuities of our experience to a principle of continuity’, predicting that under communism, when all would share the same modes of organizing experience, the phenomenon of individuals with separate mental worlds would cease to exist.

Soloviov’s pervasive influence on subsequent Russian religious idealism owed much to the charms of his vision of ‘integral knowledge’ and ‘integral life’ in an ‘integral society’.

Religious and socialist motifs were combined in some visions of an earthly paradise, such as Bulgakov’s ‘Christian Socialism’, or Gorkii’s and Lunarcharskii’s creed of ‘God-building’, which called for worship of the collective humanity of the socialist future.

In the revolutionary ferment of the first two decades of the twentieth century many religious and radical philosophers, together with Symbolist writers and poets, envisaged the leap to the harmonious future in apocalyptic terms: the novelist and critic D. Merezhkovskii prophesied the coming of a ‘New Christianity’ which would unite Christian faith with pagan self-affirmation in a morality beyond good and evil.

In the aftermath of 1917 some thinkers (notably Berdiaev and members of the Eurasian movement) found consolation in apocalyptic fantasies of a new light from the East shining on the ruins of European culture.

L.Tolstoi pointed to the chanciness of life and history in order to demonstrate the inadequacy of all attempts to formulate general rules for human societies; F. Dostoevskii confronted the systematizers with the lived experience of human freedom as the ability to be unpredictable; in their symposium of 1909 (frequently cited in the West as a pioneering analysis of the psychology of political utopianism) the neo-idealists of the Signposts movement explored the ways in which obsession with an ideal future impoverishes and distorts perception of the historical present.

Under the Soviet system a few representatives of this anti-utopian tradition ingeniously evaded the pressure on philosophers (backed up by the doctrine of the ‘partyness’ of truth) to endorse the official myths of utopia in power. The history of the novel form was the vehicle for Bakhtin’s reflections on the ‘unfinalizability’ of human existence (M.M. Bakhtin); similar insights were expressed by the cultural-historical school of psychology established by L. Vygotskii, who drew on Marx to counter the mechanistic determinism of Soviet Marxist philosophy with a view of consciousness as a cultural artefact capable of self-transcendence and self-renewal.

In the 1960s Soviet psychologists and philosophers such as Il’enkov helped to revive an interest in ethics with their emphasis on the individual as the centre of moral agency, while in its historical studies of culture as a system of semiotic signs, the Moscow-Tartu school brought a richly documented and undoctrinaire approach to important moral and political topics.

The insights of some of these individuals and movements into the attractions and delusions of utopian thought are lent added conviction by their own often spectacularly unsuccessful efforts to overcome what Nietzsche called ‘the craving for metaphysical comfort’. Tolstoi was torn all his life beween his pluralist vision and his need for dogmatic moral certainties, while Dostoevskii in his last years preached an astonishingly crude variety of religio-political messianism. The humanism of some later religious philosophers (including the Signposts authors Berdiaev and Bulgakov) is hard to reconcile with their eschatological impatience.

Required reading:

1. Solovyov, Vladimir. The Crisis of Western Philosophy (Against the Positivists), trans. by Boris Jakim, Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1996.

2. Solovyov, Vladimir. Lectures on Divine Humanity, ed. by Boris Jakim, Lindisfarne Press, 1995.

3. Berdyaev, Nicholas, Truth and Revelation, tr. R.M. French (New York: Collier Books 1962).

4. Berdyaev, Nicolas. The Russian Idea. Translated by R. M. French. Boston, 1962.

5. Lossky, Nicholas O. History of Russian Philosophy, New York, 1972.

6. Zenkovsky, V. V. A History of Russian Philosophy, trans. George L. Kline, London, 1967.

7. Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press.

8. Bakhtin, M.M. (1993) Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press.

9. A History of Russian Philosophy 1830–1930. G. M. Hamburg, Randall A. Poole (eds.). Minnesota, 2013. ISBN: 9781107612785.

Optional reading:

1. Copleston, Frederick C. Philosophy in Russia, From Herzen to Lenin and Berdyaev, Notre Dame, 1986.

2. Walicki, Andrzej. A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, Stanford, 1979.

3. Helmut Dahm, Vladimir Solovyev and Max Scheler: Attempt at a Comparative Interpretation, Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1975.

4. Zdenek V. David, "The Influence of Jacob Boehme on Russian Religious Thought," Slavic Review, 21(1962), 1, pp. 43-64.

5. Aleksej Losev, Vladimir Solov'ev, Moscow: Mysl', 1983.

6. Joseph L. Navickas, "Hegel and the Doctrine of Historicity of Vladimir Solovyov," in The Quest for the Absolute, ed.

7. Louis J. Shein, "V.S. Solov'ev's Epistemology: A Re-examination," Canadian Slavic Studies, Spring 1970, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 1-16.