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This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights and duplication or sale of all or part is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for research, private study, criticism/review or educational purposes. Electronic or print copies are for your own personal, non- commercial use and shall not be passed to any other individual. No quotation may be published without proper acknowledgement. For any other use, or to quote extensively from the work, permission must be obtained from the copyright holder/s. RUSSIAN MATERIALISM: AN INVESTIGATION OF THE PRE-REVOLUTIONARY MATERIALIST TRADITION COLIN CHANT PH.D. THESIS 1977 IMAGING SERVICES NORTH *• i *• « t \ h RARY Boston Spa, Wetherby West Yorkshire, LS23 7BQ www.bl.uk BEST COPY AVAILABLE. VARIABLE PRINT QUALITY ABSTRACT The principal aim of this thesis is to take a step towards a fuller coverage in this language of the history of Russian materialism and atheism« It is divided into Three Parts« The first discusses the transition from German idealism in the 1830s to materialism and atheism from the l840s onwards amongst the intelligentsia; particular attention is given to the vogue for Feuerbach, and it is suggested that his appeal for the Russians lay in a materialism which admitted the mental but debarred the spiritual, i«e., allowed for a moral critique of Tsarism not only outside of, but in opposition to, religion« The first part ends with an analysis of Lenin*s Materialism and Empiriocritisism« both to compare his own stance with that of Feuerbach, and to understand the presuppositions of the historiography of the 'materialist tradition*, which provides a framework for Parts Two and Three« These parts seek to establish when it makes sense to speak of the origins of a 'materialist tradition' in the sense that materialism and atheism are connected with antagonism towards the political order« Part Two is a brief rebuttal of the view of Soviet historians that the tradition originates with Lomonosov and is continued, amongst others, by Radishchev« Part Three claims that the tradition may be said to have begun with the Decembrists, and discusses the extent to which their materialism and atheism can be seen as a response to Alexandrine educational policy and attitudes towards religious u organisations and groups, as a result of contact with the West, and as a function of their own political ideas. This Part forms the bulk of the thesis, and in so doing, evinces its most important secondary aim, to attempt as far as possible to explore the historical significance of Russian materialism and atheism. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 PART ONE : CLASSICAL RUSSIAN MATERIALISM 15 PART TWO : THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 62 PART THREE : THE REIGN OF ALEXANDER I AND THE DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT 95 Section 1 Education 99 Section 2 Western Ideas 120 Section 3 The Church and Religion 142 «f •• Section 4 Political Opposition 199 Section 5 Indigenous Ideas 228 NOTES 287 BIBLIOGRAPHY 310 1 introduction The subject of this thesis first began to take shape in my mind when as an undergraduate student I was introduced to the remarkable philosophical journey of Vissarion Belinsky. It became clear that his intellectual development could be seen as an exaggerated and highly personal reflection of a transition, quite widespread in both Russia and Western Europe, from a conservative or apolitical transcendental i philosophy to almost what was its diametric opposite, a conjunction of materialism and socialism. There seemed on the basis of this general phenomenon, and in the particular case of Belinsky, to be a correlation of some kind between ontological and political views. It goes without saying that connections of this nature, and in particular the connec tion between materialism and progressive political views, are axiomatic in Marxist philosophy of history; without in any way wishing to adopt a hostile posture towards that approach, I have nevertheless preferred to confront my subject without the benefit of any strong prior theoretical commitment. It is not however the primary aim of this study to investigate the relationship between materialism and radicalism. My first consideration has been to take a step towards a fuller coverage of an aspect of Russian intellectual history which has not in my view been adequately dealt with by Western historians of ideas, namely the history of materialist and atheist thought. As far as I know, there is no work in English comparable to the wealth of monographs and essay collections generated by Soviet authors specialising in this field.^ There are probably several reasons for this disparity of attention, but the most obvious seem to be following. The first is what might be called the poverty of Russian philosophy. Although care must always be taken to avoid, or at least 2 to recognise, the prejudices likely to be instilled by a Western European education, it can scarcely be denied that there is no Russian metaphysical, epistemological or ethical work of the nineteenth century to rank with, for example, Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, in terms of originality or rigour. Why this is so could itself be the subject of another thesis, but it is worth noting that thfere are defects in the most obvious explanation, which is that Russia's philosophical backwardness is correlative to and consequential upon the political, economic and cultural backward ness induced by centuries of Byzantine isolation. In the first place, the choice of Kant as an exemplary philosopher brings to mind the opposite conclusion, that in the case of Germany, admittedly far less isolated from the rest of Europe than Russia, political and economic backwardness seemed if anything to promote rather than hinder a remarkable efflorescence of original aesthetic and philosophical activity. More importantly, Russian could be seen as being philoso phically backward not only in relation to certain West European nations, but also in relation to its own rapidly increasing strides in, for example, literature, music, mathematics and natural science. It may be that there was some intrinsic cultural factor inhibiting original philosophising; for example, it might be that the modern Russian idiom pioneered by Karamzin in the early nineteenth century proved particularly apt, for instance, for poetic expression, but, like Latin, lacked the morphological mechanisms conducive to the coining of abstract terms which, so the argument might run, are characteristic of Greek or German. This would impede the generation of other than imitative philosophical thought, but would have little or no effect on the pursuit of abstraction in music, mathematics and natural science which in diff erent ways have their own lingua franca. 3 The argument would be more convincing if Russian intellectuals from the time of Radishchev had proved more or less indifferent to pure philosophy. Not only is that not the case, but at times they have exhibited a near mania for philosophical abstraction. This suggests that the reasons for the imitative or eclectic nature of Russian philosophy are partly institutional. For the sake of the virtue of brevity and in spite of the vice of over-generalisation, it might have been expected that our non-existent major nineteenth-century Russian work of pure philosophy would in the light of West European philosophy have been produced by a gentleman of leisure or by a professional teacher of philosophy. The Russian nobility did however, as we shall see, for a long time regard education, and particularly higher education as a plebeian activity, and in any case was a most reluctant consumer of any kind of tuition which did not bear the fruits of advancement in the military and civilian service hierarchy; it was not until the l830s that the sons of the nobility began to attend the new universities in any appreciable numbers. We shall also see that after the expiry of the spirit of reform during the reign of Alexander I, departments of philosophy were often the prime targets of the academic repression which characterised most of the remainder of the nineteenth century. So far were the universities from developing an indigenous philosophical culture that it was the very foreigners who had been recruited to make up for -the lack of native teachers of philosophy who became the first victims of government persecution. Thus in the midst of the nobility's general intellectual apathy, and the enforced orthodoxy of the academic philosophers, the vital spirit of philosophical enquiry was kept alive in the rootless groups of young students, journalists and misfits who were the first members of what was later termed the intelligentsia. It was the minds of these individuals which were obsessed by a mania 4 . for abstraction, successively of a Schellingian and a Hegelian stamp, but it cannot be inferred from this that discussions of a purely metaphysical or epistemological nature were paramount. The appeal of German philosophy to the generation which followed the Decembrists was that it raised questions about the essence of nationhood and the meaning of history, questions which the acutely nationally self- conscious Russians, forever measuring themselves against the Western European nations, were as unavoidable as they were to the Germans with their own particular obsession about the French. This is not to deny that in individual cases the logic of the Hegelian dialectic acquired its own momentum, but as a generalisation, the inception of the Russian intelligentsia was marked by a powerful interest in philosophy not so much for its own sake, but as means to finding metaphysical solutions to practical, that is historical and then political, problems. Not only does this underline the connection between ontological and political views, at any rate in the Russian context, mentioned earlier, but it also diminishes the relevance of the poverty, or unoriginality, of Russian philosophy to the question of its importance in Russian history.