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A History of Philosophy, Vol. X: Russian Philosophy

Frederick Copleston

Summary

Copleston wrote this book after finishing the nine volumes of his History, and it first appeared in 1986 as Philosophy in Russia: From Herzen to Lenin and Berdyaev, published by Search Press in England and the University of Notre Dame Press in America. Continuum numbered it Volume X when it reissued the series in 2003, after Copleston's death. It is the only volume that follows one nation's thought, and it was written while the Soviet state still made dialectical materialism the official philosophy and kept most of the thinkers in its later chapters out of print at home. Copleston begins with the question that runs through the whole story: what is Russia's place between Europe and the East, and must it copy the West or develop from its own Orthodox and peasant inheritance? Pyotr Chaadaev's first Philosophical Letter, published in 1836, answered bleakly that Russia had contributed nothing to humanity, and its author was declared insane by order of the government. The Slavophiles, especially Ivan Kireevsky, replied with an ideal of integral knowledge, in which reason, feeling and faith work together within the life of the Church, against what they saw as the one-sided rationalism of the West. The next chapters follow the Westernizers and radicals. Russian readers of Hegel moved, in Belinsky's phrase, from reconciliation with reality to revolt against it; Herzen and Bakunin carried the dialectic toward socialism and anarchism. The 'new men' of the 1860s put their faith in natural science, utility and the peasant commune, and Peter Lavrov's subjective method in sociology argued that the thinking individual must judge history by moral ideals rather than wait for impersonal laws. Against these currents Copleston sets the novelists and religious thinkers. His chapter on Dostoevsky treats him as a philosopher of freedom who saw that man will not be reduced to a calculable piano key and that freedom without God destroys itself. Tolstoy is studied with others on the meaning of life and history. Vladimir Solovyov, the most systematic of the religious philosophers, receives a chapter on his metaphysics of all-unity and his idea of divine humanity, the union of God and man realized in Christ and to be realized in history. The last third follows Marxism from Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, to Lenin's theory of the revolutionary party and his materialist theory of knowledge, and on into Soviet philosophy as a state doctrine. Two chapters then describe the philosophers expelled or exiled after 1917, above all Nikolai Berdyaev, whose philosophy of freedom and creativity Copleston treats at length, before a short epilogue. Copleston's method is to let each thinker speak in his own terms. He gives the atheist radicals and the Marxists as careful a hearing as the Orthodox philosophers, though he makes plain where he thinks their arguments fail. The book is in copyright, so the library offers this summary, a guide and a buy link, and points students to the Russian novels and the Communist Manifesto already in the collection.

Top Lessons

Chaadaev's question: Russia and Europe
Copleston shows that Russian philosophy began less with abstract problems than with a question about a people's place in history. Chaadaev's despairing answer and the Slavophiles' confident one framed debates for a century. Students can see that a question about identity carries philosophical assumptions about what history is for and whether faith shapes a civilization.
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Ideas become deeds: the radicals and Lenin
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Freedom that will not be calculated
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Medical Lens

Two points touch the history of medicine and psychiatry. Chaadaev was officially declared insane after his letter was published and placed under medical supervision, an early instance of psychiatric labels used against dissent in Russia; this is a matter of record about how the state treated him, not a diagnosis. The radicals of the 1860s drew a materialist anthropology from physiology and natural science, treating mind as a function of the organism, which Dostoevsky and the religious philosophers resisted. Pointers below are to Copleston's chapters, not quotations.

Mind Body Psychiatry History Asylum Institution

Chapter on Chaadaev
The publication of the first Philosophical Letter in 1836 and the government's response, which declared its author mad and confined him to medical supervision.
Chapter on the 'new men' of the 1860s
The radical generation's trust in natural science and its materialist account of the human being, including Chernyshevsky's anthropological principle.
Chapter on Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's argument, drawn from Notes from Underground and later novels, that consciousness and freedom cannot be reduced to natural laws or calculated interests.

A History of Philosophy, Vol. X: Russian Philosophy

Summary

Top Lessons

Chaadaev's question: Russia and Europe

Ideas become deeds: the radicals and Lenin

Freedom that will not be calculated

Hearing an atheist fairly

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Medical Lens