IT TOOK THE DOSE, WHICH IS ITS TRAGEDY:

The Cost of Utopia: MOTHERLAND: A Philosophical History of Russia By Lesley Chamberlain (MARK LILLA, 7/29/07, NY Times Book Review)

...Is there something special about the Russian relation to ideas? Throughout the 19th century the so-called Westernizers blamed the Russian character, which after centuries of religious orthodoxy and political repression had become lazy, mystical and prone to fantastical dreams. What Russia needed, they thought, was a dose of Western philosophy and science to sweep out the cobwebs and rationalize society. They got nowhere, and many fled to Paris, where they bemoaned la Russie in flawless French.

The anti-Westernizers were a mixed lot. Some were believers in the old rites of the Russian church; others defended aristocratic privilege against the revolutionary mob. The most interesting minds, though, were the Slavophiles, who loathed the growing influence of Western philosophical ideas and romanticized the Slavic mind. Dostoyevsky was sympathetic to them and believed that modern Western thought was breeding a new kind of fanatic — cold, materialistic, indifferent to suffering. The traditional Russian virtues of compassion and spontaneity were disappearing in the face of utilitarianism, nihilism, anarchism and all the other isms spewed out by the West. Understanding the pancreas is all well and good, but when rationalists wearing square hats deny the demands of the soul they turn us into beasts.

Now, understanding the soul is also well and good. But what happens when soulfulness stands in the way of rational philosophy and science? Isn’t there a price to be paid? That is the question Lesley Chamberlain poses in “Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia.” The question is not new, nor are most of her answers. There are very fine studies of 19th-century Russian thought available in English — by Isaiah Berlin, Joseph Frank, E. H. Carr, Martin Malia — and the interested reader will want to turn to those first. But by focusing specifically on how Western philosophical ideas from Descartes through Marx were absorbed into Russian thinking, Chamberlain does complicate the received picture somewhat. As she sees it, the decisive struggle was not simply between Westernizers and anti-Westernizers, but between Russians who stood by the philosophical legacy of France and England, and those who drew sustenance from the far murkier thinkers of modern Germany.

Note the deep confusion of Mr. Lilla in not comprehending that the English repudiated the French Enlightenment, which is why the courses of their history are so divergent from the late 18th century to, at least, the early 21st. At the point where the Russians, unlike the British, accepted Descartes, it was all over but the mass murder.

MORE:
Ms Chamberlain wrote and asked us to post her respons, which follows:

Actually I'm a Cartesian myself, because I think the cogito is a guarantee
of individual inner freedom - note inner freedom, not political liberty.
What went wrong in Russia in my view and as I expound it in the book was
twofold:
1) not espousing the standard Caresian tradition, requiring the individual
inquiring mind to submit itself to rigorous self-questioning, led to a
general neglect of the value of truth. It wasn't the only factor, but it
combined with the prevalence of issues related to community and solidarity,
expressed in both religious and secular contexts, to create the possibility
of a totalitarian society in which solidarity was forced on people as
'truth' and almost every aspect of that society was a lie.
2)while not espousing cartesian reason as a critical function promoting
individual responsibility for truth, in a society that also would wish to
aspire to truth, Russia always needed some social glue to hold it together,
and when it discovered German philosophy in the early nineteenth century it
found in Hegelian reason, and subsequently in dialectical materialism and
Communist theory that glue, which was never (the activity of) philosophy
proper, but a principle to hold society together, as religion and serfdom
and a belief in the holiness of the tsar had done in earlier ages.

There is also a third sense in which Russian anti-Cartesianism has been, on
the other hand, productive in my view, and that is on the poetic/imaginative
side, in producing that fabulous world of Russian art that the West so
admires. It has helped Russian literature and painting for instance never to
have to have fought against the confines of a mind-body dualism - the kind
that has also prompted criticism of the Cartesian legacy in the West.
There are, in fact, many sides to the question of Descartes and his
greatness and legacy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 4, 2007 8:38 AM