Russian philosophy

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Russian philosophy carries a question that has never been fully settled: when did it actually begin? Archimandrite Gabriel, the first historian of Russian philosophy, traced its roots to the didactic "Teachings" of Vladimir Monomakh, linking Russian thought directly to the scribes of ancient Russia. Other major historians insist that Russian philosophy only became an independent phenomenon in the era of Peter the Great. The debate has never stopped. What holds this tradition together despite centuries of interruption, exile, and suppression? And what does it mean that, according to Professor Andrei Sukhov, no other philosophy contains so many reflections on the fate of a country?

• 2. Ancient Roots and Early Debates

  ›

  Metropolitan Hilarion, sometimes called the first ancient Russian philosopher, raised questions of universal values in his work "The Word of Law and Grace." From the 11th century onward, the Old Russian state produced thinkers wrestling with human nature, state power, and religious meaning. The collection of sayings known as "The Bee" and "Dioptra" by Philip the Hermit circulated widely as translated Byzantine monuments. Vladimir Monomakh, Theodosius Pechersky, Klim Smolyatich, Kirik Novgorodets, Kirill Turovsky, and Daniil Zatochnik all left philosophically significant works from this early period.

  The sharpest clash of the 14th-17th century period involved Joseph Volotsky (born Ivan Sanin) and Nil Sorsky (born Nikolai Maikov). Their followers, the "Josephites" and the "Trans-Volga elders" or "non-possessors," argued fiercely over the role of the church in state affairs and the legitimacy of church land holdings. Joseph Volotsky insisted heretics should be physically destroyed. Nil Sorsky and his ally Vassian Patrikeev argued for persuasion through words alone. This argument about power and conscience would prove a recurring pattern in Russian intellectual life for centuries.

• 3. Peter's Rupture and the Enlightenment

  ›

  The reforms of Peter I restricted church authority and opened Russian intellectual life to Western philosophy through newly created institutions of higher education. The philosophical ideas that took root most deeply were deism and its associated anti-clericalism, embraced by key thinkers including Mikhail Lomonosov and Alexander Radishchev. Atomism and sensationalism entered Russian thought at this same moment. Freemasonry also fed into the mix, as seen in the work of Nikolay Novikov.

  Grigory Teplov compiled one of the first Russian philosophical dictionaries in this era. The central texts of the 18th century included Vasily Tatishchev's "A Conversation of Two Friends," Andrei Bolotov's "Children's Philosophy," Teplov's "Knowledge Concerning Philosophy in General," and Radishchev's "About Man, His Mortality and Immortality." Professor Nina Dmitrieva observed that Russian philosophical thought up to the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries developed primarily through literary criticism and journalism, focused on immediate social, political, and ethical problems.

• 4. The 19th-Century Divide

  ›

  Schellingism reached Russia at the start of the 19th century, and in 1823 the Society of Wisdom was founded. The central conflict of the century ran between Westernizers and Slavophiles. Peter Chaadaev stood at the origins of original Russian philosophy and posed the question of Russia as a distinct civilization. Aleksey Khomyakov, a Slavophile, defended the idea of sobornost as a response to that question. Ivan Kireevsky held up the ideal of pre-Petrine patriarchal Russia. Konstantin Aksakov drew a distinction between country and state.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky declared the "Russian Idea" and insisted on restoring the bond between educated society and the people through national soil. Nikolai Berdyaev later noted that Russian thought strived to develop a totalitarian, holistic worldview in which pravda as truth would be combined with pravda as justice. The word itself, pravda, pointed to what Semyon Frank described as the inseparability of rational and moral meaning in Russian thought.

• 5. Vladimir Solovyov and All-Unity

  ›

  Vladimir Solovyov, who lived from 1853 to 1900, was called by his contemporaries the central figure of Russian philosophy. He criticized earlier philosophy for abstractness and rejected the extremes of empiricism and rationalism. His proposed alternative was the idea of positive total-unity, headed by God. He understood good as a manifestation of will, truth as a manifestation of reason, and beauty as a manifestation of feeling.

  In Solovyov's system, the entire material world is controlled by God, while the human being acts as a connecting link between God and the nature God created but left imperfect. Human moral activity, in his view, manifests as love for other people, for nature, and for God. His concept of all-unity was later taken up by Semyon Frank and Lev Karsavin. Russian religious philosophy at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries became a synthesis between Slavophilism and Westernism, with projects for building the kingdom of God on Earth taking on the features of Sophiology in the work of Solovyov and Sergei Bulgakov, and of Rose of the World in the work of Daniil Andreev.

• 6. Berdyaev and Existentialism

  ›

  Nikolai Berdyaev, born in 1874 and died in 1948, is the most prominent representative of Russian existentialism. He began his intellectual life in Marxist circles, participating in anti-government demonstrations and corresponding with Karl Kautsky, one of the leaders of German Social Democracy. He then abandoned Marxism and became one of its most detailed critics.

  Berdyaev placed the opposition between spirit and nature at the center of his worldview. Spirit is a subject, life, creativity and freedom; nature is an object, a thing, necessity and immobility. He distinguished three types of freedom: primary irrational freedom as arbitrariness, rational freedom as fulfillment of moral duty, and freedom imbued with the love of God. He argued that because freedom was not created by God, God cannot be held responsible for the evil that freedom produces.

  On the question of personality, Berdyaev turned the usual picture upside down: personality is not a part of the cosmos; the cosmos is a part of the human personality. His formulation of the Russian Idea described the Russian people as a combination of opposites, including cruelty and humanity, individualism and faceless collectivism, the search for God and militant atheism. On the events of 1917, he argued that a liberal-bourgeois revolution in Russia was a utopia and that the revolution could only have been socialist. His major works included "Philosophy of Freedom" in 1911, "The Meaning of Creativity" in 1916, and "Russian Idea. The Main Problems of Russian Thought in the 19th and 20th Centuries" in 1946.

• 7. Soviet Rupture and Revival

  ›

  Even before the October Revolution, Marxist philosophy had developed in Russia through Georgy Plekhanov and Vladimir Lenin. Once Soviet power was established, the main question of Soviet philosophy became the relationship between matter and consciousness, with dialectics as the central method. Nature was understood as matter and objective reality, eternal and infinite. Consciousness was defined as a property of highly organized matter.

  Pavel Florensky and his student Alexei Losev remained in Soviet Russia. Through Losev, the traditions of Russian philosophy were kept alive under Soviet conditions; Sergey Averintsev and Vladimir Bibikhin received their philosophical succession from him. Mikhail Bakhtin developed ideas of polyphony, dialogue, and carnivalism. Debates arose over the nature of the ideal, with David Dubrovsky and Evald Ilyenkov arguing on opposite sides. In the late Soviet and post-Soviet period, the ideas of the Moscow-Tartu Semiotic School gained broad recognition.

  After the Soviet collapse, Russian philosophy faced what the source describes as a situation of uncertainty. New fields opened, including political science, cultural studies, religious studies, and philosophical anthropology. Attempts to revive the tradition of Russian religious philosophy were judged by figures including Yuri Semyonov, Daniil Danin, and Mikhail Chulaki to have largely failed. Meanwhile, Georgy Shchedrovitsky and the Moscow Methodological Circle he founded offered what his followers described as a third Russian philosophy, one built on methodology as a way through the impasse of postmodernism.