Russian philosophy of history: an essay in understanding

Abstract

The outbreak of interest in the national philosophy of history, which occurred about thirty years ago, can be observed today again. The present author’s hypothesis is that such entities as empire, autocracy, power-property phenomenon (where no property is real property), Russian ethnic consciousness (narodnost) and Orthodoxy can be best described as constant patterns of social life that persist throughout the entire history of Russia. Such patterns, on the one hand, are part of the mechanism responsible for organization and functioning of the society; on the other hand, they are mental structures of a kind that impose restrictions or extend the directory of social, economic, socio-political and cultural development, thus contributing to the emergence of the respective social actors and blocking the emergence of actors of a different nature. The dilemma whether the existent set of constant patterns is inalterable, or it can be replaced by another set, is of central importance and has a direct bearing on that special part of the philosophy of history which deals with ideas about the desired future. In clarifying this dilemma an important role, if still underrated by many scholars, belongs to literary philosophy, or philosophizing fiction, without which any philosophy of history will be incomplete. Literature responds to the demands of the history of philosophy in two ways: by its nature it seeks to satisfy the human need for understanding the beautiful and the ugly, the proper, etc., and again through the works composed in the genres of utopia, anti-utopia, dystopia and documentary prose it warns philosophy of history to never allow a recreation of past evil once experienced by man.