Justin said:
Not at all. Democratic politics needs no philosophical justification, is what I am saying here. There I was saying that if you want to know why Soviet philosophy was was bad and boring, you need only look to the fact that in undemocrtaic conditions there prevailing, philosophers were required
by authoritarian constraint to say things they didn't believe in, or worse, that they did. The two points are connected by the thought that democratic politicsd also makes for better philosiohy, although it does not deoend on philosophy.
I say: Are you advocating a Straussian reading of Soviet philosophy? :)
I really don't buy the democracy makes for better philosophy line (Seneca, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Epictetus, Sextus Empiricus, Moses Maimonides, etc.).
Than, Charles Brown said:
^^^^^^^
CB: Democracy is the working class as the ruling class, from the best philosophical standpoint. I guess your approach would explain why philosophy in the capitalist countries is worse and more boring than in the Soviet Union, given the lack of democracy the U.S., England , France , Germany, etc.
My impression ( from Chris Doss in part) is that the Russian and former Soviet masses are much more philosophical than the American. I don't know about France. Seems the approach in the SU was more popularization of philosophy than in the U.S. This too is evidence of a more democratic attitude to philosophy. In other the test of democratic philosophy is not in the specialized philosophy departments, but how popular is the interest in philosophy.
So , the test of philosophy is democracy. I take you to mean popular sovereignty by democracy.
And I say:
Russians and ex-Sovs teld to be widly more philosophical than Americans (not to mention infinitely better-read). I've never come across a better-educated bunch of people in my life, or a group more given to introspection, espacially people who were socialized in the Union. Of course, in the pre-Glasnost SU, your access to certain segments of literature was restricted to people who could show they had a need to have access to them; if you were writing a dissertation on psychology, say, you could get access to the Lenin Library's collection of Freud. And being high up in the CPSU would get you access to material; a friend's mother managed a collective farm, and she could get her hands on stuff.
For the life of me I can't fathom why some of this stuff was restricted: Why on Earth did they try to limit access to Schopenhauer and Freud? I get the feeling that often some higher-up in the CPSU would read something, find it personally distasteful or offensive, and declare it unclean.
Cjris Doss The Russia Journal