marxist sociology Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 21:51:09 -0500 From: Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com>
I think a final evaluation of Soviet philosophy remains to be written. It seems to me that some quite substantive work was done in the early years of the Soviet Union. Certainly, the debates in the 1920s between the Mechanists and the Dialecticians seem to be of some interest, revolving as they did around some perennial issues in Marxist philosophy. (Stalin BTW settled that debated by fiat).
^^^^^ CB: I'm trying to think whether the academic powers that be in the West don't use fiat quite a bit in deciding who gets to be a paid philosopher. How many Dialecticians get tenure in the U.S. philosophy departments. It would seem the rational kernel in much postmod discussion is to point out that there is arbitrary power shaping Western philosophy too. Stalin's methods were more violent, but as far as the ultimate result if one can't get a job or get published , the debate is settled by fiat. Ironically, Justin was a victim of the Western less violent form of deciding what philosophy is correct.
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Stalin's rule as Justin quite correctly points out put a severe crimp on any truly original work in Soviet philosophy, since most of the best thinkers and scholars were (if they were lucky found themselves in Siberia) and very often were simply liquidated. Many of the scholars at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, who oversaw the publication of Marx's earlier writings (like the 1844 Manuscripts) simply "disappeared" during the 1930s.
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CB: There's some significant irony on this. Marx and Engels had to develop their philosophy in exile and underground. Lenin studied philosophy while in exile in Siberia , according to Krupskaya. (Hey, look what happened to Socrates). Note, that situation does not necessarily prevent doing philosophical work. My point on this thread is , not that it is ok to do what Stalin did, but that the Justin's claim that nobody with a brain was doing philo in the SU "after Stalin" is not true.
Carrol might have a comment on "originality ". Orginality and creativity are highly valued in the academy, especially in the bourgeois situation with publish ORIGINAL STUFF or perish. But was originality what philosophy needed in the Marxist tradition ? There is a definite sense from Engels that closure to the old philosophical lines was what was needed. Engels' saw old philosophy as the queen of the other sciences coming to an end , and formal logic and dialectics remaining with the various sciences. In other words, this would imply no "creative " development of the old philosophical traditions, rather their study as historical elements in the development of dialectical materialism.
Marxism is unapologetically non-pluralist and non-eclectic in this regard. This issue is a PHILOSOPHICAL difference between bourgeois philosophy and Marxist philosophy. It becomes a circular argument to say Soviet philosophy was not pluralist in terms of all the historical philosophical traditions. One of Marxist philosophy's points is that these other "traditions" carry bourgeois and class exploitative society "seeds" in them Afterall , Marxism's position is that philosophies don't spring from the brains of creative individuals except as reflections of the social conditions in which the philosopher lives. Marxism' position is against philosophy for philosophy's sake, so the standards and values of the western academy such as creativity and pluralism are explicitly critiqued by the philsophy itself . All of this must be taken into account in judging Soviet philosophy by these very Western standards
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The "thaw" that occured upon Khruschev's ascension to power, saw a revival of Soviet philosophy. It was during the "thaw" that Ilyenkov (http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/) first rose to prominence for instance. Justin points out that Soviet philosophers did important work in logic, and it was during the time of the "thaw" that the Czech born Soviet philosopher Ernst Kolman disucssed the relations between formal logic and dialectical logic, in which he proposed that dialectics was actually completely compatible with Aristotelian logic, and that we should be wary of identifying "dialectical contradictions" with the kinds of contradictions treated in formal logic. In his view, dialectics did not violate Aristotle's law of non-contradiction.
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CB: Engels doesn't exactly say that dialectics _violates_ Aristotle's law of non-contradiction. Rather that Aristotle's law of non-contradiction only holds in considering things in a fixed and static manner. It's more that Aristotle's non-contradiction violates reality, when things are considered deeply. The analogy I would use is snapshot ( Aristotle's non-contradiction) and motion picture ( dialectics) . Reality is like a movie, but snapshots can help us to understand at one stage of thought. Things change so they are not self-identical. Engels says that what will remain of philosophy is formal logic ( Aristotle's non-contradiction ) and dialectics.
Given that Engels projected that formal logic and dialectics would be what would remain of philosophy, it is consistent that Soviet philosophes would do important work in logic.
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In the late Soviet period, some interesting work was done in the philosophy of science. Igor Naletov's *Alternatives to Positivism* provides a well-informed assessment of Anglo-American work in the field from a Soviet Marxist standpoint, and indeed it does seem to have been the case that many Soviet philosophers did take a strong interest in Anglophone analytic philosophy. Dmitry Gorski's writings such as his *Generalisation and Cognition* for instance betrays a knowledge of the Anglophone literature in logic and analytic philosophy. Both Naletov and Gorski provide ample discussions of such thinkers as Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Popper, Quine, and Kuhn amongst others, while adhering to a broadly dialectical materialist standpoint. In fact it seems that one characteristic of Soviet philosophy was while it on the one hand pledged its loyalty to a strict orthodoxy, it was still (at least following Stalin's death) able to absorb ideas and techniques from other philosophical traditions. I seem to recall reading a book many years ago by John Somerville on Soviet philosophy which made exactly that point. Even in Stalin's time it was customary for Soviet philosophers to be assigned to specialize in the work of one or more particular Western bourgeois philosophers, in order to refute their ideas. Very often this resulted in the Soviet philosopher in absorbing many of the ideas of the thinkers that he was supposed to be refuting.
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CB: Note the Western philosophers do not know Soviet philo and dialectical materialism, but the Soviets studied the Western schools.
By the way, there are Cuban, Chinese, Viet Namese etc. philosophers who are just as smart as the Western crews today.