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Recent Questions
- Why did everyone start to hate the Russians if the U.S. did the same thing in Afghanistan, Iraq?
- What needs to be corrected in the management of Russia first?
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Both the question itself and the answer to it can hardly be unambiguous. Of course, philosophy in Russia is currently in a serious state, and there are certain reasons for this. The main one is the Soviet Union. Look, almost all the original thinkers in the Soviet era were forced to leave the country, including the so-called “philosophical steamboats” of 1922.
In fact, in the 1920s, all the most interesting and original thinkers of that time left Russia: Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Lossky, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, and others. Those who did not leave were victims of repression, and even if they were not executed in the process, they survived imprisonment in camps and/or faced restrictions in terms of the possibility of publishing their ideas, like Alexey Losev, who was able to publish only after the death of Stalin and all the actions taken in connection with the change of party leadership to rehabilitate the repressed during Stalin's rule. Thus, the original philosophical tradition that began to form in Russia in the second half of the XIX century, in fact, was destroyed.
As an alternative to it, the Soviet authorities proposed “the only scientific philosophy”: Soviet Marxism-Leninism, a maximally simplified form of Marxism, which can hardly be called philosophy at all, but rather should be considered an ideology. No philosophical discussions were possible, and philosophy turned into memorizing some strictly defined philosophical, and mostly pseudo – philosophical, texts: the works of Lenin, Stalin, materials of party congresses. Needless to say, this situation did not contribute to normal philosophical discussions and the natural development of philosophy in our country.
Philosophy is free, independent thinking. The totalitarian state does everything possible to make such thinking impossible. In this context, it is surprising that such original and interesting authors as Losev, Lotman, Mamardashvili, Shchedrovitsky or Pyatigorsky – figures most of whom are well known not only in our country, but also far beyond its borders-were able to appear and survive in the Soviet era. Although the same Pyatigorsky, again, emigrated from the USSR in the 1970s, Mamardashvili worked for some time in the Czech Republic, and Lotman-in Estonia, and all this is quite significant.
In the USSR, however, there were also interesting authors who managed, in general, to fit into the Soviet ideology. I consider cosmism, Tsiolkovsky's philosophy, which greatly influenced Soviet science fiction, to be the most interesting original direction of Soviet philosophy. However, again, in Soviet times, they did not really like to focus on the philosophical dimension of cosmism.
Thus, it cannot be said that in Soviet times there was no philosophy at all. There were some very interesting authors, despite the ideological pressure, despite the isolation from the outside world, despite the limited access to foreign literature and isolation from foreign colleagues.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the development of philosophy in Russia continued, and among modern Russian philosophers there are authors of a very good level, such as, for example, Stepin or Vasiliev. Yes, the philosophical community has a lot of problems, and whether it will be able to cope with these challenges is still questionable, but if you look closely, there are philosophers in our country who are worth paying attention to.
The current system of training philosophers does not promote their independent thinking and requires rather blind reproduction of the” correct thoughts ” of ancient philosophers.
Students begin to learn (cram) philosophy from Ancient Greece, drown in a flood of information and simply do not have time to get to the current knowledge. Such as category theory, which requires a lot of knowledge in mathematics. The development of philosophy (in my opinion) is now being carried out by system engineers, software architects, and scientists involved in weak artificial intelligence (neural networks). These people really need philosophical support to see the future more clearly. And graduates of philosophy departments continue to talk about the greatness of Aristotle, Hegel or Kierkegaard (the most stubborn).