Hegel's Thought in Europe

Currents, Crosscurrents and Undercurrents

L. Herzog

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349456369, 9781137309211
• eBook ISBN: 9781137309228
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In a broad interdisciplinary perspective, established experts and leading young scholars bring together important currents of Hegelianism in Europe from the 19th to the 21st century to trace the political, social and intellectual contexts in which Hegel's philosophy was taken up and inspired very different forms of Hegelianism and Anti-Hegelianism.

Part I

Hegel’s Thought in Russia and Romania

1

The Crisis of the Beautiful Soul and the Hidden History of Russian Hegelianism

Vadim Shkolnikov

Introduction

The Hegelian craze that swept Russia during the 1830s and 1840s – Russia’s ‘age of philosophical circles’ – was part of a larger cultural proliferation: the young Hegelians of the period served as the prototype for what would later be called ‘the intelligentsia’; they played a leading role in the rise of Realism in Russian literature; and, ultimately, a number of them would become canonized as the first heroes of the Socialist revolutionary movement. For these reasons, the story of Russia’s first infatuation with Hegelian philosophy has often been retold, in bits and pieces, from a variety of perspectives. And yet, it has proven difficult to explain, to pin down, the specific, positive nature of Hegel’s influence.

For one thing, the heightened interest in German Idealist philosophy in Russia during the reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855) has traditionally been interpreted as a product of the malaise that gripped Russian society in the aftermath of the suppressed Decembrist revolt.¹ The decisive show of force by which Nicholas crushed the rebellion would set the tone for the rest of his culturally repressive reign.² Accordingly, the widespread turn to speculative philosophy among young Russian intellectuals during the period has been explained in terms of despondency (a loss of all hope for opposing the autocratic regime), escapism (a mental flight from the ‘horrible Russian reality’), compensation (the need to find some kind of outlet, in the absence of more natural, more suitable spheres of activity), and egoism (a self-indulgent withdrawal into the world of subjectivity, at the expense of social responsibilities).³ Essentially, the flurry of philosophical activity in Russia during the 1830s and 1840s has often been reduced to nothing more than a conditioned psychological response to a stifling social environment – as if Hegelian ideas merely served as a temporary diversion during a period of apolitical hibernation for the nation’s progressive forces.

At the same time, the ‘seriousness’ of the philosophical activity during this period can also be questioned, for we are certainly not dealing with professional philosophers. The most influential early Russian Hegelians include: the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848), a major proponent of Realism and social consciousness in literature, who hailed the arrival of Gogol and profoundly influenced his younger contemporaries, Turgenev and Dostoevsky; Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), the future revolutionary and theorist of political anarchism, who would become a rival of Karl Marx for leadership in the International; and Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), a progressive writer during the 1840s, who became a Socialist leader after he emigrated from Russia in 1847, and whose brilliant and multifaceted memoirs, My Past and Thoughts, comprise both the culminating self-expression and the most influential interpretation of the intellectual life of the period. It was Herzen who first elevated the members of Moscow’s philosophical circles to the status of significant historical figures and proclaimed that Hegel’s philosophy was the ‘algebra of revolution’.⁴ Yet, if we were to judge these figures purely in terms of their contribution to the history of philosophy, we would have to admit that their contribution was negligible. In fact, it is well known that, in the case of Belinsky, who did not read German, his knowledge of Hegel was acquired entirely from second-hand sources, primarily from the accounts of his friends. It is even more problematic, however, that virtually all the important intellectuals of the period eventually abandoned Hegelian philosophy – and, based on some accounts, it even seems as if their rejection of Hegel was what allowed them to attain their ultimate cultural importance.

Yet even if this first wave of Hegelian influence in Russia never resulted in any important ‘original’ achievements within the discipline of philosophy, it nevertheless deserves our attention for the unique perspective it offers on the interaction between philosophy and life. The Russian intelligentsia of the Nicholaevan period has left us a poignant record of the impact of Hegelian philosophy on the very process of identity-formation. In this sense, the most remarkable aspect of Hegel’s initial influence in Russia manifested itself not simply in the transmission of a certain set of ideas, but in the emergence of a distinct type of personality or social identity. Beneath the heavily guarded political calm of Nicholas’ thirty-year reign, the influx of Hegelian ideas acted as the catalyst for a complex process of personal and philosophical development.

In what follows, the social dynamics of these philosophical circles are recounted. Their application of Hegelian concepts to their own lives led the members of these circles from an intense private drama that can be called ‘the crisis of the beautiful soul’ to the notorious phase of ‘reconciliation with reality’. The end result for Belinsky, Bakunin and Herzen, whose experience of this process is documented most vividly, was a unique historical self-consciousness, corresponding to a newfound understanding of meaningful social action – without which they could not have become historical agents, the leaders of Russia’s ‘liberation movement’. The encounter with Hegelian ideas thus triggered an experience of Bildung that proved decisive for their role in Russian history.

Stankevich and the culture of philosophical circles

As Hegel has noted, in ancient Greece philosophy was practiced ‘in private, like an art’.⁵ In a sense, the same thing can be said about Nicholaevan Russia. The distinct, idiosyncratic nature of early Russian Hegelianism can be attributed to the fact that it developed not within the institutionalized, academic practice of philosophy but, rather, within the private, self-enclosed world of the philosophical circle – in which philosophy served, fundamentally, as a basis for personal relationships. Accordingly, private letters and memoirs comprise some of the most important materials for documenting how Hegelian ideas first permeated into Russian society.

Looking back with ironic humour, Herzen captures the improbable intensity and the sheer excess of youthful exuberance that reigned within the circles:

There was not a paragraph in the three parts of the Logic, the two [volumes] of the Aesthetics, the Encyclopaedia, and so on, which had not been the subject of desperate disputes for several nights together. People who loved each other avoided each other for weeks at a time because they disagreed about the definition of ‘all-embracing spirit’, or had taken as a personal insult an opinion on ‘the absolute personality and its existence in itself’. Every insignificant pamphlet published in Berlin or other provincial or district towns of German philosophy was ordered and read to tatters and smudges, and the leaves fell out in a few days, if only there was a mention of Hegel in it.⁶

Most strikingly, however, the culture of the philosophical circles was initially characterized by the practice of applying newly-acquired philosophical terminology to the analysis of everyday experiences. Recalling these first naive attempts to bring philosophy into contact with life, Herzen writes:

The man who went for a walk in Sokolniky [now a large park in Moscow] went in order to give himself up to the pantheistic feeling of his unity with the cosmos; and if on the way he happened upon some drunken soldier, or a peasant woman who got into a conversation with him, the philosopher did not simply talk to them, but sought to define the essential substance of the people in its immediate and incidental manifestation. The very tear that began to form in his eye was rigorously referred to its proper classification, to Gemüth or ‘the tragic in the heart’.⁷

In a similar vein, Lydia Ginzburg observes that, for the young Bakunin, ‘the domestic world was no less the dominion of absolute spirit than the universe itself’.⁸ On one hand, this questionable practice seems to epitomize the amateurish nature of early Russian Hegelianism. But inasmuch as ‘the child is father to the man’, this naive implementation of philosophical concepts was never simply abandoned: rather, it would evolve into a mature self-understanding.

The leader of the most important Hegelian circle of the 1830s remains somewhat of an enigma: commentators have long debated how Nicholas Stankevich (1813–1840), who died at age 27, without having published a single significant work, could have been the guiding ideological force within a remarkable group of young intellectuals that included Belinsky and Bakunin.⁹

In the 1830s, prior to the influence of Hegel, Russian philosophical culture was still evolving primarily as an extension of more firmly established literary and aesthetic sensibilities: German literature paved the way for German philosophy. Thus, under the influence of Schiller, Goethe, and some popularized notions from Schelling, Stankevich first brought his circle of friends together by professing the fairly widespread precepts of aesthetic humanism – the belief that beauty alone can govern and harmonize social relations – and by exalting love as the path to spiritual self-perfection and true cosmic being. Love would achieve the very essence of aesthetic humanism, an unmediated connection between beauty and moral conduct: ‘He who loves acts beautifully’, he wrote to his best friend Neverov.¹⁰ Among the members of the circle, these principles became the basis for an ideal of philosophical friendship – embodied in the poetic, harmonious figure of Stankevich. In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Hegels Thought in Europe
• Part I  Hegels Thought in Russia and Romania
• Part II  Hegels Thought in Scandinavia and Germany
• Part III  Hegels Thought in Great Britain
• Part IV  Hegels Thought in Italy and France
• Index