Arc of Utopia

The Beautiful Story of the Russian Revolution

Lesley Chamberlain

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781780238524
• eBook ISBN: 9781780238562
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Although Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries never called themselves Utopians—believing strictly in a science of revolution, they considered Utopians to be merely dreamers—they were enormously inspired by the grand humanitarian aims of the French Revolution of 1789. Taking up this French revolutionary agenda and reinforcing it with German philosophy, Russians formed a beautiful vision in which an imaginary theology blended with a premier role for art. Arc of Utopia offers a fresh look at these German philosophical origins of the Russian Revolution. In the book, Lesley Chamberlain explains how influential German philosophers like Kant, Schiller, and Hegel were dazzled by contemporary events in Paris, and how this led a century later to an explosion of art and philosophy in the Russian streets, with a long-repressed people reinventing liberty, equality, and fraternity in their own cultural image. Chamberlain examines how some of the greatest Russian names of the nineteenth-century—from Alexander Herzen to Mikhail Bakunin, Ivan Turgenev to Fyodor Dostoevsky—defined their visions for Russia in relationship to their views on German enthusiasm for revolutionary France. With the centenary of the Russian Revolution approaching, Arc of Utopia is an important and timely revisioning of this tumultuous moment in history.

1

The Wisest Man

Immanuel Kant, the most significant German philosopher of the eighteenth century and perhaps of all time, was wise enough to understand that the rational and the non-rational live side by side. The irrational is normally outside the domain of philosophy, but the non-rational domain, of our artistic and moral strivings and our fears and delights, is very much with us when we think how we perceive the world depends on our own humanity. Whatever might or might not be the case out there, according to some unknowable objective state of affairs, it is what our collective human mind can construct that matters.

Kant lived through two world-changing upheavals which confirmed him in the view that humanity should sort out its own affairs, without reference to explanations delivered by the Church. The human agent mattered; the divine agent was a fiction. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 almost annihilated a great European city, and Kant wrote about it as a young man; and then towards the end of the century the French people revolted against absolute monarchy, executing their king and passing through a year of Terror. Again Kant, having made his career as a university professor and now at the height of his powers, picked up his pen. The Lisbon earthquake and the French Revolution happened with such force that they demanded he interpret their meaning for contemporary European society: what these cataclysms meant for modern, not medieval, ideas of how to live, and, above all, their impact on morals.

The elemental disaster that consumed four-fifths of Lisbon left Europe aghast. At least 100,000 people died in a city ranked the fourth most populous on the continent. The shock was the equivalent of today’s Rome being reduced to rubble. In a deeply Roman Catholic country, it seemed to the pious that God was furious with the citizens of Lisbon, while atheists were flattered when they noticed that while all the great churches in the Portuguese capital had crumbled, the brothel district had remained intact.¹ Traditional and modern views of the world were immediately in conflict. Although no spokesman for fornication, Kant was on the side of the atheists in the ensuing controversy.

It was not the punitive rumblings of a putative divinity that interested him, but rather the earth science behind the catastrophe of 1 November 1755. Within months of receiving the news the young university lecturer from Königsberg had published three essays, and scheduled a lecture course for the summer semester of 1756: ‘On Physical Geography and On the Basic Aspects of Natural Science’. Königsberg was a great Baltic port, like Lisbon one of the finest in Europe, and, amongst its own pious or even faintly superstitious inhabitants, not quite convinced of the newly touted powers of reason, anything that could be done to avoid divine wrath was welcome news. Kant had read Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the French naturalist who had published an account of the earth that rendered it unlikely God was in charge. That in itself was surely the greatest revolution of modern times, a real incentive for atheism. Buffon himself had read Newton, whose mechanics guided him towards geology. Scientists would only start to understand a century later that earthquakes were not caused by an angry God but by tectonic shifts in volatile areas, but where Kant made a start was in considering the disaster from a purely human viewpoint. How might the city be rebuilt more safely? was the gist of his newspaper articles. If there was a moral lesson to be learnt, it was that humanity could manage its own well-being, through increased scientific understanding.²

And so, when he was 28, his future thinking began to emerge. Reason, not religion, would be his focus. Whatever nature inflicted, rational human beings had the capacity to stand back and consider their situation and how best to handle it.

Reason meant freedom: freedom from superstition, freedom to deliberate according to scientific evidence, and freedom to build a uniquely human world. Reason was confidence in the good society that humanity could achieve unaided. Reason promised to build a better future for the whole human species, if men and women would emancipate themselves from chasing shadows and work for self-improvement.

Kant was not a utopian philosopher in his own view. His work was not designed to sit alongside Plato’s lost city of Atlantis in Timaeus and Critias, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) and Denis Veiras’ L’Histoire des Sévarambes (1677–9), he said.³ He was, by contrast, always a practical philosopher, who began from what did happen before he pointed out what should.⁴ But he was certainly a philosopher of progress, and it is with him that the story of a modern fancy-led, Romantic, political phenomenon, poetic, idealistic, extravagant and fantastical, poised between the imaginative and the imaginary, the creative and Quixotic, the fertile and absurd,⁵ begins. It was the idea of a humanitarian Utopia, organized by scientific minds for the greatest human well-being.

Utopias were only ever as good as the people who inhabited them, so some attention had to be paid to human nature. For Kant the Lisbon earthquake was a good moment to see how untutored human emotions came into play in a crisis. Survivors everywhere gawped and gossiped and thanked their lucky stars. Many were awed by the power of nature, and some, perhaps many, were also afraid; not because they were sinful but because as mere flesh-and-blood creatures they felt powerless and humbled when the earth cracked and the sea rose. Many years later these thoughts about our capacity for fear and respect in the face of a mighty nature, alongside our reason, would find their way into Kant’s ‘analytic of the sublime’, part of his work on aesthetics.

In fact he was writing on the sublime when he witnessed the French Revolution, and between one text and another, now in The Critique of Judgement (1790) and now in ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), he was fascinated by the reach of reason in coming to terms with dramatic upheaval. In France it was not nature but humanity that had smashed the existing order, but the awesome spectacle had a similar emotional effect. In fact, just as he had been curious and concerned on behalf of all Europeans in the wake of the Lisbon disaster, Kant was now fascinated by the Revolution taking its course and, above all, how Europe’s spectators viewed it. Were they gawping, praying, rejoicing or what?

‘We’re not interested in the events in France because we want to witness acts of heroism and evil deeds,’ he wrote.

A kind of magical transformation of the French state, and an upsurge of the new as if from the bowels of the earth, is not our concern. No, nothing of all this. It is the mindset of the spectators watching the play of these great transformative forces, and how that mindset reveals itself publicly. It is the participation of the players on one side against another, a participation at once general and unselfish, all the more given the danger that taking sides could turn out to be very detrimental, that interests us. It is how that mindset lets those sides speak, and loudly. It is how (because of the universal element) it characterizes the human race in general and at the same time (because of the selflessness) it proves at least in terms of aptitude that humanity has a moral character, and this in turn allows us not only to hope for progress towards a better world, but for it actually to be happening, based on present human capacity.

The Revolution of an intellectually cultured people, which we have seen happening in our times, may succeed or not; it may be so full of misery and of acts of abomination that no right-thinking person, hoping that with a second chance he might successfully carry it out, would ever risk an experiment at such a cost – this Revolution, I say, nevertheless, excites in the minds of all who have watched it (who are themselves not caught up in actual events) a willingness to participate that borders on enthusiasm, and the expression of which brings its own dangers, and which therefore can have no other cause than a moral aptitude in the human race.

This cause which affects us morally is two-fold: firstly it is the cause of Law, that a people has the right not to be prevented by other powers from giving itself a citizens’ constitution, as it thinks to be good; and secondly it is the purpose at stake (which at the same time is a duty) wherein a people’s constitution can in itself only be legally and morally good when by its nature it has been created to offer fundamental principles for not fighting wars of aggression, and this cannot be other than a republican constitution, at least in the idea, and further to commit to refraining from war (the source of all ill and of the decline of civilization), such that the progress of the human race, for all its frailty, is negatively guaranteed, at least not to be hindered along the forward path.⁶

Kant concluded that the French Revolution could also transform the German-speaking world; could send it too ‘along the forward path’. It was a conclusion that historically bridged the two neighbouring cultures. The French were so much more advanced democratically than the Germans, but now perhaps there could also be change on the German side. In Prussia, where Friedrich Wilhelm III had just succeeded his father and grandfather, much of the press was reactionary and the country had a terrible history of war; on the other hand it did have a new sovereign in place. Less cautious as he grew older, Kant in 1798 dared to give reason a distinct content in favour of republican government, and expressly hoped for a transformed political landscape in which the German people, through philosophers teaching their leaders, would be educated to understand the scope of freedom.

Kant applied the word ‘revolution’ to himself. His was the Copernican Revolution in reason, he said. It was the moment when modern reason measured its own scope. Yet he was essentially, as the titles of his major works declared, a critical philosopher, keen to delineate those areas of experience reason couldn’t reach. The Lisbon earthquake even became a metaphor for him, for, while science could probe and measure the earth’s crust, he was sure the human mind could never understand its inner core. His philosophical measure therefore was that scientific reason, pure reason as he called it, had its limits. Not because some other, truer realm of being existed beyond the actual, but because the human mind could ultimately only have certain knowledge of itself; of what it projected on to the world in order to understand it. Things in themselves, free of human involvement, were unknowable.

There was this constant duelling between subject and object, reason and the ultimately unknowable, in Kant, which it’s useful to understand in terms of where German philosophy had arrived back in the 1750s, when Kant began his career. Then German philosophy was an ongoing contest between the experimental science of Newton and the enduring theodicy of Leibniz. At the time of their deaths, Georg Wilhelm Leibniz in 1716 and Isaac Newton in 1727 had both established themselves as the inventors of calculus, but their positions couldn’t have been more different. Calculus, as the mathematical study of change, gave way to two distinct philosophies of nature, in which Leibniz took the dynamic approach, and Newton the mechanistic. For Leibniz there were forces inherent in bodies, and in the universe, that made them behave as they did; whereas for Newton matter was dead in itself, but subject to laws according to its weight and mass. Newton, not Leibniz, helped Kant make sense of the Lisbon disaster. Yet Kant’s approach to nature was never entirely mechanical. Indeed, that was why his philosophy consisted of three ‘Critiques’, or three simultaneous approaches to knowledge. Kant’s genius was to show how each approach intersected with and affected the other two. As he might have said, the cosmos may or may not harbour the patterns of its own future growth. We can’t actually know and I doubt it. But what we can know is the emotional dynamism in the human subject which is full of longing for such patterns to exist. We human beings really want the universe to cohere and have moral meaning for us. And so the task of philosophy is to understand the human subject, and the limited certain knowledge it has, along with the tendencies of its yearnings to go far beyond.

‘The Contest of the Faculties’ was at once Kant’s most extended response to events in France and his final statement on progress before he died. It was a superb moment for European humanity, something like the philosophical equivalent of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’. Kant wrenched optimism out of the naive context in which he found it in Leibniz, where it functioned as a rather simple-minded ‘everything is for the best the way it is’, and re-installed it at the heart of a more sophisticated and self-critical modern outlook. Leibniz imagined a benign God setting the forces of the world in motion. He pictured God as an intelligent designer, we would say today, moreover one who wanted the best for us. But when the Lisbon earthquake happened, that idea looked ridiculous. The disaster was tragic and comic proof that the human order of things was no vast clockwork set in motion by a benign higher power, but a fragile construction likely to be overwhelmed. ‘All this is for the very best end, for if there is a volcano at Lisbon it could be in no other spot,’ laughed Voltaire in Candide (1759). Yet Kant was not as sarcastic as Voltaire, the great publicist of the French Enlightenment, nor as saddened as Voltaire’s fictional mouthpiece; and his own philosophy of reason always stood out from, and against, French rationalism, because of what it inherited from Leibniz, allowing for emotional longing.

That difference is commonly explained as stemming from German philosophy’s relative lack of hostility to the Church.⁷ Protestantism was more of an adjunct to the German scene of philosophy than the Roman Catholicism that the French philosophers commonly viewed as a corrupt accessory of the French state promoting social subordination through fear. Philosophers didn’t have to protest against Protestantism. Protestantism did not deal in sin but in the qualities of individual consciousness, and that was territory philosophers could readily take over. Kant was heir not to the deism of the French Enlightenment therefore, a rather tricky truce in the three decades before the Revolution, but to the Enlightenment’s humanitarian optimism, to which he brought a critical edge. As rational creatures we can formulate great goals for the future of humanity, but what nourishes our faith in them and keeps us going? Are they dreams or real goals? Kant found his answers in examining our moral and beautiful imagination.

To treat the human subject as an imaginative subject was Kant’s greatest achievement, in my view, and, as so often with German Idealism, it did two seemingly contradictory things. It at once powered him on in a vision of modern rational progress and kept him close to Leibniz. Leibniz gifted him the idea that human beings both have a sense of ‘purpose’ and often discern it in objects around them. In fact what he took from Leibniz wasn’t an easy borrowing for Kant, because Kant was vehemently opposed to the anti-Newtonian theory now spreading across the Continent, that matter was alive; that it had purpose. Kant was too much a man of the Enlightenment to accept what he saw as the new irrationality of Johann Gottfried Herder. But he did believe in the human capacity to imagine any inherent purpose in things, and thus to adopt a utopian outlook.

Kant ended up proposing two versions of natural philosophy. In the First Critique the human mind understood nature through patterns of causality which, while they didn’t touch ‘things in themselves’, provided entirely workable explanations of the physical world. The Second Critique was then a kind of celebration, of the fact that, in answer to what was physically unknowable, there was no hindrance to the moral future of a self-determining mankind.

So then what of those feelings, such as might move a spectator of an earthquake or a revolution to rejoice, or despair? That became his third approach. Kant’s other approach to nature, alongside the cognitive, was to remember in effect how much we love it. We take our measuring tools to nature, to understand how it works. But we also see it as the bearer of beautiful patterns to which our imaginations respond lovingly and which we long to reproduce in art. What Kant perceived was that there was a kind of shared pattern-making that situated men in the natural order. As rationalists alone they might well feel orphaned, because they could not know ‘things in themselves’. But pattern-making was compensation for that.

In effect, Kant came back, in his Third Critiqu...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Author’s Note
• Glossary of Names
• Introduction: The Arc of Utopia
• 1 The Wisest Man
• 2 Good Men, Drama and Dialectic
• 3 Excitement in the Seminary
• 4 Reason, Fashion and Romance among the Russians
• 5 Philosophy as Dream-history
• 6 Bakunin on Fire
• 7 A Land of Hamlets and Don Quixotes
• 8 The Chattering Classes and the Moment of Grace
• 9 ‘The Triumph of the Movement which is Dear to Me’
• 10 ‘We Want All to be Fulfilled at Once’: The Great Uprising of Art and Creativity
• Afterword: ‘The Unity of Great Ideas and Strong Feelings’
• A NOTE ON FURTHER READING
• REFERENCES
• INDEX