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SYNTHESIS IN RUSSIAN CULTURE

In her autobiography The Italics Are Mine (1992), Nina Berberova, one of the most important writers in twentieth-century Russian literature, describes a struggle that is at once profoundly personal and profoundly suggestive of the Russian character. She describes “one of the most important themes of [her] inner life,” as she aims for the “fusing of opposites” in her very being:

All dualism is painful for me, all splitting or bisecting contrary to my nature.… My whole life has been the reconciliation within myself of the old dichotomy.… [D]iverse and often contrasting traits fuse in me. Long ago I stopped thinking of myself as being composed of two halves. I feel physically, that a seam, not a cut, passes through me, that I myself am a seam, that with this seam, while I am alive, something has united in me, something has been soldered, that I am one of many examples in nature of soldering, unification, fusion, harmonization, that I am not living in vain, but there is sense in that I am as I am, an example of synthesis in a world of antitheses. (23–24, 36)

No theme has been more central to the history of Russian thought than this struggle against dualism. It emerges from a desire to transcend the dichotomies that fragment human existence: spirit versus flesh, reason versus emotion, the moral versus the practical. This yearning to achieve synthesis in the human condition was fully absorbed by Ayn Rand and became one of the earmarks of her Objectivist philosophy.

Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum,¹ in St. Petersburg on 2 February 1905, during the Silver Age of Russian cultural history. Though she later attributed much of Russia’s cultural brilliance to its Westernized elements, she reveled in the beauty of the epoch:

As a child, I saw a glimpse of the pre–World War I world, the last afterglow of the most radiant cultural atmosphere in human history (achieved not by Russian, but by Western culture). So powerful a fire does not die at once: even under the Soviet regime, in my college years, such works as Hugo’s Ruy Blas and Schiller’s Don Carlos were included in theatrical repertories, not as historical revivals, but as part of the contemporary esthetic scene.²

Rand’s recollection reflects her abiding contempt for the specifically “Russian” aspects of the culture. By emphasizing the achievements of the period as distinctly “Western,” Rand disowned the Slavic mysticism and collectivism that she considered characteristic of the Russian psyche. This fact is crucial to our understanding of Rand’s early intellectual development. It helps us to grasp why Rand could never admit that she was a child of her Russian past. For Rand, Russian culture meant hatred for the individual and the rational mind. Russian thought stressed emotion and intuition, not logic and reason; it rejected individualism and embraced communal organicism as expressed in the concept of sobornost’ (conciliarity);³ it was antimaterialist and, above all, anticapitalist. Each aspect of this Russian totality was a natural extension of the other. In Rand’s view, the rejection of reason required the renunciation of individual freedom, material wealth, and capitalism. When Rand tied her defense of the free market to her celebration of the free mind, she was establishing an inseparable link between reason, freedom, individualism, and capitalism, all elements that were absent from the Russian culture that she despised.⁴

Tatyana Tolstaya (1991) echoes much of Rand’s own view of the constituent elements in the Russian psyche:

In Russia, in contrast to the West, reason has traditionally been seen as a source of destruction, emotion (the soul) as one of creation. How many scornful pages have great Russian writers dedicated to Western pragmatism, materialism, rationalism! They mocked the English with their machines, the Germans with their order and precision, the French with their logic, and finally the Americans with their love of money. As a result, in Russia we have neither machines, nor order, nor logic, nor money. (6)

It was perhaps in reaction to this Russian hostility toward reason and individualism that the mature Rand seemed to overemphasize the rational and individuating aspects of human nature.⁵ But inherent in Rand’s view is an integration of reason and emotion, individual and community. By explicitly rejecting conventional rationalism and atomistic individualism, Rand implicitly affirms important elements in the Russian critique of “Western” dualism.

This is not to say that the struggle against dualism is an exclusively Russian project. To distinguish between Russian and Western culture does not imply that each is hermetically sealed from the other. The history of Russian philosophy is replete with intermingling between Russian and European, especially German, thought. What has emerged, especially since the time of Peter the Great, is a complex amalgam of multiethnic and Western influences. Many Russian thinkers in fact were schooled in European universities; they absorbed the integrated constructions of such Western philosophers as Aristotle, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, among others.⁶

THE CHARACTER OF RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY

One of the most startling characteristics of Russian philosophy has been its nonacademic, noninstitutional orientation (Edie, Scanlan, and Zeldin 1965, ix). Until the end of the nineteenth century, most creative Russian thinkers worked outside the university. Even Vladimir Solovyov, the father of systematic Russian philosophy, withdrew from academia at an early point in his life, because of serious disputes with government authorities (Kline 1967, 258).

Russian thought has always been human-centered, intimately connected to the literary arts, and immoderately passionate (ibid.). In fact, most of the great Russian thinkers—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pasternak, Gogol, Blok, Bely, and Solovyov—were literary artists and social critics, whose zeal was partially responsible for their exclusion from academic life.

Russian philosophy throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was considered suspect by the government. In fact, philosophy as a separate discipline was banned from the Russian university curriculum for considerable periods. And until 1889, only the study of certain Platonic and Aristotelian texts was permitted (ibid.).

The lack of formal philosophical instruction led to the genesis of informal intellectual groups during the 1830s. Many university students studied German metaphysics and French social theory in such group settings. They rejected the view of philosophy as pure contemplation and saw it as a tool in the struggle for truth, justice, and freedom. The whole notion of philosophy as a strictly theoretical discipline is alien to Russian culture. Marxists would later emphasize the unity of theory and practice, but such a social commitment has always been deeply ingrained in the Russian psyche (Copleston 1986, 1). As Kline (1967) explains: “The Russian intelligentsia subordinated theoretical truth (istina) to practical truth-justice (pravda). Russian thinkers were engaged in the ‘quest for truth-justice’ (iskaniye pravdy)” (258).

This integration of the theoretical and the practical suggests a dialectical theme in Russian philosophy. In the 1840s, Russian intellectuals were deeply influenced by the Idealism of Schelling, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. In particular, Hegel’s impact on Russian intellectual life was immeasurable. Even Hegel’s dialectical language found a home in Russia. Hegel stressed Aufhebung, a process in which one evolutionary state is transcended and abolished, while being simultaneously absorbed and preserved in the motion of the succeeding state. In Russian, the Hegelian Aufhebung is captured by the term snyatiye, which connotes “sublation,” “cancellation,” the “raising to a higher level,” and “preservation” (Edie, Scanlan, and Zeldin 1965, xii). The Hegelian domination of Russian philosophy set the stage for a Marxist infusion in the 1890s and beyond.

THE SLAVOPHILES

The movement toward dialectical transcendence of opposites is manifested especially in the 1840s in Khomyakov’s critique of Western religion. Alexey Khomyakov embraced the Slavophile devotion to Orthodox Christianity and personal mystical experience. He viewed Russian Orthodoxy, with its Byzantine roots, as the reconciliation of Catholicism and Protestantism. N. O. Lossky, Rand’s teacher and author of the indispensable History of Russian Philosophy, explains that for Khomyakov, “the rationalism of Catholicism which established unity without freedom gave rise, as a reaction against it, to another form of rationalism—Protestantism which realizes freedom without unity” (1951, 37). Khomyakov saw the necessity for a communal, conciliar unity that transcended the Catholic emphasis on the individual judgment of the pope and the Protestant emphasis on the individual judgment of the believer.⁷ Russian Orthodoxy bound the Church and the state much more closely than was the case in the West. It was the original organic union, in Khomyakov’s view, a freedom-in-unity and a unity-in-freedom.

The whole theme of transcending opposites is both a Kantian and Hegelian inheritance. Lossky (1951) explains: “Many Russian philosophers in dealing with the essential problems of world interpretation like to have recourse to antinomies; i.e., like to express the truth by means of two mutually contradictory judgements, and then seek ways of reconciling the contradiction” (190). This Hegelian streak in Russian philosophy made a deep impact on both Slavophiles and Westenizers, and even on those thinkers who turned to materialism and positivism (134).

Ivan Kireevsky followed in this dialectical tradition. He was among the first of the Slavophiles to trace the “intimate internal relations in the world” (Lossky 1951, 21). Kireevsky rejected Western dualism and its inherent fragmentation of spirit, science, state, society, and family. He strove “for wholeness of the internal and external mode of life” (24).

But in celebrating the holistic worldview of Eastern Orthodoxy and Russian culture, Kireevsky did not reject the Western Hegelian and Aristotelian traditions. Surprisingly, whereas some critics have derided Hegelian dialectics as a violation of the Aristotelian law of contradiction, Kireevsky argued that the genuine Aristotelian spirit “reappeared with Hegel.” Kireevsky saw Aristotle’s basic views as identical with Hegel’s. Hegel’s system was “as Aristotle himself would have constructed, if he had been born in our time.” Especially in his celebration of reason as the “sole arbiter of truth,” and in his emphasis on the relational and logical connections between concepts, Hegel had, in Kireevsky’s view, carried on the Aristotelian project.⁸

Following the Hegelian model, Kireevsky departed from the one-sidedness of the Slavophile tradition. The typical Slavophile appealed to the Russian national character and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, arguing that Russian culture must avoid the influence of the Western secular enlightenment. The Westernizers, by contrast, advocated that Russia assimilate European science and commit itself to secular reason. Kireevsky aimed for integral knowledge, a wholeness in the human spirit, a synthesis of the two worldviews and a transcendence of the gap between reason and faith. Isolated from each other, the Slavophile and the Westernizer presented incomplete perspectives. For Kireevsky, unity was of prime importance.

Such unity was also expressed in Kireevsky’s elaboration of Khomyakov’s concept of sobornost’, a doctrine accepted in varying forms by most Russian philosophers. Lossky (1951) explained that sobornost’ involved “the combination of freedom and unity of many persons on the basis of their common love for the same absolute values” (41). In Kireevsky’s view, “The wholeness of society, combined with the personal independence and the individual diversity of the citizens, is possible only on the condition of a free subordination of separate persons to absolute values and in their free creativeness founded on love of the whole, love of the Church, love of their nation and State, and so on” (Lossky 1951, 26).

The struggle against dualism and fragmentation is manifested in the ontological and ethical theories of other Russian philosophers in the nineteenth century, such as Nicholas N. Strakhov, Nicholas G. Chernyshevsky, and Nicholas F. Fedorov.⁹ Like Kireevsky, the Slavophile Strakhov viewed the world as a “harmonious organic whole.” His book, The World as a Whole conceptualizes the parts as constituents of the totality, even as the totality constitutes the parts. The parts submit to one another; they “serve each other, informing one whole” with “man” at the center (Lossky 1951, 72).

Rejecting the mysticism and altruism of the Slavophiles, Chernyshevsky embraced a materialist, atheistic, and democratic socialist world view that greatly influenced Lenin. He valued the Hegelian dialectical method and proposed an organic union of spiritual and material dimensions (Shein 1973, 223). His ethics is a form of psychological egoism, where each person always acts selfishly. In his novel What is to be done? Chernyshevsky’s main character, Lopuhov, states: “I am not a man to make sacrifices. And indeed there are no such things. One acts in the way that one finds most pleasant.”¹⁰ But for Chernyshevsky, each person’s happiness and self-interest coincides with the common good, and hence, there is no conflict between the individual and society. His ethical ideal approaches a secularized sobornost’.

Fedorov utilized the Hegelian category of “relatedness” in his conception of mankind as a constituted whole. He criticized Western positivism for its “separation of theoretical and practical reason” (Edie, Scanlan, and Zeldin 1965, 30). Like Chernyshevsky, however, Fedorov attempted to eliminate the distinction between egoism and altruism. Whereas egoists live only for themselves, and altruists only for others, Fedorov argued that this was a false dichotomy. He envisioned a moral world in which each individual lived with and for others.

THE IMPACT OF VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV

Vladimir Solovyov was the first and most original of Russia’s systematic philosophers. Like Leibniz, he exhibited a genius for absorbing and synthesizing the contributions of many varied thinkers and traditions (Zenkovsky 1953, 484–85). From Hegel, Solovyov learned to use a formal dialectical method. He was also influenced by the mystic Slavophiles, as well as by Fichte, Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Spinoza. Having received his doctorate from St. Petersburg University, Solovyov proceeded to develop an organic synthesis of religion, philosophy, and science. His impact was widespread; he influenced nearly every Russian thinker who succeeded him, including Trubetskoy, Frank, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and Lossky. Each of these thinkers elaborated on Solovyov’s doctrine of intellectual intuition.

In 1874, Solovyov wrote The Crisis of Western Philosophy. He criticized positivism and the empiricist-rationalist dichotomy. Empiricists, according to Solovyov, have embraced a form of sensualism that reduces everything to simple and subjective sense-experience. In the end, empiricism dissolves into subjectivism. So, too, positivism excludes metaphysics and “cuts itself off from reality.” Rationalism, by contrast, identifies being with pure thought (Copleston 1986, 220). Thus each tradition fails to grasp the integrated nature of real being. Frederick Copleston argues that, in Solovyov’s view, “we cannot understand reality without sense-experience, and we cannot understand it without ideas or concepts and the rational discernment of relations. What is needed is a synthesis of complementary truths, of distinct principles” (213).

Lossky (1951) grasped that this Solovyovian synthesis was at root, profoundly Hegelian:

The final results of empiricism and of rationalism are somewhat similar: empiricism leaves us with nothing but appearances, without an object of which they are appearances and without a subject to whom they appear; rationalism ends with pure thought; i.e., [quoting Solovyov:] “thought without a thinker and without anything to think of.” Neither in experience nor in thought does man transcend his subjective relation to the object and become aware of the object as an existent, that is, as something which is more than his sensation or his thought. Neither experience nor thought can, then, lead to truth, since truth means that which is—i.e., existence. [Quoting Solovyov:] “But only the whole exists. Truth, then, is the whole [emphasis added]. And if truth be the whole, then that which is not the whole—i.e., every particular thing, being or event taken separately from the whole—is not truth, because in its separateness it does not even exist: it exists with all and in all. Truth then is all in its unity or as one.” (96)

Solovyov’s synthesis of experience and reason, empiricism and rationalism, echoes Hegel’s dictum, “The True is the whole” as expressed in The Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel [1807] 1977, 11). For Solovyov, as for Hegel, no particular thing can be grasped if it is cut off from the totality, which gives it meaning. And yet Solovyov rejected Hegel’s metaphysics for its one-sided rationalism.¹¹ Solovyov argued that by dichotomizing experience and reason, practice and theory, Western philosophy embraces alternatives that are equally one-sided and partial. Both experience and reason are essential to the comprehension of objective reality. Experience provides the sensory data for knowledge, as reason apprehends relations. But in uniting experience and reason, Solovyov embraced a third means of knowledge, exemplified in faith and mystical intuition.

Like Kant, Solovyov attempted to reconcile science and religion. He sought to unite the true, the good, the beautiful, the philosophical, and the theological. Recognizing that no philosopher could escape from examining his own premises, Solovyov attempted to achieve a synoptic grasp of reality. Lossky (1951) explained that Solovyov gave clear expression to the “characteristic features of Russian philosophical thought—the search for an exhaustive knowledge of reality as a whole and the concreteness of metaphysical conceptions” (95).

Following in the footsteps of his Slavophile ancestors, Solovyov saw religion as providing this synoptic “total unity.” Each branch of philosophy echoes this unity. In metaphysics, the world is conceived as an organic whole. In ethics, Solovyov attacked both moral subjectivism and social realism. The subjectivist stresses the realization of individual good, and the social realist views the individual’s moral will as subordinate to society’s institutions. Solovyov integrated the essential moral will of the individual with the necessity of social life. As morality is both public and private, politics bridges the gap between individual and social good. In the perfect, ideal society, a Slavophile messianism will achieve a free theocracy that unites all people.

That such a system might deteriorate into totalitarianism was one of the chief objections raised by the Russian Hegelian philosopher, B. N. Chicherin.¹² But Chicherin accepted Solovyov’s universalist aim to transcend both rationalism and empiricism. Deeply influenced by Hegel, Chicherin argued that dialectical logic is ontological; the laws of reason are then identical with the laws of being. Like Solovyov, Chicherin was highly critical of the dichotomy of reason and experience. He advocated their integrated unity.

THE SILVER AGE

In the post-Solovyovian period, Russian philosophy entered a Silver Age. But the Silver Age was much more than a philosophical renaissance. It was an era of cultural flourishing that had begun in the final decade of the nineteenth century and had culminated by 1924, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Silver Age was the historical context of Rand’s formative years. It was marked by a burst of creativity in the literary arts, coupled with a renewed interest in religion, mysticism, and the occult. Artists and philosophers reacted strongly against positivism and materialism, examining the nature of freedom, art, beauty, truth, and the dignity of the individual. They precipitated a revolution of the spirit, heralding the radical changes that were to consume Russian society.

THE INFLUENCE OF NIETZSCHE IN RUSSIA

The Russian Symbolists constituted one of the most important cultural movements of the age.¹³ Writers such as Dmitri Merezhkovsky, Andrey Bely, Aleksandr Blok, and Viacheslav Ivanov attempted to transcend the polarity in Russian culture between Westernizers and Slavophiles. Paradoxically, they embraced the Christian messianism of the Slavophiles and Solovyovian mysticism, while simultaneously absorbing the Dionysian aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy. They challenged both materialism and asceticism, positivism and rationalism, Marxists and czarist authoritarians. As nihilists, emotionalists, and subjectivists they were hostile toward reason and science. They rejected urbanization and industrialization, and envisioned a new anarchic culture of freedom, love, and sobornost’.¹⁴

Central to the Symbolist movement was the absorption of key Nietzschean themes. The Symbolists answered Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity by cultivating a new religious morality of cultural creativity, Promethean individuality, and sexual pleasure.¹⁵ Symbolist artists aimed to embody the characteristics of Nietzschean supermen and to achieve a transformation of values by integrating Christian mysticism and Dionysian revelry.¹⁶

Like Nietzsche, the Symbolists rejected dualistic interpretations of the world. In Nietzsche’s view, as in Hegel’s, one cannot isolate the elements of opposition, which are often “insidiously related, tied to, and involved” with one another ([1886] 1966, 10). For Nietzsche, as for Hegel, historical evolution develops through such opposition. But Nietzsche refused to embrace monistic idealism. Monism merely emphasizes one aspect of a dualist distinction at the expense of the other. Nietzsche aimed to transcend the very language of duality.

One of the distinctions that Nietzsche attempted to transcend was the opposition of good and evil. These ethical constructs are problematic, in Nietzsche’s view, because their meaning is deeply dependent on the moral system in which they are expressed. The Christian “slave morality” views altruistic self-sacrifice as the good. According to Nietzsche, it achieves submission and conformity by appealing to resentment, guilt, jealousy, and envy. However, the achievement of human mediocrity is not the ethical goal of “master morality.” Instead of appealing to the herd mentality of the mob, master morality elevates self-responsibility and nobility as an ethical ideal, stamping out the weak and uncreative elements of humanity.

Like his distinction between master morality and slave morality, Nietzsche’s conceptualization of the Apollonian and Dionysian duality also made a deep impact upon the Russian Symbolists. The Symbolists embraced the Dionysian principle as a corrective for the excessive rationalism of Western philosophy. Rosenthal argues that the Apollonian-Dionysian dualism gave the Symbolists “a conceptual framework for esthetic and psychological reflection and fueled their opposition to positivism and utilitarianism, sanctioning their demand that the needs of the inner man (the soul or the psyche) be heard. The Dionysian became a symbol of interrelated esthetic, psychological and religious impulses.”¹⁷

For Nietzsche, Apollo and Dionysus embodied opposing metaphysical principles. In 1969, Rand would reiterate this Nietzschean symbolism in her assessment of New Left counterculture. In Rand’s view, Nietzsche had used the symbols of Greek tragedy to express a false dichotomy between reason and emotion. But Rand saw Nietzsche’s archetypes as appropriate symbols for what happens when reason and emotion are disconnected. Apollo embodies individuation and is “the symbol of beauty, order, wisdom, efficacy … —i.e., the symbol of reason.” By contrast, Dionysus’s drunkenness is characterized by a loss of self, “wild, primeval feelings, orgiastic joy, the dark, the savage, the unintelligible element in man—i.e., the symbol of emotion.”¹⁸ Though Nietzsche saw power in the integration of Apollo and Dionysus, he embraced the superiority of the uninhibited, unfettered Dionysian impulse.

Rand argued that the New Left counterculture exhibited this Dionysian loss of self. Though Rand sympathized with the New Left’s rejection of the Establishment, she condemned its flagrant irrationalism, its drug-induced emotionalism, and its anti-industrialism. Perhaps Rand had recognized in the New Left the elements that she had observed in the Russian Symbolist movement of her youth. Rand may have appreciated some of the Nietzschean undertones of Symbolism; she cites Aleksandr Blok as one of her favorite poets.¹⁹ But Rand was quick to recognize the antirational, antiself, and anticapitalist components of the Dionysian principle. Ultimately, her rejection of Dionysian subjectivism would separate her from Nietzsche and his “counterfeit” individualism.

As for Aleksandr Blok, he was the dominant literary figure in the St. Petersburg of Rand’s youth. Educated at St. Petersburg University in the Juridical and Philological colleges (fakul’tety), he emerged as the supreme Russian Symbolist poet of his generation.²⁰ He gave regular readings of his poetry at the university until his death in 1921. Like his fellow Symbolists Ivanov and Bely, Blok conjoined fierce Dionysian imagery with Solovyovian Christian mysticism, putting forth an image of “a Nietzscheanized Christ, a Christ-Dionysus archetype.”²¹ Blok envisioned an anarchistic sobornost’ unifying all believers in the mystical body of Christ.²² He aimed to resolve the tension between individualism and social cohesion, between culture and civilization.

Blok argued that there was an inherent contradiction between culture and civilization. Culture, in his view, is Dionysian; it is spontaneous, creative, organic, and whole. Civilization is Apollonian; it is mechanical, abstract, rational, and materialistic. Blok opposed bourgeois society because it fragmented culture and civilization and gave one-dimensional emphasis to the Apollonian principle. Ultimately, Blok envisioned a society that integrated Apollonian structure and Dionysian process.

Envisioning a similar transcendence was Dmitri Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky. Merezhkovsky was a prolific Symbolist writer who argued that the highest unity would be achieved through the sex act, since each body is interpenetrated and expressive of all other bodies. Merezhkovsky’s rejection of the split between men and women led him to embrace the androgyne, or man-woman, as the ideal personality. Each man and each woman would freely express both the masculine and the feminine characteristics they each embody. Merezhkovsky aimed not for the artificial merging of two selves but for an organic and indivisible sexual whole within each human being. His aesthetic sought to synthesize the polarities of the external world that reflected the splits within him (Rosenthal 1975, 36). To bridge the gap between real and ideal, Merezhkovsky embraced a form of mysticism that “absorbed all dichotomies, softened the hard edges of reality into a beautiful and harmonious unity” (226).

Though some Symbolists opposed the Bolshevik Revolution and its Marxist materialism, their attempt to reconcile Nietzsche with Russian mysticism had contributed to the erosion of the old values and institutions. The Symbolists had uncovered a dimension in Nietzsche’s thought that served their cultic and collectivist desires to liberate the instincts and transcend the self. Their attacks on Christian slave morality would ultimately reinforce the atheism of their Bolshevik rivals.²³

The impact of Nietzschean philosophy on Russian Symbolism was significant. But Nietzsche’s thought also influenced the Marxism of the Silver Age. The interpenetration of Nietzschean and Marxist thought was facilitated by their common Hegelian roots. Four important Nietzschean Marxists of the period were Stanislav Volsky, Anatoly V. Lunacharsky, Aleksandr A. Bogdanov, and Vladimir A. Bazarov. Even Maxim Gorky, the father of Socialist Realism, underwent a Nietzschean phase.

The Nietzschean Marxists stressed the individual’s free will, desire, and creativity. They rejected Kant’s deontological ethics and viewed the proletariat as beyond good and evil. As George Kline (1969) explains, “The Nietzschean collectivists maintained that under socialism individuals would freely desire to subordinate their individual creativity to the creativity of the collective” (171).

Stanislav Volsky argued that bourgeois society alienated the individual. Genuine individualism would not emerge until socialism was achieved. In the new society, “All obligatory norms … will eventually disappear” (172). Lunacharsky, Bogdanov, and Bazarov shared the same concern for the free individual. Like their philosophic predecessors, however, they embraced a Russian sobornost’ in which the individual is liberated through his dissolution “in an impersonal social collective” (177). These thinkers espoused a humanist religion in their early years and were known, appropriately, as the “God-builders.” Elevating human strength and potential to God-like status, they argued that in socialism, “man” would be the master of his own fate. Though Lenin rejected their secular religion, they had fully incorporated the Nietzschean-Dionysian principle of self-transcending collectivism into the corpus of their thought.²⁴

NEO-IDEALISM AND THE RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS RENAISSANCE

Nietzsche’s influence extended also to the Russian religious renaissance of the neo-Idealists. But it is more likely that the neo-Idealists absorbed Nietzschean and existentialist ideas from Dostoyevsky. Mihajlo Mihajlov suggests that Dostoyevsky had, in fact, made an impact on Nietzsche himself. Nietzsche’s notes and drafts in the winter of 1886–87 constantly refer to Dostoyevsky. Nietzsche also wrote abstracts of several of Dostoyevsky’s works.²⁵

The neo-Idealists praised Dostoyevsky for his dialectical literary method. Each of Dostoyevsky’s characters embodies particular ideas. In their interplay, collisions, and encounters, certain of these ideas emerge victorious (Copleston 1986, 142). It is this literary method that deeply influenced Rand.²⁶

Though traces of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche may be found in the work of the neo-Idealists, it is also true that the ideas of these two seminal thinkers were preserved in the Russian tradition of philosophical synthesis. Such thinkers as Kozlov, Shestov, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Florensky, Frank, and Lossky had all been influenced by the thought of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Solovyov. Many of the neo-Idealists studied in Germany, working in the seminars of philosophers who represented the Freiburg and Marburg schools of Transcendental Idealism. Most of them strove to overcome Kant’s phenomenalism by attempting to link the knowing subject and the world in an organic unity.²⁷ They followed Hegel in seeking the identity of thought and being.

The neo-Idealists had attempted to provide a genuine philosophical basis for religion. They began not with religious presuppositions, but with some of the more advanced ontological and epistemological theories of their day. They had accepted Solovyov’s critique of Western positivism and rationalism and his intuitivist theory of knowledge. In the words of Father Pavel Florensky, they grasped that “Truth as a living wholeness” could emerge only through the direct rational intuition of the objects of the external world. Florensky affirmed that the essence of religious experience was love, “because love means that an entity passes from the isolated separateness of A into the other, non-A, establishes its consubstantiality with it and consequently finds itself, i.e., A, in it” (Lossky 1951, 179–80).

The neo-Idealists included in their number two genuinely original, systematic intuitivists, Semyon Frank and N. O. Lossky. I discuss Lossky’s thought in Chapter 2. At this point, it is valuable to examine some of the contributions of Frank, who was Lossky’s colleague at St. Petersburg University from 1912 to 1915. By 1921, Frank took the position of Chair of Philosophy at Moscow University.²⁸

Like Lossky, Frank called his philosophical system “ideal-realism,” symbolic of his attempt to integrate apparent opposites. Rather than embracing a dualistic vision, Frank saw three levels of existence: the physical world of objects, the spiritual world of ideas, and an unobservable, mysterious sphere in which both the material and the spiritual were fully united.²⁹ True to the Hegelian tradition, Frank presented this vision of the world as a “metalogical unity.” He argued that this unity encompasses both A and not-A. It does not violate the law of contradiction; the law is “simply inapplicable to it” (Lossky 1951, 267). In this organic whole, both unity and plurality are subsumed. Frank preserved the Hegelian Aufhebung by advocating an “antinomic monodualism.” He argued that in negation, we both destroy and preserve “the connection between distinct, differentiated entities, and thus ascend to the universal ‘yea,’ to the all-embracing acceptance of being, including the negative relation as well as that which is negated” (271).

The vision of the world as an organic whole was not restricted to the religious Russian philosophers. Naturalists such as V. Karpov and K. Starynkevich saw each organism as connected to a whole. In analyzing a beehive, a forest, or a marsh, these thinkers viewed all life as part of an organic unity on earth stretching even into the cosmos (330). Other organicist visions were proposed by Gustav G. Shpet and Alexey F. Losev, who combined Hegelian and Husserlian insights to defend dialectical phenomenology and philosophical realism (Zenkovsky 1953, 834).

RUSSIAN MARXISM

Most significant of all the nonreligious organicist conceptions however, was Russian Marxism.³⁰ The Russian Marxist intellectual movement drew from the messianic tradition of the Slavophiles, putting forth a secularized, proletarianized version of sobornost’.³¹ This ideological amalgam had inherent problems of internal consistency but it did not depart from any of the essential organicist and antidualist characteristics of Russian philosophy.

Part of the reason for the fundamental agreement of Marxism with its Russian counterparts is their common philosophical roots. Marx, like many Russian thinkers, was influenced by Leibniz, Spinoza, and Hegel. Bertell Ollman (1993) argues that these thinkers shared a belief “that the relations that come together to make up the whole get expressed in what are taken to be its parts. Each part is viewed as incorporating in what it is all its relations with other parts up to and including everything that comes into the whole” (35). Leibniz, Spinoza, and Hegel had differing conceptions of the parts. For Leibniz, the parts were monads. For Spinoza, the parts were modes. For Hegel, the parts were ideas. But the logical form of the relation between the parts and the whole was the same (ibid.).

Marx inherited this dialectical tradition. But he transcended the tendency to dissolve all things into their relations. As Sidney Hook observes, Hegel had embraced a strict organicity, in which “all of existence becomes relevant in considering the nature of any part of it.” Thus, “piecemeal knowledge is impossible; since if everything must be known before anything can be known, nothing can be adequately known” (Hook [1936] 1950, 53). For Hegel, Truth is indeed the Whole; error emerges in the one-sided abstraction of any single part from the totality.

Although Marx accepted the spirit of Hegel’s dictum, he departed from strict organicity in several significant ways. Marx argued that no whole could be studied from a synoptic vantage point. The totality is studied through the abstracted parts. Marx varied the scope of his abstractions by altering the relational units, the perspective, and the level of generality. By focusing on the mutual determination of structure and function, Marx concretized knowledge of the whole. As Ollman (1979) argues, Marx refused to separate “events from their conditions, people from their real alternatives and human potential, social problems from one another, and the present from the past and the future” (126). Marx viewed each part of the totality as a cluster of relations. Each part is in organic conjunction with every other part such that each expresses the sum of its interrelations. The conditions of each thing’s existence are taken to be part of what it is (Ollman 1976, 15–16). Ollman (1993) explains further that the Marxian dialectic replaces “the common sense notion of ‘thing,’ as something which has a history and has external connections to other things, with notions of ‘process,’ which contains its history and possible futures, and ‘relation,’ which contains as part of what it is its ties with other relations” (11).

This emphasis on internal relations was equally important to the Russian Marxists. But Marxist scholarship in Russia underwent several transformations. From the earliest moments of the Bolshevik Revolution, Marxism was hardening into a state ideology that legitimated repression and dictatorship. During the Silver Age, however, Marxist thought was being supplemented in a variety of ways. Such thinkers as Berdyaev, Bulgakov, and Struve integrated Marxism with Kantian ethics.³² The Nietzsche-an Marxists explored the provocative synthesis of quasi-individualist and socialist ideas. And Lenin utilized a naive realist epistemology to answer Machian neo-Kantians, as well as more popular revisionist and positivist interpreters of Marx. By the following decade, professional scholars had probed the limited editions of Marx’s Grundrisse, which appeared in the Soviet Union as early as 1939 and 1941 in two successive volumes published by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.³³ Throughout this period, however, the entrenchment of Stalinist dogmatism ultimately quelled all theoretical debate and dissent.

Though Lenin’s writings suffered at times from simplistic diatribe, his influence on Russian Marxism made a significant impact during the Silver Age. Despite Lenin’s failure to develop his realist perspective adequately, his polemics were extremely effective in shaping the character of Marxist ideology.³⁴

Lenin began with a realist ontology. He saw objective conditions as prior to consciousness. He asserted the primacy of the material world and the objectivity of space and time. He wrote in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism that “things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our perceptions, outside of us.” Epistemologically, he adopted a reflection theory of knowledge. He disputed the Kantian distinction between the phenomenon and the noumenal thing-in-itself. “The only difference,” in Lenin’s view, “is between what is known and what is not known.”³⁵

Like Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, Lenin rejected dualism, since it failed to grasp the internal relatedness of mind and matter. Lenin recognized the supreme importance of the Hegelian dialectic to Marx’s method. His writings feature scathing attacks on subjectivists and empiricists who divorced cognition from the object. He believed that the reduction of the world to pure sense perception led inexorably to a subjectivist, solipsistic idealism. Like Nietzsche, he condemned such empiricism as a philosophy of immaculate perception.³⁶ But Lenin rejected rationalism as equally one-sided, and proposed a resolution of the age-old dichotomies. His attempt at an organic synthesis was entirely within the tradition of Russian philosophy.³⁷

The appeal of Russian Marxism, however, had little to do with Lenin’s critique of dualism. The Russian Marxists had strategically merged Western dialectical categories of explanation with the indigenous concept of sobornost’. They secularized the concept, and aimed not for Oneness in the mystic body of Christ, but for a collective unity that was One with the Proletariat. Evgeny Ivanovich Zamiatin warned that this would lead to the establishment of the One State. Ultimately, the voluntarist sobornost’ had been replaced by the Bolsheviks’ administrative machinery for massive statist repression.

By 1919–20, anti-Bolshevik writings enjoyed limited circulation throughout Russia. One of these works, We, written by Zamiatin,³⁸ depicted a totalitarian society in which peoples’ names were replaced by numbers, and the distinction between public and private life was all but obliterated, except for two hours a day when the “mighty uni-personal organism” was allowed to disintegrate “into separate cells.”³⁹

Each morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the very same minute and the very same second we, in our millions, arise as one. At the very same hour we monomillionedly begin work—and, when we finish it, we do so monomillionedly. And, merging into but one body with multimillioned hands, at the very second designated by The Tables of Hourly Commandments we bring our spoons up to our mouths; at the very same second, likewise, we set out for a walk, or go to an auditorium, or the Hall of Taylor Exercise, or retire to sleep. (177)

The One State forbade romantic love and the free conduct of sexual life, for

isn’t it an absurdity that the State … could allow sexual life without any control whatsoever? Anybody, any time, and as much as one wanted to.… Completely unscientifically, like brutes. And, like brutes, they bred offspring gropingly. Isn’t it laughable—to know horticulture, poultry culture, pisciculture … and yet be unable to reach the last rung of this logical ladder: child culture. (178)

Like Zamiatin, Rand rejected the One State. In the 1930s, having escaped to America, she would author a number of anticollectivist writings of her own, including the “semi-autobiographical” novel, We the Living, and a futuristic novelette called Anthem. These works would portray Rand’s rejection of the intellectual trends during America’s so-called Red Decade, when many writers and artists embraced the promise of collectivism (B. Branden 1986, 95). But Rand’s early works can also be read as a passionate reaction against the dominant philosophic and cultural trends of the Silver Age. Rand would reject the Slavophile and Symbolist denigration of reason and their cultic commitment to the dissolution of self in a collective whole. She would reject the neo-Idealist defense of religion. She would reject Russian Marxism as a legitimating ideology for the newly emerging totalitarian state.

In her rejection of Russian mysticism, altruism, collectivism, and statism, Rand began to identify a philosophic conjunction that was not as apparent to others of her generation. Perhaps this unity was clearer to Rand because she had lived in a laboratory that had enabled her to make such grand inductive generalizations.

But in repudiating these traditions, Rand had absorbed the tendency toward synthesis so prevalent in Russian philosophy. Wherever the young Alissa Rosenbaum had turned, she would have encountered a nondualistic, formal commitment to the dialectic. This mode of inquiry was apparent in Nietzsche’s philosophy, which had influenced the philosophic and cultural movements of the Silver Age. It was also prevalent in the works of the Slavophiles, Solovyov and his successors, the Symbolists, the Russian Marxists, and the neo-Idealists of the religious renaissance. And the most important philosopher of this neo-Idealist tradition was Nicholas Onufrievich Lossky, Rand’s teacher.