Soviet Scholasticism

The present work is a study of the method of contemporary Soviet philosophy. By "Soviet philosophy" we mean philosophy as published in the Soviet Union. For practical purposes we have limited our attention to Soviet sources in Russian in spite of the fact that Soviet philosophical works are also published in other languages (see B 2029(21)(38». The term "method" is taken in the sense usual in Western books on methodology .1 In view of the content of the first chapter it will be useful to explain the last term a little more fully. By method we mean a procedure and it is obvious that the principles according to which a procedure is carried out are rules, i.e. imperatives, which tell us not what is but what should be done. Such imperatives mayor may not be connected with and founded on certain descriptive statements (the fact that every rule of formal logic is based on a corresponding law has been well-known since Husserl's "Logische Unter suchungen" and is generally accepted in contemporary logic), but such a foundation is irrelevant to a methodological study. The object of such a study is to find out what these rules are, why they are accepted and how they are inter-connected and applied. This is how methodology - the science of method - is conceived in Western treatises on the subject and this is also the standpoint assumed here.

This book offers a complete survey of contemporary Soviet theory of knowledge. It is by no means meant to replace De Vries' excellent treatise on the same subject. Since De Vries depended mainly on the 'classics of Marxism' and the few contemporary Soviet works which were available in German translation, his account is at best an in troduction to the contemporary period. In a sense this book is com plementary to his: he presents the doctrines of the classics and criticizes them, this book recounts what came after and what is going on now. Epistemology and theory of knowledge are taken here as equivalent terms, representing the Soviet gnose%gija and teorija poznanija. No attempt to justify the existence of such a philosophical discipline will be attempted here. Even outside of this question of the legitimacy of epistemo logy, it is not easy to delimit the domain of its purvey. We have, therefore, taken it in a wider rather than narrow sense. This means that some ques tions of logic and psychology have been taken up - to the extent that they overlap with the field of philosophical consideration of knowledge.

Early in 1958 a number of research projects on Soviet philosophy were started at the Institute of East-European Studies at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) under the direction of the undersigned. At present, they are all completed or nearly so and their results are described in 18 different volumes. In spite of the fact that all of them have been already published or soon will be (mostly in German), it has been thought worthwhile to present their main conclusions in the form of short English reports. This book contains in the main these reports. Only the two programmatic papers (my own and that of Dr. Buchholz) and the study of Dr. Dahm are not direct results of the above-mentioned projects. But it will be clear to everyone that they, too, are closely connected with the subject envisaged and are written from a similar point of view. It will, perhaps, be convenient to briefly formulate this standpoint. All the writings included here are concerned with recent (i. e. mainly post Stalinist) developments in Soviet philosophy, where "Soviet" is taken in the wide meaning of the word, covering also Marxism-Leninism in Communist countries other than the Soviet Union. All the authors started with the assumption that there are interesting aspects to these more recent developments. There was also a common assumption that only specialized work on first-hand sources can be of relevance in this field.

`Scientific history of philosophy' was one of the professional branches of Soviet philosophy, and a place where philosophical culture was preserved in an often hostile environment. Situated between the ideological exigencies of the Soviet system with its Marxist-Leninist `theoretical foundation' and the need for an objective account of philosophy's past, Soviet history of philosophy displays the characteristic features of Soviet philosophy as a whole, including a forceful reappearance of its Hegelian background. This book is the only Western monograph on this important part of Soviet philosophy, thus filling the last main gap in Western `Philosophical Sovietology'. At the same time, it offers the first survey of Soviet philosophy after the disappearance of the Soviet system itself, embarking on an historical and meta-philosophical investigation of Soviet philosophical culture. The book will be of interest to students of Soviet and Russian philosophy, historians of philosophy and specialists in Soviet studies.

This book offers a critical outline of the sources of the history, of the spirit and of the doctrines of present-day Soviet Russian Dialectical Materialism ('Diamat'), i.e. of the philosophical foundations of Marxism Leninism. It is scarcely necessary to stress the usefulness of a short outline of this kind, as Russian sources are not easily accessible in the West and as it is of considerable interest to know the doctrines which make up the faith of the Communists* in all countries. The material for this book was first made public in a series of lectures at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), first in French in the summer term of 1949, later in English at the Summer School in the same year. The French text, slightly expanded, was translated into German by Miss M. Hoerkens, Dipl. rer. pol. Various imperfections in the wording of the text and in the bibliography can be explained by the process of formation of this book. The author hopes that such imperfections will not prove disturbing.

The nrst of the people to be thanked for their help during the composition of this work is Professor I.M. Bochenski, under whom I had the good fortune to study for an extended period of time. Without his help, it is doubtful that this work would have been writt"l1 at all. Among the other professors who helped along the way, I would like to cite in particular Professors A.F. Utz, M.D. Philippe and N. Luyten of the University of Fribourg. Many friends were present at the birth of the ideas contained in this book. By naming K.G. Ballestrem, T.l. Blakeley and M.F. Gagern, I do not want to slight any of the rest. It was A. Spiekermann in Hollinghofen who saw to it that other preoccupations did not rob me of all the time needed for the study of the subject-matter and to the composition of this treatise. Of particular help in getting sources from the libraries of the world were Miss Lifschitz of the Institute of East-European Studies and Mr. Uldry of the Cantonal Library in Fribourg, Switzerland. Finally, my patient typist, Mrs. Frey in Munster, deserves special mention for her beautiful work.

A survey of the intellectual history of Marxism through its several phases and various national adaptations suggests, for any of at least three reasons, that the attempt to provide a widely acceptable summary of 'Marxist ethics' must be an enterprise with little prospect of success. First, a number of prominent Marxists have insisted that Marxism can have no ethics because its status as a science precludes bias toward, or the assumption of, any particular ethical standpoint. On this view it would be no more reasonable to expect an ethics of Marxism than of any other form of social science. Second, basing themselves on the opposite assumption, an equally prominent assortment of Marxist intellectuals have lamented the absence of a coherently developed Maryist ethics as a deficiency which must be remedied. ! Third, less com monly, Marxism is sometimes alleged to possess no developed ethical theory because it is exclusively committed to advocacy of class egoism on behalf 2 of the proletariat, and is thus rooted in a prudential, not a moral standpoint. The advocacy of proletarian class egoism - or 'revolutionary morality- may, strictly speaking, constitute an ethical standpoint, but it might be regarded as a peculiar waste of time for a convinced and consistent class egoist to develop precise formulations of his ethical views for the sake of convincing an abstract audience of classless and impartial rational observers which does not happen to exist at present.