Meeting the Soviet Philosophers
Feuer, Lewis S.
I make no claim to being an "area specialist" on the Soviet Union, but for many years I have read the literature on Soviet society and ideology. For several years I attended courses in the...
...No American felt guilty for the advent of the depression...
...But with one glance they had been warned: Do not ask about this man...
...They do not share the guilt which haunts the older generation, almost universally involved in different degrees in Stalin's guilt...
...Then I went on to develop my "law of the spectrum," the emergence of diverse philosophies in the Soviet Union, with critical realists in the Russell fashion, positivists, mathematical logicians opposed to the dialecticians, and those who emphasized "practice" indistinguishable from American pragmatists...
...for "objectively" Dewey was a supporter of imperialism...
...This was a situation, he argued, common to all industrial countries...
...The problem has to be dealt with objectively," they said...
...I spoke of the generational differences among American philosophers—how the older philosophers were idealist, realist, or pragmatist, the middle-aged ones naturalist or positivist, and the younger ones, existentialist or ordinary linguisticians, and suggested that under normal conditions such a spectrum of philosophies would manifest itself in the Soviet Union, that this was typical of societies where the spectrum was not deflected by external pressure...
...that his essay on savage mind in 1902 had been directed against racist imperialism in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War...
...Confronted by a series of ambiguities in "practice," they propose vague solutions which are remarkably akin to Dewey's logic...
...The chairman nodded assent...
...But Professor Sokolov remained adamant...
...There was a round of pleased laughter from the younger side of the room...
...For the "cult" confronts Soviet ideology with what we might call its "Great Contradiction...
...The problem of the "cult of personality" virtually haunts Soviet social science and philosophy...
...It was amazing...
...What impressed me most was how even in such an intelligent circle the capacity for thinking in terms of political alternatives and concrete reforms has been almost extinguished...
...Its use is part of the continuing repression in the Soviet Union of the facts of Stalinism...
...The chairman proposed another meeting but I said I was leaving shortly, and would summarize briefly what I had to say concerning their philosophical work...
...that he had been personally invited by Krupskaya, presumably on Lenin's behalf, to help in reorganizing Soviet education...
...all Soviet philosophers were dialectical materialists...
...A successful outcome will mean a Renaissance of Soviet Thought, as the burden of guilt is lifted from people's minds...
...the Americans are regarded as proponents of common sense, as relatively superficial...
...The sense of a continuing and supporting tradition of philosophical discussion is absent...
...The machine-bureaucrats rule, not the intellectuals...
...The person who makes a mistake is always credited with motives that are sound...
...The historicists quote the second Preface to Marx's Capital, whereas the antihistoricists cite Marx's letter to Mikhailovsky and Engels' letters on historical materialism...
...Next to taking refuge in one's specialty, the most frequent answer I got was that the explanation for the cult of personality was well-known, inasmuch as it was based on Stalin's mistakes...
...The younger sociologists have as quietly as possible discarded the dialectical methodology...
...in that case, he finds himself a critic of the Soviet social system...
...What is scientific is moral, and what is moral is scientific...
...Second, I had found not a single article or book on anti-Semitism...
...therefore no one feared the analysis of its causes...
...I encountered this projection many times...
...You yourselves," I said, "have since then come to recognize that with regard to these trials Dewey was right and Stalin was wrong...
...They find German existentialist philosophy more interesting than American thought, and feel themselves closer in spirit to the Germans than to the Americans...
...each social system had its specific sociological laws, but a law common to diverse social systems was out of the question...
...At the University of California, several hundred thousand dollars were being spent in such an investigation...
...No Soviet sociologist, however, had shown any readiness to study the phenomena of conflict...
...The official replied with simple, straightforward bureaucratism, "You are wrong," he said...
...He replied, after a moment's thought, that no such history of Soviet philosophy existed...
...Soviet ideologists still shrink from the serious study of Freud...
...the cost of its repression is the destruction of their sincerity...
...Not the voting of the uneducated and ignorant, but the rule of the scientists, that is the best...
...I said that no decisions were made at an international philosophical conference...
...The audience consisted largely of the Institute's Section on Bourgeois Philosophy and Sociology...
...The child wanted to solve the problem, but its skill with numbers was inadequate...
...As one professor observed: "They are interested in Marx when he was not yet a Marxist...
...Another man, however, disagreed...
...that their influence was small, he was extremely skeptical, and said that after all President Kennedy was a Catholic, and that consequently, the importance of Catholic ideology must have increased...
...Perhaps we can have some young philosophers accompany them, but above all we need experienced men who can make decisions...
...They are "protiv" existentialism, "protiv" pragmatism, "protiv" realism, "protiv" abstractionism, "protiv" whatever emanates from the bourgeois world...
...Their ignorance of the details of international political debate was astonishing...
...I looked at the audience...
...The primary task of Soviet philosophers, in the government's eyes, is to serve as officers of ideological warfare against the West and against "ideological coexistence...
...A child does an arithmetical problem for homework...
...Someone interrupted and said they have had other things to do...
...Both the scientific realists and the existentialists are together in one camp as "anti-dogmatists...
...I had in the course of my travels, however, found ample evidence of such a conflict...
...The Institute of Philosophy should be renamed more accurately the Institute of Ideological Warfare...
...I could read those speeches too...
...Soviet social science seemed to me to have failed to confront four important problems: First, there was no research on the conflict of gen erations...
...One day I asked an Institute official which Soviet philosophers were going to attend the forthcoming International Philosophical Congress in Mexico...
...The official conception of philosophy as ideology makes it difficult for the ideologists to understand the nature of American philosophy and society...
...No doubt the book Science at the Crossroads was known to both the chairman and interpreter...
...he quoted from an American book which said that Dewey had become anti-communist long before it was fashionable to be so...
...From what social classes had they come...
...I mentioned to him that I had sent a copy of my book to Premier Ben-Gurion of Israel who had then responded with a friendly appreciative letter...
...Who were the accusers...
...But questions such as why there had been a recrudescence of anti-Semitism would have to be dealt with scientifically...
...But what then of Marx's attack on the Malthusian notions as arising from specific capitalist conditions...
...I would compare their sociological studies with work in America...
...The most frequent answer I got was "that is not my problem...
...references to their writings are to be avoided by the prudent Soviet scholar...
...Questioned, I replied that the letters of Eleanor Marx, the daughter who had killed herself, showed there was a deepseated unhappiness in the family, and that one factor had probably been the birth of an illegitimate son to Marx by the maid of the household, Helene Demuth...
...I was told this was an unsound approach "because on this level an antinomy arises between ethical and material motives...
...its opening essay was by the still unrehabilitated Nikolai Bukharin, and Hessen himself evidently vanished during the Stalinist era...
...But the chairman cautioned everybody to remember that I was giving my "personal opinions," and that they should bear in mind that Dewey had supported Trotsky, and that Trotsky had been trying to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union...
...Another scholar who has turned from contemporary philosophy to ancient Asian thought in order to escape ideological pressures told me he would probably have to compromise by studying the philosophy of Nehru...
...Thereby the long paragraph on the dialectical method in Marx's second Preface to Capital is rescinded...
...This struck me as tantamount to admitting that the philosophical life of his country was so uninteresting that it didn't deserve to be written...
...The pragmatists like to recite Marx's Theses on Feuerbach...
...They do not, however, think highly of the philosophical merits of the existentialists, who in their opinion have not yet broken with the Hegelian concept that contradictions can exist in reality...
...The scientific realists and the existentialists regard each other as "socially progressive" because both oppose the dogmatic Stalinists...
...I observed that he was engaged in a revisionist enterprise, for according to the dialectical standpoint there should be a capitalist law of population and a socialist law, but not one common to all industrial societies, socialist or capitalist...
...why bother writing a history of commentaries and explications of the Truth which was already written clearly enough by Marx and Lenin...
...that was why they avoided discussing the causes of Stalinism...
...Questions on my findings and method followed, and then the floor was taken by the Soviet authority on American pragmatism, Yuri Melvil...
...A young member of the editorial board of Voprosy Filosofai, for instance, knows all about alienation in bourgeois society, and can discourse at length on how Jaspers and Freud show the bankruptcy of their society, but when I asked him for his explanation of the Stalinist era he took refuge in: "I am not a specialist in this field...
...this was a subject for detailed investigation...
...I replied that in America the depression was unpleasant, but that we analyzed and discussed its causes...
...They project the Soviet model on American thought, and regard American philosophy as a kind of official ideology akin to their own...
...The restless searching for a new philosophy manifests itself in the purely voluntary students' discussion groups which have come into existence in the universities...
...The Section on Bourgeois Philosophy and Sociology, for instance, instructs each research worker to prepare an authoritative refutation of some bourgeois representative...
...Their longing for a single free students' magazine in the Soviet Union was patent...
...On the day in question, however, although the younger researchers were present, the discussion was monopolized by older ideologists, who had rarely participated in our previous meetings...
...Heads were shaken in vigorous disagreement...
...The Soviet existentialists are concerned with problems of freedom and ethics which were banished from the consciousness in the Stalinist era...
...At the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, I gave five lectures to the research workers, ranging in number from twenty to fifty...
...Similarly, in Moscow, one investigator has found a decline in the average size of the urban family which evidently brings it even lower than the comparable American figure...
...A lecturer at the Institute for International Relations pursues his labors by reading the critiques of America by Americans, and rewriting them in the cliches of the decline of capitalist society...
...I was promptly challenged at that meeting and at subsequent discussions to apply these "laws" to Soviet philosophy...
...The point, of course, is that a terrible guilt is felt about Stalinism...
...a mistake is a reminder of human fallibility...
...it does not proceed from vicious motive...
...Their names are still enveloped in the collective repression of Soviet memory...
...I had asked upwards of 150 sociologists and philosophers whether any one of them was studying the cult of personality, and without exception they had all replied: "That is not my problem...
...My first lecture was on "The Development of Dewey's Pragmatism...
...So the meeting began...
...I suggested this subject because I thought it would enable me to raise directly what I regarded as shortcomings and misstatements in the studies by Soviet ideologists of American philosophy...
...In the last few minutes of the lecture, I considered the allegation which I found in Soviet books that Dewey was the philosopher of American imperialism...
...it is around this problem that the future of Soviet thought will be determined...
...We began one evening with a discussion of the theory that the intellectuals were the ruling class in the Soviet Union...
...In that case he would have to have recourse to psychoanalytical concepts...
...the younger generation observes their evasions...
...What is a "mistake," an oshibka...
...There were recent occurrences at Moscow State University into which I would not enter...
...The Germans are said to be deeper, to raise at least the problems of existence though they cannot solve them...
...I prevailed on the chairman to allow me a few minutes to reply (it is the custom of the Communist party to allow its spokesman the last word...
...I said that on my way to Moscow I had visited the International Institute of Social History to confirm the existence of documentary evidence on this matter, and had been informed the evidence was incontrovertible...
...I met a smiling young author who presented me with a passionate pamphlet "protiv" Sidney Hook...
...France, for example, with its "hotel families" was in a similar position...
...Soviet thought, I said, was at the crossroads...
...At any rate, he supports the view that a general pattern with similar birth control practices is emerging in all industrial countries, socialist as well as capitalist...
...I asked one young philosopher, the author of a work on English intuitionist ethics, if he could give me the title of a good history of Soviet philosophy...
...Where Marxist professors in Japan would speak freely of their different tendencies, among Soviet professors there was a conditioned preliminary response to profess a unanimous consensus in dialectical materialism, even when their differences were patently straining the consensus into a dissensus, and tearing the ideological garments at the seams...
...The young philosophers in the audience listened intently, and did not challenge these observations...
...I said I hoped the Academy would send some of the young philosophers who were really interested in discussion with Western and Asian scholars, and whose own thinking was alive...
...he would like to call it, he said wistfully, Man and Movement, but its title will be English and American Philosophy in the Epoch of Imperialism...
...The official insisted, however, that it would be a worthwhile occasion especially for the audience which, he said, would be made up of the young researchers with whom I had had individual discussions several times...
...There is a tacit understanding within them that their discussions are sincere and private, and not to be repeated to the authorities...
...I said that from his first political writings, Dewey had been a critic of all imperialist ideology...
...This fact of their political unity is perhaps an item of evidence against the historical-materialist theory of ideas, since, on the face of it, their philosophical differences correspond to no differences in politics, and this indeed may be the beginning of philosophy and the end of ideology in the Soviet Union...
...For several years I attended courses in the Russian language, and acquired a stuttering knowledge...
...No Soviet philosopher, of course, can decide simply on his own...
...He too is facile in depicting the common man's alienation in Western society, but when asked about the Stalinist era and present-day alienation he will just pass the former over with an unctuous phrase of how regrettably bad it was, and then go on to a glib misdescription of an all-contented Soviet citizenry...
...he would find himself becoming a Freudian despite himself, and raising such problems, furthermore, as the factors which made the Communist Party so sado-masochist in its psychology that it collaborated in and glorified Stalin's rule during all that time...
...I spoke of the interest in Freud, despite the great difficulty in securing his books...
...One could meet readily in Japan, for instance, with a variety of factions in the Zengakuren, but in the Soviet Union my meetings with free student circles had to be arranged with caution...
...Dewey, he asserted, was the philosopher of American imperialism, and all the facts I had adduced were trivial...
...When I replied 1 Cf...
...In America, I added, where I believed there was much less anti-Semitism than in the Soviet Union, the problem was nonetheless studied extensively...
...I discussed my characterization of their philosophical attitude as "protivism," and the development of "Soviet existentialism...
...They wanted to know all about the American beatniks, with whose anti-organization and anti-establishment attitudes some of them clearly felt a kinship...
...That is not true," said one of them...
...the exception, a professor of sociology, had been in the country too short a time to have learned very much of what was going on...
...Reprinted with permission of author and publisher from Survey, April 1964...
...I hoped they would not send a delegation dominated by some of those familiar official figures who had already made their appearance at the International Sociological Congress...
...The scientific philosophers are (what 1 called) "scientific realists," that is, their "materialism" is simply a belief in the reality of the physical world...
...it would be revisionism, he said, to assert that history knows no progress, or to deny that existence determines consciousness, but it was not revisionist to ascertain a general law by means of concrete researches...
...But I had talked with scholars and students in institutes and universities in a series of "interview-dialogues," the oldest philosophical method in the world...
...The existentialists quote from the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts...
...Professor Kharchev at Leningrad, for instance, found that one-fourth of the married couples were living under "abnormal housing conditions...
...I hey are intrigued by the concepts of "structure" and "isomorphism," and talk very much in Russell's terms about how only the structure of the physical world can be known...
...I encountered an amusing instance of protivism in the person of Professor Sokolov of Moscow State University...
...Another continued in the same vein: "I think the intellectuals should rule...
...large numbers were involved in its operations, and that is why the phenomenon is repressed by making Stalin the bearer of all that was rotten in themselves, and mitigating it all with the mild, de-emotionalized word, oshibki...
...Theirs is a "delegation," not a group of individual scholars who have decided entirely on their own to attend and who speak for themselves only...
...these were the picked Soviet research workers on Western thought, and all had to acquiesce in this nonsense...
...I went to Tashkent to talk with the Institute of Philosophy and Law in Uzbekistan, and to Tbilisi, for long discussions with scholars at the Georgian Institute of Philosophy...
...this was using "objectively" in an unverifiable sense to conform to dogmatic preconceptions...
...they are concerned with the quality of individual life rather than with the tactics of ideological class struggle...
...I answered it was an article by the Soviet scholar, B. Hessen, "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia," published in 1931 in a book called...
...At Leningrad, I inquired into the projects of the hard-working sociologists of the Social Research Laboratory...
...How could Ben-Gurion have written you a friendly letter...
...Finally, I said that if I had a "last message," it was that Soviet thought now needed someone who would do for it what John Stuart Mill did for England and Ralph Waldo Emerson for America—to emphasize not "class," not "people," but the importance of the individual...
...The discussion which followed showed how hard the Soviet ideological stance makes it for them to approach the history of ideas in an empirical spirit...
...I could not tell how much anti-Semitism there was...
...I assured him that despite President Kennedy's election, I did not know a single colleague who read the periodicals he had named, that the fact that the President was a Catholic had in no way affected philosophical teaching in the United States, and that, if anything, I felt that Kennedy's election had strengthened the liberal rather than the ideological side of Catholicism...
...I was asked, now that my travels in the Soviet Union were over, to give a last report on my impressions of their philosophy and sociology, and had been reluctant to do so...
...In the Soviet Union, the counterpart exists for every philosophical movement in Western Europe and America...
...Then the habit of political discussion might re-awaken among the Soviet people, and they would begin to emerge more fully from their Stalinist torpor...
...At Leningrad University, at an open meeting of the Communist organization of the Philological Faculty, students had challenged and ridiculed the apology which the editor of Neva tried to present for the new party line against abstract art...
...I then spoke of the lack of any sociological article or book analyzing the "cult of personality...
...I then tried to show how the history of American philosophy did not confirm the Marxist formula that materialism was the progressive philosophy, and idealism the reactionary...
...When I noted that this was the precise point—that they preferred the Marx who was not a Marxist—he retorted: "They will evolve towards Marxism...
...When a person can prove something, he doesn't need illegal methods...
...In America we had several studies under way on student movements...
...I said that in America we devoted much time to the sociology of political leadership...
...In reply to a question, I said that I disagreed with a seminal Marxist essay in this field...
...The dogmatists," said a young philosopher, "are the previous people, the immoral ones, who fear that logical meth ods will unmask their foolish doctrines...
...The Soviet delegation is organized hierarchically with a chain of command...
...They are engaged in catching up with problems and readings which were central in American philosophy thirty-five years ago...
...Clearly, silence about the destroyed generation of Soviet thinkers is still regarded as judicious...
...In any normal gathering, the scholars would have been eager to get the exact reference to an important, neglected essay of one of their own countrymen...
...According to Marx, there were no universal laws of social science...
...How often I heard that self-exonerating phrase about the oshibki of Stalin...
...In the Soviet Union, however, although they evidently knew all about racial problems in Birmingham and imperialism in Asia and Africa, they could produce no scientific study of the most important recent phenomenon of political sociology in their own country...
...The scientific realists make their appeal to Lenin's Materialism and EmpirioCriticism...
...The Soviet bureaucratic ideologists, moreover, evaluate their participation in international philosophical and sociological meetings in strict protivist terms...
...Although a scientist himself, he said he remained a communist, that it was a question of liberalizing the system—allowing foreign papers, journals and statistics to circulate so they could make meaningful comparisons...
...I explained to the Institute official that were I to speak, much that I would have to say would be unpleasant, and that perhaps it would be better if such a last report were omitted...
...I continued and said they had not studied the social consequences of tying their moral education to historical models—Lenin's picture as a hunter in a rifleshop, Lenin playing chess for the chess club, Lenin with children telling them: "study, study, and study"—and present Marx's character as the model for family life...
...I meant a sociological analysis: How many victims had there been, year by year...
...I said they should study, too, what happened to the children of the people who were sent to Stalin's camps...
...The Soviet sociologists, under the pressure of their actual researches, have found themselves obliged to drop this dialectical outlook...
...The questioner was puzzled...
...How did the accusers profit by the accusations...
...The organs of independent political reasoning have atrophied in the Soviet Union from compulsory disuse...
...It holds meetings at which tactics are determined...
...1 They are thus in a " position to argue that a universal law and pattern of population common to both socialist and capitalist countries does not contravene their philosophy...
...Your book is against (protiv) the Judaistical interpretation of Spinoza...
...For there is a callousness in equating the millions of destroyed lives with a child's spelling mistakes through the use of the same word...
...The Soviet Academy, however, regards such congresses as international ideological skirmishes in which tactical decisions have to be made on the spot...
...Neo-dialecticians prefer to quote from Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks...
...I said I didn't mean by a scientific analysis their repeating Khrushchev's phrase about the mistakes (oshibki) of Stalin...
...The scientific realist group is on friendly political terms with the Soviet existentialists, that is they regard them as "moral people...
...When will the revolt against canonical texts begin...
...Our delegation must be made up of men who can make decisions...
...He was a protivist only when engaged in the ceremonial ritualistic exorcism of some name which was not really a name but an intimation of an unreal bourgeois ghost...
...The logic of protivism dictated that the Israeli Premier should have taken a stand against my book...
...I said Marx would never have concealed such documents...
...I pointed out what a "dogmatic Marxist" he was, for his dogmatism was such that no set of facts could possibly move him from his belief that Dewey "objectively" was a philosopher of imperialism...
...In the first place, they prefer to study the humanistic Marx of the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts, the Marx of the concept of alienation...
...It struck me that the most significant practicable reform in the Soviet Union today would be a simple one—to begin the publication in the newspapers of the differences of opinion in the Central Committee, or to start the regular publication of a Central Committee Record like our Congressional Record...
...I said that though they criticized American culture, they did not study their own culture as the Americans did theirs...
...The existentialists and scientific realists do not, of course, exhaust the modes of philosophy found among young Soviet thinkers...
...The names in question, however, were with one exception those of American communists or fellow-travellers, who, I suggested, had probably told their hosts what the latter would like to hear...
...he said...
...I tried next to consider the sociological study of Soviet mass culture...
...What characterizes the Soviet existentialists...
...Not a word, not a question about the Soviet scholar to whom I had referred...
...I had gone to the Institute to confirm this report, and spoken with its secretary...
...it is the most characteristic word in Soviet philosophical essays...
...that he had lived in China for two years and had witnessed the May Fourth movement in 1919, and had written a series of remarkable articles defending its anti-imperialist program...
...They are concerned with clarifying such an ambiguous concept as "practice...
...Most of all, I learned from discussions with Soviet philosophers who raised objections and questions at my lectures...
...A defeat will mean the repartition of guilt among the younger people, and another Time of Torpor...
...and there were several more heated interludes...
...everybody worked within the framework of Marxist philosophy...
...My hope in going to the Soviet Union was to do what I had once done in Japan—namely, to engage in discussions with its philosophers, sociologists, and students, to speak with them while their doubts and searchings had not yet been blue-pencilled out of existence by editorial committees, administrators, and bureaucrats...
...One Soviet sociologist in Tbilisi said that when something unpleasant has occurred, we prefer to avoid speaking about it...
...Or, on the other hand, he can attribute the "cult" phenomena to the effects of Stalin's paranoid personality, his persecution complex, his fears, his irrationality...
...There was no study extant of the appeal, for instance, of American jazz to their youth...
...This conception of philosophy as ideological warfare enforces on its practitioners a spirit which we might call "protivism...
...The only Marxian joke I ever heard at the Institute...
...They are immoral," he replied, "in their daily practice...
...I do not know his name...
...I chose this subject because I wanted to emphasize the tremendous variation in American philosophies, the "law of the spectrum," I called it, according to which the distribution of philosophies was primarily the outcome of differences in individual temperament, and the "law of the wings," in accordance with which every philosophical movement, whether pragmatism, idealism, or materialism, tended to evolve into right, left and center wings...
...During four and a half months, I talked with upwards of a hundred and fifty Soviet philosophers and social scientists, sometimes fox an hour, sometimes for five hours...
...All the varieties of dialectical materialism in the Soviet Union fasten on different texts of Marx, Engels, and Lenin for their support...
...It is all thoroughly protivist, but the consequence is that the abler Soviet thinkers remain at home while the bureaucrats make jaunts abroad...
...that, finally, the Soviet attacks on Dewey as an imperialist philosopher had begun only in the midthirties when Dewey criticized the Moscow trials and purges...
...They tend to reject Engels' theory of sensation as a "reflection" of the world, and find this to be "mirror-magic...
...I was presenting material which was published the following month in a book, The Scientific Intellectual...
...They take the basic meaning of "reflection" to be "isomorphism...
...He said they regarded me as a friend, and that the Institute had had such talks in the past from visiting Americans, whom he named...
...My third lecture was on "Contemporary American Thought...
...To their great good fortune, the young Soviet demographers have managed to find a canonical text, a letter of Engels to Kautsky in 1881, which acknowledges that even communist society may find itself "obliged to regulate the production of human beings," and "to achieve by planning a result which has already been produced spontaneously, without planning, in France and Lower Austria...
...Someone asked to what essay I was referring...
...As Marxists, they hold that the Marxist sociology of revolution is confirmed in "practice," but what does this mean...
...its mood was best described in Turgenev's title, On the Eve...
...Many of those present had to leave at this time for a candidate's examination...
...They denied that there was anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union but I had visited the synagogues of four Soviet cities, and everywhere had been told that the Jews lived in fear...
...This repression of the "subjective" is probably the most basic reason for the antagonism to Freud in the Soviet Union...
...The young philosopher went on to add that a chapter on philosophy during the Lenin period had been prepared for the sixth volume of their collective history of philosophy, but it had been so much criticized that it had never been published...
...When millions of people had been killed and tortured, it was not sociological analysis to refer to it as "oshibki...
...In what way," I asked, "are they immoral...
...A significant group, particularly in the social sciences, is drawn to American pragmatism...
...I looked at the author and looked at the pages, and decided one was alienated from the other...
...One must study the laws of development which determine the shift of intellectuals without reference to their subjective motives which they think determine them...
...These were not illiterates...
...The chairman was quite interested, and one of his colleagues then piped up: "That accords with Marx's saying `Nihil humani a me alienum Auto...
...I said I had once been a Marxist, but that my experience, and philosophical and sociological studies, had persuaded me there were basic limitations to Marxism...
...if you examine the lists of directorships of big enterprises and leading positions, you will find that most of them are held by uneducated men...
...Psychoanalytical ideas are suspect because the Soviet regime wants people to accept all its propaganda on the manifest level, and never to enquire into latent meanings...
...All sorts of intermediary theoretical positions are possible, but every intermediary position would involve an admixture of an acceptance of the totalitarian potentialities of the Soviet system and the crucial role of unconscious, irrational, "Freudian" factors in history...
...I proposed to raise problems to which I did not know the answer, and which I did not know how I would face were I in their place...
...I remarked that in the United States we had several histories of American philosophy...
...A young scholar told me of the book he is writing on the emergent evolutionists...
...They enjoy reading such authors as Berdyaev and Solovyov, and take an interest in Freud...
...The continuing use of oshibki as an explanation for a whole era's distortions is a sign that the mentality of that era persists...
...it makes a mistake...
...I found circles, for instance, studying such works of Bertrand Russell as Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy and the more recent Human Knowledge...
...The older men wish to repress the problem...
...that he had been a critic of American imperialism in Mexico...
...My last talk at the Institute of Philosophy brought forth an outburst of populist bureaucratic denunciation on the part of the Director...
...such "ideologettes" are in preparation against Husserl, Hartmann, Santayana, the German realists, Whitehead, personalism, French Positivism, Gelman neo-Thomism, and Reinhold Niebuhr...
...I was to find that it took a month or more to learn in the Soviet Union what needed only a week in Japan...
...The argument which followed, begun by the chairman calling me "an agent of the cold war," would take too long to tell...
...I make no claim to being an "area specialist" on the Soviet Union, but for many years I have read the literature on Soviet society and ideology...
...The younger generation of Soviet thinkers asks above all for a final reckoning with the ethical and sociological problems of the "cult of personality...
...I replied that Ben-Gurion was keenly interested in Spinoza's philosophy, and that I believed he would appreciate my study for whatever scholarly merit it might have...
...Professor Sokolov was incredulous: "But how can that be...
...The dogmatists continue to insist that pragmatism is a form of subjective idealism, but some younger thinkers are turning to the study of Peirce and Dewey...
...An incident during the discussion of my second lecture on "The Sociology of Science" illustrated vividly the official obliteration of the Soviet philosophical past...
...Professor Kharchev, of course, denied that he was a revisionist...
...In the Soviet Union it was denied that there was any conflict of generations...
...The circle was composed of about twelve young instructors and graduate students...
...They were much interested in hearing also about the all-night vigil in Berkeley after the Soviet resumption of nuclear bomb testing, and about the proliferation of student magazines...
...Dictatorial power, not intellectual agreement, imposes the harness of a planned ideology on recalcitrant temperaments...
...Once I asked whether the motives of intellectuals in the socialist movement were those ascribed to them by the Communist Manifesto...
...Whether it's a biography of Marx, a treatise on Buddhism, or an analysis of American culture, somewhere the Soviet ideologist is called upon by the Institute head, or his section chief, or the party group, or the magazine editors, to sound the keynote of protivism which alone shows that the given work is helping to fulfill the role assigned to philosophy in the seven-year plan...
...For instance, when I lectured on "Contemporary American Thought," one questioner asked me about the influence of such Catholic philosophical journals as the American Ecclesiastical Review, New Scholasticism, and Thought...
...my friendly philosophical correspondence with him violated the "laws" of ideological warfare...
...What varieties of accusations had there been...
...Psychoanalysis threatens the "official face" with the underlying "real face...
...Soviet philosophers and sociologists are vaguely apprehensive that there are problems whose honest study might shake the foundations of their theoretical structure...
...I got to know one such group, and found in it a curious mixture of political idealism and technocratic views, and a yearning for more intellectual freedom...
...The positivist-inclined cite from Anti-Duhring the passages where Engels speaks of the replacement of philosophy by science...
...108-109...
...They say the study of "subjective" motives is futile...
...I believe in technocracy...
...When I first did so, and pointed to the emerging diversity which I had encountered among Soviet philosophers, I was told that a few weeks of discussions were no sufficient basis for such a judgment...
...As the months went by, and the discussions accumulated, it became still more evident to me that a variety of conflicting philosophies is emerging in the Soviet Union, and that they are housed together under the rubric "dialectical materialism" in an unstable equilibrium...
...The word "protiv" means "against...
...that he had visited the Soviet Union in 1928, and written a series of warmly enthusiastic reports concerning the Soviet experiment...
...Thus the dialectical method is being revised out of existence by Soviet methodologists, even as they continue to profess their unswerving loyalty...
...In the Soviet Union, the philosophical views of the head of the government do become those of the universities, and he found it hard to conceive that the religion of the American President was not reflected in the American universities...
...It would be hard to exaggerate the degree to which the Stalinist era extirpated original philosophy and social science, and how its effects still persist...
...Or a child makes a mistake in its spell ing...
...if planned ideology was eliminated, one might expect a flowering of these diverse philosophical trends...
...This protivism ramifies throughout Soviet ideology in manifold ways —choice of titles of books, choice of subjects, choice of arguments...
...Transcendentalism, for instance, was the philosophy of the most radical group of reformers in American history—the New Englanders, who, before the Civil War, dedicated themselves to socialist and abolitionist movements...
...The reason, he said, was simple: they had no need of one because, unlike America, they had no different schools of ideas...
...they try to suppress their enemies administratively...
...Thus, the very use of oshibka implies that Stalin was trying to do the right thing...
...The language of protivism, militant, hortatory, embattled, finally becomes a meaningless literary convention...
...I asked almost all the 150 scholars I interviewed whether he or she was in any way concerned with the sociological and philosophical problems arising from the "cult" phenomena...
...The chairman looked at my interpreter, an unspoken message seemed to flash between them, and the interpreter interrupted me: "We do not know anything of the author...
...he has to be chosen by the Academy of Sciences, and only after having been thus chosen is he allowed to receive the customary invitation and announcement which individual scholars receive, as a matter of course, all over the world...
...I had been told that historians at the Marxism-Leninism Institute were preparing the publication of the documents on the "cult" period...
...Among the young philosophers, I found chiefly three trends: scientific realism, existentialism, and pragmatism...
...There is not a large collection of revolutions which would give meaning to probability-frequencies as the verificational basis for their assertions...
...Marx and Engels on Malthus (London, 1958), pp...
...He told me emphatically they have no plans whatsoever for such a publication...
...Neverthe less, even within the framework of the mandatory creed, one discerns the workings of the law of the spectrum...
...He had reviewed my book on Spinoza recently in Voprosy Filosofai on the whole favorably, while regretting my lapses into "Freudo-positivism...
...On the one hand, the Soviet ideologist can remain loyal to historical materialism, and explain the Stalinist superstructure in terms of the underlying economic foundation...
Vol. 12 • January 1965 • No. 1
