근대 러시아 지식장과 역사철학 논쟁: 서구주의 비평가의 내면적 초상으로부터 = The Knowledge-Field and the Debates of Historical Philosophy in Modern Russia: From the Inner Portrait of the Westernist Critic

Abstract

This article aims to shed light on the situation of the knowledge-field in modern Russia, especially on the debates of historical philosophy between Westernizers and Slavophiles in that period of history. According to Foucault, the knowledge-field is formulated with the propositions and thesis, composed mainly of semantic concepts that have been believed as “knowledge” in certain communities. “Discourse” means that there are people who believe in some kind of an absolute or stable truth that can be proved in linguistic forms. From this, the representational space appears in a particular period of history, and we can find its extraordinary cases in the debates between Westernizers and Slavophiles in nineteenth-century Russia. The Slavophile philosophers argue that Russia’s own way is very different from that of modern Europe, because Russians have some special traditions with which they could overcome the Western historical errors. Ironically, these kinds of beliefs on their own historical vocation turned out to be influenced by the German idealist philosopher Georg Hegel. Vissarion Belinskij, a representative Westernist literary critic, was also deeply impressed by Hegel, but he believed that Russia’s future was located in the more accelerative Westernization of Russia. So-called “debates on historical philosophy” were some sort of critical touchstones, which illuminate how the modern knowledge-field works in concrete historical situations. This is the reason why we chose the case of Belinskij, the Westernist literary critic to survey the structures and the functions of the knowledge-field in modern Russia.