Contemporary Yugoslavian Philosophy

Abstract

After World War II, Yugoslavian philosophy started from scratch. There had been hardly any important philosophical tradition in Yugoslavia. This, of course, does not mean that there had been no teaching of philosophy at the universities. However, it had been mainly imported philosophy, imported predominantly from Germany and France. It is important to keep in mind that Marxism had at that time considerable influence upon a portion of the students; but that influence used to come mainly from outside the universities and, as a rule, not from the teachers. A lot of students who then accepted Marxism played a very important role in the revolution of 1941-45. In the twenty-year postwar period, Yugoslavian philosophy has been predominantly Marxist. That is why I am going to concentrate exclusively upon contemporary Yugoslavian Marxist philosophy. In my opinion, four different periods, and at the same time four different orientations, can be recognized in its development up to now. Needless to say, there exist no clearcut lines between these phases. The small amount of professional philopophy we had immediately after the war was mainly under the influence of Russian Marxism. As is well known, it was not in many respects an original but a Stalinized Marxism. The break of Yugoslavia with Stalin and the Informbureau in 1948 gave impetus to the process of gradual liberation from Stalinist dogmatism. This is the main characteristic of the second phase in Yugoslavian postwar philosophy. This process of liberation from Stalinism was completed in four to five years. At the same time, an effort began to turn to original Marx, who was interpreted as a humanistic philosopher interested mainly in problems such as alienation, freedom, and the place of the individual in society. That time of back to was simultaneously the period of work on most general philosophical, especially humanistic, categories, but with hardly any critical application to the concrete social conditions. I should add that at that time there was too much preoccupation with Marx's texts. Around 1960 there began a period of alXnost non-dogmatism, even in relation to Marx himself. I say almost complete because sometimes too much attention is still paid to what Marx wrote. Whenever they meet a problem, some Yugoslavian philosophers first of all try to see what Marx said about it. And, of course, it may happen that Marx said nothing, or if he said something it could be of small relevance to our time. Thus it is not pointless in Yugoslavian philosophy to insist that Marxists should not make of Marx a barrier against recognizing and solving contemporary human problems. The fourth phase is being characterized also by the application of humanistic categories to the concrete social reality in Yugoslavia. They are taken as criteria of philosophical criticism of the society. Another characteristic of the relatively recent development is the great opening toward the other philosophical orientations. It is generally thought that lots of things could and should be accepted from them. As a result, the influence, on the one hand, of the analytical movement and, on the other hand, of the phenomenological-