Hegel in the Mirrors of Soviet Philosophy

Abstract

The attitude to Hegel in Soviet philosophy was contradictory and depended to a considerable extent on ideological conjuncture. Waves of love and hate for Hegel alternated periodically. At different times emphasis was placed on the “revolutionary” method, dialectics, or on the “reactionary” system, the justification of the old world. On one page Lenin admired Hegel’s logical discoveries, on the next page he scolded him with harsh words for idealism, mysticism and “goddikin”. The article draws a parallel between the stylistics of Lenin’s philosophical works and the avant-garde artists and poets who gave a “slap in the face” to public taste. Philosophy becomes in Lenin’s hands the servant of politics; later on, the “principle of partisanship” became the credo of Marxist dogma and the criterion of the truth of philosophical doctrines. The Hegelian wing of Soviet Marxism was formed in the 1920s. The party leader of the “Dialecticians”, Abram Deborin, initiated the publication of Hegel’s Collected Works, which was published with a number of large and small interruptions over the course of 30 years (and the last, 15th volume never saw the light of day). After the defeat of the Deborinites in 1931, Hegel’s popularity gradually declined. However, some original studies coloured by love for Hegel appeared. Vygotsky used Hegelian concepts of “mediation” and “cunning of reason” to create a cultural-historical psychology; he believed that Hegel “walked lamely to the truth”. Mikhail Lifshits regarded Hegel as a “great conservative of mankind”, and Georg Lukács, who came to the Soviet Union, wrote his famous Young Hegel here and defended this book as his doctoral thesis (1942). Lifshits and Lukács concentrate on Hegel’s “historical dialectic” and on his comprehension of the revolutionary events of his epoch. By the end of the Great Patriotic War, Hegel’s philosophy had been declared an “aristocratic reaction to the French Revolution” (Stalin), and hatred of Hegel became reflexive. The party of persecutors of “Hegelianshchina” was led by Zinovy Beletsky, Professor at Moscow State University. It was only after Stalin’s death that serious research into Hegel’s philosophy could be resumed. E. V. Ilyenkov interpreted dialectics as “the method of ascent from the abstract to the concrete” and traced how this — materialistically reinterpreted — method works in Marx’s Das Kapital. It was Neo-Hegelians who brought to the fore the category of the concrete, understood as “diversity fused into unity” (Ivan Ilyin); in this respect, Lenin was in full solidarity with them. In parallel with European Marxists, Ilyenkov criticised the interpretation of dialectics as a universal picture of the world, a new metaphysics cultivated by “diamat” and “istmat”. He did not, however, share the anti-Hegelian sentiments of the schools of G. della Volpe and L. Althusser. For Ilyenkov, Hegel is the greatest revolutionary in logic since Aristotle. At the end of the article are the facts showing that interest in “Soviet Hegel” is still alive today.