On the Metaphilosophical Conception of G.E. Koryavko

Abstract

The article examines the metaphilosophical conception of Galina Koryavko (1944–2018), doctor of philosophy, professor, an outstanding scholar and teacher, who worked in Samara in the 1990s. Those years were difficult not only for the country but also for Russian philosophy, it was caused by a radical revision of the attitude to Marxist philosophy, which in the Soviet period was considered as the only true philosophical teaching, whereas in the post-Soviet period, Marxism was mostly passed over in silence. This circumstance initiated the search for new, often very far from Marxism, interpretations of the meaning of philosophical activity, the nature of philosophy, its place in the intellectual culture of modern Russia. The practical significance of such studies was determined, first of all, by the fact that under the new conditions it was necessary, in a short time, to qualitatively restructure the teaching of philosophy courses in Russian universities. The metaphilosophical conception of G.E. Koryavko, developed in the late 1980s, was based, like the vast majority of philosophical works of that time, on the Marxist philosophical paradigm, which, in the spiritual atmosphere that has developed in Russia over the past 30 years, expectedly led this conception to almost complete oblivion. This study identifies the strengths of G.E. Koryavko’s interpretation of philosophy and also identifies the controversial points inherent in that interpretation. The goal of the article to reconsider G.E. Koryavko’s conception in order to indicate the directions of strengthening and modernization, to carry out its new reading. The article’s author comes to the conclusion that this conception represented one of the significant and timely attempts to comprehend the conceptual prerequisites of the crisis of public consciousness in the USSR in the 1980s, which implied a a demand for significant modernization of Soviet Marxism, taking into account the latest scientific achievements for that time, the entry of mankind into the post-industrial and information era. Unfortunately, the author of the conception failed to dialectically reconstruct the interpretation of ideology as “false consciousness” (F. Engels), as well as to substantiate the fundamental need for the presence of qualitatively different forms of false consciousness in any historical types of civilizations.