The End of the Intelligentsia: The Future of the Philosopher in Russia

Abstract

For Nikolai Berdiaev in The Russian Idea (Russkaia ideia, 1946), the content and form of Russian literature and philosophy are nonnegotiable: Russian literature is philosophical; Russian philosophy is literary. Both are necessarily religious. Moreover, both disciplines make strides toward the same messianic end: to represent the deeply engrained moral character of the Russian people and to reveal the future toward which this character leads. In the previous chapter, we saw two anthropological alternatives to this model. Philosophers Sergey Horujy and Valery Podoroga explicitly separate themselves from the mythologized category of Russian philosophy, in part out of allegiance to their respective views of disciplinary professionalism. While Horujy split with the canon of Russian religious philosophy over what he viewed as its methodological sloppiness, Podoroga has described his own approach as sharing nothing in common with the sacralizing tendencies of Russian religious philosophy. Both see themselves as philosophers in Russia, as philosophers by profession, but not as Russian philosophers in some inherited sense of the term.