Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1997 17:20:50 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: tv personalities...


On Tue, 11 Nov 1997 MSalter1-AT-aol.com wrote:
> Chris
> Could you please say a little more about this russian dialectical tradition?
> what was their sense of "dialectics", how close to Hegel's? or the
> Anarchists who were I gather also influence by the early Hegel - particularly
> re negation!
> I'm working on a book chapter on the signifiance of dialectics in and for the
> german legal theory tradition but have little background in the Russian
> Michael

I'd be delighted.  Actually, I'm working on my own book dealing at least
partially with dialectics, and of course, there are many different
incarnations of dialectics that one finds in the history of thought.  The
Russian tradition, at least prior to the Marxist dominance in the
revolutionary era, was deeply influenced by an interesting combination of
Hegel, Aristotle, and Nietzsche.  The theme that seemed to unite nearly
all the Russian intellectuals was the revolt against dualism, particularly
Western modernistic dualisms of mind-body, theory-practice, fact-value,
morality-prudence, spiritual-material, etc.  There was a deep emphasis on
organic unity from the time of the Slavophiles and Solovyov, and this
continued well into the Silver Age, that period from the 1890s till around
1924.  Nietzsche's thought made a huge impact on the Silver Age
neo-idealists, but also on Symbolist writers and Russian Marxists.  One
can find some of the major doctrines of dialectical discourse on display
during this period, including a stress on internal relations and a 
critique of atomism, mechanism, and Kantian subjectivism.

Interestingly, what most infected the pre-Bolshevik philosophers was the
mysticism that was endemic to much of Russian culture; the Soviet era
brought forth a materialism that was almost as virulent as the mysticism
which preceded it.  What I found most fascinating though, was the
interplay of Hegelian and Aristotelian concepts of dialectic.  Lossky, who
was Rand's teacher, was working quite explicitly in this tradition, prior
to his exile in 1922, along with hundreds of other intellectuals.

Post-revolution, of course, the Soviet philosophers rigidified much of
dialectical doctrine, with applications to history and natural science
that made it more of an ideology than a mode of inquiry.

Chris

==========================================Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Visiting Scholar
Faculty of Arts and Science
New York University Department of Politics
715 Broadway
New York, New York  10003-6806
Email:      sciabrrc-AT-is2.nyu.edu
Website:    http://pages.nyu.edu/~sciabrrc
==========================================