The Philosophy of Modernity and its Refraction in Russia — Daria Dugina

The present text was an essay written for one of Daria Platonova Dugina’s courses at the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University.

Western philosophy came to Russia in rather strange ways. There was no logic or consistent sequence. We took some things from the West, often by coincidence, such as whatever was popular there, while neglecting other more important things. Hence the quirkiness of Russian-Western philosophical dialogue. At times, these fragments have been reconciled with each other in absolutely exotic ways. Logic was taken and turned into morality, and dry rational philosophy inspired writers and poets to completely unanticipated conclusions and images. Despite the fact that Russian thinkers and writers have at times interpreted Western philosophy in completely arbitrary, even distorted ways, they have grasped some of its aspects so penetratingly that it even began to seem to the West that Russians had discovered something new and unexpected that had eluded them.

On the whole, the correlation between Western European thought and its reading in Russia in the 18th-19th centuries is a separate topic. Proceeding from the chaotic nature of this reception, we can draw any number of parallels and compare both obvious sources of influence and less apparent ones. Yet, the most profound and the most original Russian authors understood what is foremost in the Western culture of Modernity. Vladimir Solovyov referred to this as the atomization of culture, individualistic disintegration into fragments, and he saw in this the fate of European Modernity. In the very beginning of his programmatic article “Three Forces,” Solovyov spoke of a culture of forced unity which he identified with the East and a second, opposing force, that of the modern West.

Solovyov wrote of the Western cultural force:

It strives to break the stronghold of dead unity, to everywhere give freedom to individual forms of life, freedom to the individual and his activity; under its influence, individual elements of mankind become the starting points for life, act exclusively from and for themselves, and the common loses the significance of real, essential being, and turns into something abstract, empty, into a formal law, and finally is completely deprived of any meaning. Universal egoism and anarchy, a multitude of individual units lacking any inner connection — this is the extreme expression of this force. If it were to attain sole dominance, then mankind would disintegrate into components, the connection of life would be torn asunder, and history would end in a war of all against all with the self-destruction of mankind.

Source: Vladimir Solovyov, “Trisily” (1877) https://www.vehi.net/soloviev/trisily.html

Excerpt: from Eschatological Optimism by Daria Platonova Dugina

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