Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета: Серия I. Богословие, философия (Dec 2020)
On “snake venom” and philosophy of the soviet era (response to K. M. Antonov’s article “Conservative criticism of culture as a historical and philosophical method: advantages and drawbacks”)
Abstract
This article is a response to the detailed review by K. M. Antonov of my book “Philosophy of the Soviet time: Mamardashvili and Ilyenkov (the energies of repulsion and attraction)”. As indicated by its title, “Conservative criticism of culture as a historical and philosophical method: advantages and drawbacks”, the article by K. M. Antonov notes both the advantages and achievements of my work as well as makes a number of serious criticical comments. In my response, or “review of the review”, I focus on the second, polemical part of the article by K. M. Antonov. The controversy touches on such topics as the nature of the phenomenological epoch and the problem of the non-referential phenomenology of consciousness, the relationship of faith and reason, the problem of the autonomy of scientifi c knowledge and its relationship to ideology, criticism of Orthodoxy and Russian culture by Mamardashvili, etc. The answer is given as to how I understand the relationship between the philosophical and ideological aspects of creative Soviet philosophers and why pure science is impossible from this point of view. It is noted that the positive point in this dispute is going beyond the actual Soviet philosophy or the philosophy of the Soviet time. The latter becomes rather an occasion or material for general judgments about the possibilities of reason, the relationship of reason and faith, etc. This shows, among other things, that Soviet philosophy and its study have not only local historical and philosophical significance. I agree with the reviewer that a number of methodological premises of the book have insuffi ciently substantiated grounds, but I explain this as a consequence of the intermediate nature of the work in several senses at once, both in personal and biographical (which, nevertheless, belongs to the entire generation), and the scope of Russian culture and its opposed poles, i.e. Orthodoxy and atheism, radical Westernism and conservatism, Soviet socialism and autocratic monarchy, etc. It is extremely difficult to present this extraordinary scope, breadth and diversity of poles in a unifi ed and methodologically verifi ed, consistent picture.
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