10 - Semën Frank's expressivist humanism

Summary

To approach the philosophical thought of Semën Frank with a focus on his ideas concerning human dignity and self-realization is to view it from a perspective quite unlike the one from which it is generally viewed both in the standard histories of Russian philosophy and in recent Russian studies of his thought. The influential émigré historian Vasilii Zenkovskii, who considered Frank “the most outstanding among Russian philosophers generally,” saw him primarily as the creator of a system of metaphysics founded on the notion of the world as a total unity (vsëedinstvo). On the other hand, Piama Gaidenko, an acute contemporary Russian expositor of Frank, focused her attention on his epistemological theories, presenting him as a leading representative of the “turn to ontology,” i.e., epistemological realism, in early twentieth-century European philosophy. This approach links him with such thinkers as Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann, and Martin Heidegger.

Without question, Frank's labors in the fields of metaphysics and theory of knowledge absorbed a large part of his energies as a philosopher, and called forth many of his most original insights. Yet I would maintain that Frank had no more compelling concern throughout his philosophical career than to vindicate a view of the human person as the earthly receptacle of divine spirit, and hence as a being of infinite worth. The theme of human dignity and individual rights surfaces again and again in Frank's writings, from the inception of his public activity to its very end.