Philosophy in Russia

Extract

Since ‘dialectical’ materialism was proclaimed in Soviet Russia to be the only true conception of reality, the red philosophers found themselves in a worse plight than ever. They have now to guard against the pitfalls of ‘mechanistic’ materialism on the one hand, and of idealism on the other; and as by ‘idealism’ Soviet writers mean almost anything opposed to their own views, it is easy enough to detect traces of it hi any thinker. The wide field thus opened for mutual recriminations, accusations of deviating from ‘the general line of the Party,’ etc., makes any genuine philosophical work even more difficult than it was two or three years ago. There is a marked decrease in the number of philosophical publications. According to the Knizhnaya Letopis (a U.S.S.R. weekly bibliographical survey), all that has appeared in the philosophical line during the last six months of 1932 is a new translation of Spinoza's Letters, a reprint of an old translation of his Ethics, and a few dozen small textbooks on dialectical materialism, published by various schools, such as the Leningrad School of Engineering, the Leningrad Electro-Mechanical School Combine, and so on. The editorial board of the journal Psychology, which has existed for some years, announces that their programme “is entirely determined by Lenin's principle of observing party considerations in scientific work”; they are resolved “to champion the heritage of Marx and Lenin and to assign psychology a practical part in the building up of a socialist state.”