Abstract
This chapter investigates Hegel’s impact on nineteenth-century German thought by reference to the question of freedom that so preoccupied nineteenth-century Russian thinkers. The investigation is articulated into three parts, each dealing with a different kind of freedom and a Russian thinker who addressed that kind of freedom extensively by engaging with Hegel’s thought. Thus it deals with Mikhail Bakunin’s attempts to define freedom in the political sphere, Alexander Herzen’s concern with human freedom in relation to nature and Vladimir Soloviev’s broad notion of human emancipation as a process of deification.
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Notes
- 1.
Nikolai Berdyaev claimed that Hegel’s importance for Russia resembled the importance of Plato for the patristics and Aristotle for the scholastics (Berdyaev 1948, 72). The standard accounts are Chizhevsky 1992, Jakowenko 1934, Koyré 1950, and Planty-Bonjour 1974. There are also several recent articles, for example, Frede 2013 and Shkolnikov 2013.
- 2.
In doing so, I am offering a somewhat different picture than most traditional intellectual histories of Russia which, as Alexandre Koyré notes, are organized chronologically (Koyré 1950, 104). Moreover, there is a slightly polemical intent, primarily in regard to Bakunin and Herzen. I wish to highlight the importance of both but in a somewhat different manner than as characterized in Sir Isaiah Berlin’s important and pioneering essay. See Berlin 1978, 82–113.
- 3.
See in this connection Toews 1985.
- 4.
Victoria Frede notes that Stankevich himself, and thus the circle as well, was influenced primarily by the older generation of Hegelians, the right Hegelians. This suggestion supports the notion (see below) that Bakunin’s view about Hegel underwent a change from an appreciation of Hegel as the architect of the modern rational state to an aversion to his thought based in an aversion to the rational state. See Frede 2013, 159–174.
- 5.
- 6.
It is intriguing to note that a similar attitude to Hegel was expressed in France by the generation of the 1960s. Some trace this rejection to the interpretation of Hegel presented by a Russian, Alexandre Kojève, whom we may place with the left Hegelians, at least as regards the form of his interpretation.
- 7.
The general view is that Bakunin changed the views he expressed in 1838, though at least one scholar provides a much more nuanced account of Bakunin’s development: see Del Giudice 1981, 302–303.
- 8.
This is an issue of some moment since the association with Fichte allows an interpretation of Bakunin’s thought as radicalnihilism in the sense often applied to Bakunin as a prophet of destruction, or creation through destruction. As I note below, the problem essentially comes down to an understanding of what Bakunin means by destruction: Is destruction the suppression of other in favor of some self that antecedes the other, or, as I will argue, the destruction of oneself as individual in favor of a collective self dispensing with the need for authority. Regarding Bakunin as a Fichtean, see McLaughlin 2002, 23–24. Again, Del Giudice provides a carefully nuanced account—Del Giudice 1981, 151–279. Del Giudice makes an excellent case for the far greater depth and breadth of Bakunin’s engagement with Hegel than with Fichte.
- 9.
By “voluntarist” I mean one whose will is creative, not merely responding to different choices but creating those choices by initiating a series of states. A will that chooses to obey natural laws (as Bakunin seems to bid us to do) is hardly will within this meaning of the term and suggests in fact that Bakunin is more of a right than a left Hegelian in so far as his notion of emancipation is at the same time an exhortation to obey (natural laws): Bakunin does not tell us to impose human rule on nature but, to the contrary, to impose the rule of nature on human beings (an apparently contradictory plan of action if we are already natural beings). Here Bakunin seems to end up in difficulties which his twentieth-century successor in negation, Alexandre Kojève, resolved by making the point of negationnature itself. From this perspective Bakunin creates a secularized Augustinian view whereby will [voluntas] is expressed as the power to disobey as well as obey, with God being replaced by natural law.
- 10.
This interpretation of anarchism may not immediately seem to fit well with Bakunin’s properly anarchist writings of the later 1860s and early 1870s where the element of self-sacrifice is less clearly evident though the assertion of natural law remains (indeed, it becomes more dominant). Bakunin writes in God and the State: “In his relation to natural laws but one liberty is possible to man—that of recognizing and applying them on an ever-extending scale in conformity with the object of collective and individual emancipation or humanization which he pursues” (Bakunin 1973, 129). Is such emancipation a dedication to the subordination of insubordinate particular impulses to these sweeping laws that govern us? In any event, any dedication to universal laws has to bring about the same negation of particular interests as Bakunin seems to promote in “The Reaction in Germany” and thus may be regarded as continuing the program announced in the article.
- 11.
- 12.
“The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of such truth. To help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual knowing” (Hegel 1977, 3).
- 13.
This translation has occasioned some controversy. It is no doubt more literal than God-manhood since the Russian chelovek, like the Greek anthrōpos, does not indicate gender. The other aspects of the debate have to do with emphasis: Is it God who is humanized or humanity that is divinized? I will not be going into the intricacies of the arguments—suffice it to say that I put more stress on the divinization of the human because this retains, it seems to me, the separation that Solovyov retains between the divine and human absolute.
- 14.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose influence on German Idealism as a whole is hard to overestimate, makes this point eloquently at the beginning of the second part of his Discourse on Inequality. See Rousseau 2002, 113.
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Love, J. (2021). Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Russia. In: Bykova, M.F., Forster, M.N., Steiner, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62982-3_7
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