CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE SO-CALLED SOCIOLOGICAL SUBJECTIVISTS; LAVROV AND MIHAILOVSKII
I
§ 115.
PETR LAVROV became well known in Europe as a theorist and leader among the revolutionary refugees. Of his numerous essays, pamphlets, and longer works, a few only have been translated, notably the Historical Letters. He also contributed several essays to European socialist periodicals, chiefly French and German.
Lavrov's literary physiognomy is peculiar to himself. Pisarev, with youthful impudence, termed him a scholastic, but this was a libel. Lavrov was a conscientious scholar, what Russians might call "a German professor." He was diligent as an analyst, but lacked constructive talent and had little originality, and was a vigorous but not an incisive thinker. As an author he was cumbrous, and of his opus magnum, which was to be a history of thought, nothing more was ever completed than an introduction to the introduction. But he was prolific as a clandestine poet, and his Russian "Marseillaise" is still sung.[1]
Like his contemporaries, Lavrov was a student of Hegel and of the Hegelian left, his first literary works being devoted to Hegel; but whereas so many Russian writers of that day remained Feuerbachians, Lavrov returned from Feuerbach to Kant. He was acquainted with French philosophy, that of Cousin and others, but the influence of Comte and of positivism generally were decisive upon his development. Among the French socialists, Proudhon influenced him more than Louis Blanc or any other. The writings of Darwin and Spencer had a great effect upon him, and through a study of the doctrine of evolution he was led to make the Comtist idea of progress the central notion of his system. In epistemology, too, Lavrov learned much from Herbert Spencer.
Lavrov was a contemporary of Černyševskii, and was influenced by that writer. The two men passed through the same philosophical school, and were busied with and disquieted by the same problems. But whereas Černyševskii decided in favour of positivist materialism and utilitarianism, Lavrov turned back to Kant, though, without abandoning positivist materialism and utilitarianism. Lavrov was keenly aware of the opposition between criticism and positivism, between subjectivism and objectivism, between Kant and Comte, but lacked power to transcend this opposition. His solution of the difficulty was to conceive the fundamental epistemological problems psychologically, somewhat after the manner which had been adopted by the most recent adherents of Hume, and after the manner which Spencer attempted for the apriori. Lavrov also speaks of the concept of duty quite in the Kantian style. He formulates his own categorical imperative, but this imperative (and it is here that he differs from Kant) is referred by him to psychical endowments which are to be admitted positivistically as extant facts.
Notable is the extent to which Lavrov was influenced by thinkers of the second and third rank. In the Historical Letters more space is allotted to the consideration of Proudhon, Buckle, Ruge, and Bruno Bauer, than to the consideration of Kant and Comte, although the book is essentially concerned with the ideas of the two last-named philosophers. Proudhon reproduced the ideas of Kant, Buckle, and Comte; but just as in Proudhon's writings Kantianism passes without transition into Hegelianism and into positivism, so in the writings of Lavrov do Kant and Comte, Comte and Hegel seem to merge one into another. Further, just as, for Lavrov, Buckle was the chief instigator to the study of numerous questions, so Ruge was the Russian's leader in the problems of individualism.[2]
We shall learn shortly how far as a socialist Lavrov agreed with Marx. For the moment it will suffice to say that Lavrov's socialism was ethically grounded, that Lavrov rejected historical materialism, appealing to the categorical imperative and not to the general law of evolution.
Historical Letters embodies an endeavour to solve the old problem of object versus subject, subject versus object, Lavrov contrasting history with the process of nature, civilisation with nature. By the term history, Lavrov understands objective and subjective history, to use the current distinction. He conceives objective history as part of the general nature process, considered not materialistically but in Spencer's fashion. The contrast he conceives between nature and history is therefore, properly speaking, a contrast only between nature and history in the subjective sense. Such is the significance we must attach to Lavrov's "historical realism,"the name he himself gives to his standpoint. He opens his enquiry by asking whether natural science or history is "the closer concern" of modern man. He replies that history touches man's vital interests more closely; that history is the story of human problems. Natural science may enable us to conduct life more rationally, but history alone can represent life and comprehend it. We recognise that "history" signifies here the history of consciousness, that the contrast to which reference is made is between nature and consciousness, and, be it noted, between nature and individual consciousness—nothing but individual consciousness, as Lavrov again and again insists.
This opposition between natural science and history is not subjected by Lavrov to a detailed epistemological examination. It certainly does not suffice to say that history is man's, modern man's, closer concern; but we can excuse Lavrov when we remember that Comte failed to examine the contrast with any greater precision. Nor shall we dispute the contention that history, as contrasted with natural science, embraces, properly speaking, the entire domain of the mental sciences, and that it merges into psychology.
Lavrov reckons the morphological and phenomenological disciplines among the natural sciences. The former are those termed by Comte the concrete sciences, whilst the latter are the sciences whose aim it is to establish the laws of phenomena. They are enumerated by Lavrov in the following order: geometry, mechanics, physics and chemistry, biology, psychology, ethics, sociology—a somewhat motley hierarchy, which is obviously reminiscent of Comte as restated by Spencer. Lavrov is at one with Spencer and differs from Comte in affirming the independence and importance of psychology and ethics, because he takes consciousness as his starting point, and is unable to accept the Comtist view of psychology as an appendage to biology. None the less the Comtist and naturalist demands are conceded to this extent, that psychology, ethics, and sociology are made to figure as natural sciences. The use of the term "phenomenological" is doubtless intended to imply that positivism is phenomenological, but the word is unhappily chosen, seeing that (from Lavrov's outlook) the "morphological" sciences have likewise to do with phenomena. With Comte, Lavrov sees in the phenomenological sciences the laws of phenomena. They are, in fact, the "abstract sciences" of Comte.
History does not appear in Lavrov's hierarchy. It is plain, however, that we must understand him to speak of history, now in a wider sense (that which is contrasted with nature), and now in a narrower and more ordinary sense. But the domain of the latter is not clearly defined. We are told merely that history must furnish the interpretation, must explain the significance, of historical development. It must therefore provide a philosophy of history such as was undertaken by Comte as a department of sociology. Lavrov had not attained to clarity of thought upon these fundamental epistemological and methodological questions. For example, he gives very vague explanations of sociology, and in especial he fails to determine the relationship between sociology and history. He defines sociology (which he also speaks of as "social science") as the theory of the processes and events of social development, and also as the science of social organisation (the social organism). But concerning the relationships between these disciplines and history, all he tells us is that they are "closely connected," and he explains that history is the science of non-recurrent phenomena, whereas sociology is the history of recurrent phenomena. Are we to interpret this as meaning much what recent philosophers of history (for example Windelband and Rickert) mean when they talk of the individual in the historical process? In one who wrote after Comte, and after the Spencerian criticism of Comte's hierarchy of the sciences, this lack of precision is a serious matter, even apart from the consideration that, as previously pointed out, Lavrov failed to distinguish clearly between the ideas of Comte and those of Kant.
For Comte, in his classification and hierarchy of the sciences, applied his positivism, which he believed to be perfectly objectivist. Psychology, based upon the conceptions of consciousness, disappeared from the field, because consciousness, individual consciousness, disappeared before the historical process of humanity at large; psychology was degraded to become a mere department of biology, sociology being constituted as the true mental science, and being conceived also as the psychology of humanity and of human history. Spencer, on the other hand, rightly rejected the Comtist hierarchy of the sciences, for he found it impossible to dispose of the facts of "subjective" psychology in the unpositive and autocratic manner adopted by Comte. Spencer insisted upon the rights of logic and above all upon those of ethics, and on these lines constructed his epistemologically modified classification of the sciences. Spencer had recognised how naïve was Comte in epistemological matters; he had grasped the fundamental significance of consciousness and therefore of psychology; and in like manner he had recognised the importance of ethics beside and above sociology. Spencer paid due epistemological regard to the rights of subjectivism, whereas Comte, in his later phase, which was contrasted with his objectivist positivism, was forced uncritically into subjectivism. Spencer, too, believed that his evolutionism sufficed to explain Kant, alike epistemologically and ethically.
By the study of Kant, Comte, and Spencer, Lavrov was led to the same problems as Spencer, but Lavrov lacked the philosophic strength which would have enabled him to establish his doctrines upon sound epistemological foundations, to render his standpoint philosophically secure. Lavrov's classification of the sciences was an unorganised compromise between Comte and Spencer.
§ 116.
EVOLUTION is the evolution of thought, of thinking. Since the sixteenth century, mankind has abandoned the religious outlook and the religious regulation of life which had hitherto prevailed, and a secular education has been the result. But there has ensued a disastrous dualism between scientific theory, between theory based upon the sciences (philosophy), on the one hand, and the police state (Lavrov means the absolutist state) which has replaced the church, upon the other—the police state characterised by competition in the economic field. This dualism must yield place to a new and superior unity of theory and practice. Scientific socialism and internationalism are competent to bring about such a synthesis. But religious views and practices will continue to exist as vestiges long after socialism and scientifically grounded social institutions have come into existence.
Thus far we have a presentation of Comte's developmental scheme, socialistically retouched, but it is not made clear to us why the absolutism which has replaced the church has manifested the same or a similar opposition to science as did the church.
The Comtist scheme is expanded by Lavrov in the Darwinian evolutionist sense, following the lines of Spencer and of more recent students of civilisation, notably French and English writers. Lavrov's History of Thought begins with the history of the cosmos and of the formation of the earth. Man separated himself from other animals in virtue of the organ of thought, living at first in loose isolated groups, which attained their acme in the patriarchal tribal organisation. Lavrov leaves open the question whether the patriarchate preceded the matriarchate, and in any case to him the problem is of less importance than it is to the Marxists. From out the patriarchal order the economic organisation of contemporary society developed through the division of labour, and the political and legal state organisation came into being. This development was completed (Lavrov here follows Comte) upon the basis of the theological and religious outlook on the universe. Like Comte's, is Lavrov's conception of the church, and of the medieval state subordinated to the church; the reformation broke the power of the church and its doctrines; the absolute state came into existence, but will yield place to the new socialistic ordering of society.
Whereas Comte regarded social evolution and its stages as proceeding in accordance with a historically given regime of law, Lavrov refuses to accept this reign of law as a mere empirical datum, but desires to understand it and establish it rationalistically. Comte had indeed explained his law of the three stages psychologically, with reference to the analogy of individual development. But in his Philosophie Positive, Comte failed to demonstrate the individual obligation to accept his positivism; he did not show why everyone of us ought to cooperate actively in tie spread and practical development of the positive, antitheological, and antimetaphysical outlook on the universe.
Lavrov was aware of the weakness of positivism in this respect, and he therefore endeavoured to introduce the idea of moral obligation into the historical process without the epistemological dualism which severs Comte's Politique positive from his Philosophie positive. To Lavrov, universal history was per se a world assize; he regarded evolution as the development of moral aspirations; for him, the historic description of individual historic epochs was an illustration of ethical principles.
To Lavrov, history was a developmental process subject to definite and necessary laws. Man, himself, was likewise subordinated to these laws, but was at the same time empowered with full awareness of the situation, to adapt himself to the historical process, freely deciding to strive for attainable goals. Lavrov terms the primary social state "culture," this being the stage which Hegel described as the unfree and the unconscious. But, according to Lavrov we have to understand by "civilisation," history as it is deliberately made by men with awakened consciousness, the purposive elaboration of inherited "culture."
The Kantian postulate of freedom is transformed by Lavrov into the illusion of freedom. The conscious individual (and when Lavrov speaks of consciousness he is thinking not only of the psychological but also of the critical and ethical consciousness) chooses aims for himself and appraises these aims ethically. But whereas Kant had endeavoured establish ethical purposiveness upon his apriori, Lavrov content to recognise the existence of a higher impulse towards truthfulness and morality. Lavrov here follows the French socialists, and we may consider in especial that he must have borrowed from Louis Blanc the doctrine of physical, intellectual, and moral needs; but whereas Blanc had a theistic foundation for his psychology, Lavrov detests metaphysics and religion.
Thus Lavrov attains a peculiar subjectivism of aims and values. The moral ideal is considered to give men their perspective for the arrangement and valuation of history, many recognising that, despite temporary arrests and relapses, historical progress is a reality.
The brief formula of the idea of progress is thus worded by Lavrov: "The development of individuality alike physically, mentally, and morally; the incorporation of truth and justice in social forms."
Society and individuals are veridical data; but only the fully conscious, the "more definite" individuality, the personality, only (as Lavrov expresses it, following Ruge and Bruno Bauer) the critically thinking individuality, makes history—by elaborating, as we have already been told, traditional culture, and thus forming a human society out of the human ant-hill. The critically-thinking individuality keeps history going, keeps it moving, and in doing so converts simple evolution into progress.
Bruno Bauer in conjunction with many adherents of the Hegelian left, transformed Kant's Critique of Pure Reason into a "pure critique," that is to say into a negation of theology and of the (absolutist) state. Lavrov agreed in this estimate, but wished the criticism to be conceived more in Kant's own sense. Such was the leading problem with which he dealt, though it was not clearly formulated. We note, however, his endeavour to display the contrast between faith and criticism, meaning by faith, not religious faith merely, but faith of every kind. He was aware that faith alone can move mountains, and he desired such a faith for himself, condemning unfaith as indifferentism. Criticism must not destroy faith. Its function is to upbuild firm convictions, so that what was criticism yesterday becomes belief to-day. Faith is omnipotent, but is not all-sufficing, since falsehood no less than truth may be animated with faith. This is why criticism on the part of the thinking individualities is essential; for Lavrov, "critical thought" becomes the creative principle as spirit was for Hegel.
It is plain that Lavrov saw the negative tendency of the Hegelian left, and that for this reason he drew nearer to Kant but failed, as we have seen, to formulate the problem with adequate precision. For like reasons and in like manner he extolled the Russian critics (Herzen, Granovskii, Bakunin, Černyševskii, and Dobroljubov) without giving any exact account of the nature of their criticism.
The same philosophical weakness clings to Lavrov's other ideas.
For example, he expounds his subjective teleology of the historical process, but looks also for objective props of this teleology; such is the origin of his formula of progress, Moreover, he believes in a coincidence of individual interest with the interest of the community, quite after the manner of the older metaphysical teleologists and teleological economists. But while expressing profound approval of this community of interests, and terming it "solidarity," he is nevertheless disquieted because, after all, the interests of the individual and those of the community are frequently divergent. When this happens, however, an appeal is made to the categorical imperative: "Live according to the ideal which thou hast formed for thyself of what a fully developed human being should be." Lavrov is aware that progress has been a most costly affair. Blood has flowed in streams, but has been poured out ever for the sake of posterity. It is therefore the duty of each one of us to pay his share of the costs of progress to do his best to lessen the evils which threaten society, in the present and in the future.
Lavrov sees that his critically-thinking individualities are in truth isolated in their brilliant and heroic struggle against society, but he consoles himself with the thought that the heroes are never quite alone, and that the number of their adherents and fellow fighters is increasing.
The duty of the strong, of the "more definite" individuals is, therefore, to join the party of those who are struggling on behalf of progress. There are in truth three tasks for the critically-thinking individuality. First of all such persons must instruct and enlighten their fellow men concerning progress, must devote themselves to propaganda; secondly, they must enter into an organised progressive fellowship; last of all the organiser of the party of progress must alike theoretically and practically be a model of the right way of living.
Lavrov recognises as his fundamental dogma the idea of humanity; life is the cult of the ethics of humanity, but life further demands self-sacrifice; the struggle for progress is imposed upon individuals as a moral duty.
Lavrov criticises the various theories of progress, and rejects most of them. He cannot accept uncritical optimism; he rejects pessimism; and he is no less displeased with naturalism, which describes progress as an illusion, and considers mechanical and technical evolution to be the only real factors of history. In this connection, historical (economic) materialism is likewise rejected. Lavrov terms himself a historical realist, and for the historical realist the very formulation of the problem is different. Even if the universe and history were naught but illusion, man cannot help setting himself aims and seeking suitable means for their realisation. Man cannot comprehend the ultimate nature of things, and need not, therefore, waste his time over metaphysics; but we can and must act ethically, even though our ethical aspiration be purely subjective. Let the nature of things be what it may, for us insists Lavrov, the question of "the better," the question of progress, remains always of vital significance.
Lavrov's compromises are obvious. He has amalgamated Kant's thing-by-itself, the apriori of cognition, and the categorical imperative, with positivist relativism; he has fused and confused Kant with Comte. Of course, Lavrov is likewise extremely sceptical, admitting as he does the possibility of illusionism, even though he terms it "idealisation"; this idealisation, he considers, is found above all in the working of the consciousness of freedom (of free will), by which the power of the laws of unconscious matter is transcended. Lavrov accentuated his scepticism by the study of the ancient sceptics, quoting above all Protagoras in support of his relativist subjectivism.
Lavrov, like Kant, values practice more highly than theory. Or rather it may be said that Lavrov is so much the positivist that he here modifies Kant to some extent, placing theory and practice on the same level, postulating the unity of theory and practice. The idea of progress is doubtless theory, but at the same time it involves practice, and the practice of progress involves for our age that the conscious, the fully developed and progressive man, should collaborate in a party with others of the like way of thinking to ensure the realisation of progress. "History needs sacrifices, and he makes sacrifices who accepts the great and severe task of becoming a fighter for his own development and for that of others. The problems of evolution must be solved. The conquest of a historic future must be achieved. Everyone who has become a conscious of the evolutionary need has to face the terrible question: Wilt thou be one of those who are ready for all sacrifices and sufferings, that they may be numbered among the fully awakened and far-seeing fighters for progress, or wilt thou stand aside, as passive spectator of the terrible ills of the world, with the carking awareness that thou art renegade? Choose!"
Fighter for progress, but perspicacious fighter! We have already made ourselves familiar with Lavrov's theory of revolution as formulated in the program of "Vpered"; we have seen how he cautiously weighs the pros and the cons, how he endeavours to calculate the chances of the revolution, and how, just as in the Historical Letters, he feels the final decision to be a terrible responsibility. Lavrov was one who could not venture without thus estimating the chances, and this is why he and his adherenst were vilified by the Bakuninists as mere propagandists. In actual fact, as a practical revolutionary, Lavrov never failed to fulfil the three demands which he considered to be imposed upon the practitioner of progress, upon the revolutionary; but he did not show himself to be a leader of the revolutionary movement. Yet it must be remembered that Lavrov never claimed such leadership.
At the outset he opposed the terrorism of the Narodnaja Volja, but in the end he joined that camp, approving, or at least tolerating terrorist tactics. He protested against Tolstoi's doctrine of non-resistance, and expounded the ethical justification for the exceptional use of forcible measures.
We can now form a definitive judgment upon Lavrov's subjectivism, and alike from the epistemological and the metaphysical outlook this is the important matter in the study of the movement of Russian thought.
Lavrov's views are ill-defined.
Lavrov formulated his subjectivism in several different ways, and he admitted, to use his own phrase, that it was derived from various sources. He drew distinctions between subjective aims, the outlook on the universe, on the one hand, and the consequent judgments, the valuation of the world outlook, on the other; between judgments concerning the course, the epochs, and the phases of progress, and judgments concerning the causes and consequences of these epochs and phases. It is obvious that this subjectivism implies nothing more than variations in the judgments of the individuals who are thinking historically—that it has nothing whatever to do with the great question of subjectivism and objectivism as studied by postkantian German idealists. The Marxists, for example, likewise speak of class morality, and thus, for all their objectivism, recognise such a "subjectivism," i.e. relativism.
But Lavrov furnishes us with supplements to critical subjectivism in so far as, with Schopenhauer, he cherishes epistemological and metaphysical illusionism. Nevertheless in this question Lavrov is less decided than Schopenhauer, for Lavrov is a sceptic, and his acceptance of illusionism is no more than conditional.
In the name of individual freedom, Bělinskii protested most energetically against history, its chronological sequence, and its individual data, and yet we should not term him a subjectivist. Lavrov, like Bělinskii, championed the individual and individual liberty against the historical and social totality. Society was no abstraction to Lavrov; it was a real complex of definite and 'more definite' individuals. Progress, says Lavrov, is not non-individual, it is definite persons who progress, who comprise society and make history. Some are the genuine factors of the historical process; others merely participate in it; and yet others are merely in it, are simply there while it goes on. We see that Lavrov rejects, not only the Marxist conception of society and history, but the Comtist conception as well; he holds fast to individual consciousness, and endeavours from this outlook, somewhat after the manner of Spencer, to effect a reconciliation between the views of Kant and those of Comte.
People often speak of Lavrov's "subjective method" but Lavrov himself rarely makes use of the expression. We have not, in fact, to do with a method, but with something more concrete, with a decision upon the question of objectivism versus subjectivism. The term "subjective method" is employed more frequently by Mihailovskii and subsequent writers.
§ 117.
LAVROV'S socialism is essentially based upon Kant's idea of humanity—humanity and human dignity. Mankind, life, sacrifice, are Lavrov's humanistic battle cries; justice and truth are his two great demands. Theoretically the aspiration towards truth, practically the struggle for justice, these are the duties of the developed individuality. Justice is recognised to consist in equal respect for the rights of one's own and for those of another's individuality.
Lavrov was on terms of personal friendship with Marx and the earlier Marxists, but never accepted historical materialism. To use his own words, he was not a historical materialist, but a historical realist. Being the latter he rejected materialism as a whole, regarding it as too dogmatic, as unduly metaphysical; nor could he accept the extreme objectivism of the materialists, the historical materialism of Marx. Lavrov was a subjectivist. Nevertheless he endeavoured to be just to metaphysical and historical materialism, which impressed him by its consistency and its radicalism. In the works he wrote after the Historical Letters, economic conditions were recognised as extremely important factors, political manifestations, for example, being deduced therefrom. From time to time he represented the present as predominantly economic, but he never really abandoned a rationalist foundation.
Nor must we fail to note what Lavrov said about the class struggle, which did not to him scem of essential significance as it did to Marx.
We must note, too, his outlook on the international, which he regarded as the realisation of philosophic cosmopolitanis waxing enthusiastic on behalf of the latter at the very time when Marx was endeavouring to exclude cosmopolitanism from the international.
Lavrov was further distinguished from Marx by his conception of society and of history, for Lavrov made the individual his starting point, held fast to the individual consciousness, and considered that qualitative differences between individuals must be invoked to explain the historical process. Concessions to Marx and Comte were doubtless made, but the individualism of the "critically-thinking individuality" was nevertheless retained.
In agreement with Comte, Lavrov conceived historical development as the development of mankind. But whereas Comte regarded the individual nations as the representatives and leaders of mankind during different epochs, and expected that the definitive positivist organisation of humanity would ensue from a synthesis of the leading nations of Europe, Lavrov assigned to the nations a more modest role, holding that human development was effected by individuals. The idea of nationality had, he thought, no more than a temporary and transient significance; nationality was characterised, in part by certain mental qualities, but mainly by historical occurrences; in practice the question of nationality was a question of states. Lavrov was hostile to nationalist chauvinism. For him (and here he reminds us of Čaadaev) the true patriot was one who endeavoured to make his nation, his fatherland, the finest representative of science and of justice among contemporary nations.
The state, too, had for Lavrov no more than a temporary significance, although it seemed to him more important than did nationality. The leading task of socialism was, he considered, to fight the state, against which the social revolution was directed. The state originated in a contract. Lavrov accepted this obsolete theory, but his interpretation of it was that the social contract, whereof law was the formal expression, could not be regarded as absolutely binding. For Lavrov, the state was no more than the external order which men without convictions had accepted—it was the unreflective acceptance of vital conditions which were not dependent upon individuals. In this view the state becomes a coercive order, merely physical at first, but subsequently moral or religious. Lavrov therefore held that political history was of very trifling interest, that the aim of progress was to reduce the state to minimum. To attain this minimum was the endeavour of modern scientific socialism, which would abolish the social order of the state as a modification of the church.
Lavrov's conception of the future was that it would be a federation of communes and artels. Nevertheless he admitted the possibility that there would be a zemskii sobor, as an organ of the definitive social revolution, and presupposing that it would duly promote the economic and political interests of the peasants. Lavrov made a sharp distinction between the liberal conception of the state and his own conception. In all forms of state; the republican not excepted, he was opposed to centralism, for he regarded the centralised state as essentially bourgeois.
I cannot expound in detail how in these questions, too, Lavrov was eclectic, how here likewise he displayed tactical vacillations between "politism and apolitism," between socialism and anarchism, between Marx and Bakunin. This is obvious in his relationship to anarchism and in the cautious way in which he formulated his hostility to the state. His opposition to Bakunin and Načaev was based chiefly upon ethical grounds.
Lavrov's attitude towards Herzen was dictated by the former’s consistent socialism and by his ethical rigorism. Lavrov was a stoic, and Herzen seemed to him unduly dilettantist (using the word in Renan's sense). He stood nearer to Bělinskii and Černyševskii, and had, indeed, marked resemblances with the Jatter. In the early sixties, Lavrov preached anthropologism, following Černyševskii. From this standpoint, the "historical realist," like the Feuerbachian anthropologist, was thoroughly rationalistic and definitely anti-religious. When we studied the program of "Vpered" we saw that historical realism was sharply contrasted with theology and philosophy. Černyševskii, too, was an ethical rigorist, and it was from the characters in What is fo be Done that Lavrov derived the content of his socialistic imperative. Finally, Černyševskii likewise displayed a certain harshness of style, and we may ask ourselves whether in his case, as in that of Lavrov, this may have been connected with the vigorously rationalist outlook,
Passing finally to consider Lavrov’s relationship to the narodniki, it is an illuminating fact that Lavrov cannot be accounted one of the philosophers of the narodnicestvo. To Lavrov, as to the other progressive and revolutionary thinkers and politicians of his day, it seemed that the Russian peasantry constituted the Russian folk, and his "workers' socialism" was conceived rather on agrarian than on industrial lines. Moreover, he approved the mir and the artel as socialistic institutions, and he favoured propaganda among the peasants. But just as for himself he was content with propaganda among the intelligentsia, so were his whole method and mentality too much the fruit of his strong and peculiar individualism for it to be possible that he should accept as decisive and assume for his own guidance the principles of the narodničestvo.
Late in life (1893) Lavrov wrote an introductory article entitled "History, Socialism, and the Russian Movement" for a collection Materials for the History of the Russian Social Revolutionary Movement, published by some of the older adherents of the Narodnaja Volja. Herein, and likewise in a second article written in 1895, "The Narodniki 1873–1877," he expressed warm approval of the propaganda of the revolutionary narodniki as a fulfilment of the Russian socialist mission. He welcomed this propaganda amongst the people as the logical continuation of the civilisation and Europeanisation of Russia that had been begun by Peter. The movement "towards the people" seemed to him the fruit of the humanist idealism of the forties, and above all of the enthusiastic materialism and realism of Černyševskii and Pisarev. When, shortly before his death, the Russian refugees founded an agrarian socialist league, Lavrov hailed its program with delight.
§ 118.
PROFESSOR KARĚEV declared that Lavrov was the first and most influential of Russian sociologists. In my opinion, Čaadaev and Kirěevskii were more notable than Lavrov as philosophers of history and as thinkers. The questions which by Comte, Marx, and the later sociologists were placed in the foreground of sociological interest, questions of fact and of methodology, were not, it is true, discussed by Caadaev and Kiréevskii, or at any rate were not discussed in detail, for the only philosophy of history with which they were acquainted was that of German idealism; but they did not fall into the errors which characterised Lavrov's thought upon such matters.
Lavrov, though familiar with the sociological and philosophical situation of his day, was incompetent to play an effective part in its further development. Let me give an example. Lavrov's conception of the historical subjective method was that the ndividual historian or philosopher of history, taking his stand in the present at the close of a historical period, acquires thereby a historical perspective, and crom this standpoint looks on into the future. The presentation is quite accurate, but explains nothing, for it merely states he fact of historical contemplation and historical construction (i.e. speculation regarding the future). Neither qua fact nor qua methodology is the process elucidated and firmly established. Lavrov should at least have paid due attention to the problems of historical method formulated by Mill, who built here upon a Comtist foundation—to say nothing of the discussion of the wider problems of the philosophy of history.
I may content myself therefore, in this study, with indicating what were the problems with which Lavrov busied himself, for the results of his investigations were of comparatively little moment. It was important in relation to Russian conditions that Lavrov should have occupied, nay tormented, his mind with the philosophical problems of his day. He did good service here, and showed his strength by his avoidance in the theoretical field of the materialism to which his contemporaries succumbed; but his influence in this direction was negative rather than positive. Lavrov's subjectivism would have been of considerable importance in the development of Russian thought had he been able to state precisely the boundaries and the range of subjectivism, and had he been able to present an epistemological criticism of his objectivist Russian contemporaries and predecessors. He failed, too, to assume a definite position in relation to contemporary adversaries of materialism. He gave special approval to Jurkevič, the opponent of Černyševskii, but characterised him by the vague epithet of "dialectician."[3] Moreover his polemic against Pisarev and Antonovič, against the nihilists and their radical opponents, dealt only with their depreciation of morality and their contempt for the idea of duty, for a usual the metaphysical and epistemological problem was far too cursorily considered.
To express the matter concisely, the essence of Lavrov's philosophic weakness lies in his failure to take a profounder view of the relationships between Kant and Comte. Kant's criticism was quite unhistorical; Comte's positivism was thoroughly historical, but quite uncritical; Comte, Hegel, Darwin, and Spencer were the spokesmen of contemporary historism, of evolutionism. Now how is Kant's criticism to be associated with this historism and evolutionism? Can criticism and historism be harmonised, and if so, how? German philosophy is still occupied with these questions to-day, and it was the merit of Lavrov that he mooted the problems as early as the close of the sixties. But his defect was that he made no attempt to solve the problems epistemologically. I have previously explained that he effected no more than a compromise between Kant and Comte, his essential mistake being that he degraded the Kantian criticism to the level of the criticism of Ruge and Bruno Bauer.
I may point out that Lavrov, in contradistinction to the other philosophers that have been treated in this work, though himself an imaginative writer, was but little concerned with literary criticism. It is true that he wrote essays on Tolstoi, Turgenev, and others, but merely in order to discuss the socio-political problems of the day, as they were presented in the works of these writers.[4]
Consider, again, what Lavrov thinks concerning the problem of individualism. Writing of the relationship between the individual and society, he declares that individuals (by which he means the "more definite" individuals, his critically-thinking individualities) create the organism, wherein they subsist "as mere organs" of the common organisin. It is true that the individualities are accustomed to "moral isolation," but they voluntarily undertake social duties, they subordinate themselves, so that their individualities disappear, to become merged in the general trend of thought.
Now what precisely is this "general trend of thought"? Must not the "more definite" individuals recognise it as a duty, on occasions, to resist the general trend? Is it permissible for these "more definite" individuals to merge themselves, to disappear, if the thought trend is to be general or universal? It can be universal only if they too exert their influence upon it; if they disappear, the individualities of less value remain predominant.
Besides, Lavrov directly contradicts himself. In one place he demands the subordination of the individual to the whole, and speaks of the disappearance of individuality, but he subsequently protests against the subordination and engulfment of the individual, saying that we must think merely of a merging of "social and individual interests" (interests, then, are something altogether distinct from individualities).
In ethics, too, Lavrov did not get beyond a compromise. On the one hand he accepted Kant's absolutism and rigorism, and yet he simultaneously clung to utilitarianism and the theory of egoism. How is the struggle between the conflicting interests to be adjusted? How are we to figure the harmony of egoistic and social interests? "Sociality becomes the realisation of individual aims (purposes) in social life." But is this definition of sociality anything more than an assertion of mutual accommodation?
Finally, while Lavrov adopts from Comte a positivist, antitheological, and antireligious standpoint, he provides no foundation for his positivism. He should have analysed religion more closely, for positivism cannot rest content with the simple assertion that religion is a vestigial remnant. Is religion really dead? Or is it only theology and the church that are defunct? Lavrov accepts the Kantian reduction of religion to morality, and insists therefore upon Proudhonian justice in addition to (theoretical) truth. He is in his rights, but, Kant notwithstanding, and we may even say because of Kant, the problem of religion is not thereby reduced to non-existence.
In the political field, Lavrov's work remained preparatory, cultural, educative, rather than the work of a leader. His industry, probity, self-sacrificingness, sense of discipline, and above all his character and example, had their due influence; but as a leader he was weak. He lacked the faculty, so essential to the leader, for making prompt decisions, and his political development was tardy. In the sixties he was of moderate conservative or liberal views, certainly not a radical. During the seventies he became a declared socialist, coming to consider social questions more important than political, and taking the social revolution as his terminal aim. In this phase, he was opposed to liberalism, and declared that the socialist must not make common cause with liberals. In the eighties, politics has resumed its place, in the first rank; the primary task was to break and destroy absolutism; for this end, he was now willing to unite with the liberals. Whereas some years earlier he had condemned terrorism, he now favoured terrorist methods. For a moment he even believed in the possibility of negotiating with absolutism and its official representatives. I am thinking here of the episode with Pobědonoscev's "Holy Retinue."
Lavrov closed his political career as editor of clandestine literature. Throughout life he was a writer and a man of learning, but sacrificed his learned leisure and his opinions for political ends. This must not be taken as implying that he was weak of character. Whilst he temporarily accepted political and revolutionary methods, his fundamental aim ever remained to bring about a moral modification of society, for this change seemed to him of more decisive importance than any socio-political transformation.[5]
The judgment of the most competent of his contemporaries, of those whose personal knowledge of the man especially entitled them to an opinion, was that Lavrov's greatest and most far-reaching influence was exercised by his Historical Letters, by the effects which this book produced upon the rising generation then awakening to revolutionary ideas.
Lavrov's influence upon his contemporaries and successors was greatly restricted because he became what I may term an absolute westerniser. I mean that in his books he concerned himself little about his Russian predecessors and contemporaries, writing like an Englishman or a Frenchman who knew nothing of Russian literature and Russian thought. For example, he accepted the Comtist developmental scheme; his thought was devoted to western Catholicism and Protestantism, to European philosophers and their systems. The Russian church and its development, Russian sectarians, and Russian thinkers, seemed for him practically non-existent. Čaadaev had renounced the Russian church, but we feel that this renunciation cost him much. Lavrov desired to be a revolutionist, a revolutionary leader, but he wished to play this part with a positivist ataraxia which made him his own historian while he was yet living. Lavrov wrote as if he were presenting another's thought system instead of his own.
An additional cause of Lavrov's weakness as a leader that, for all his theoretical scepticism, he was a convinced utopian, for he believed in good earnest that the definitive social revolution was impending, that its coming was a matter of two or three years at most.
II
§ 119.
NICOLAI KONSTANTINOVIČ MIHAILOVSKII[6] is rightly placed beside Lavrov. The two men represent the same philosophical trend, and their writings have considerable resemblance in point of style. Mihailovskii, a self-taught man thirsting for knowledge, had his attention drawn by Lavrov to the rich sources of European literature. This was his introduction to Comte and to socialism, and he was greatly influenced by the fundamental conceptions of "historical realism." Though he was not pleased by the Historical Letters the book had a considerable effect upon his mind.
Mihailovskii belongs to the younger generation, being younger than Černyševskii and Lavrov, and a contemporary of Pisarev and Kropotkin. During the years after the liberation of the peasantry he was exposed to the philosophical and political influences which have been adequately discussed in earlier pages. A good German and French scholar from childhood onwards, Mihailovskii was not solely dependent upon Russian teachers, but early began to absorb French and German literature, belletristic no less than scientific.
He was chiefly distinguished from his somewhat older contemporaries in that the influence of Hegel upon him was small, whereas the influence of Comte was practically decisive. I might speak of him as a fully conscious Comtist, but I cannot term him a critical Comtist, for he did not sufficiently exercise his faculty of epistemological criticism. Had he done so he would not have remained a positivist. But his tlook on positivism was less naïve than that of many of his contemporaries.
In epistemological matters Mihailovskii was a positivist and an ultra-empiricist. Comte's formula, that while observation cannot take place in the absence of a guiding theory, his theory cannot possibly have been constructed without preliminary observation, is accepted by Mihailovskii as it was accepted by Mill, the former believing with the latter that this is not to argue in a vicious circle. The observations and generalisations which are at first unnoticed (Mihailovskii writes that they are "unconscious"), are subsequently developed into clearly formulated general and abstract propositions, which guide the detailed observations. These propositions are generalisations from experience; there is nothing innate apriori about them.
Mihailovskii expressly rejects innate ideas, as expounded by the doctrine of idealism. Not merely is he, with Mill, opposed to the notion that there are inborn moral ideas; but further, touching upon the problem of mathematical axioms, he decides with Comte and Mill that these axioms, and axioms in general, are no more than extremely simple and therefore generally recognised truths.
In opposition to Kant, Mihailovskii borrows here also from Spencer. By empiricism (experience) he understands, in addition to our own experience, the experience of our forefathers. The brain of the newborn is not a tabula rasa. He even believes that hereditary transmission of ancestral experience is manifested physiologically through changes in the descendants' nerves. It is true that Mihailovskii does not verify the hypothesis, and all that he says under this head amounts in the end to no more than to show that the so-called innate ideas are referable historically to tradition and psychoogically to apperception ("apperception preponderates over perception"). It is true that he has certain hesitations, seeing, for example, that tradition may be false as well as true; and seeing that the apriori of idealism, when explained by inheritance, becomes tantamount to "preconceived opinions," i.e. to prejudices. But he is satisfied in the end with the emendations that result from experience and from increasing insight.
In metaphysics, too, Mihailovskii follows Comte, holding that the nature of things is uncognisable, incomprehensible. But the thesis is not precisely formulated in detail; the proposition is reiterated in the terminology of Hume and Comte and sometimes also in that of Kant; on the whole it is Spencer's agnosticism to which Mihailovskii adheres. Quite in the sense of Comte, he insists upon the idea of the relativity of knowledge. Man cannot get beyond his five senses; there are no absolute truths, but only relative truths, things that are true for men.
It is plain that Mihailovskii's theory of cognition remains purely positivist. Like his contemporaries, above all like Lavrov, he rejected the Kantian idealism, in so far as this was criticism, in a most uncritical manner; and he reduced the apriori to physiological differences of organisation.
Nevertheless Mihailovskii was not a naturalist, not a materialist like the radical realists; to him psychical phenomena were no less real than physical. Mihailovskii was here in agreement with Lavrov and with the emphasis the latter laid upon consciousness.
From Comte and Spencer, Mihailovskii passed to Darwin. Having been trained in the natural sciences, he retained interest in these branches of knowledge. Darwinism gave him an opportunity to clear up his ideas upon the important question of the social struggle, and evolutionism confirmed for him the positivist doctrine of progress; but, as we shall shortly see, he made a profound, a positively dualistic distinction, between progress and evolution, and he rejected Darwinism.
In ethics, Mihailovskii was a utilitarian, and he took occasion from time to time to defend this standpoint, all the more since utilitarianisin was condemned in official literature. For example, he championed utilitarianism against the theologian Malcev, a Russian writer whose name is not unknown in German theological literature. For Mihailovskii, utilitarianism was the ethic based on experience. Precisely because based on experience was it preferable to intuitive morality, erroneously preferred as more ideal. Mihailovskii differed from Lavrov concerning Kant, and Kant's conception of duty, which Mihailovskii could not accept. Were he a painter, said Mihailovskii, he would represent the history of mankind in three pictures. The second of these would be named "The Last Criminal." It would show society perishing, but in the very last moment the last criminal would have been executed in the name and in honour of absolute justice. In the main square of the abandoned and ruined city, we should see the crumbling scaffold on which is the skeleton of the last criminal; perched on the skull is a raven; fiat justitia, pereat mundus.
Despite this rejection of rigorism and its metaphysical foundation (the term metaphysical is used in the Comtist sense), Mihailovskii laid stress upon the necessity for recognising the extant contrast between good and evil, which he tended to conceive as a continuation of the ancient Iranian and Indian dualism. Truth has withdrawn to heaven, and the task of the ethical volunteer corps is to bring it back to earth. For the positivist, truth is merely relative, not absolute; but in practice, says Mihailovskii, it is after all absolute for man, since man cannot transcend it.
Mihailovskii was a Comtist, but he apprehended positivism as it was originally conceived by Hume and emended by Mill, for both the English philosophers regarded ethics as an integral portion of philosophy. Spencer, too, showed Mihailovskii the right path in these matters.
Mihailovskii was much influenced by the socialists as well by Comte. Proudhon, Louis Blanc, and Marx, must in especial be recognised as his teachers. Proudhon was commended to him by the authority of Herzen, and exercised a great effect upon his mind in carlier years. In 1867 he translated Proudhon's De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières, and he learned from its author to prize individuality. He was attracted by Louis Blanc's philosophy of history, was delighted by the principle of the organisation of labour, and vas an enthusiast on behalf of social workshops; he is said to have spent inherited property upon founding of a bookbinders' workshop. Marx's writings, and in especial the first volume of Capital, drew Mihailovskii's attention to the dangers of the division of labour and to the anarchy of the capitalist economic order.
From 1877 onwards, Mihailovskii was interested in the work of Dühring, the opponent of Marx and Engels, and was interested also in that of F. A. Lange, recommending both Dühring and Lange to the Russian youth. It need hardly be said that Mihailovskii's thought, like that of his Russian predecessors and contemporaries, was akin to Feuerbach's.
In addition to these influences, we have to consider Mihailovskii's acquaintanceship with the works of Rousseau, for this led the Russian towards socialism, towards the social collectivity, as contrasted with Proudhonian anarchism.
Russian literature exercised a notable influence upon Mihailovskii. I have already referred to Lavrov; but Mihailovskii learned also from Herzen, and still more from Černyševskii, whose anthropologism recurs as "humanitism." Mihailovskii was a consistent opponent of Pisarev and the latter's adherents, and sharply distinguished his own individualism from that of Pisarev. Nor did Mihailovskii forge Bělinskii. It is noteworthy that Mihailovskii was at an early date intimately associated with Nekrasov and Saltykov, becoming in 1868 a contributor to Nekrasov's periodical. At this time he was on friendly terms with several other Russian authors, amongst whom may be mentioned Eliseev and Šelgunov. Among the Russians who helped to form his mind, Mihailovskii refers to Nožin, who died prematurely in the year 1866, being then only twenty-three years old. The two men worked together for several years on the staff of the same journal. Nožin was involved in the trial of the Karakozovcy. Nožin was a zoologist. In a European journey he had made the acquaintance of Bakunin. His publicist ideas derived primarily from Proudhon, but he differed from his teacher in his view that the division of labour was injurious to individuality and was the cause of the unequal division of the product of labour. Nožin denied the reality of the Darwinian struggle for existence among the individuals of the same species, referring expressly to the phenomena of mutual aid. All these ideas recur in the work of Mihailovskii.
§ 120.
MIHAILOVSKII was a sociologist, and in sociology was a follower of Comte, but he was distinguished from Comte, and was distinguished no less from Marx and the Marxists, by his insistence upon the "subjective method" in sociology.
In Russian literature, much has been said concerning Mihailovskii's and Lavrov's "subjective method." The Marxists, in particular, have fiercely attacked it, and one of Plehanov's principal writings is devoted to Mihailovskii and to a refutation of the subjective method.
Mihailovskii, like Lavrov, recognised the existence of psychology, side by side with sociology, as an independent science, differing here from his leader Comte, and accepting the views of Mill and Spencer. The sociologist must employ the subjective method as well as the objective; social and historical facts demand a psychological as well as a material explanation. Consequently Mihailovskii often speaks of "social psychology."
Mihailovskii explicitly protested against the idea that the subjective method was not inductive, and would conflict with experience. But in sociology, he said, in the explanation of the relationships between human beings, the objective method was not all-sufficing. The historical process, he declared, is teleological, for individual men, groups of men, and humanity as a whole, pursue aims. Now an aim implies a desire, the sentiment of what is agreeable, and the consciousness of duty. The sociologist, therefore, in his presentation of the historical process and of social organisation, must duly take into account this subjective element in man.
Mihailovskii demands that the observing sociologist shall allow his mind to permeate the observed object, man; the observer, as he puts it, must "merge" with the object, so that the observer may find himself in the place of the observed; he demands that the sociologist shall have the faculty of "impressionability" (imaginative insight).
But this is not to give an exhaustive account of Mihailovskii's subjective method. Every individual, he says, is member of a historically given group of human beings, of a class, and shares the opinions and desires of that class. Utterly different are the respective judgments formed by the feudalist and by the socialist concerning historical and social things. What standpoint should the scientific thinker assume? Mihailovskii admits that a man's views are invariably suggested by his social position. How, then, is scientific sociology possible? Mihailovskii adheres to the opinion of Comte. He who desires to devote himself to sociology must attain to a high moral level, that he may be able to do justice to all views and valuations, and that he may be able to overcome preconceived opinions based upon tradition (apperception).
For Mihailovskii, the objective method in sociology seems no more than a mask, assumed by men without conscience in order to befool their conscientious fellows. Mihailovskii justifies his departure from Comte’s historism by referring to Comte's own mental development, to the way in which Comte moved on from his objective sociology to the subjective method in politics and the philosophy of religion. He quotes Balzac's La recherche de l'absolu, showing how the brilliant realist had made positivist detachment appear ludicrous and contemptible, by representing a disciple of Lavoisier defining tears in purely chemical terminology as consisting merely of this and that variety of matter. In contrast with such an outlook, Mihailovskii champions the socio-psychological standpoint, rightly declaring that to do this is not abandon positivism.
Comte had demanded that we should avoid any tincture of enthusiasm or of a spirit of condemnation in our judgment of historical and above all of political facts; we should regard them, he declared, as simple facts of observation, comprehending each fact solely in its setting in relation to coexisting phenomena and in association with the antecedent and subsequent condition of human development. But Mihailovskii, while recognising that this positivist detachment is a demand of "pure rationality," regards it as impossible and unsound. "Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner," is a pretty saying, but wrongheaded. "Tout comprendre" must not be taken to imply that we are not to insist upon the fundamental opposition between good and evil. "Tout comprendre" is impossible; no one can understand everything, and therefore we must not forgive cverything. Besides, "tout comprendre" is impossible to a decent man; for example, certain meannesses are quite beyond his understanding. In a word, there is no justification for the demand that the historian should display a positivist detachment. Mihailovskii returns frequently to the exposition of these views, and they are especially to be found in the preface to his John the Terrible.
Plehanov's rejection of Mihailovskii's subjective method is based on the contention that this method suggests no other criterion than the personal wishes of the individual, that it proposes to replace scientific research by subjective caprice.
Indisputably there are historians and philosophers of history who are guided by caprice, but the objection is none the less fallacious. As a Marxist, Plehanov adopts the standpoint of purely objective history, the individual consciousness being eliminated by Engels and the other Marxists. Mihailovskii's views are clearer and more accurate, for he recognises that the objective interpretation of history is inadequate. Marx believed himself to have proved that the age of communism was approaching by historical necessity; he believed that this proof could be furnished by the use of the Hegelian dialectic. But what would be the result of such a proof for my personal conduct, for yours, for Marx's own, for everyone's? The socialist decides in favour of socialism and communism upon ethical and not upon historical grounds; the Russian socialists are right; Marx's attempt to give socialism a purely objective historical foundation was futile. It is only because men of the present day are deciding in favour of communism, and have reasons and motives for this decision, that historians have been able to point to the beginning of the communistic epoch. Other philosophers of history, differing from Marx, refuse to consider the socialist movement as the opening of a new historical epoch, and look upon it as no more than a morbid episode. Which party is right? Upon whose side, that is to say, is the truth—a truth which, as I see it, can be no more than relative? It is clear that the question with which Mihailovskii is really concerned when he discusses the subjective method, is whether psychology, and sociology grounded upon psychology, are really possible. To-day we may say that the question has been adequately answered, thas been answered alike theoretically, epistemologically, and practically, by the advent of a genuinely scientific psychology and sociology, whereby the objections of the Marxists have been rendered simply anachronistic.
But for Mihailovskii the question has a yet more general significance. If every human being be involuntarily and necessarily guided by the preconceived opinions of his class and of his day, how is science possible? To put the matter in concrete terms, Which class can contend that it possesses science, that science is enlisted in its service? Mihailovskii replies by amending Lassalle and Engels, by saying that science serves the people, that is, the "entirety of the labouring classes of society."
It is necessary to note and to commend the way in which Mihailovskii invariably pays great attention to the problem of accurate method. When discussing individual scientific philosophic writers, he never fails to examine their methodology, and to consider how it corresponds to their actual treatment of the topic. As regards sociology, he challenges the validity of analogy as a method capable of giving accurate results, his views in this respect conflicting with those of Spencer and certain Russian sociologists, above all with those of Stronin.
Mihailovskii contests Spencer's opinion that society is an organism, rejecting at the same time false conceptions of a collective consciousness. For Mihailovskii, society is an organisation of individuals of like kind and of equal value. In his explanation of historical and social facts, the sociologist ought not to set out from the whole, but from the consciousness of the individual. The nature of the individual, says Mihailovskii, is most conspicuously shown in work; for men, for the human individual, work is what motion is for matter. (It must be observed that Mihailovskii is here drawing an analogy!) Work is the chief attribute of individuality, the chief characteristic of individuality as such. Talent, birth, wealth, beauty—these are non-essentials, to a greater or less extent they are chance qualities; talent comes by favour of fortune; a man's wealth is not won solely by himself; and so on. But work is the deliberate use of energy, the expenditure of energy to attain a goal, and work is therefore the manifestation of man's true essence, the manifestation of individuality.
It follows that the essence of sociality is to be found in the collaboration or cooperation of individuals, and that the nature of the cooperation determines the character of successive epochs.
For this reason, because cooperation socialises men, Mihailovskii is just as little inclined as Comte and other sociologists to admit the validity of economic materialism. Cooperation is not merely economic in nature, but comprises all social work, including intellectual work. In the last resort culture subserves the purposes of work, and therefore culture cannot be utilised as an explanation of social and historical processes. Of course the cooperation of human beings is explicable by motives and reasons, and is referable above all to inborn egoism and altruism. Here Mihailovskii follows Adam Smith, for to natural and inborn egoism he counterposes the no less inborn and natural altruism; he appeals to Comte's "altruism," to Feuerbach's "tuism," and to Dühring's "sympathetic natural impulses."
Mihailovskii was not slow to study Marx. Immediately after the appearance of the first volume of Capital he read the book carefully, and was especially interested in the chapters upon cooperation and upon the division of labour, for his attention had already been drawn to these questions by Comte, Adam Smith, and Louis Blanc. In his work on Darwinism, published in 1870, Mihailovskii stated that in Capital he had found the confirmation of his views concerning the disastrous consequences of the division of labour. Mihailovskii was likewise interested in Marx's philosophy of history, and had frequent controversies with Marx and the Marxists, especially in later years, when the latter had come to regard him as an adversary. Notwithstanding his esteem for Marx, he never accepted the doctrine of historical materialism, but, on the contrary, always energetically combated it.
The way in which Mihailovskii appealed to psychical energies in explanation of social facts, is shown by his studies concerning imitation and suggestive influences, a theme in which he was always greatly interested. From 1882 onwards he penned a series of essays analysing the way in which human beings influence one another, and why certain men in particular (the "heroes") influence the masses for good or for ill, and compel lesser men to follow their example. Mihailovskii displayed much industry, here anticipating Tarde, in studying the French writers who have recorded manifestations of imitativeness and have described its pathological forms.
It seems self-evident to Mihailovskii that history is subject to laws. Man, he says, cannot escape from the domain of natural law. But in the field of politico-moral processes the human will is one factor among many, and within this field therefore freedom of the will has its scope. The formation of ideals and the endeavour to realise these ideals, occur, therefore, likewise in accordance with law. Mihailovskii understands freedom of the will in the determinist sense, making a sharp distinction between determinism and fatalism.
General laws determine the order of the phases of historic evolution, but individual intervention can retard or accelerate the course of development. Great and vigorous personalities make their appearance upon the frontier between two phases of development.
Mihailovskii, consequently, takes a critical view of the so-called "great men theory" of recent days. Following Louis Blanc, he shows that great men create, not out of themselves, but out of their environment, and that it is individual circumstances and the circumstances of the day which make these great men representatives and leaders. Precise psychological analysis enabled Mihailovskii to reduce to reasonable proportions exaggerations à la Carlyle (hero-worship), and to keep close to fact.
Mihailovskii's social psychology, precise and indefatigable, utterly excludes historical materialism. For Mihailovskii, as he himself said at times, the stomach question was also a soul question.
§ 121.
THE philosophy of history, as Mihailovskii maintains in opposition to the sceptics in his study of Louis Blanc, ought to expound the meaning of history. Mihailovskii takes this idea from Comte, the socialists, the evolutionary students of natural science, and above all from Darwin. In practical and political matters it is natural that Mihailovskii should think as a Russian concerning the meaning of historical development, his outlook being determined by that of his Russian predecessors and contemporaries.
He formulates a scheme of development in three stages, naming them, in conformity with Lavrov, the objective anthropocentric, the eccentric, and the subjective anthropocentric stage.
The objective anthropocentric stage is characterised by the naïve belief in accordance with which man holds himself to be the objective, absolute, and real centre of nature, determined from without. It is the stage of anthropomorphism and mysticism, the stage of theology and religion, the stage of objective teleology. The second or eccentric stage, pushing dualism of body and soul to an extreme, regards man as under the dominion of abstract ideas. The third or subjective anthropocentric stage is the genuinely human epoch, wherein man, his ethical ideals, a purely human teleology, are realised. It is, at the same time, the era of science and of positivism. Manifestly this scheme is referable to the three stages of Comte. We are contemplating the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive stage; but whereas Comte maintains as his principle of classification the theoretical relationship of man to the universe, Mihailovskii is increasingly concerned with the ethical relationship of man to his fellows and to the universe.[7]
We may think also of the three stages of Louis Blanc, which are likewise to some extent a reflex of Comte's ideas; the stage of authority (Catholicism), of individualism (Luther and Protestantism), and of harmony or association. Mihailovskii himself expounds Louis Blanc's philosophy of history, and does so to clarify his own ideas. He also reproduces Saint-Simon's scheme, in which Saint-Simon distinguished between the organic era and the critical; and he adduces Vico's three stages, the divine, the heroic, and the human. He compares all these schemata with Comte's stages and with his own.
Mihailovskii devotes much thought to the three stages of development. He moots the question why historians and philosophers of history commonly inclined to speak about three stages, and answers his own question by an analysis of the Hegelian dialectic evolutionary process, which likewise has three stages. He contends that the basis of this conception of three stages is to be found in the natural and obvious contemplation of the future as compared with the present and the past. Since the future is the natural continuation and development of the past, with the idea of the three historical stages there very readily becomes associated the concept of the Hegelian dialectic or that of Vico's "ricorsi," namely that the third stage redevelops itself into the first. But this redevelopment is not a reversion; it is a further evolution upon a higher level. Mihailovskii therefore distinguishes between the degree of development and the type. When Rousseau, for example, expresses his loathing for civilisation and his desire to return to primitive conditions, he is not longing for the savagery and lack of cultivation characteristic of primitive man, but aspires merely to restore primitive simplicity (the type, that is to say) in conjunction with the higher evolution.[8] The idea of Vico's recurrences (ricorsi) is reduced by Mihailovskii to the simple conviction that the social principles given to man by nature necessarily enter into strife one with another (as we see, in the modern age, in the struggle between authority and criticism), and that ultimately one of these principles secures general validity as the principle of authority has done in science, and so on.
Mihailovskii likewise applies his three stages in the domain of economics. Society is for him the organisation of labour, society is a working and co-operating society.
In the first stage, according to Mihailovskii, simple co-operation is dominant, a number of individuals working side by side and together for the same practical end. From the very first these individuals are differently endowed and differ in the extent of their training; but even at this stage there are manifest the first and still inconspicuous consequences of co-operation, in the form of the division of labour. Division of labour, however, does not become well marked until the second stage. This "eccentric" stage is not characterised by any aim tending to unite men, by any human aim; theory and practice are severed; the division of labour is perfected; the individual becomes one-sided and a mere organ of society; man ceases to be a complete man, and therefore ceases to be man. Not until the coming of the third stage, the subjective anthropocentric stage, does man return to the type of simple cooperation, but does so upon a higher plane of evolution. "Man for mankind, everything for mankind," becomes the saving password.
In the domain of knowledge, the fully developed human being is presented to us as "the profane one." He is the positivist philosopher who has renounced metaphysics and theology, and who endeavours to cognise those things only which are within his mental grasp. He is the positively trained man of culture in contradistinction to men of professional dexterity and the one-sided specialists of earlier days.
§ 122.
MIHAILOVSKII was compelled to consider Darwin's theory of evolution, for this theory was interwoven with the leading social and political problems, not only by Marx and Engels, but also by the Darwinists and their opponents. History and the philosophy of history were extended to cover biology, zoology, and cosmology; and conversely the theory of evolution in the world of natural science influenced history and the history of philosophy. Mihailovskii was very keenly aware of this mutual relationship.
Mihailovskii examined Darwinism and Darwinistic literature to ascertain whether the theory of the struggle for existence must be applied to human society to justify struggle, or at least to show that struggle was inevitable. He admitted that struggle was characteristic of nature, of the animal world, but since he would not admit the applicability of the analogical method to sociology, he considered that biology could not furnish any sociological deductions. He accepted the Darwinian theory in large part, was willing to admit that man is an animal, of animal origin, but did not think that this made it necessary, as he once put it, to regard man as a beast. Experience showed him that the struggle for existence has indeed a place in human society, but it also taught him that man, recognising the harmfulness of the struggle for existence, endeavours to mitigate it and to put an end to it.
When he speaks of struggle in society, Mihailovskii thinks not merely of war, but also, and still more, of the continuous struggle enduring for entire epochs between the rich and powerful on the one hand and the poor and weakly on the other. In this matter he accepts the view of the socialists, who desire to put an end to the social struggle of the capitalist era with its highly elaborated system of the division of labour.
Like Marx and the other socialists, Mihailovskii discerns in history a degenerative development of egoism as contrasted with the temporarily weakened altruism of mankind; it is insatiable covetousness which splits society into the two camps of rich and poor, of workers and rulers.
According to Mihailovskii, Darwinism does not explain the social division of labour. Spencer attempted to identify the physiological differentiation of the various organs of the individual with the differentiation of individuals in the capitalistic epoch. Mihailovskii considers that such an identification is impossible; the facts with which we have to deal in the two cases are of distinct categories, and analogy is no proof. Moreover, Darwinism affords an explanation of the differentiation of species only, not of individual differentiation.
Mihailovskii accepts the general law of evolution, in accordance wherewith organised matter becomes ever more complex and the sum of individual energies and capacities continually increases. The increasing complexity consists in this, that the number of the organs increases, that the differences between them become more marked, and that physiological division of labour (i.e. the differentiation of organs for special functions) becomes more effective. Social division of labour, however, as history shows, is not a natural law; it is an empirical law, a social and historical law applicable to a particular epoch, and the division of labour can therefore be replaced by simple cooperation.
Liberalism, with its false doctrine of the necessity for free competition, might endeavour to turn Darwinism to account. But, with Louis Blanc and the other socialists, Mihailovskii shows that as far as the workers are concerned, liberty and free competition do not entail freedom but slavery. To liberalism, therefore, he counterposes socialism, which demands equality, including economic equality; and he proposes to replace the division of labour, with its differentiation of individuals, by the simple cooperation of fully cultured individuals, of individuals whose cultivation is persistently maintained. Free competition, being in truth anarchy and slavery, must be abolished.
Darwinism is conceived aristocratically and plutocratically, not democratically. Mihailovskii therefore shows that the boasted democracy of the natural sciences (an idea which appealed to many socialists) has no absolute validity. Sociology, history, and scientific philosophy may be democratic. "All roads lead to Rome," says Mihailovskii. He admits, too, that the natural sciences, by weakening theology, by establishing the doctrine of the natural equality of men, and by favouring the spread of modern industry and technique, may have exercised a democratising influence in the era before the great revolution. But he considers Buckle to be wrong in maintaining that natural science is essentially democratic.
Looking at the matter subjectively, Mihailovskii contends that it is a universalised aspiration of modern man to abolish the division of labour; the modern human being energetically desires to become a complete individuality, to make an end of the partialities and incompletenesses that are entailed by the enforced division of labour. The aspiration is justifiable, and does not conflict with innate altruism; on the contrary, altruism will first become possible in a society of fully developed individuals, of individualities. Mihailovskii considers that the struggle for individuality comprises the main content of human history and development; this struggle corresponds to the social ideal of the abolition of the division of labour, of the process by which the individual is damaged, restricted, subdivided. The division of labour must yield place to simple cooperation on the part of fully developed human beings.
"Our human ego is not something single and undivided; it is not an 'ego,' it is a 'we.' But the members of this plural have long since, by the process of organic evolution, been reduced to the level of completely subordinated individuals, whose independent significance is merged in the consciousness of the whole." Spencer, the opponent of socialism, might be content with this declaration. Here, as so often, Mihailovskii's thought is far too biological, so that he himself lapses into the detested objective method. The lack of clearness is connected with the fact that, as regards consciousness, Mihailovskii adopts the alleged explanation furnished by Haeckel, Maudsley, and others, which assumes man to comprise within himself numerous subjects and consciousnesses which are hierarchically subordinated to the whole; this whole is self-conscious, and carries out its will as a unified undivided ego.
In this connection it is necessary to refer to the concept of individuality. Mihailovskii docs not apply this term merely to the isolated human individual, as individuality, seeing that to him the family, the class, the state, the folk, etc., are likewise individualities—"egocentric" individualities fighting for their individuality.
Mihailovskii's aim is to fuse Proudhon with Louis Blanc, to effect a harmonious combination of individualism and socialism. With this end in view, he gives the following formula of progress. "Progress is the gradational approximation to the totality of individuals, to the maximum possible and most comprehensive division of labour among the organs and to the minimum possible division of labour among men. Immoral, unjust, injurious, and irrational, is everything tending to arrest this movement. Moral, just, rational, and useful, are those things alone which lessen the diversity of society while thereby increasing the diversity of the individual members of society."
Beyond the limits of this formula, says Mihailovskii, no compromise is possible between the interests of the individual and those of society; beyond the limits of this formula, no end can be secured for the wearisome struggle between these respective interests.
All formulas of this character, precisely because they are so extremely generalised, are liable to divergent interpretations; and this criticism is especially applicable to Mihailovskii's formula owing to the deliberate vagueness of its terminology (e.g. the use of the expressions "maximum possible" and "minimum possible"). Lavrov contested the validity of the formula, saying that it did not deal with the actual facts of evolution; it was negative; it merely prescribed what history ought not to have been. Later critics, adherents as well as opponents of Mihailovskii, have refused to accept the formula. Mihailovskii himself seems to have been aware of its vagueness, for he frequently returns to the subject with elucidations and amplifications. Interesting is Mihailovskii's relationship to Durkheim, who, following Comte, regards the modern division of labour as the most important factor in recent history and as the foundation of social solidarity. The possibility of this sociological conception and valuation of the division of labour compelled Mihailovskii to revise and supplement his formula. Durkheim's De la division du travail social was published in 1893. Criticising the work in 1897, Mihailovskii wrote, in definite opposition to Durkheim, that the social division of labour must be conceived as involving class differences and class contrasts. But it is open to question whether the emendation can save the formula or free it from ambiguity.
§ 123.
FOR the history of philosophy, at least for the two earlier epochs, Mihailovskii contents himself with the most abstract formulas. He reviews the work of Louis Blanc, Vico, Comte, etc., drafts his schemata, supplements or modifies in various respects what he has culled from these authorities. It is needless to go into fuller detail here, though I may mention in passing that Mihailovskii assumes that after the first development of man from the animal world there was a period wherein no cooperation was practised He was greatly interested in studies dealing with the primitive forms of marriage (by Bachofen and others), and in works on the law of population, but did not upon these subjects utter definitive views of his own. As in so many other questions, it sufficed him to gain a general scientific outlook.
Were we to enter into a fuller criticism of his views, we should have to ask whether Mihailovskii had rightly understood the evolution of the division of labour and the significance of that process, and we should have to enquire whether the abolition of the division of labour has the fundamental importance that Mihailovskii ascribes to it. Marx looked forward to such an abolition in the society of the future, but to him the matter was of no more than secondary importance. Closer study of the subject is requisite. With Bücher and others we may distinguish between several kinds of division of labour; we must clearly recognise that the injurious effects of division of labour are largely dependent upon the undue length of the working day, and so on.
No more than a passing reference can be made to all these questions, for I desire to do no more than indicate the leading defects of Mihailovskii's periodic subdivision of the stages of evolution. His distinction of the three stages as objective anthropocentric, eccentric, and subjective anthropocentric, was a failure.
In early days man was objectivist, for he did not, like Descartes, deliberately make his own consciousness the starting point of his theory and practice; man had a naïve belief in the outer world, wherein his thoughts and feelings were wholly immersed. Nevertheless, and indeed for this very reason, he was a (naïve) anthropomorphist and mythologer, as we learned in § 41a. The middle ages had not become "eccentric"; what Mihailovskii talks of as eccentric is nothing more than the objective anthropomorphic stage; there is no distinction here between the middle ages and the earlier epoch. Besides, the dualism of body and soul is by no means characteristic of the middle ages.
Equally unsatisfactory is Mihailovskii's characterisation of the subjective anthropocentric era. He supplements his study of Louis Blanc's philosophy of history by an accurate estimate of Descartes' subjectivism; but he fails to distinguish adequately between epistemological and critical subjectivism, on the one hand, and sentimental or "romanicist" subjectivism, on the other. In both respects the anthropocentrism of such a philosopher as Fichte was something very different from the anthropocentrism of the medieval and classical philosophers. I can but refer again to § 41a.
Just as little as Lavrov, does Mihailovskii attain to psychological grasp of the difficulties which his predecessors Bakunin, Bělinskii, and others, had had in their dealings with the subjectivism of German idealism. For all his perspicacity and circumspection, Mihailovskii shows here his lack adequate insight in the psychological and the philosophico-historical fields. He has not grasped the epistemological significance of German idealism, despite his own excursion (immediately to be discussed) into the same domain of thought. Mihailovskii's defects arise out of his positivism.
§ 124.
MIHAILOVSKII contemplates chiefly the modern age, the present day, having far less interest in the earlier periods of history. With Comte, he considers that the modern age is the historical transition to the desired social reconstruction.
Following Comte, he characterises the epoch of transition as anarchist, exaggeratedly individualistic, and sceptical. Like Comte (and like Louis Blanc and the French in general), he considers that the decomposition of the Catholic-feudal middle age begins with Protestantism, with Luther, and in philosophy with Descartes, whose "cogito ergo sum" gives expression to a one-sided and overstrained individualism. Descartes is already sceptical, but Montaigne is the true spokesman of the sceptical spirit. Then came the eighteenth century, with Voltaire, the encyclopedists, and the materialists, the age of rationalist enlightenment, whereby the old medieval philosophy and morality were definitively uprooted. The great revolution brought this negative and destructive epoch to a close, being itself the transition to a new organic epoch. In Mihailovskii's terminology the revolution constitutes the transition from the eccentric to the subjective anthropocentric modern age; the revolution is the beginning of the modern age. In connection with this philosophico-historical construction, I must refer to what has previously been said concerning his philosophy of history; the Comtist formula has replaced his own, for there is really no difference between the two; the characterisation of the period of transition, in especial, is purely Comtist. Hence Mihailovskii has to make use of Comte's terminology. The designations subjectivism, individualism, anarchism, scepticism, and metaphysics, are all taken bodily from Comte.
This close adhesion to the views of Comte leads us to the question how we are to apply to Russia Comte's subdivision of historical epochs. Mihailovskii is far too fond of speaking of the Catholic and feudal middle age of the west; he accepts the world-historical importance of Protestantism and the great revolution. But has the revolution, have Protestantism, feudalism, and Catholicism, the same world-wide significance for Russia? Comte considered that his classification into epochs was universally applicable, and he utilised it for the explanation of human evolution in its entirety. To Mihailovskii, however, fell the task of discovering how to apply the formula to Russia. On one occasion, referring to the relationship between Russia and western Europe, he said that the Russians disported themselves like a cook who had been given an old hat by her mistress. If we look to the philosophico-historical significance underlying the sarcasm, the meaning would seem be that Russia is following the same developmental course as the west. We shall learn, however, that Mihailovskii likewise defended the view that Russia might evolve differently from Europe. But, for this very reason, an exposition of thee universal validity of Comte's historical epochs might have been useful.
Mihailovskii assumes that the political problem, the question of political freedom, has been solved by the revolution; but that the question of social equality, the bread question, has not been solved. However, in his opinion, by 1840 the problem had become ripe for solution.
According to Mihailovskii, the complete freedom demanded by the revolution took the form of anarchy. Men rejected supernatural and theological traditions, and devoted themselves to observation and experiment, but economic freedom was not established in conjunction with theoretical freedom. Liberalism is inadequate. "Mankind," solemnly proclaiming the fights of man as the eighteenth century drew to its close, assumed the lineaments of the petty bourgeois, covetous and small minded. This bourgeois was an enthusiast for freedom thought, and demanded political freedom, but was a convinced defender of serfdom; he favoured political freedom, but defended the monarchy, because liberalism pushed him onwards toward republican forms. The liberal bourgeois was delighted with Darwin's doctrine, because it enabled him to adduce scientific proof in support of his inward conviction that inequality was a most useful institution.
In Russia during the forties the social question was brought to the front with the appearance of "the aristocrat doing penance" (the phrase is Mihailovskii's own). Isolated specimens had appeared at an earlicr date, but in the epoch of the forties he first appeared on the historic stage as a mass phenomenon. During the sixties aristocrats of this type became a notable historical factor, mingling with the raznočincy, that is to say, with men from the lower strata of society belonging to the most varied professional classes and differing greatly in the extent of their possessions, who had been called to social activity by the reforms.[9]
The modern Russian woman is for Mihailovskii a notable sign of the times. Mihailovskii warns us against regarding the woman's question as the principal question of the fifties and the sixties; the new women, he says, are among the "aristocrats doing penance"; the new women take their places among the new men. Mihailovskii insists that there were no raznočincy among the new women, and that the ideas of the raznočincy had but little influence upon new women.
Mihailovskii is very serious and extremely definite in the enunciation of his views concerning love and marriage. Off-spring, he says, are not the aim of marriage, but merely one of its consequences. Love, he contends, has physical roots, but psychological blossoms. A successful marriage will not interfere with the aspiration for individuality.
§ 125.
MIHAILOVSKII rejects economic liberalism because doctrine leads in the end to Stirner's egoistic individualism, to social atomism. He is not unsympathetic towards certain representatives of the ethical trend of political economy and towards some of the so-called professorial socialists, but his formula for the solution of the social question (the abolition of the division of labour by simple cooperation) has a purely socialist foundation. His socialism, however, is not Marxist.
We have already seen that Mihailovskii does not accept economic materialism. He rejects, further, the positivist objectivism and the amoralism of the Marxists; nor does he, like Marx and the Marxists, provide for socialism a necessary and exclusively historical foundation. Mihailovskii is a subjectivist, and his socialism has an ethical foundation; in his treatment of history he elucidates the social mischief which has been effected under the regime of liberalism. Despite his socialism, and qua socialist, Mihailovskii fights for the rights of individuality. The loss of individuality, the impossibility for the average man to develop his individuality completely, de-individualisation—this is for him the crowning evil of the capitalist division of labour, and of the capitalist economic oppression of the masses.
Mihailovskii prizes Marx's sociology more than he prizes that writer's economics. He considers that Marx was still far too much influenced by the unsound conception of the abstract man by which the thought of Adam Smith, Ricardo, and the other classical economists, was dominated. Speaking generally, Mihailovskii censures the economists for undue tendency to abstraction, objecting above all to the concept of national wealth as an abstract figment in whose name individuality is stifled. It is for this reason, says Mihailovskii, that the liberal political economists never carried the principle of individualism to its logical conclusion. Like Comte, he refuses to regard political economy as the leading and determinative constituent of social science, for he looks upon it as a discipline subordinate to sociology, one whose function it is to discuss a variety of social reciprocity, namely economic reciprocity.
Mihailovskii wrote freely in support of his campaign against "the disciples" (i.e. the followers of Marx), but it cannot be said that he settled his account with Marxism adequately.
His polemic against the Marxists brought Mihailovskii into closer personal relationships with the narodniki, and eventually he became one of the collaborators on their literary organ. But we cannot term him a narodnik, even though some have wished to describe him as a representative of the "critical narodničestvo." He blames the narodniki for their failure to direct their interest towards all sides of social life, and for their narrowness in regarding the folk as consisting of mužiks alone. To Mihailovskii, the folk was the entirety of the working classes of society, and he therefore was decisively opposed to Voroncov's unsympathetic attitude towards the intelligentsia, whilst he rejected the liberal and bourgeois identification of the folk with the nation—the political nation. But he never forgot that the enormous majority of Russians are mužiks, and that for this reason political and social activities must be mainly concentrated upon the mužik.
When he spoke of the intelligentsia he was thinking of the scientifically and artistically cultured members of the community. This intelligentsia, liberal and progressive in its political and social ideals, though detached from the folk, honestly devotes itself to the service of the folk, and with the judgment as well as with the emotions. The intelligentsia, therefore, consisting of workers, of persons who are working on behalf of the folk, must be sharply distinguished from the bourgeoisie, for the bourgeoisie is composed of non-workers, it is the class of those who pay the workers.
Mihailovskii's views concerning the mir and the artel resembled those of his predecessors, and he was at one with the narodniki in holding that these institutions, being of a social nature, must be preserved. Mihailovskii, however, laid less stress than did some of the narodniki upon the social significance of the mir, precisely because his socialism was less exclusively based upon the economic system. This is manifest, likewise, in his utterances concerning the manual workers. Mihailovskii censures the Marxist intellectuals for their tendency to exalt labour over the labourer. In his view, neither the operatives nor the mužiks were to be regarded as constituting the entire folk.
Mihailovskii was opposed to capitalism. As we are aware, he considered that the division of labour, with its antisocial consequences, was the outcome of capitalism; whereas the narodniki held less decisive views upon this matter. Some of Mihailovskii's strictures upon the capitalisation and industrialisation of agrarian Russia have been declared reactionary. The interpretation is unsound. We must keep in mind Mihailovskii's fundamental philosophic and sociological doctrines, for these give the true meaning to his concrete and practical declarations. Mihailovskii never failed to apply his ethical measure to economic development, to apply it, that is to say, to the individual men who were conducting economic development.[10]
Mihailovskii found the correct answer to the question whether Russia had or had not yet become a capitalist country. In Europe, he said, capitalism was not so completely dominant as the narodniki maintained (Mihailovskii was criticising the views of Voroncov). In Russia, on the other hand, the development of capitalism had proceeded a great deal further than the narodniki were willing to admit.[11]
Mihailovskii believed that it might be possible for Russia to overleap the middle stage of European evolution, that of the bourgeois state, and to attain forthwith the higher phase of political and social order. Writing in 1880, he said this development was theoretically conceivable, but that its likelihood was daily diminishing.[12]
§ 126.
IT is not easy to ascertain Mihailovskii's attitude in political matters, and especially his views concerning Russian refugees and the Russian revolution, for very few sources of information on these matters have as yet been opened. Of late there has been a tendency to regard him as having been in truth, even though unoficially, on of the "ideologues" of the Narodnaja Volja, whilst some declare that even more that Lavrov he was a leader of the revolution.
My own view of Mihailovskii's relationship to practical politics is formed by a study of his works, and these suggest that his outlook was predominantly theoretical. As a sociologist, of course, he considered the political questions of the day; as a socialist and an adversary of liberalism he favoured the radical trends; but I do not believe that he was personally in the revolutionary camp.
Such is the general impression produced by his writings, even though, reading between the lines (as we must do in the case of all Russians who wrote under the pressure of the cencorship), I can discern passages containing extremely radical allusions to the misdeeds of powerful persons. It does not follow that Mihailovskii's influence was trifling because he was never banished to Siberia. In 1883, Pleve sent him to Viborg for a speech he had made to students at a ball, and it is said that sharper measures were contemplated.
The opinion I have formed regarding Mihailovskii as politician, an opinion based upon my first study of his writings, may now be briefly elucidated by an examination of his ethical teachings and of such clandestine works as are at my disposal.
Like Lavrov, Mihailovskii assumes the unity of theory and practice.[13] He refers to the development of the fifties. The younger Russians of that day adopted materialism, positivism, and realism because, after the experiences of the Nicolaitan epoch, they wished to know what the world really is, whilst simultaneously, and for the same reason, they desired to know what the world must become. Not merely did they contemplate the world positivistically, but they wanted to transform it in the positivist direction.
From the mutuality of the individual and of society there is deducible, according to Mihailovskii, but one practical morality, which is far from being a morality that implies, under ethical pretexts, a withdrawal from social life. He opposes recipes for self-development; he opposes the comfortable and cheap individualism which works "upon, in, over, and under itself" (compare Pisarev's similar expression), whilst ignoring the folk, the working people. For the same reason, Mihailovskii rejects liberalism because it is concerned only about the few. He is not satisfied with political freedom in default of economic freedom, for he will not consent to the sacrifice of millions of hungry proletarians for the sake of a few thousand fat bourgeois. For Mihailovskii the only ethics are socialist ethics, and the socialist tests everything by its effect upon the workers. For Mihailovskii, therefore, "the right of ethical judgment is per se the right to intervene in the course of events, and to this right there corresponds a duty, the duty of responsibility for one's actions. The living individuality, with all its thoughts and feelings, becomes, at its own risks, a factor in history."
The ethical struggle must therefore at the same time be a struggle for the right. To Mihailovskii it seems that the motivation to this struggle is necessarily twofold. The campaign on behalf of individuality, intervention in the causal chain of historical and social events, is on the one hand determined by a sore conscience, and on the other by an injured sense of honour. In his study of Saltykov, Mihailovskii brings into prominence these two fundamental motives of practical socialist ethics. A man's conscience, he says, leaves him no rest as soon as he has come to realise that in one way or another he has unjustly exercised power over his fellows; his conscience demands an adequate sacrifice. If he cannot change his nature or his habits, it is his duty to offer up his life. The sense of honour is the awareness of needlessly endured affronts and constraints, and this therefore demands, not self-sacrifice, but space for all the energies and ideals that have hitherto been repressed. If, from the pressure of circumstances, this space, this satisfaction, cannot be secured, the man whose sense of honour has been awakened is in this case too impelled to sacrifice his life. Mihailovskii is aware that this rigorous demand will not always be fulfilled; he knows that the conscience and the sense of honour are not in every case sufficiently keen; he knows that compromises will be effected. There are cases, again, when the sacrifice of life is not required, and when men find satisfaction in struggle. Finally, in the great majority of men, conscience and the sense of honour are not awakened at all.
Mihailovskii enters a protest against the criticism that his concept of honour is identical with the feudal and aristocratic "honneur" of the days of chivalry; it is, he contends, a new and entirely different ethical sentiment. Personal wellbeing as an ethical principle, he says in one place, is old, and it is enough for the bourgeois; the ethics of compunction are likewise old; but new, perfectly new, is the "sentiment of personal responsibility for one's own social position."
In his study of Renan and Dühring (1878), Mihailovskii contrasted the idea of the sovereignty of the individual, the democratic right of every individual to political initiative, with the oligarchical and monarchical right of the few or even of a single person, which the bourgeoisie regards as valid. We may harbour doubts concerning the way the principle is formulated; we may ask whether the relationship between conscience and the sense of honour be rightly conceived; but the fundamental idea is sound.[14]
When therefore the question is mooted, which rules are higher, those of individual morality or those of social conduct, Mihailovskii shows (Letters Concerning Truth and Untruth, 1878) how the customary political programs may lead indeed to results, but not to sound and just results. It seems to him, therefore, that the conscience is the only ultimate court of appeal. He refers to the fortunate circumstances in which there may be no conflict between individual and social ideals, but being well aware that these are no more than fortunate (i.e. exceptional) circumstances, we must continually reiterate the moral demand to remain faithful under all circumstances to truth and justice.
Let us now examine Mihailovskii's own political conduct. We may recall that he began to come to the front in the literary world during the carly seventies, at the time when the far-reaching and widely diffused literary movement was in progress, paving the way for and organising the practical movement "towards the people." His writings during this first phase afforded sufficient proof of his socialist views. In 1873, Lavrov invited him to collaborate upon "Vpered." Mihailovskii hesitated for a time whether he should not leave Russia for good, and make common cause with Lavrov; but in the end he became convinced that, as he expressed it, he was no revolutionary, and was indeed more afraid of the revolution than of the reaction. His political credo at that time was, "Sit quiet and make ready." Mihailovskii was a Lavrovist in that he accepted Lavrov's propagandism, whilst his refusal to work with Lavrov shows that he had formed a just estimate of Lavrov's incapacity for leadership.
Mihailovskii's views were still apolitical. This is most plainly shown in his criticism of Dostoevskii's The Devils, published in the year we are considering (1873). Mihailovskii therein declares that he desires political freedom, "but if all the rights associated with this freedom are to be for us nothing more than a pretty and sweet-smelling flower, these rights and this freedom are things we can dispense with! Away with them when not merely do they fail to provide for us the possibility of paying our debts, but when they even contribute to swelling the total of these debts!" At a later date (1886), Mihailovskii declared that these words were too emphatic, but it would seem that his views concerning the utility of politics had undergone a change.
Mihailovskii's socialism, his work for the folk and above all for the peasants, harmonise better with the political aspirations which found their climax in the call, "Land and Freedom." I do not know whether and to what extent he was then connected with the secret societies, but in 1878 he wrote on behalf of "Načalo" (beginning, principle), a revolutionary periodical clandestinely printed in Russia, a leaflet in which the acquittal of Věra Zasulič by the jury was made the occasion for the demand for a constitution or for the summoning of the zemski sobor. Should this demand not be granted, a secret committee of public safety must be constituted. "Woe, then, to the fools who oppose the course of history!" Zasulič was represented as the embodiment of the Russian conscience and the Russian idea, but Mihailovskii emphasised the words which Zasulič had uttered before the judge: "It is hard to raise one's hand against a fellow human being."
In 1879, Mihailovskii published in the organ of the Narodnaja Volja two Political Letters by a Socialist. They were political because he had come to the conclusion that the revolutionists were mistaken in despising political work because they aspired to the social revolution. He reiterated his views concerning the consequences of the French revolution, which had indeed brought the constitutionalism of bourgeois liberalism, but had left social inequality. The revolutionaries were wrong in believing that Russia could effect the social revolution without the aid of the bourgeoisie. Russia, he showed, was still under the yoke of its bourgeoisie. Alexander II would not voluntarily grant a constitution; it must be forced from him. Mihailovskii therefore summoned the revolutionaries to the political struggle. In Europe, political freedom was proclaimed after the third estate, the bourgeoisie, had already become firmly established alike intellectually and materially. Russia must learn by Europe's example, and must exact political freedom by force before the bourgeoisie had in like manner become firmly established in Russia. Mihailovskii did not believe that the Russian folk would rise in revolt; and the revolutionaries, the intelligentsia, must therefore take up the political struggle. The social disease of Europe was caused, not by political freedom, but by the system of private robbery. The Russian eagle had two heads, and with one beak he tore political freedom in pieces, whilst with the other he gobbled up the peasants. "Aim, therefore, at both heads of the bird of prey! Vogue la galère!"
Mihailovskii's writing was signed "Grognard." It certainly lacks clarity. What were the revolutionaries really to do? How were they to conduct the desiderated political struggle side by side with the social struggle? Were the two campaigns distinct, and if so in what respect? The second writing was somewhat clearer. Mihailovskii declared that he did not himself feel able to kill a human being in cold blood, and that he had never thought it right to teach others who was to be killed and how. He desired to undertake a logical investigation, from the outlook of those who claimed a right to kill, to ascertain what practical meaning the assassination of such men as Mezencev could have. The revolutionaries said that the Russian revolution was of an exclusively social character. They did not want a constitution, for this would merely impose a new yoke upon the people. They contended that the assassinations were nothing more than a defence against spies, against the Mezencevs. Blood must be paid for with blood.
The reader will recall Stepniak's theory, against which Mihailovskii now directed his arguments. Mihailovskii insisted, in the first place, that the alleged self-defence was, after all, nothing but a political struggle; the terrorist murders had no specifically socialist character; the same means were employed by aristocrats, clericalists, liberals, intriguers of all kinds. Hence, continued Mihailovskii, it is not the Mezencevs who ought to be killed, but the idea of autocracy. He therefore demanded a political struggle of a different kind. The terrorist method was too episodic and unsystematic; there was no clear consciousness at the back of it; the revolutionists, he complained, understood how to die but did not wish to live. His conclusion was that the revolutionists ought to combine with the liberals for a systematic political struggle, not a struggle waged on their own behalf, but for the sake of the whole country and to win the whole country. For Mihailovskii, the constitutionalist regime in Russia was merely a question of the morrow, though this morrow, it was true, would not bring the solution of the social problem. Human peace and wellbeing belonged to a remoter future.
Among other clandestine essays I must mention a vigorous criticism of Count Loris-Melikov, the "Asiatic diplomatist," and the Open Letter of the Executive Committee to Alexander III. In the latter document an explanation is given of the death of Alexander II, and his successor is exhorted to put an end to the revolution by granting complete amnesty and by summoning a legislative representative assembly of the entire people.[15]
Concerning Mihailovskii's relationship to the Narodnaja Volja and its executive committee, we are further enlightened by the fact that he was deputed to take part in the negotiations with the "Holy Retinue" which were conducted by Lavrov in 1882.
Mihailovskii subsequently wrote several more essays for publication in clandestine journals, among which was one discussing the suppression of his review in 1884. His political views do not seem to have undergone any further change. But this point cannot be decided until a completer edition of his writings and a collection of his letters are available. In the works belonging to the close of the eighties and subsequent years he is partly engaged in his struggle with the Marxists. In a letter of July 1898 to Rusanov (Kudrin), who had been a refugee, he deplored the effects of the refugee movement by which Russia was deprived of her young people. Mihailovskii was inclined to regard this loss as responsible for the prevailing mental chaos and for the spread of Marxism. The end would doubtless come before long. Either liberal tendencies would gain the victory at court, or else "we shall return to the terror with its indefinite consequences (though I regard the results of the terror in the seventies as definite enough)." Rusanov's explanation of Mihailovskii's allusion to the indefinite consequences of terrorism was that the terrorist movement did not "march consistently forward towards a definite end." In 1901, again, it seemed to Mihailovskii that the return to terrorism was inevitable. "I cannot myself take part in it, and I cannot recommend it to others, but it must come sooner or later."
We see that Mihailovskii vacillated from the first between theory and practice, between sociology and politics, between constitutionalism and revolutionism. He condemns the terrorist revolution; in his moral system there is no place for Stepniak's motivation by vengeance; but when terrorism has become an accomplished fact he recognises it as inevitable, and finds himself "logically" compelled to rally to its support. Mihailovskii was ever fearless in the way he devoted his pen to the awakening of political consciousness and of the vengeful feeling of honour.
§ 127.
MIHAILOVSKII'S attitude towards the religious problem was peculiar. He was favourable to religion, ascribing to it the greatest value alike for the individual and for society; but his treatment of the matter was never more than casual, and he frequently apologised for being altogether the layman in relation to theology.
This avoidance of the religious problem was not wholly dependent upon his fear of the censorship.
Mihailovskii's distinctive outlook upon this field is displayed in his studies of Tolstoi and Dostoievskii. He does not analyse the attempts they made to solve the religious problem, and merely reports that they considered it. He shows a similar reserve in his analysis of European writers. In 1873, penning a critique of Strauss's The Old Faith and the New, he merely takes occasion, apropos of the theory that the gods are anthropomorphic constructions, to throw light upon the contrast between an ideal and an idol; and he demands that idealistic and realistic idols (in the addition of the "realistic idols" he is inspired by his antagonism for Pisarev's realists), that is to say, mythical and anthropomorphic idealisations of men and things, shall yield place everywhere to ideals.
None the less, in 1901, Mihailovskii published Fragments concerning Religion. Here, in reference to the greater literature on the topic, the existence of the new "science of religion" is recognised, and its justification is admitted; but at most he is willing to allot the vague name of "teachings concerning religion" to this domain of enquiry. He inveighs against economic materialism, with its endeavour to make light of the significance of religion (in socialism and elsewhere); but thereafter he is content to refer to recent works upon the evolution of religion and to make special mention of certain theories concerning the origin of religion—those of Comte, Spencer, Tylor, Lubbock, Feuerbach, Guyau, etc.,
As regards the essential definition of religion, Mihailovskii refers to his own expositions of the matter in 1875. These were interesting, all the more so, perhaps, because they were parenthetical, because they were the outcome of frequently recurring personal moods and doubts.
Mihailovskii had been disquieted, not for the first time as we shall learn, by the increasing frequency of suicide, and it occurred to him to compare our own epoch with that of the decay of Rome. In this comparison he was concerned more with differences than with resemblances, and was particularly struck with one phenomenon. Recalling the early Christians and their pagan opponents, he was filled with wonder at both parties, both the martyrs and their persecutors, being astonished at the splendid definiteness of all their doings. These people were perfectly clear as to their purposes, those of one side killing with unalloyed energy; and those who died being equally clear as to what they were dying for. This definiteness of view, said Mihailovskii, existed because both sides were religious, "It was religion which gave their feelings, their ideas, and their actions, the definiteness which our feelings, ideas, and actions lack; the lack of this definiteness in our dead-alive social life can be explained solely by this lack of religion. . . . By religion I understand a doctrine which connects the views concerning the universe prevailing at a given time, with the rules of individual life and social activity; this connection must be so firm that no one who professes the religious docirine can possibly disregard his moral convictions, any more than he can admit that 2×2 is a tallow candle." Mihailovskii complained of the indefiniteness of the age. Our views of what is were isolated; our views of what ought to be were isolated; similarly, our actions were isolated. This, exclaimed Mihailovskii, is our misfortune, the supreme misfortune of Russian social life. Kavelin had desired to overcome the moral weakness of the Russians by the elaboration of an independent Russian philosophy. But in opposition to Kavelin, Mihailovskii contended that this would not suffice. Philosophy might unify ideas of what is and what ought to be, but this unification would merely be effected in the sphere of thought, in the thoughts of a few men; it would not be effected in the sphere of life. Philosophy would not furnish that religious devotion to an idea which alone was competent to overcome moral weakness. It did not suffice to unify theoretical ideas. "The crumbling habitation" of ideas must be set in order in such a way as to be the starting point of action in a definite direction.
Mihailovskii did not forget Spencer's philosophy of religion, but Spencer's religion did not suffice him, for in his view it lacked the most essential characteristic of religion since it was incompetent to guide men's actions. Mihailovskii was aware that the demand for a coherent outlook on life was widespread, but this philosophical coherence the field of theory did not suffice for the demands of practical life; did not teach us how to live. Again and again, Mihailovskii alluded to the absolute certainty, definiteness, devotion, preparedness, and active zeal, of the Christian martyrs.
Mihailovskii consistently held to this theory, returning to it in his John the Terrible (1888) and again in the Fragments. In the work on John the Terrible he gave a more succinct definition of religion, saying that it was a harmonious blend of reason and sentiment.[16] It is important to note that Mihailovskii, therefore, considered that the essence of religion must be sought in the sphere of reason as well as in that of feeling. Knowledge and faith, he said, are in a sense less widely separated one from another than is commonly assumed, faith or belief represents our provisional conclusions, before we have attained to knowledge; in the domain of science, hypotheses constitute the clement of faith; by a quite natural process, beliefs (hypothetical assumptions) are replaced by knowledge, and conversely from knowledge we pass on to beliefs (hypothetical assumptions).
We are not here concerned to ask whether Mihailovskii's philosophy of religion is sound, but it certainly seemed remarkable that in his critical studies, and above all in those dealing with Russian poets and prose writers, Mihailovskii did not undertake a profounder discussion of religious problems. I have previously referred in this connection to Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, but the remark applies equally to Merezkovskii and other writers about whom Mihailovskii wrote critiques. It applies above all to Mihailovskii's endeavours to take a comprehensive view of latter day developments in Russia, for such a view cannot be attained without a study of the religious problems and endeavours of an epoch. Yet Mihailovskii, though, as we have seen, he thought the main weakness of the day was its lack of religion, did not undertake such an enquiry.
Positivism or positivist detachment cannot have been his reason for ignoring the matter, for he had early overcome this defect of positivism. Nor can I regard his ethical views, his utilitarianism, as the cause—all the less seeing that, despite his hostility to Kant, his utilitarianism had a distinctly rigorist flavour.
The objection may be made that Mihailovskii reduces religion essentially to morality (the question whether this is done with or without Kant may be left unconsidered), and that his analysis of the springs of moral conduct is therefore adequate. It is unquestionable that Mihailovskii's primary demand from religion was not for dogmas, but for strength of character, for definiteness. For him, nevertheless, religion was something more than, something different from; morality. In his Literary Reminiscences (1894) he alluded to various ethical systems, and made the following characteristic utterance: "Morality incontestably begins from the moment when man imposes any sort of bridle upon his ego, from the moment when he is willing to give up any of his wishes in the name of something which he regards as higher, as sacred, as inviolable. Until this moment comes, we have nothing but customs!"
By other socialists, Mihailovskii, for having used this image of the bridle, was accused of borrowing from Kant's rigorism. He defended himself, though not very vigorously. (He might have referred to his description of the execution of the last criminal!)
"I believe that I do not err in saying that the extant Russian realism is as remote from the ideal of religion as it is from a star in the heavens." The lack of religion was evident, not in Russia alone, but in France and throughout the world. Mihailovskii gave an account of Bourget's novel Le disciple, and accepted its analysis of the modern mental cleavage which takes the form of the paralysis of will by the analytical reason. He recurred to his diagnosis of the lack of religions harmony in modern man. Noteworthy is the manner wherein, along a devious route, Mihailovskii passed by way of Bourget to Dostoevskii, coming to essential agreement with the last-named. But it is likewise noteworthy that he did not directly consider Dostoevskii's analysis of the modern man in order to give his opinion thereon.
Let me repeat, however, that Mihailovskii was sufficiently positivist to regard religious feeling, in the sense in which he used the word, as thoroughly natural, for he would have nothing to do with mysticism. Instructive, in this connection, is the study of 1875 mentioned two or three pages back. He considered that weakness of character was exhibited even by the men all of whose thoughts and doings had been summarised by Ščedrin in the single word "devourers"! Even these clear-sighted and deliberate devourers were afraid to display their morality in all its nakedness, and concealed their motives behind moral flourishes. "So difficult do even such as these find it to be religious. Do I say 'religious'? Yes, for it is to be religious to pursue an aim with the whole soul, with the whole will, without any reserves." Mihailovskii concludes the passage with a lament that it is impossible to approximate to this religious ideal if a man has a wider and more complicated program than the "devourers," if he desire to recognise a wider circle of phenomena, and if he wish to take his stand in a more complex grouping of facts. Being an evolutionist, Mihailovskii assumes that religion is destined to undergo further evolution. Whereas Comte, led astray by Hume, had regarded religion as a surpassed historic phase, Mihailovskii holds rather with Spencer that religion is destined for further development. He understands Hume's view that religion is mere superstition, but does not agree with it. In so far as religion involves faith, it may at any given moment become superstition; but superstition can be replaced by knowledge; thereby religion is modified, not destroyed. Mihailovskii draws attention to the fact that men have found the designation faith or belief inadequate, and have therefore made use of the term religion. It is obvious that Mihailovskii felt that in his own epoch there was occurring a transition from the extant ecclesiastical religion to a higher religious form, but for his own part he was incompetent to determine the psychological characteristics of the transition and to formulate the elements of the new religion.
§ 128.
MIHAILOVSKII'S interest was to a high degree concentrated upon the signs of the period of transition, and he endeavoured to find meanings in the chaos of the transition. He was especially struck, as one of the signs of the times, with the increasing frequency of suicide, characteristic of Russia no less than of western Europe, and he was able to show that suicide and melancholia were assuming positively epidemic proportions.
He touched on the question in 1875, in connection with his first formulation of the religious problem, referring to the great number of suicides in Russia, and asking the momentous question as to the cause. He recognised that the corpses of the unfortunates harmonised in tint with the corpselike lividity of background in the general social structure, but this was to see a picture, not to give an explanation. He knew that at least half of those who had taken their own lives could not have explained a moment before the act why they were about to do so, whilst in the case of the other half the suicide had been determined by the pressure of the question, Why am I in this picture at all? Finding no answer, they deliberately sought death. Thus Mihailovskii's .answer to the sinister "Why," was that a life without meaning or aim was intolerable,
On this first occasion, Mihailovskii did not dwell on the topic. It merely occurred to him that the frequency of suicide and the associated cry for "bread and circuses" gave our time a similarity to the decadent epoch of Rome. Though the thought was not followed up, it led Mihailovskii to recall the early Christian martyrs and their opponents, and it was in this connection that he formulated his definition of religion. From the definition and from the connection in which it is given, the conclusion may be drawn that the lack of religion is the answer to the question asked by the sociologist and by the suicide who falls victim to his era. A life without meaning and aim is intolerable.
Mihailovskii returned to the problem of suicide in a study of Eduard von Hartmann and of modern pessimism with its characteristic torment of the soul and its ultimate expedient, suicide. He took Goethe's Faust as spokesman of the day, and explained why Faust could find neither happiness nor satisfaction, Faust was unhappy because he could discover no answer to his questions regarding the real being and essence of things. Faust failed to understand that there is no answer to such questions, that it is a false metaphysics which leads us to ask them, and that we must do away with them altogether. This false metaphysics must be replaced by positivism. The metaphysics is false because it has originated in a false relationship to the sciences, has originated in an aristocratic endeavour to answer ultimate questions without a positive study of the special sciences. It is the philosophy of capitalism, is constructed by the capitalist who is cut off from the tools that produce by direct labour. The Fausts seek happiness, but discover nothing beyond an unappeasable thirst for happiness, because their metaphysics is based upon the labour and hunger of millions, and because this leads them to set themselves tasks which transcend their own powers and transcend human faculty in general. Practical life, positive and unmetaphysical knowledge, oppose Faust and refute him.
Faustian metaphysics is not only theoretically false, but is likewise morally unsound, being an expression of the crass egoism which leads a man to isolate himself from the great majority of his fellows, although he wishes to exploit the labours of his fellow men for his own private purposes. "The metaphysician is a man who has been driven mad by fatness."
The Fausts, therefore, are just as unhappy as the speculator who is driven to suicide by a collapse on the stock exchange. Mihailovskii alludes more than once to the suicide of the unsuccessful commercial speculator, and there is an obvious connection in his mind between the word "speculation" in this sense and the speculation of the Fausts.
Mihailovskii concludes his sketchy analysis by saying that neither Hartmann with his philosophy of the unconscious, nor Pogodin with his orthodox slavophilism, could exorcise the spirit of suicide.
In a study of Garšin (1885) Mihailovskii analysed The Night. It is a minor point that Mihailovskii should have regarded the hero's death as a suicide, whereas Garšin merely made him die suddenly from the intensity of his newly awakened sentiment of love for his fellows. What interests us is Mihailovskii and his analysis of suicide. Like Faust, the egoist is recalled to childhood by the sound of the bell summoning to early mass; he feels what pure love and pure sentiment might be; he would like to tear the pot-bellied idol out of his heart; but he does not know where to turn and how to take up the burden of his fellow men's misery. The new feeling is fugitive, and the egoist puts an end to his life with a pistol shot.
Mihailovskii considers that Bourget's book Le disciple contains an accurate analysis of the modern incapacity for living. The modern man is riven in twain, his thought is estranged from life, his thirst for analysis undermines the energy of will, he is afraid to act, and he succumbs to this disease of the will.
In his explanation of consciousness as an aggregate of multiple consciousnesses, Mihailovskii extols the centralism and despotism of the central consciousness, which finds expression in the will. This, he says, is health, but the loss of such a healthy despotism leads to a weakening and destruction of consciousness and of life in general. It is obvious that the explanation is purely verbal, that no real explanation is given why consciousness and will become enfeebled, seeing that we are not told for what reason the beneficent activity and energy of the healthy centralising despotism disappear, because we do not learn under what conditions they disappear.
§ 129.
MARX had represented Goethe's Faust as a capitalist. Mihailovskii followed up the idea, for the Faust problem attracted him and busied him from early days. In one of his first studies, that of Voltaire as Man and Thinker (1870), Mihailovskii discussed the question at some length.
Faust could not become happy because he had set himself an impossible aim and had chosen improper means for its realisation. Faust made a sharp distinction between the physical and the mental, and this was why, as Goethe aptly shows, he desired to solve his metaphysical problems with the aid of magic. But merely to formulate these problems is to enter the wrong path. In order to illustrate the morbidity characteristic of these Fausts with divided minds, Mihailovskii quotes from Brierre de Boismont's Du suicide et de la folie suicide similar speculations by a suicide.
Voltaire's good, learned, and wealthy Brahman was no less unhappy than Goethe's Faust. He had studied and taught for forty years, and knew in the end just as little as Faust; an old woman, his neighbour, who had learned nothing, and merely had faith in Vishnu and the old myths, was perfectly happy. The Brahman was well aware that he too would have been happy had he remained stupid, but neither he nor anyone else would have been willing to change places with the happy old woman. Voltaire caustically enquires why intelligence and happiness should be thus contrasted, but cannot furnish an answer.
Metaphysical speculation devours itself and others. Mihailovskii, borrowing an expression from Turgenev, terms it "self-devouring." There is a remedy for the trouble, the remedy recommended by Chrysostom to a disciple suffering from the malady of speculation, and it is to have a wife and children. This, says Mihailovskii, is practical counsel, for it prescribes that man shall not live for himself alone, but shall concern himself for others. The Brahman and the old woman are both defective, both impossible, both victims of social institutions; they are not complete human beings, but merely parts of the social organism. The Brahman's old neighbour works and does nothing else, just as Wagner, Faust's famulus, does nothing but work, seeing that his only function is to acquire knowledge of facts The Brahman and Faust, no less than the old woman and Wagner, are not complete human beings. They are all invalids; they all suffer from hypertrophy of some particular organ, which undergoes excessive development pari passu with neglect of the other organs. If we are to remain human in our study of science, we must ot like the Brahman and Faust endeavour to transcend the limits of the knowable, but we must be equally careful to avoid becoming like Wagner enslaved by sensual empiricism. Wagner, too, ceased to be human, for it was he who endeavoured to construct the homunculus. Faust did not follow Wagner in this unnatural aberration, but Faust himself succumbed to the folly of metaphysics.
In the second part of Faust, Goethe attempted to solve the problem. The allegorical struggle with the forces of nature, says Mihailovskii, is magnificent; the endeavour to be useful is morally good—but it fails. The principle of utility is no less inadequate than are all the other special criteria, such as truth, beauty, justice, etc. The only sound criterion of perfection in human affairs is integrality, a harmony of functions in man, and harmony of means in man's activities. By an integral human being, happiness for himself and his associates can only be found in activity on behalf of himself and his associates. Wagner can discover truth as well as another; to stitch shoes and to drain marshes are useful actions. The man of science may strive with nature, and he may do this theoretically (not practically like Faust); but what he must shun is the method adopted by Faust or by Wagner. Faust desires to work magic, and thereby becomes non-human. Wagner, too, is non-human, for everything human is alien to him; he is the piston of a pump, a pumping machine; not a whole but a mere part; not an individual (integral or undivided) but a mere instrument for the acquisition of facts.
With Comte, Mihailovskii appeals against Faust and the Brahman to the consideration that in true humanity theory and practice exist in mutual equipose. If we can give Faust and the Brahman fuller scope for their activities, if we can give them the opportunity and the power of sympathising practically with others' lives, if we can awaken in them the altruism of Comte, the tuism of Feuerbach, the sympathy of Adam Smith, they will become healthy, they will be concerned about very different problems, and this concern will lead them to victory, not defeat.
Faust and Wagner, the Brahman and the old woman, live close beside one another, but they do not know one another, and scarcely notice one another. They are complementary opposites, the obverse and the reverse of the same "eccentric" medal.
The use of the word eccentric shows us what was Mihailovskii's historico-philosophical explanation of the Faust problem.
It is the division of labour into the economic and mental spheres which has made men non-human. Philosophically it is metaphysics which causes the disintegration of the stage of eccentricity. It is thus in Saint-Simon's sense that Mihailovskii appraises the eighteenth-century enlightenment which found expression above all in Voltaire, by saying that an organic epoch is succeeded by a critical epoch. In the story of the Brahman and the old woman his neighbour, Voltaire displayed the opposition between knowledge and happiness without being able to show how the opposition could be transcended. Voltaire could not be positive; he was merely negative; his philosophy and Goethe's philosophy issued from a moribund social order.
The connection of the Faust problem and the suicide problem in Mihailovskii's thought has now been made clear. Faust's questions cannot be answered by metaphysics; his ethics can furnish no satisfaction for his aspirations. Faust, like the Brahman, can undermine the old woman's faith, but he has no power to make either himself or his associates happy In the moribund epoch, men die by their own hands.
The age is inharmonious; all our social institutions are inharmonious; individual human beings are inharmonious Epoch, society, and men, are irreligious—thus runs Mihailovskii's briefest formulation, for to him irreligion is the disharmony of reason and sentiment, of science and life, of philosophy and ethics. Upon this disharmony depends the modern malady of the will, the incapacity for living.
Faust is the representative of civilisation. The majority of German civilised beings are to some extent Fausts, and this is why Mihailovskii considers Faust the greatest of Goethe's works. Not until the end of his life does Faust succeed in doing that which every village lad learns to do from the very beginning—useful work. Mihailovskii asks which is the higher, Faust or the village lad. In accordance with his theory of progress, Mihailovskii replies that, whilst Faust has attained a higher stage of evolution, the village lad stands higher as type.
§ 130.
FROM 1901 onwards Mihailovskii wrote his literary reminiscences in a series of essays entitled Literature and Life. These were subsequently collected in book form as Literary Reminiscences and the Present Chaos. Two additional volumes of studies, reprinted from Mihailovskii's review after his death, pursue the same aim.
When Mihailovskii speaks of "the present" he thinks primarily of the nineties and of the opening years of the new century, but he is also concerned with the eighties, with the whole period since the days of Nicholas, and one may even say with the epoch since the forties, when the Russians first clearly recognised the consequences of the great revolution. By "chaos" Mihailovskii means the philosophical and literary confusion attendant upon the unclarified and gloomy situation, but we must remember that the Russian word smula likewise signifies "riot." In his historico-philosophical scheme he describes the period of transition from the eccentric to the subjective anthropocentric epoch as anarchy and false individualism, and likewise speaks of it as revolution and as scepticism, The ultimate stage of the eccentric epoch has deindividualised and therefore dehumanised man. Faust, Wagner, and-the stock exchange speculators, have broken the shackles of religious and political absolutism without being able to throw off economic shackles. The regime of arbitrary force continues, and in the tiniest village no less than in the capital the usurer satisfies his avarice with the aid of the state police. In the west, liberal constitutionalism and parliamentarism, the monarchy and the republic, serve the bourgeois vampire; whilst in Russia, absolutism, with its bureaucracy academically trained on the European model, serves the bourgeois.
Mihailovskii's analysis of the chaos lays bare its various elements. In the theoretical field the leading factor is the indefiniteness and dilettantism of metaphysics, the negative philosophy of the spiritual and political slaves who have been awakened by Voltaire and the enlightenment.
Morally, the enlightened slave, the bourgeois, now freed from his dread of the old authorities, reveals himself in his pornographic literature. Mihailovskii does not hesitate to condemn, as far as Russian developments are concerned, Zola's theoretical talk concerning the alleged naturalistic positivism; and with all the energy of which he is capable he censures such writers as Nemirovič-Dančenko who have devoted their pens to a literature which has sunk to the level of the Parisian "Journal des Cochons." Mihailovskii is especially fierce in his denunciation of the lesser bourgeoisie of the third republic. By their wealth they were removed from the necessity of labour; they had abandoned clericalism and even Catholicism without finding anything to replace it which could minister to the mental and moral life; thus had it come to pass that the "Journal des Cochons" was the catechism of these philistines. Pornography has always existed, but not until to-day has it been raised to the level of a public system.
In Russia the lesser bourgeoisie was not so numerous as in Europe, but here it was the greater bourgeoisie which followed in the footsteps of the aristocratic leaders. Mihailovskii was never weary of attacking the European leaders of decadence, symbolism, magianism, and the rest, so that he might inflict shrewder blows upon their Russian imitators. He adopts from Nordau a few references to these types of degeneration, and analyses the ideas of Sacher-Masoch.
Pessimism is the upshot of such ethics. The readers of the "Journeaux des Cochons" become gloomy and melancholic; tedium and melancholia drive them to a voluntary death. Works dealing with the problem of weltschmerz did not escape Mihailovskii's literary attention, and he did not fail to point out the false individualism of the chief exponents of weltschmerz. Mihailovskii enters the lists against Stirner and Nietzsche as apostles of arbitrariness. Nietzsche, it is true, opposed the decadent movement, and therefore occupied higher ground than his Russian imitators, against whom Mihailovskii protects their teacher; but Nietzsche's superman is, after all, no more than the expression and the advocacy of eccentric dehumanisation.
Thus Mihailovskii is led to attack Darwinism with peculiar energy, and unceasingly to oppose its aristocratic master morality.
The ethics of free competition unchains the war of all against all. To Mihailovskii, Byronic "gloom" seems the ultimate result of this development. It is only a dog that remains faithful to its dead master.
The bourgeois is subject to the dominion, not of the state alone, but also of chauvinistic nationalism, For this reason Mihailovskii is even more averse to the new slavophilism than to the old, and for this reason he attacks the chauvinist narodniki. He continues his campaign against all the decadent phenomena of the day, disregarding accusations that he is aiding sanctimonious humbug and police rule. He knows well enough that the obscurantists opposed Darwinism, declaring Darwinism to be a sign of the times. In a vigorous satire, Darwinism and Offenbach's Operettas (1871) he shows that Darwin's doctrine may very well be compared with Offenbach's music, in that here and there Darwinists and Offenbachians misuse science and art for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. Beyond question Offenbach with his cynical mockery of the old gods and the old morality could exist only in a decaying, degenerating, and corrupt society. But this immorality is one of the hammers of history; a great amputation is imminent. The eighteenth century enlightenment and the diffusion of wealth have freed the lords of the theatre from their fears, and they now plunge into enjoyment.
Notwithstanding his onslaughts on the dominant morality, Mihailovskii did not become a disciple of the Russian preachers Dostoevskii and Tolstoi. They too, were absolutists who represented their own opinions and feelings as universally valid rules of ethics. In the case of both these moralists Mihailovskii censured the exaggerated personal striving towards self-perfectionment, which led Tolstoi to a Buddhistic quietism, and Dostoevskii to the voluptuousness of martyrdom. Man has not simply to consider his personal responsibility. Not conscience alone is decisive, but also the sense of honour, and it is the two in conjunction which lead the rightly balanced human being to play his part in the social order.
Mihailovskii opposed the representatives of the latest Russian philosophical idealism, which was on such excellent terms with bourgeois politico-social materialism. In the days of the great revolution; the bourgeois had been the idealists, whilst- the philosophers of that day had taught anthropological and cosmopolitan realism. The philosophical idealists were like Voltaire, who thought that a belief in God was a good thing for his tailor.
Mihailovskii was especially opposed to those later disciples of Marx who abjured historical materialism to champion mysticism and ecstasy. Whilst Mihailovskii had at first attacked the Marxists on account of their historical materialism, he turned later against the materialists who had been converted to idealism.
Mihailovskii draws a sharp distinction between religion and mysticism, considering them to be fundamental opposites. Mysticism translates man from natural reality into a cloudy indefinite remoteness, into regions where the fantastic gods of the mythologies play their senseless parts; religion, on the other hand, connects man with the realities of life, and makes him responsible for his actions. Belief and knowledge may be dead, may be incapable of leading to action. Religion is the harmony of belief and knowledge with man's ethical ideals, and is the impulse to action in a definite direction. The religious man has a clear and definite idea of what he wills to do; he believes, not only in what he wills to do, but in what he actually, does.
§ 131.
WHILE still a student at the mining academy, Mihailovskii made his first literary venture by penning an analysis of the female types in Gončarov's books (1860), but he did not seriously engage in authorship until 1869. A general survey of his works subsequent to that date gives the following results. During the first years, to be precise, from 1869 to 1871, Mihailovskii's writings were of a predominantly scientific character. Some were essays upon themes of his own choice, but most of his scientific writings were critical notices of works by other authors, selected by Mihailovskii from the literature of the world as a vehicle for the conveyance of his own ideas and plans. The six-volume edition of his works contains about thirty-five lengthier essays, twenty-three of which deal with European and twelve with Russian authors. In the period from 1872 down to the beginning of January 1904, Mihailovskii wrote more or less connected accounts of the principal events in Russian life, of individual authors, and of literary trends. with occasional references to the drama and to graphic art, Such essays, taking the form of "Literary and Journalistic Observations," "A Layman's Notes," "A Contemporary's Notes," "A Reader's Diary," and so on, bulk more largely than studies of a monographic nature. As far as such studies were produced during this period, they belong chiefly to the seventies. Mihailovskii never wrote a book, a work containing the systematic elaboration of some particular theme. By deliberate choice he remained a critic, but as he himself put it on one occasion, the critic is neither more nor less than the expounder of artistic creations. Mihailovskii himself, however, was likewise an expounder of-scientific creations.
If we compare Mihailovskii's style and his whole method of criticism with those of his predecessors, the contrast with Herzen and Bělinskii becomes obvious. Mihailovskii has more kinship with Černyševskii and Lavrov. His writing has a certain hardness, produces an impression of greyness, and yet we soon forget this as we go on reading, for we become enthralled by the contents, by the sturdiness, and by the conscientiousness of what is written.[17] Mihailovskii had belletristic aspirations, and proposed to write a topical novel, but soon desisted from the attempt. His best friends advised him against it, and he was sufficiently self-critical to recognise that his imagination was unequal to the task. The cumbrousness and monotony of Mihailovskii's style is especially conspicuous in his more intimate reminiscences and in his critiques of the masterworks of literature; but he understood how to express his judgments in pregnant words and phrases, as if in the hope that these, giving colour, would make the reader forget the stylistic monotony. Not a few of his words and phrases have become widely current.
Throughout life, though he acquired much knowledge, and acquired it thoroughly, Mihailovskii regarded himself, not as a philosopher, but as a reader. "A Reader's Diary"—here we have a picture of the onlooker who is an indefatigable reader, but we have likewise a characterisation of his literary modesty. This modesty does not exclude a justified self-complacency. When he contrasts himself as a "layman" with professional experts, or when his pen finds a critical word to say about "men of learning," we sense satire and gentle mockery. Yet Mihailovskii could gladly do justice to the claim of the professional expert. He was less abstract than Lavrov. The latter took Europe as his starting point, and contemplated Russia from a distance; the former lived in Russia, and set out from the extant problems and difficulties of that country.
Whereas Lavrov, like so many of his predecessors and contemporaries, wrote as a refugee, and whereas, living abroad, he enjoyed complete freedom of speech, Mihailovskii worked at home, under the knout of the Russian censorship, and very few of his essays were first published abroad. The consequence was that Mihailovskii's method of expression was somewhat subdued, and bore the stamp of excessive reflection, while his choice of subjects was determined in relation to the censorship. But the very significance of Mihailovskii lies in this, that he did not take refuge abroad, and was not sent to Siberia. Thus for three decades, from the beginning of the seventies onwards, his works were as a beacon to the younger generation and as a guide to his contemporaries. But this guide himself belonged to the generation of those who had attained to intellectual maturity after the liberation of the serfs.
Reference should be made to Mihailovskii's literary and philosophical steadfastness. Whereas in their literary development most of the Russian thinkers have displayed crude transitions and profound internal revolutions, Mihailovskii remained the same from his debut-in youth to the end of his literary career; he developed, he matured, but there was no change in his fundamentally positivist outlook. As he himself puts it, he wore an overcoat throughout life. In one of his essays he compares Proudhon and Bělinskii, referring to the steadfastness of the Frenchman and to the vacillations and mutability of the Russian. He is inclined to regard this lack in Russian writers as due to the want of a cultural tradition, but he is aware that to Europeans tradition is a heavy ballast. The influence of Mihailovskii's steadfastness was necessarily all the greater seeing that his fundamental outlook and his leading doctrines were already formulated at the very outset of his career.
Literary criticism thus used to the exclusion of other methods was the implement of the philosophic and political opposition. Discussing the doctrine of the adaptation of individuals to the environment, Mihailovskii distinguishes between two types of adaptation. Some endeavour to raise the environment to their level; others adapt themselves to the environment. The fishes and the birds, he says, are the best adapted in the latter sense, and they therefore are the happiest of all animals. In human society, the birds and the fishes are represented by the men who delight in celebrating the days of their patron saints (the Russians have a special name for such festivals). In politics and history, the leading principle of these proposers of toasts is patriotism; in economics, it is perpetual harmony and wealth for wealth's sake; in science, it is science for science' sake; in philosophy, it is the teleology of nature; and so on.
In aesthetics, these adapters have the principle of art for art's sake, and against such a formula Mihailovskii protested from the very first. Art, in his view, had social significance. As early as 1574 he defined the poet as one endowed with the capacity of speaking for himself and for others. What applies to the poet applies to artists in general. They can speak for others, they can live the inner life of others, can feel their way or think their way into the inner life of others. Mihailovskii considers that the artist possesses in a high degree that capacity for sympathy which every man ought to have, but of course the artist is likewise distinguished by his method of expression which differs from that of the non-artist, The aim of the critic must therefore be to report how the artist speaks for himself and for others, and to report for whom the artist is speaking. The critic must grasp the relationship between the artist and his object, and must show how this relationship is artistically displayed. Mihailovskii complains of Čehov that he applies his artistic apparatus in like manner to the swallow and to the suicide, to the fly and to the elephant, to tears and to water. Mihailovskii demands from the artist the same definiteness that he demands from others.
Mihailovskii will only recognise as a true artist one who does not speak for a class or group of socicty, but for the entire folk, for the workers. The idea of the folk is implied in every serious work of art. Starting from his view that society rests upon cooperation, he would like to introduce work as the measure of value into belles lettres and aesthetics no less than clsewhere. Tle thought is not elaborated, but enough is said to show what Mihailovskii demands from art, namely that it should pay at least as much attention to the idea of the folk as to the idea of love.
Mihailovskii frequently insists that the true artist should exhibit a sense of proportion, for he considers that the essential quality of artistic capacity is displayed in moderation. To give a concrete instance, he contends that Grigorovič and Lěskov lack a sense of proportion.
Art is per se social and ethical; ethics and aesthetics are intimately associated—although Mihailovskii recalls the fact that Cain and Abel were brothers, and yet one of them slew the other! Mihailovskii was not guilty of literary fratricide; his ethics and his socialism are guided by the old but beautiful and genuinely humane saying, nil humanum a me alienum puto; but the fact that he had no liking for the decadents and for their sexual erethism and abnormality may be ascribed, not merely to his socialist ethics, but also to his healthy virility.
From this outlook, Mihailovskii can best adjust his relations to his contemporaries; his ablest and most detailed literary studies deal with his friends and acquaintances, with Ščedrin, Uspenskii, and Nekrasov. It is characteristic that he should show most interest in and understanding for the imaginative writers, those whose work manifests-reflection or the direct life of feeling—Ščedrin, for instance, on the one hand, and Uspenskii and Garšin, on the other. Jakeibovič (Melšin) is congenial to him; of Čehov, the same can be said as regards the later works, wherein that writer has abandoned his earlier pose of impassivity. Mihailovskii found Andreev obscure, and Gorkii's work did not please him, for he considered Gor'kii's characters too domineering.
There is little about Puškin in Mihailovskii's writings, and little about Gogol. He cannot forgive the latter for sermonising, and he finds the same tendency to sermonise uncongenial in Dostoevskii and Tolstoi. The two last-named writers, however, receive detailed consideration, with the remarkable omission, previously referred to, that Mihailovskii largely ignores their discussion of religious problems. Doubtless Mihailovskii had good grounds for rejecting passivity and humility, but these do not comprise the whole of the religious problem. The relationship to Dostoevskii is remarkable, for Dostoevskii's literary and journalistic genre resembled that of Mihailovskii. Yet Mihailovskii's treatment of Dostoevskii was inadequate, whilst Dostoevskii never said a word about Mihailovskii.
Mihailovskii has frequently been extolled, as for instance by Kropotkin, because as early as 1875 he predicted the religious crisis which was coming in Tolstoi's mind. Kropotkin refers to the articles entitled The Right Hand and the Left Hand of Count Tolstoi. In my opinion, however, Tolstoi had clearly displayed this trend long before 1875, for the later Tolstoi is foreshadowed in that writer's earliest creations. However this may be, we are here concerned only with the characterisation of Mihailovskii himself, with the study of Mihailovskii's mental development. We can readily understand that he could not approve Tolstoi's campaign against science, or the ethical outlook on marriage enunciated by Tolstoi in The Kreutzer Sonata, though it may be suggested that Mihailovskii took the onslaught on science too literally. Moreover, Tolstoi's apolitical trend requires closer examination, for we must ask whether it did not in the end subserve the aims of the political movement. May we not suppose that the left hand (passivity, shrinking from responsibility) knew what the right hand (energy, criticism, activity) was doing?
In historical perspective, Mihailovskii pictured the evolution of Russian literature as a transition from aristocracy through the stage of the "aristocrats doing penance" to the democratic literary movement of our own day. Analysing the spokesmen of the aristocratic epoch, and in especial the writers of the forties and the sixties, Mihailovskii found in their work a confirmation of his own historico-philosophical analysis of the age. Lermontov's Hero of our own Time is the spokesman of bezvremen'e (the word has the double meaning of bad weather and bad luck), the representative of an inert epoch. From Avděev's Our Society in the Heroes and Heroines of the Literature of the Fifties (1874), Mihailovskii cites the analysis of the types Čackii, Oněgin, Pečorin, Rudin, Bazarov, and Rjazanov; and Mihailovskii is doubtless right when he makes common cause with Avděev on behalf of Rudin as a representative of the sixties, suggesting that Rudin was by no means so passive and inert as is usually held. Turgenev already represented the coming of better days, and still more could this be said of Mihailovskii's favourite authors, but the bezvremen'e has by no means disappeared, as can be shown by a study, not only of Dostoevskii, but also of Tolstoi, and still more of Čehov and of the decadents.
Apropos of the term favourite authors, Mihailovskii is by no means a blind admirer. For example, in connection with the dispute concerning Nekrasov's true character, Mihailovskii recalls an early saying of Nekrasov's, that he had sworn not to die in a garret. Mihailovskii saw clearly enough that this proletarian wished to become a wealthy man.
In his criticism of philosophical and of social and political trends and currents (Mihailovskii speaks rather of "moral and political" trends and currents), Mihailovskii is concerned chiefly with the present day. Only in passing does he allude to the earlier movements, like those of the slavophils and of the westernisers, for he considers that both these trends belong entirely to the past.
He says very little, too, concerning his Russian predecessors in the critical fields, concerning Černyševskii, Herzen, and Bělinskii; but in the early days of his literary activity he is never weary of pointing out the exaggerations in the nihilist aesthetics of Pisarev and that writer's associates, whilst he stigmatises Pisarev's attitude towards PuSkin as pure vandalism. Mihailovskii is a sharp critic of realism, condemning the whole trend, but Pisarev and Blagosvětlov in especial, for this literature, he says, had no thought for the folk, but only for a sect. Mihailovskii speaks with much sympathy of the works written by his friends Eliseev and Šelgunov.
The shafts of Mihailovskii's criticism were directed against European authorities as well as against those of Russia, and in this respect he is differentiated from Černyševskii, Herzen, and Bělinskii. Consider, for example, his writings on Darwin and Darwin's successors, on Spencer, Voltaire, Renan, Stirner, Nietzsche, Hartmann, Zola, and Ibsen. Mihailovskii uses this means of attack against many of the dominant views in his own camp, for the foes of his own household seem to him more dangerous than declared opponents.
In connection with his analysis of the contemporary chaos, and in especial in his analysis of the decadent movement, Mihailovskii had a controversy with Merežkovskii and with the critic Volynskii.
I must conclude these brief and incomplete observations. It has not been my aim to expound Mihailovskii's views on aesthetics, but merely to show his spiritual associations ("Tell me thy company, and I will tell thee what thou art").
Our definitive judgment of Mihailovskii cannot but be favourable. His uniformity, consistency, and independence were af notable significance to Russia. He was not a genius, nor even a brilliant writer, but his methodical foresight, his endeavour to attain clearness and precision, made his works what they still are, a notable school of sociological and political culture. The subjective method (a bad name for an excellent thing) corrected the one-sided drift of the positivists towards natural science and materialism, and supplemented realism by the study of psychology and of mental activities.
Delight in psychological analysis led Mihailovskii to bring his philosophy into harmony with the "psychologism" of the Russian novelists, but the outcome of this psychologism was to lead Mihailovskii to reduce the theory of cognition to the sphere of psychology. The consequence was that, not in metaphysical questions merely, but likewise in epistemological questions, Mihailovskii’s thought was affected by a vagueness which was dangerous to the success of his aspirations towards precision. Without being aware of it, Mihailovskii replaced epistemological criticism by a reliance upon authorities whom he did not venture to question. Comte, Feuerbach, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill were for him such authorities.
Of late there has been a tendency to class Mihailovskii as among the empiricist critics, and to speak of him as a precursor of Mach and Avenarius. Such a classification is admissible only in so far as it is true that Mihailovskii accepted the positivism of Comte and Mill, and was content with a purely psychological analysis. Believing with Comte that we can have no scientific knowledge of the nature of things, Mihailovskii rested content with this agnosticism. Mach and similar thinkers have moved along the same road with their revival of Hume; but Mach, Avenarius, etc., studied Kant, and took Kant's thought into account in the formulation of their own empirical standpoint, whereas Mihailovskii ignored Kant. Herein lies a notable distinction between Mihailovskii and the German Humists.
Of late certain disciples (Struve, Berdjaev, etc.) have undertaken an epistemological examination of Mihailovskii's subjective method, and have brought it into harmony with the more recent developments of German philosophy, but I cannot see that these investigations have had any noteworthy result. The "chaos" against which Mihailovskii fought still dominates the theory of cognition and the field of criticism.
Mihailovskii's psychologism can further be detected in his philosophy of religion. An effect of the religious spirit is mistaken for the very essence of religion. But an important contribution is made to the practical aspect of the problem, inasmuch as Mihailovskii demands clearness and definiteness above all in the ethical domain, and here finds his strongest standing ground. In this respect he is in agreement with Hume, but also with Kant and with more recent writers, such as Mill and Spencer. His theoretical agnosticism becomes a practical gnosis, if I may employ the word to denote his clearly conceived and deliberately chosen ethical outlook.
I have already pointed out that Mihailovskii did not study the religious problem as considered in the works of Dostoevskii and Tolstoi. This seems to me very remarkable, but I cannot venture to suggest an explanation. In his analysis of the environing chaos he occasionally refers to the philosophy of religion of some of the slavophil stragglers (Rozanov, for instance). But this cannot be termed a serious analysis of the problem. Is it possible that fears of the censorship withheld him from a thorough analysis, not only of Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, but also of such writers as Vladimir Solov'ev and Pobědonoscev? But surely the work could have been published abroad?
For Mihailovskii the association of religion with morality was extremely intimate, and here the influence of German philosophy, indirectly that of Kant, is perceptible. To Mihailovskii the transition to socialism, and to a union of French and of German socialism, was to be effected on these lines. In this matter Feuerbach rendered Mihailovskii the service which Mihailovskii rendered to Marx.
Such considerations indicate Mihailovskii's philosophical position in relation to socialism. Some have regarded Mihailovskii's work as the climax of "Russian socialism." In actual fact, Mihailovskii derived his socialism from the same philosophical, historical, and political sources as those from which the views of Lavrov, Černyševskii, Bělinskii, and Herzen were derived; but Mihailovskii's outlook upon the justification of socialism and the necessity for socialism was far more comprehensive than that of the other writers named. In essence, Mihailovskii's socialism, like that of his predecessors and teachers, was a logical application of humanist morality. Man, the human essence, are the alpha and omega of Mihailovskii's socialism. For Mihailovskii, therefore, socialism was revolutionary in Europe, but conservative in Russia.
In this matter, above all, he agreed with Lavrov. The fact that Mihailovskii and Lavrov, one remaining in Russia, the other a refugee in Europe, should have simultaneously insisted upon the ethical trend of philosophy and of socialism, is one of primary significance, and exercised a great influence in educating and leading forward the young generation that arose after the liberation of the peasantry.
I may point out in conclusion that Mihailovskii would have done well to pay closer attention to Marx and Marxism. What he had to say about these matters in his controversies with the Marxists and the narodniki (in the middle nineties and subsequently), and in his controversies with Plehanov, Struve, and Voroncov, did not serve to clear up the questions in dispute either philosophically or economically. Mihailovskii was an adversary of historical materialism, but nevertheless his philosophy of history paved the way for the spread of Marxist ideas, both in their orthodox and in their revisionist forms.
- ↑ Historische Briefe aus dem russischen übersetzt von S. Dawidow. Mit einer Einleitung von Dr. Charles Rappoport, 1901. These Historical Letters vere first published during the years 1868–1869 in the periodical Nedělja, being signed with the pseudonym, Mirtov. In 1870 they were published in book form. In 1872, Lavrov prepared a new edition which, however, was not issued until 1891, when it had been revised and had been supplemented by a letter written in 1881 on the Theory and Practice of Progress. This second edition is the basis of the following sketch. Lavrov was a prolific writer of essays and books, his books being no more than enlarged essays. Consult also Arnoldi (Lavrov), The Task of History, the Project of an Introduction to the Study of the Development of Human Thought, 1898; Arnoldi, Contemporary Teaching concerning Morals and the History of Ethics, 1904; Attempt at a History of Modern Thought, vol. I, Introductory, part 1 Preliminaries, The Tasks and History of Thought, book I, Prehistorical (1888).—Petr Aleksěevič Lavrov was born in 1823. His father was a retired colonel, and a wealthy landowner. From the age of thirteen the son was educated in the artillery school for an officer's career. Under the father's pedantic and unsystematic supervision the boy devoted himself at home to an unregulated course of reading, this being facilitated by his knowledge of French and German. When nineteen years of age he became an officer, and when twenty-one he was appointed teacher of mathematics in his school, subsequently becoming teacher at the artillery academy. He married in 1847, his wife being of German descent. His education at home was conservative. At the military school his views were modified as a result of his training in exact science. The excitement aroused by the Crimean war affected him no less than others; his poems, voicing the views of the opposition and revolutionary in sentiment, were widely circulated in manuscript, but they were topical verses rather than the expression of any carefully considered program. Lavrov, like his contemporaries, had given much time to the study of German philosophy, and in addition was well read in French socialism, being familiar with the works of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc, and Proudhon, and with those of the Catholic socialist Buchez and his pupils. These influences led him in 1862 to join the secret society Zemlja i Volja, in which, however, he did not play an active part. At this epoch, too, he was acquainted with Černyševskii. In 1865 his wife died. A year later, after the attempt of Karakozov (to whose circle he did not belong), he was arrested on account of his clandestine literary activities, poems directed against Nicholas I and Alexander II, and on account of his personal relationships with Černyševskii and Mihailov. In 1867 he was interned at Vologda, where he wrote his Historical Letters. Lopatin, the translator of Marx, helped him to escape. Herzen had invited Lavrov to Paris, and he reached that city in March 1870, but before that date Herzen had died. Lavrov became a member of the International, and took part in the Commune, being sent to Belgium and to London to seek help for the Commune. In London he became acquainted with Marx and with other continental refugees, but had before this date become a convinced socialist. From 1873 to 1876, he was editor of the revolutionary periodical Vpered, with whose program we are already familiar. Not only did he become estranged from Bakunin and the Bakuninists, but in 1876 his own supporters turned against him. From 1376 to 1877, Vpered continued to appear under a different editorship. For six years thenceforward Lavrov remained outside the revolutionary organisation of the new Zemlja i Volja and of the Narodnaja Volja, and in 1879 he protested against the fighting methods of the latter body. After the assassination of Alexander II, Lavrov resumed a place in the ranks of the active revolutionaries, promoting the organisation of the Red Cross of the Narodnaja Volja, and being for this reason expelled from France for some time. In London he entered into relationships with the Narodnaja Volja, and became co-editor of its organ, Věstnik Narodnoi Voli (1883–1886). During this period Lavrov was chiefly engaged in the attack upon absolutism. During the nineties, Lavrov edited clandestine refugee literature, and wrote, Contributions to the History of the Russian Revolution. In addition, as in earlier years, he was continually occupied with his personal work in the theoretical field. He died in Paris in the year 1900.
- ↑ Ruge drew attention to Buckle by his translation of that writer's work (1860).
- ↑ Lavrov thought well also of Giljarov-Platonov, the theologian, speaking of him and of Jurkevič as "our ablest contemporary dialecticians."
- ↑ In a dialogue, To Whom Belongs the Future? Lavrov formulates his views on aesthetics. Being a positivist, he is on the side of realism as against romanticism, and rejects the romanticist theory that artists are persons of especially lofty and positively prophetic capacity. Realistic psychology will admit that things can be comprehended without precise analysis and systematic synthesis. Lavrov is therefore inclined (and this is typical of his method) to adopt a middle position between the two extremes, and to say that the artist perceives the true significance of things by his direct intuition of them. Lavrov gives as an example Lermontov and his poetic "intuition" of contemporary history. It is obvious that, notwithstanding his positivism, Lavrov has here abandoned positivism for romanticism, or has at any rate tinged positivism deeply with romanticism.
- ↑ His adversaries continually recur to the fact that prior to the publication of his program in 1873 he had drawn up two other programs of a more radical character. In 1895, Lavrov explained this apparent vacillation by saying that in the two earlier programs he had attempted to establish at least a modus vivendi with his Bakuninist adversaries, and had therefore partially suppressed his own views.
- ↑ Mihailovskii was born in the year 1842, in the administrative district of Kaluga. His parents were of noble birth, but not very well off. After leaving the lower gimnasija he went to the mining academy, from which he was sent down. As early as 1860 he produced an essay on Gončarov. Thenceforward, from his eighteenth year until his death in 1904, Mihailovskii devoted himself to scientific and philosophical self-culture and to the popularisation of science.
- ↑ In a study of Bismarck (1871), Mihailovskii, quite in Comte's manner, formulates the following aphoristic scheme: I Absolutism, Theology War, Regime of Great Landed ProprietorshipII Constitutional Monarchy, Metaphysics and Professional D xterity, Stock Exchange, Regime of Capital; III Science, Right to Work and Duty to Work.
- ↑ An example may make the matter clearer. Mihailovskii holds that economically England is on a higher level than Russia, but that as type Russia is higher than England. When Tolstoi said that the melody, Back to Mother Volga, was loftier than any of Beethoven's symphonies, the assertion was true of the type, not of the stage of development.
- ↑ Mihailovskii instances Pisarev as an aristocrat doing penance, whilst he regarded Rěšetnikov as a literary raznočinec.
- ↑ Here is a characteristic sentence from an economic report of the year 1872: "True freedom, rightly organised and useful industry, honest financial combination, the construction of necessary railways, genuine self-government, cannot be opposed to the interests of the folk, or, and this is the same thing, cannot be opposed to the interests of labour." True, useful, honest, necessary, genuine—these and similar epithets show what were Mihailovskii's views upon industrial development. Nor must we forget that for him the folk did not signify the agriculturists alone. We see in the passage just quoted that he accepts the definition of the concept folk which he has taken from western socialist science.
- ↑ Mihailovskii found much to say about the leading narodniki, and especially about Voroncov and Nikolai-on. With perfect justice he wholly condemned Juzov; but he approves the sociological works of Južakov.
- ↑ In 1877 Mihailovskii defended Marx against a Russian critic (Carl Marx before the Tribunal of I. Žukovskii). He here mooted the question whether Russia, now enlightened by Marx concerning the capitalist evolution of the west, must necessarily follow the same course. Accepting Marx's description of European evolution, he enquired whether Russia might not fake warning by this development. As shown above, he made a distinction between historic determinism and fatalism. He held, therefore, that a Russian disciple of Marx could not be content to look on quietly at his country's evolution. It was necessary for the onlooker to take a side, he must make up his mind whether he was to rejoice at the capitalisation of the still medieval economy of Russia, to rejoice despite all the evils attendant on the process, to rejoice in the break up of the medieval mir and artel and of the system of common property in the soil and the instruments of production; or whether he would deplore these developments and seek to resist them to the uttermost. Quoting Marx's polemic against Herzen (in the first edition of Capital) Mihailovskii defended Herzen's view that Russia could traverse an evolution sui generis, but did not surrender to slavophilism, and did not ascribe to the Russian folk any mystic or sublime qualities peculiar to the Russian national spirit. The Russian, he said, must and will learn from Europe. The man who has studied Marx will reflect upon the evolutionary process to which Russia is subject, and if the Russians must traverse the same route as Europe, they can traverse it fully aware of what they are doing. But since Russian conditions differ from those that obtain in Europe, the development of capitalisation in Russia maz prove peculiar to that country. Mihailovskii drew attention to this possibility in 1872, shortly after the publication of Russian translation of Capital. Marx wrote an answer to Mihailovskii, but the reply did not appear until 1888, when it was published in the Russian periodical, The Legal Courier, as A Writing by Carl Marx. Marx explained that he had not formulated his law of evolution as universally valid, but that as soon as a country had entered this specific course of development it became subject to the formulated laws of evolution. In each individual case the matter must be considered in relation to the peculiarities of the historical extant conditions. There was no fatal necessity about the capitalist development of Russia, nor was it essential that in Russia the countryfolk should be proletarianised in order to become "free" industrial workers, as had happened in Europe. Mihailovskii referred to Marx's reply as late as 1892, insisting once more that in view of the special character of Russian historical condition it was certainly possible that Russian evolution would take a course peculiar to that country.
- ↑ Mihailovskii is fond of pointing out that the Russian terms for the respective concepts of truth and justice, pravda and spravedlivost', have the same primitive significance.
- ↑ In the study of Dühring, Dühring's theory of vengeance as the source of criminal law and of law in general is described as negative, and autonomy of the individual is asserted as a positive, as a reasonable demand of democratic equality, But it is a matter for examination how much of Dühring's theory underlies Mihailovskii's theory of the sense of honour.
- ↑ This document, one of considerable political importance, received its definitive form in Mihailovskii's hands.
- ↑ A more precise analysis of Mihailovskii's views would demand a fuller account of his psychological conceptions. Here, in reference to his positivism and to the question of positivist detachment, I may point out that he did not regard reason, feeling, and will, as three absolutely distinct faculties or activities, but considered that all three elements are present in every psychical act. Mihailovskii referred occasionally to Lehmann's psychological study, The Principal Laws of the Affective Life of Man, 1892.
- ↑ Herzen, though pleased with the contents of Mihailovskii's first published work, What is Progress, censured its style.