Kant, or The Courage to Use Your Own Mind: On the 300th Anniversary of the Philosopher

Abstract

In his article written for the Kant jubilee, the author examines the topic of the perception of Kant’s philosophy in Russia, based on the words of Vladimir Solovyov, that Kant did not open new worlds to the mind, but put the mind itself on such a new point of view, from which all the old appeared in a different and truer form. But this was realized later. In the meantime, the great philosopher’s contact with Russia has received an unexpected character. Russian troops were stationed in Prussia, and Private Professor Kant lectured Russian officers on mathematics, military architecture, fortifi cation, and pyrotechnics. Interestingly, Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov could attend the philosopher’s lectures. The latter was a lieutenant colonel at that time and visited his father V. I. Suvorov, Governor-General of East Prussia in 1761–1762, in Konigsberg. The author also dwells on a conversation with Kant by N. M. Karamzin, one of the fi rst Russians to appreciate  Kant. Further, the defi nition of Pushkin’s hero is already clear: “...an admirer of Kant and a poet.” But the attitude towards Kant was ambiguous. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a clear rejection of Kant in Russian, especially Orthodox and in the spirit of Russian Marxism-oriented philosophy, suddenly emerged. In “The Philosophy of Freedom” (1911), the former Marxist N. A. Berdyaev, who became an Orthodox thinker, is rudely unambi guous: “Kant gave a brilliant example of purely police philosophy.” V. I. Lenin, an outspoken enemy of Christianity and the ideologist of “neo-Paganism” (S. N. Bulgakov), in these years also categorically demanded “to dissociate himself in the most decisive way and irrevocably from fideism and agnosticism, from philosophical idealism and from the sophistry of the followers of Hume and Kant” (“Materialism and Empirio-criticism”, 1909). As you know, in 1917 there was a revolution, the Leninist Bolshevik Party won, so it would seem that Kant, the ideological opponent of the leader, had to be forgotten. And they forgot. But at the end of the 1930s, the brilliant novel “The Master and Margarita” was written, published much later, after the terrible war, in 1966. But still published. And  it is amazing that it began with a conversation on Patriarchal, where Woland (the devil) told about his conversation with Kant. Kant continued to be heard in the highest achievements of Russian culture.