Fichte’s Ideas in the Philosophical Doctrines of Russian Neo-Kantians
Abstract
Fichte’s doctrine played a significant role in the emergence of Neo-Kantian philosophical projects both in Germany and in Russia. This paper proceeds from the works of Boris Vysheslavtsev, Boris Yakovenko and Henry Lanz and tries to reconstruct the influences exerted by Fichte’s ideas on the philosophical ideas of Russian Neo-Kantians. The historical-philosophical works of Russian Neo-Kantians constitute an integral body which provides an interpretative context of Fichte’s philosophy and forms an inalienable and significant part of Fichte studies in Russia. The main tendency of these works is an attempt to bring Fichte’s doctrine closer to Russian philosophy, to represent his philosophical system in its entirety without dividing it into autonomous periods, drawing attention to the ethical character of his philosophy and stressing the German philosopher’s contribution to the study of the problem of the irrational. The works of Russian Neo-Kantians are characterised by particular attention to Fichte’s ideal-realist ideas, his logicistic approach to absolute being, the attempt to overcome the contradiction between absolute unity and the concrete manifold. Fichte’s idea of the primacy of practical reason, which shaped the image of Fichtean philosophy in Gertman Neo-Kantianism, was taken up and developed in an original way by Russian Neo-Kantians. Vysheslavtsev made a consistent attempt to derive law, the state and economics from the ethical content of epistemology, “the science of knowledge”; Yakovenko suggested interpreting “the science of knowledge” as a teaching on life and freedom, as the philosophical grounding of the Christian idea; Lanz wrote about Fichte’s philosophy in the same vein as “the revolt of morality against theory”, as a philosophy of freedom.