Between Emotion & Reason

Lesley Chamberlain is an English writer with two distinct specialties: cooking and history. She has published several cookbooks dealing with Russian and East European cuisines, one of them titled “From Stroganoff to Strudel” (2000), as well as studies of Nietzsche and Freud. I have not seen her culinary works but “Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia” (Overlook, 331 Pages, $35) is both strange and confusing.For one, it is no history of Russia, as the subtitle claims, either “philosophical” or any other. Rather it offers reflections on the Russian intellectual tradition that I, for one, find difficult to follow. Part One presents no problem: It treads, rather cursorily and impressionistically, over familiar ground, namely Russian social thought between 1815 and 1991. But then the book begins to meander, offering impressions of various aspects of the country’s philosophical tradition whose objective is utterly obscure. I have read the two prefaces — one to the original English edition, the other to the American — several times and still remain in the dark as to the author’s intentions.We are told that “Russia is a culture without reason,” whatever this may mean. Next we are informed that Russia’s philosophical contribution “has scarcely been written down,” although the number of histories of Russian thought is legion. Objecting to Cold War studies, Ms. Chamberlain insists that Russian intellectual history is of “a piece,” presumably meaning that the 71 years of communist rule allowed Soviet citizens to speculate freely on moral or religious issues, which clearly was not the case.Throughout the book, there are numerous statements that are either wrong or else incomprehensible. Among the wrong assertions is the claim that the serfs emancipated in 1861 were “left without land.” In fact, they received roughly all the land they had cultivated for themselves (rather than their masters) while enserfed. Nor is it true that the state “paid compensation to the landowners.” The state advanced to the landowners the money the peasants were assessed for the land they had been given and which was landlord property, and for which the freed peasants had to compensate the government. Obscure passages abound. The following are a couple of examples taken at random. The first concerns General Kutuzov:The victorious Russian Leader against Napoleon existed as a foil to Napoleon’s individualistic Western rationalism. Kutuzov was a good man and took the right decisions because his soul was mysteriously embedded in the flow of Russian being. His ultimate wisdom came from passively committing his country to God’s way, not from wasting himself in self-assertive action. He was what Russian culture wanted him to be, an epistemic hero — a man who showed how to know.Kutuzov surely would have been surprised — and puzzled — by this description of himself for he was rather a simple man. And very likely he would have asked a university-educated adjutant whether he should be glad or mad at being called “epistemic.”Here is another example:It seems possible that the long tradition in Russia ended in 1991. This is not intended to mean that Russia has given up its characteristic ways in philosophy, torn between constructionism and anarchism, but that it can as a culture no longer pretend that the French Revolution didn’t happen.What does this mean? How can a culture “pretend” anything and when did Russians deny the French Revolution?It is true that Russian thinkers have often lacked the precision of Western philosophers, that their ideas tended to be driven more by emotion than logic. Ms. Chamberlain is right that Descartes did not strike root in Russia. This is quite understandable. Russian intellectuals since the reign of Catherine the Great had absorbed contemporary ideas imported from the West, yet they lived under an Oriental despotism which kept four-fifths of the population in bondage and barred its subjects from any involvement in politics. No wonder that the abstract issues that agitated Western philosophers left them cold They were impassioned, often contradictory, and mostly unrealistic. But this does not entitle a scholar dealing with them to cast aside precision, clarity, and logic.Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford don and historian of Russian thought whose student Ms. Chamberlain apparently was and whom she quotes copiously, surely would not have been pleased by this book.Mr. Pipes is the Frank B. Baird Jr., Professor of History, Emeritus at Harvard University.

Between Emotion & Reason

Between Emotion & Reason

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