Paul Goble
Staunton, June 18 – Most analysts conceive Russia’s turn away from Europe to Asia as being primarily economic in nature, but this shift must involve philosophy as well, with Russia forming its own national philosophical school rather than being part of or a response to European philosophy, Andrey Volodin says.
“Philosophy is a deeply Western phenomenon,” the student at the Baltic Federal University acknowledges. “It dates back to the work of Heraclitus and Parmenides and more broadly to the pre-Socratics in general.” And as a result, those who engage in the philosophical enterprise elsewhere are affected by that (iarex.ru/articles/85942.html).
But Russia is a separate civilization and the turn to the east which it has been compelled to make now “should not be limited to economics” but involve philosophical inquiry as well, with its practitioners going back “to the very foundations of the far from obsolete ‘folk spirit,’ folk identity and monotheism within Russia.
Doing so will not be easy, Volodin suggests, because the leading Russian philosophers were engaged in a dialogue with Europe rather than with this tradition; and the turn to the east in philosophy will require a break with that and a renewed focus on what makes Russian thinking distinctive.
Perhaps the most intriguing part of his argument is his suggestion that Sufism in the North Caucasus provides a model. The Sufis of Daghestan, he says, are so nationally specific that many mainstream Muslims view them as something less than Islamic. A genuinely Russian philosophy could be something like that with respect to European philosophy.
But the most important aspect of Volodin’s article is the way it suggests that the push for Russia to turn away from Europe and the West won’t be as limited as many hope but rather is already extending into a variety of spheres and thus will be far more difficult to reverse in the future.
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