Mikhail Lifshits - An Enigmatic Marxist - 2016

Stud East Eur Thought (2016) 68:241246
DOI 10.1007/s11212-016-9261-x
Mikhail Lifshits: an enigmatic Marxist

Andrey Maidansky1 Vesa Oittinen1
Published online: 16 November 2016

Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
Mikhail Lifshits (Lifschitz, , 19051983), the Soviet friend and comradein-arms of Georg Lukacs has for a long time been a neglected figure, remembered in
the West mainly for his work The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx. The English
translation of the book was published in 1938. Although it was republished in the
70s with a short but approving foreword by the distinguished English Marxist Terry
Eagleton, Lifshits has remained something of a private tip for the few initiated.1 As
late as 1997, Stanley Mitchell, who publishedat the request of Lifshits widow,
Lidia Reingardtin the Oxford Art Journal a long essay on Lifshits views on
aesthetics and philosophy, repeatedly pondered the question why is he not known
here(Mitchell 1997, 38). The situation quite obviously puzzled Mitchell, since,
given Lifshits original interpretation of Marxism, he should have been much more
well-known and esteemed not only in Russia, but elsewhere in the world. But no:
while Lukacs was able to enjoy worldly fame, Lifshits remained in oblivion.
In recent times, however, some changes in this situation are discernible, albeit
mostly in Russia only. It is probably too ambitious to speak of a Lifshits renaissance,
but nonetheless his disciples and followers have in the last few years, despite financial
difficulties and lack of interest on the part of the cultural establishment of present-day
Russia, managed to publish new editions of his writings (writings is here an
1
The first sketch of the book was published already in 1927; the English translation is based on the final
version Esteticheskie vzglyady Marksa, published in 1932. A reprint of the English edition by Pluto Press
came out in 1973, with a foreword by Terry Eagleton.
& Vesa Oittinen

[email protected]
Andrey Maidansky
[email protected]; [email protected]
1
Helsinki, Finland
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A. Maidansky, V. Oittinen
appropriate label, because Lifshits was more an essayist than an academic writer and
was not interested in producing large monographs). These publications include even
hitherto unknown texts from Lifshits vast archives, among other things his
correspondence with Georg Lukacs. Two volumes, consisting of Lifshits correspondence, have been described in a detailed review by Evgeni Pavlov in the latest issue of
Historical Materialism (Pavlov 2012, 187198).2 Another interesting publication is
the collection Nadoelo, published in 2012. It contains an extensive interview with
Lifshits accorded to the Hungarian Marxist Laszlo Sziklai in the 1970s, which
provides many valuable clues as to Lifshits views and intentions. Much, however,
remains still unpublished. According to his pupil Viktor Arslanov, in the Archives of
Russian Academy of Sciences there are some 700 files of notes, sketches, and other
materials waiting for publication (Arslanov 2010, 5). At the moment, there is no good
survey of the contents of the archives.
Lifshits book on Marxs aesthetics was indeed a pioneering work. It was written
in a constant struggle on two fronts: against vulgar sociologism, on the one side,
and the ultra-leftist Formalist tendencies, on the other. The so-called Plekhanov
orthodoxy had reduced the Marxist theory of art to a kind of sociology, and Soviet
Marxism in the 1920s mainly restricted itself to interpreting literature and art as
phenomena of the superstructure reflecting the economic basis. Against these
tendencies, Lifshits set as his task to reconstruct the genuine Marxist aesthetics from
disparate statements by Marx and Engels. However, as Terry Eagleton rightly
remarks, his aim was not to distill a separate philosophy of art from the corpus of
the classics of Marxism. Instead, he sets out to trace some crucial aesthetic themes
in Marxs work in terms of their integral relations to the developing totality of his
thought. In doing so, Lifshits showed, that far from being only some kind of
superstructure arising on the economic basis of society, the aesthetic moment is
present at all levels of Marxist theory; in fact, Marx had a close and continuous
engagement in imaginative production (Eagleton 1973, 8).
In the early 1930s the young Lifshits met Georg Lukacs in Moscow, and this
inaugurated a period of fruitful collaboration which lasted for several years. Both
Lifshits and Lukacs contributed on a regular basis to the journal Literaturnyi kritik. Its
first editor was the philosopher Pavel Yudin, who had earned his stripes in the
ideological campaign against the Menshevizing Idealism of the Deborinites a couple
of years earlier. Together with Mark Mitin, Yudin has gone into history as Stalins
The reviewed books of Lifshits are Mikhail Lifshits and G. Lukach, Perepiska 19311970, .:
Grundrisse 2011, and Pisma V. Dostalu, M. Mikhailovu, V. Arslanovu, .: Grundrisse, 2011. Other recent
publications of Lifshits by this small publishing house are Varia, M.: Grundrisse 2010, and Monten.
Vypiski i kommentarii, .: Grundrisse 2012, the latter containing materials of an unrealised book project
on Montaigne. Further publications: Problema Dostoevskogo (Razgovor s chrtom), M.: Akademicheskii
Proekt 2013, and Pochemu ja ne modernist? Filosoja. Estetika. Khudozhestvennaja kritika, M: Iskusstvo
XX vek 2009. Several years earlier by the financial support of the Aleksanteri Institute in Helsinki
was published Dialog s Evaldom Ilyenkovym, M: ProgressTraditsija 2003, which is a critical essay on
the philosophical ideas of Ilyenkov, especially the concept of the ideal, and Chto takoe klassika? M:
Iskusstvo XXI vek 2004, a collection of fragments from the extensive Lifshits Nachlass by Viktor
Arslanov. Finally, one should mention the volume on Lifshits, edited by Viktor Arslanov, which has been
published in the series Russian Philosophy of the Second Half of the twentieth Century (V. G. Arslanov
(ed.). Mikhail Aleksandrovich Lifshits, M: ROSSPEN 2010), containing i.a. a useful bibliography.
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henchman in philosophy. The journal did not, however, directly continue this campaign
but represented a position Lifshits later calledwith an ironical pointthe Techenie
(Current). Although Deborin had been denounced as a Hegelian, Lukacs and Lifshits
developed a Marxist theory of art leaning even more on Hegel than Deborin had.
In the works of the Berlin master thinker Lifshits sought a historical dialectics,
the existence of which other Soviet philosophers had not noted (and in the West,
too, it was just beginning to come into fashion thanks to the lectures of Alexandre
Koje`ve in Paris). Much as Lenin consulted Hegel before taking important political
decisions in the years of the First World War and War Communism, so, too, does
Lifshits hope that it is possible to understand the logic of the post-revolutionary
development of Soviet culture with Hegels help. He writes:
The Hegel in the works of Deborin and his school was a scholastic philosopher
of minor interest, an abstract thinker [] Our interest in Hegel was of quite
dissimilar character. For us, what was important in the doctrine of the German
thinker was its real content and a deeply tragic relationship to the events of the
French Revolution and the post-revolutionary epoch. All this had many
smiliarities with the problems encountered those who have tried to make sense
of the immense historical changes which have taken place in our days (Lifshits
2012, 84).
The mission of the artist was, according to Lifshits, to depict in a veridical manner
these dramatic and contradictory changes. Of the novelists of the time, whose
production best corresponded to the aesthetic and political programme of the
Techenie, Andrei Platonov was the most important. And in fact Platonov
published several articles in the Literaturnyi kritik. However, the journal was closed
already in 1940 by a Party decree. This came across as the turning point in Lifshits
career, since thereafter he found himself in growing isolation. As Mitchell puts it,
his post-war intellectual role was very different from what it had been in the
thirties, particularly when the ideological restrictions were eased after the death of
Stalin. Heterodox then, Lifshits now appeared orthodox [] [H]e was hopelessly
isolated from the young, who regarded him as a reactionary (Mitchell 1997, 34).
Lukacs had already aroused opposition among other Marxist theoreticians by
stubbornly clinging to the novel of the classical bourgeois epoch as the role model
for all subsequent, thus even proletarian, literature and condemning modern art, for
example, in the well-known debate on expressionism with Bertolt Brecht. But
Lifshits was even more hostile towards new forms of modern art. His essay Why I
am not a modernist?, published in the early 1960s,3 in which he denounced
modernist art as essentially nihilist, sealed his reputation as a retrograde thinker and
alienated him from the new generation of the shestidesiatniki, the liberals of the
Khrushchev era. Solzhenitsyn called him a fossil Marxist. Lifshits wittily replied:
There are useful fossils, too. The articles written by his critics Lifshits put into a
folder labelled Chorus of the unhatched chickens.
A German translation of this article was included in the collection of essays: Michail Lifschitz, Krise
des Hsslichen, Dresden: Verlag der Kunst 1971.
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In the last years of his life Lifshits finally obtained the freedom to write what he
thought openly. He was elected corresponding member of the Academy of Arts of
the Soviet Union in 1967, his works began to be published, and translations of them
appeared in other socialist countries. Lifshits dreamed, alluding to the example of
Spinoza, of presenting a systematic philosophy in a book with the title Aesthetics
(Lifshits 2010, 89). He said:
In a long life so astonishingly little is done, and all that is but spin-offs,
occasional works, marginal remarks. Astonishingly little is seen of the
invisible part of the iceberg. Indeed, I am myself guilty that this happened
(Lifshits 2011, 93).
Following Lifshits death, a three-volume collection of his works was published
(Lifshits 19841988) and soon after, in 1987, a German translation of his works,
containing texts from the 1930s, was published in Dresden.4 The posthumous
publication of Lifshits manuscript Ob idealnom i realnom, which is his critique
of Evald Ilyenkovs theory of the ideal, triggered a lively debate that continues to
this day.
In his extensive autobiographical interview, published in Hungarian in 1980 and
a year later in German with the title Gelebtes Denken, Lukacs seems to have taken
distance from his erstwhile Russian friend. When the interviewer Istvan Eorsi asked
for his views about Lifshits, Lukacs answered first with praise:
[W]e were the first to speak about a specifically Marxist aesthetics, not of this
or that aesthetics that would complete the systemof Marxs system. The idea
that aesthetics forms an organic part of Marxs system is to be found in my
article that I wrote about the Sickingen debate between Marx and Lassalle, and
in Lifshits this idea is in his early book that he wrote about the young Marx
[] My opinion of Lifshits is that he belonged to the greatest talents living in
those times [in the 1930sA.M. & V.O.], especially at the purely literary
level. He saw the problem of realism very clearly (Lukacs 1981, 141).
But then Lukacs switched to a more critical tone, claiming that Lifshits did not
extend this to other fields of culture, and remained stuck in his old positions of the
1930s, whilst he, Lukacs, on the contrary, had already then managed to go further.
Lukacs claimed that, unlike Lifshits, he was able in his book Der junge Hegel and
especially in the Zerstrung der Vernunft, to give an interpretation of Marxist
philosophy that abandoned the official line represented by Zhdanov, which reduced
modern philosophy entirely to the opposition between materialism and idealism.
Poor Lifshits stayed in Russia. I do not blame him for this. What could he possibly
do in Russia? He supported the line that modern literature is not good. His views
became outrightly conservative. I will not say that our friendship would have ceased
because of that. But of course I have left those things far behind that Lifshits has not
managed to settle to this day (Lukacs 1981, 1412).
4
Michail Lifschitz, Die dreissiger Jahre. Ausgewhlte Schriften, Dresden: VEB Kunst (Fundus-Bucherei
113115), 1987. It seems that the intention was to publish more volumes, but if so, the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989 nullified these plans.
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The belittling tone of Lukacss memoirs reveals a hidden jealousy between the
two Marxist savants. It seems that Lifshits never had the opportunity to read
Lukacs interview with Eorsi, but despite this he managed to pay back Lukacs.
Recently, notes have been published, from the folder No. 232 of Lifshits archive,
labelled simply as Lukacs, in which he comments, polemically and in a
uncompromising manner which was characteristic of him, his friends writings (see
Lifshits 2004, 99166). Lifshits compared himself to the teacher of swordplay who
taught Cyrano de Bergerac some tricks of how to use the saber, but remained in the
shadow of his more famous pupil:
But in not one of my main ideas do I see any influence of Lukacs. On the
contrary, he followed me in at least two major points of his aesthetics []: a)
the contradiction between capitalism and the destiny of art; b) the idea of
realism in the broad sense of the word, or of truth in art (Lifshits 2004, 160).
Acerbically, Lifshits recalled that Lukacs had celebrated, in his well-known book
Zerstrung der Vernunft, the charlatan of science Lysenko, comparing his position to
that of Tertullians credo quia absurdum (Lifshits 2004, 102).5 Although the notes
in the folder are very fragmentary, even cryptic, one main line of Lifshits critique
seems to be that Lukacs has a tendency to emphasize the role of the subjective
factor, whilst Lifshits tends towards a more Platonic worldview. Lifshits traces
this subjectivism in Lukacs to a Neo-Kantian influence: Lukacs is insufciently
Hegelian. That he would be a Hegelian is but a fancy. The southwest German
current of Neo-Kantianism has had much influence on him much (ibid., 113).
Lifshits followed Lukacss later career and was especially critical of his
ontological turn in the 1960s. According to him, with the ontology project
Lukacs returned to the themes of his youth (ibid. 111). Especially the core idea of
the project, the teleology of human activity, was to Lifshits mind one-sided. Human
labour, argued Lifshits, consists not only in the realisation of goals, but is a
reaction that is transformed into the reproduction of life, which generates even the
goal itself (Ibid., 139). In other words, Lukacss concept of human labour is for
Lifshits too subjectivistic, since it reduces labour to teleological positing.
Lifshits returned several times to the theme of non nito, the tragic incompleteness of human works, the unfinished solutions of historical theorems. He referred
in this respect, inter alia, to Marx, who, as well, never completed his main work
(Lifshits 1985, 190200). However, he expressed the hope that maybe someone in
posterity will be able to reconstruct the antediluvian animal from one vertebra of
his skeleton. If this indeed is the case, maybe our present thematic issue will prove
helpful to the future Cuvier.
To sum up, there seemed to be something enigmatic in Lifshits position: clearly
he was not a Stalinist, nor an anti-Hegelian, although he opposed the Deborin
school. But neither did he belong to the adherents of new and critical trends in
Marxism. He did not want to make compromises in his critique of modernism,
although nor did he identify with the official doctrine of Socialist Realism. Lifshits
characterized himself as chelovek tridtsatykh godov, a man of the Thirties,
5
Lifshits adds: But do you think that Tertullian was a fool because he believed in the absurd?
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pointing to the fact that the early years of the 1930s had been of formative
significance for him: all the central motives of his later writings can be traced back
to the discussions of this period.
This issue of SEET contains 8 articles that approach the Lifshits phenomen
from different angles. We begin with an interview by Dmitri Gutov, an
internationally known Russian artist, who has devoted much time to researching
the Lifshits heritage and is one of the most important connoisseurs of his work in
present-day Russia. The papers by Klimova, Jubara, Maidansky, Oittinen, Dmitriev,
Mareev, and Mareeva each deal with certain aspects of Lifshits oeuvre.
References
Arslanov, V. G. (2010). Ot redaktora. In V. G. Arslanov, (Ed.), Mikhail Aleksandrovich Lifshits. M:
ROSSPEN.
Eagleton, T. (1973). Preface. In M. Lifshitz (Ed.), The philosophy of art of Karl Marx. London: Pluto
Press.
Lifshits, M. (19841988). Izbrannoe, 13, M: Izobrazitelnoe iskusstvo, 19841988.
Lifshits, M. (1985). V mire estetiki. M: Izobrazitelnoe iskusstvo.
Lifshits, M. (2004). Chto takoe klassika? M: Iskusstvo XXI vek.
Lifshits, M. (2010). Varia. M.: Grundrisse.
Lifshits, M. (2011). Pisma V. Dostalu, M. Mikhailovu, V. Arslanovu. M.: Grundrisse.
Lifshits, M. (2012). Nadoelo. V zashchitu obyknovennogo marksizma. M: IskusstvoXX vek 2012.
Lukacs, G. (1981). Gelebtes Denken. Eine Autobiographie im Dialog, ed. by Istvan Eorsi, Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp 1981 (edition suhrkamp NF 88), p. 141.
Mitchell, S. (1997). Mikhail Alexandrovich Lifshits (19051983). Oxford Art Journal, 20(2).
Pavlov, E. V. (2012), [Review of: Perepiska [Letters], Mikhail Lifschitz and Gyorgy Lukacs, Moscow:
Grundrisse, 2011; Pisma V. Dostalu, V. Arslanovu, M. Mikhailovu [Letters to V. Dostal, V.
Arslanov, M. Mikhailov], Mikhail Lifschitz, Moscow: Grundrisse, 2011] in: Historical Materialism
No. 4 (2012), pp. 187198.
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Stud East Eur Thought

DOI 10.1007/s11212-016-9270-9
An interview with Dmitri Gutov

Andrey Maidansky1 Vesa Oittinen1
Dimitrii Gutov is a Russian artist and art theoretician. Born in Moscow, 1960, he is one
of the most widely known and charismatic artists of the post-Soviet era. His works are
stored and exhibited in leading museums of the world: the Tretyakov Gallery, the
Russian Museum, Russian Icon Museum (all in Moscow), the Louvre, the Guggenheim
(New York), Kiasma (Helsinki). Gutov participated in the Venetian Biennials of 1995,
2007 and 2011, at Manifesta (1996), Documenta (2007), Volta (New York, 2009), the
Biennials in Istanbul (1992), Sao Paulo (2002) and Shanghai (2012).
The theoretical interests of Gutov focus on the philosophy of Marx and the
heritage of the Soviet aesthetician Mikhail Lifshits. In 1994 he founded a creative
group named The Lifshits Institute in Moscow.
Despite the fact that Gutov has become famous thanks to his avantgarde
paintings and installations, he has always applied himself to exploring the forgotten
and non-modern phenomena of the art. Hence his interest in the painting of the
Peredvizhniki group, Rembrandts sketches, orthodox icons, and the design of
Soviet journals of the thaw epoch. Lately he has worked especially with metallic
materials and organised expositions on Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, on
erotic motifs in antique Greek vases and Picassos graphics. One of his first metal
works was a 3D manuscript page of Marxs and Engelss The German Ideology.
AM and VO: Dear Dmitri Gutov, there have not been many translations of
Lifshitss works in other languages, maybe with the exception of some anthologies.
Which text of Lifshits would you, above all, recommend for translation?
& Andrey Maidansky

[email protected]
Vesa Oittinen
[email protected]
1
Belgorod State University, Belgorod, Russia
123
DG: There are some publications of Lifshits in the good old German Democratic
republic, but in English there exist practically no translations. Even the anthologies
containing texts of Marx and Engels on art have not been published according to his
plan, with the exception of the GDR edition of Marx and Engels Uber Kunst und
Literatur (Berlin 1948, with several later printings). In English there exists only the
text Lifshits wrote when he was 27 years old, The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx,
published in New York in 1938 (Lifshitz 1938). The translation is not very good and
contains many cuts. In addition there exist some articles lost in American journals of
the 1930s. At present, the Lifshits Institute is working intensively on translating
Lifshits works into English.
Of the shorter and forceful texts which contain the quintessence of Lifshits
aesthetics, I could mention the letter to Fridlender on Pushkin, written April 8,
1938.1 To this letter one can apply what Lifshits once said of himself in a note:
There remains the hope that some day a future Cuvier will reconstruct on the basis
of one bone fragment from my skeleton the entire antediluvian animal. This letter
contains in concentrated form the reflections of a man at the very centre of a
universal cataclysm at such a tragic and intense moment of history which humanity
has seldom experienced. Compared to those times everything which later
generations had to cope with looks like duck soup. It is exactly this fact which
hinders us from understanding what was said in the 1930s. Every word in this text
requires a comprehensive commentary, which, to boot, cannot be only historical. It
is kind of a Tao-te Ching. I do not doubt that such commentaries will be written.
Have you worked in the Lifshits Archive? Have you seen Lifshits drawings, and
if so, what do you think of them?
Yes, I have been working on the manuscripts of Mikhail Aleksandrovich and
have studied for hours both his drawings and the few remaining paintings. They
contain a very forceful paradox, a real drama. At the age of 19, Lifshits made a
decision to abandon his aspirations to become an artist. Despite this, he was drawn
to artistic activities throughout his entire life whole his life, as we learn from his
letters. One has to understand what kind of choice this was. It permeates all his
writings and in many respects determines their energy and problematics. Not
incidentally, Lifshits was so interested in that moment of the life of the young Marx
when he abandoned poetry. The theme of the end of art, its death and future
resurrection belongs to the core of Lifshits views. In the above-mentioned letter to
Fridland there is the phrase: Art is dead!Long live art!. One must know well
the first half of this sentence in order to avoid turning the second part into empty
babble.2 The first half of the sentence distinguishes Lifshits from all official Soviet
aesthetics (which, according to his definition, was but pure babble), the second half
from Western aesthetics. Thanks to this, his position is quite unique in the twentieth
century. This sentence contains the essence of Lifshits ideas and that which
determined the movement of his wrist when he painted landscapes and portraits. His
drawings are like an electric arc between these Dead and Long live!.
1
The letter was published in Pushkinist, vol. 1, Moskva: Sovremennik 1989, pp. 40314.
ibid., p. 404.
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Furthermore, Lifshits acquired a phenomenal formal education in the VKhUTEMAS. The covers of self-made binders, in which he preserved his archive of
manuscripts, are visible evidence of this.
In a recent program Tem vremenem of the TV channel Kultura you
mentioned a room dedicated to Lifshits at an art exhibition in Madrid. Could you
say more about this project?
In 2012, I was invited by Boris Groys to participate at the Shanghai Biennale.
There I had at my disposal a big hall where I exhibited 28 stands with collected
materials on Lifshits: photographs, document copies, manuscripts, marginal notes to
books, book covers, and so on. It was a cross-section of what had accumulated
during the last 25 years, a kind of a tacit research, a little reminiscent of Aby
Warburgs Mnemosyne Atlas. Alongside the exhibition there was a 45 min film
devoted to Lifshits and the small group of artists interested in him. The film had
been produced ten years earlier by appointment of the Zentrum fur Kunst und
Mediatechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe. During those ten years it was shown in
several places throughout the world. The Shanghai exhibition aroused interest
among the professionals, and we decided to stage it in some places in Europe, in
particular at the Vienna Secession of 2013 and, in Autumn 2014, in the main
Spanish museum of modern art, the Reina Sofia in Madrid.
Which should to your mind be the main direction for future studies of Lifshits
philosophical heritage?
The study of Lifshits should go through two phases. The first is, simply, to read
and attempt to understand what is said in his texts. This is an elementary level, but
even it has not yet been carried out in a satisfactory manner. More serious work on
Lifshits begins where one encounters most profound ideas, which the author himself
did not strive to make public; or, to state the point in a more complicated manner,
one encounters situations in which the ideas were expressed in an inverted manner,
v obratnoj forme as Lifshits himself said. A valuable cargo can be exported only
under this flag at those times, he sometimes said.
Here is what he writes about the problem of the rationality of the world in Hegel:
In Hegels formula Everything real is rational is contained the assertion of the
irrationality of realityin the only form which was possible for him and, generally,
for the epoch (Lifshits 2004). Or about Dostoevsky: He directs curses to that
which is for him the most valuable, the highest good (Besedy 1988).3 Or about
Diderot: The anger of Diderot against Boucher: he quarrels with his own bread and
butter. This is an element of protest against libertinage and demonic materialism.
But the fools think (Lifshits)
Every thought can be read literally, but it can be read even in another, deeper
manner, which Lifshits called the inverted gesture and the error of great men.
The error of great men: they think that they are understood not only by
denotation, but even by connotation, to use medieval terminology. However, they
are constrained to speak not at all about what they have in mind, but in such and
3
Iz avtobiografii idej.
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such manner, and the readers and listenersespecially posteritywho are not
aware of the intellectual folklore of the epoch nor of the real situation of the times,
take their words literally. Such was the fate of Hegel with his Prussian police ideal,
such was the fate of Chernyshevsky with his paradoxical simplifications. Such is the
fate of all great conservatives of mankind who must necessarily express their
curious and progressive thought in a lopsided and even contrary form. But if great
men had to commit this mistake, if they are guilty without guilt, so for us, the
ordinary men who read their works, there is no need to follow them and repeat their
mistakes.4
Lifshits never wearied in repeating the following in several of his texts: I have
to give an account of some details of our intellectual life in the Thirties above all
because I myself was aboard, and my works of that epoch, which are now presented
to the reader, need specifications, especially in places where they may understand
this epoch too literally and externally, and do not understand its inverted gesture
and the real, valuable content of the epoch.5
Well, what about Lifshits critique of modernism? Should it, too, be understood
as an inverted gesture? If the answer is positive, then what is the real, valuable
content of modernism?
In making an anathema of modernism, Lifshits was merciless to the extreme. In
his texts there is not a word about the valuable and real content of modernism. For
him, modernism reflected a monstrous historical situation and was in itself a
contribution to its consolidation. He never compromised on this view.
Stanley Mitchell, the best connoisseur of Lifshits in the English-speaking world,
who valued him unusually highly and wrote a couple of important publications
devoted to him, once said to me: Conceal everything that Lifshits has written about
contemporary art and try to make it that no one ever sees it, if you want to make sure
that he does not lose his reputation for all time. Actually, on a literal reading, what
Lifshits says is but the usual Soviet rubbish. Dreadfully reactionary, only executed
in a considerably more rigorous manner and developed ad absurdum. What should
one, indeed, think about one of his declarations in the programmatic manifest from
1963, Why I am not a modernist?: Faced with such a program, I opt for the most
mediocre, the most epigonic academism, because it is the lesser evil (Lifshits
1978). The Dadaists in Zurich of 1916 could not have invented a better phrase with
which to startle the philistine, who from the end of the 1950s had already begun to
worship the newest forms of art.
In his pamphlet Why I am not a modernist? Lifshits attempted to express his main
ideas in a hyper-concentrated form. Compared with the letter to Fridlender, this text
is even more complicated from the point of view of its reception, since it is
constructed as an open challenge, as a poetics of shock.
Lifshits views modernism as the new religion of educated philistines of the
twentieth (and now the twenty-first) century. Whereas in earlier times, a cathedral
stood in a city centre, now there must be a museum of modern art. Essentially,
4
Ibid., p. 107.
Ibid., p. 105.
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Lifshits projects on modernism the analysis of religion conducted by Marx in the

Introduction to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right. This is an art which
assists in reconciliation with the existing order of things. It is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, this time only in ultra-modern
packing. The uncompromising critique of this art is criticism of that vale of tears of
which it is the halo. Every compromise with it means for Lifshits a compromise
with the world where human relations have been turned upside down.
But the matter has a reverse side, too. Twenty years ago I attacked at a private
meeting the book by Professor Viktor Arslanov, Mif o smerti iskusstva. The book
concentrates on a critique of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt school. I was
especially displeased by the title of the book, which indicated that the death of art
was but a myth, an invention of intellectuals who had not been consequent enough
in their thinking. Attempting to crush me, Arslanov said: But the books title was
conceived by Lifshits. I began to reflect on this. To me, it seemed that Lifshits
idea of a coefficient of the ability to reflect the world, as well as his thesis that there
are situations in which reality cannot be grassed in aesthetic form, both make up a
radical and original conception of the death of art. And then one of the listeners of
our dispute remarked: the concept of myth has yet another sense, for example, the
myth of the dying and resurrected god. If I am right, this second sense was not
relevant to the content of Arslanovs book, but it was important as regards Lifshits
ideas. He views modernism like an antique tragedy, where the artist cannot avoid
the role prepared for him, the tragic guilt: This must be, this doleful experience is
necessary for art (Lifshits and Reinhardt 1968).
The concept of a doleful experience, pechalnyj opyt, is one of the most
important in his system of ideas. It refers to the doleful experience of the stages of
Being through which solar systems, biological species, and civilizations develop.
Such are the nuances that distinguish Lifshits critique of modernity from outwardly
kindred phenomena. One must very accurately understand the overtones of
meanings which Lifshits does not think need to be amplified. He sees very well the
insurmountable obstacles facing artists at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Exactly for this reason he writes about their tragic guilt; he does not mean guilt in
the meaning the criminal law gives to it. There was simply no other way out from
the cul-de-sac in which the European culture had ended up. But the most important
trait that distinguishes Lifshits from his epigones and from the Soviet critique of
avantgarde art is the intonation with which he writes about modernism: It is
possible that in this process of decline one can discern the curse of Nemesis, or a
protest against the slavish imitation in the art currents of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries; it was a surrogate for real regeneration. I do not know.
[] I remember the superstitious awe with which we looked at Kazimir Malevichs
painting The Black Square, which was later so praised and included in all
encyclopedias of modernism. It seemed as if the author challenged the satiated
philistines of the model year 1913: This is what I can show as evidence in this case.
All that remains is but illusion or lie (Lifshits 1979).
Commenting the words of an artist who declared the Earth to be the biggest work
of pop-art, Lifshits wrote: Nastily said (Lifshits and Reinhardt). This expression,
nastily said, contains the core of his attitude to the matter in question. Lifshits
123
entered the VKhUTEMAS at a moment in the 1920s when modernism was at an

impasse, as it had already some years earlier reached the limits of its possibilities. It
reached its conscious creative maturity at the moment, when all was, basically,
already done. There remained only the possibility of varying the theme. Hegel,
when he spoke about the death of the art, stated: We will never again kneel before it.
Lifshits in 1923 might have similarly said: We are never again going to be startled
by the new anti-art. One must distinguish Lifshits position from those who not only
never rose above modernism, but did not even reach it.
Lifshits characterised himself on several occasions as the man of the 30s . In
the article you published in the book edited by Boris Groys et al, Zuruck aus der
Zukunft, you write that the Soviet Thirties are one of the darkest and opaque in
history. The key to them is so far lacking . Do you think that studying Lifshits
thoughts and writings we are able to decipher this enigmatic and terrible period of
history, or at least find some hints as to how to proceed in deciphering it?
Not only do I think so, I would add that Lifshits texts have a key significance for
understanding the drama which began to evolve in the 1930s. Of course, we have
many reliable sources that recount the inner life of those years of music, prose,
poetry, and the art of painting. But they all are in need of translation into the
language of thought. Lifshits offers us a unique possibility to get in touch with the
self-consciousness of the times, not in its figurative, but its literal form. All of his
writings, whatever they may have been about, are dedicated to the theme of the
tragedy of the revolution. All his subsequent intellectual activity consists of
reflections on this theme. The fact that in 1937 and 1938 he published in his
anthology, Marks i Engels ob iskusstve, which was intended for a broad public,
fragments on crude and levelling communism from Marxs 1844 manuscripts, is
very telling for those who can understand. By the way, I do not know anyone who
would have taken any notice of this nuance. The experts on the history of Marxism
have to this day believed that these texts of Marx became accessible to the Soviet
reader only in the period of Khrushchevs thaw. A significant crop of lectures,
which Lifshits read in the IFLI6 in the years of the Great Terror and in the first years
of the 1940s, is awaiting publication. They are preserved only in the form of
incomplete stenographic notes which the author himself had not edited, but they
reveal that grief of inner rupture which characterized the epoch. For me, it is
simply incomprehensible, how one could talk about the pre-war decade without
referring to such a programmatic concept as man of the 30s. And, of course, this
all surpasses the boundaries set by simple historical interest. It is the quintessence of
the already mentioned doleful experience.
Hegel says in the Foreword to his Philosophy of Right, that it would be as silly to
believe that a philosophy could surpass its present world as to believe that an
individual could go beyond his time. Hegels device is, on the contrary: hic Rhodus,
hic salta! which means that every thinker must reckon with his circumstances and
6
That is, the Moscow-based Institut filosofii, literatury i istorii imeni N.G. Chernyshevskogo (MIFLI,
often abbreviated as IFLI), which existed from 1931 to 1941; later incorporated into the Moscow State
University.
123
with how others might receive his message. In this light, Lifshitss stubborn nonconformism seems very un-Hegelian. He does not follow the current of his time nor
mind what others think of him
It seems to me that Lifshits is simply literally following the ideas which are put
forth in this famous Foreword. He does not grow weary in repeating that he himself
is the voice of a definite historical situation, literally a function of the
circumstances that had emerged at the time. On this he builds his entire theory
of reflection. There cannot be, in the head of a man, anything which does not exist in
reality itself. What was is Reason, wrote Hegel in the Foreword. But he does not
say here or anywhere else that every thinker must reckon with his circumstances
and with how others might receive his message. Why should one reckon with this?
Everybody is, anyway, the child of his age. The already cited most important thesis
of Lifshits is that everything can be read in two principally different ways. You have
to seek the contrariesthat is how you might formulate the essence of his approach.
If Lifshits moved against the current of his time, that means that there was another
current, deeper and more powerful, and not superficial. That is why in the thirties
Lifshits popularity was actually off-scale.
Lifshits edited in the 1930s works of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and wrote
an extensive introduction to them. Do you see any affinities between the aesthetic
programs of Lifshits and Winckelmann? As is well known, Winckelmann insisted
that imitation of the Ancients is the best way to greatness and to the flourishing of
culture. Of course, he meant by imitation (Nachahmung) something other than
mere copying. Lifshits, for his part, dreamed of a resurrection of the art of classical
antiquity.
Winckelmann built up his aesthetics in a very peculiar manner: if you want to be
modern, so follow the Ancients; if you want to be inimitable, then imitate antiquity.
But what does this mean? You have to imitate the Ancients in the first instance
because they themselves imitated no one. Open your eyes in order to investigate
Nature in its immediacy. All this has nothing to do with attempts to force-feed
people with classicistic academic schemes (although such a meaning may of course
be deduced from the idea of imitation). We can once more remind ourselves of the
Foreword to Hegels Philosophy of Right. Philosophy does not tell the world what it
should be likeand it would as senseless to tell this to art. Behind the achievements
of antique sculpture there was a phenomenal level of personal freedom. In the
present conditions of wage labour it is impossible even to dream of it. Talk about the
resurrection of ancient art boils down to the idea that, in more benevolent
circumstances, Man can move the weight of the body on one foot as freely as
Polykleitoss Doryphoros did. And the artist gets visual material to create a classical
figure. When Lifshits speaks of Russian icon painting of the fifteenth century and
connects its achievements with the epoch when the peasants had not yet became
serfs, he, too, is relating to Winckelmann. A harmony which is achieved by
abandoning all that is organic or plastically natural constitutes the other focus, the
focus of our days. The Mondrian Grids. Lifshits calls this the crazy tyrannical
utopia of straight lines.
123
Thus, the Greek ideal of Winckelmann, Hegel, Marx, and Lifshitswhich of

course must not be understood as an abstract idealisation, but as a doctrine of
political freedom, which endows art with excellence, toomaintains its energy. As
we know from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Marx, only those should deck out in
antique togas who want to conceal from themselves the real sense of their restricted
agency.
Could you, please, say something about the Lifshits Institute. What are you
preparing at the moment?
To understand the intent of the Lifshits Institute, it is important to be aware of the
conditions under which it emerged. The idea of the institute was conceived at the
end of the 1980s, in the hectic days of the Perestroika, when Marxism and
everything connected with it was condemned by just about everyone. It was a
radical protest against what happened then, but of course it did not aim to defend
that which in the USSR was known as Soviet power. Finally, in 1993, in
conditions which now were not at all favourable, my friends and I decided to create
the Institute. We began to have more or less regular meetings, to read and discuss
texts, to organise exhibitions now and then and sometimes even to publish. Well,
those times when almost everyone put his forefinger to his temple and twisted it,
when hearing that someone was interested in such matters, are now gone.
Today our activity has a more profound character. Thus, recently the publishing
house Grundrisse published five of Lifshits books, in association with the Institute.
A significant part of these consists of archive materials which are published for the
first time. Another part is composed of republished articles from old and forgotten
journals. There is a kind of paradox with these publications: they are all financed by
the sale of just those works of modern art against which Lifshits fought. But this is
in line with the character of his unusual life. In like manner I and my friend David
Reef have succeeded in delivering lectures on this theme in the academies of
different countries.
References
Besedy M. A. (1988). Lifshitsa. In Kontekst 1987. Literaturno-teoreticheskie issledovanija (p. 300)
Moskva: Nauka.
Lifshits, M. A. (1978). Pochemu ja ne modernist? In Iskusstvo i sovremennyj mir (pp. 2829) Moskva:
Izobrazitelnoe iskusstvo.
Lifshits, M. A. (1979). Karl Marks Iskusstvo i obshchestvennyj ideal, (2nd ed.). Moskva: Khudozhestvennaja literatura.
Lifshits, M. A. (2004). Chto takoe klassika? Ontognoseologija. Smysl mira. Istinnaja seredina. (p. 429).
Moskva: Iskusstvo XXI vek.
Lifshits, M. A., & Reinhardt, L. J. (1968). Krizis bezobrazija (p. 77). Moskva: Iskusstvo.
Lifshitz, M. (1938) The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx, New York: Critics Group 1938 (2nd ed.)
London: Pluto Press 1973.
123

DOI 10.1007/s11212-016-9263-8
The aesthetic realism of Mikhail Lifshits: art, history

and the communist ideal
Andrey Maidansky1
Abstract The aesthetics of Mikhail Lifshits may be characterised as a quest for

pravda (truth/justice) in art. The article discusses his assessment of the fate of art in
the communist revolution and his view on revolution through the prism of classical
art. Pondering the metaphysical foundations of his realist aesthetics, Lifshits offered
a naturalistic version of the theory of reflection based on the contradistinction of
big and small being.
Keywords Mikhail Lifshits Marxism Aesthetics Realism Modernism
Communism Reflection The ideal Ontognoseology
The truth seeker

Events make philosophers, Mikhail Lifshits said. He was born in the year of the
first Russian revolution, and the October Revolution became the seminal event in
the life of the provincial Jewish boy. It always became clear to me that I am a
function or the voice of a certain situation, of certain circumstances,he said in an
interview in the twilight of his life, having in mind, first of all, the situation of the
October Revolution and the civil war. Grandiose events do not pass without
leaving their mark. Once he has lived through them, a man is no longer in a
position to change his perspective later (Lifshits 1988a, 271).
I think, the word truthseeker (pravdoiskatel) gives us the most accurate
description of Lifshitss life perspective. In Russian, the word pravda
combines the meanings truth and justice, i.e. logical and ethical ideals. Lifshits
& Andrey Maidansky

[email protected]
1
Department of Philosophy, Belgorod State University, ul. Preobraghenskaya 78b, kv. 79,
Belgorod, Russia 308000
123
A. Maidansky
added the third, aesthetic dimension: the true is beautiful, and vice versa. To him,
portrayal of real life is the matter of art and the artists supreme vocation.
The quest of truth is not a purely intellectual exercise, it is a continuous drama
of life, as Lifshits expressed the idea. It was the Russian October Revolution that
became the historical culmination of this drama. Lifshits called himself a son of
the Revolution, who had the opportunity to learn its lessons at firsthand (Lifshits
1988a, 266). Every revolution begins with the abstract negation of the old, and
young Lifshits, as he confessed years after, was captured by the fantastic
enthusiasm of breaking and denial, joining the radical left wing painters at
VKhUTEMAS (Higher Artistic and Technical Workshop), a stronghold of Leftist
revolutionary art, much like Weimars Bauhaus. However, this enthusiasm did not
last for long, a year or two, after which Lifshits developed a strong immunity to
neopathy, as he called the pursuit of the new, that disease of a modern philistine.
Like any seeker of truth, Lifshits was in a state of permanent conflict with the
mainstream in arts, in philosophy, and in life itself. Criticism of avant-garde art
earned him a reputation as an aesthetic counter-revolutionary and made it
impossible to continue his studies. Lifshits switched to the teaching of philosophy
and moved to the Marx and Engels Institute.
At that time he studied German, collected all of Marxs and Engels judgments
about art in the writings, and prepared to publish an anthology designed to prove
that the founders of Marxism had their own, genuine aesthetic theory, though no one
had ever noticed it before.1 Needless to say, this theory vindicated the classical
ideals of Antiquity and the Renaissance. In this way Lifshits acquired allies against
which nobody could argue in those years.
Meanwhile, avant-garde art was crushed in the Soviet UnionStalin began to
establish his own socialist pseudo-realism. Lifshits once again found himself in
opposition. He had to defend his views in discussions with the creators of the new
mythology, whose arguments resembled the sound of a falling mortar shellhello
from hell. One cannot but marvel at Lifshitss courage: in the years when churches
and monasteries were being destroyed, he writes articles and delivers lectures on the
realism of ancient Russian icon-painting. It might seem strange that he preferred
orthodox icons to canvases of the revolutionary avant-garde. And after that, he
would still consider himself a foster child of the October Revolution?
Lifshits expands the scope of this paradox, showing that both fathers of the
proletarian revolution, Marx and Lenin, were also notable for their conservative
predilections in art. It is a well-known fact that Marx placed Aeschylus and
Shakespeare above all contemporary writers. Lenin acknowledged that he did not
like nor even understand avant-garde art. How do a revolutionary spirit in politics
and a deep-rooted conservatism in art correspond to each other?
In his Introduction to the Grundrisse Marx had meditated upon the same
problem: why is it that Greek art is still appreciated as a norm and unattainable
example, if in a material respect modern civilisation has made such great strides?
1
I remember that I submitted a report to the Director of the Institute, suggesting setting up a room for
aesthetics, in order to study Marxs and Engels aesthetic views. My initiative came to nothing. It was
received with a certain irony, though kindly enough. Ryazanov did not believe that Marx and Engels had
their own system of aesthetic views. However, nobody realised this at that time (Lifshits 1988a, 278).
123
The aesthetic realism of Mikhail Lifshits: art, history and
The eminence of ancient art, according to Marx, is a direct expression of those

unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise. Antiquity is
the historical childhood of humanity. Every succeeding epoch admires the nave
sincerity of ancient art and strives to reproduce at a higher stage the truth inherent
in the child. Does not the specific character of every epoch, in its natural veracity,
come to life again in the childs nature?.2
It clearly follows from this consideration that Marx sees the aim of art, if not its
very essence, as expressing, by artistic means, the truth of lifethe natural
veracity (Naturwahrheit) of a given epoch. This, too, is the credo of Lifshitss
aesthetics. He calls the art that participates in truth realistic. The concept of realism
in Lifshits is extremely broad. It is not simply one of the historical trends in art. Any
true art is realist.3
Lifshits treats truth in a Hegelian sense as a plenitude, a completeness of being,
or as the correspondence of a phenomenon to its own nature. Truth is a perfection,
an ideal:
We call somebody a true friend or a true patriot, meaning that they
represent the personification of a certain perfectio or ideal, in contrast to false
friends and sham patriots (Lifshits 2003, 212213).
For Lifshits, the classical definition of truth is too abstract. Not just any
correspondence of thought to the facts of experience makes a given thought true.
The matter is what these facts are in themselves. Some facts express the core of a
thing, its very nature, other facts are accidental and inessential for the thing; they are
introduced from without due to the influence of things having an entirely different
nature. True (=realist) art is able to discern and show what is essential and valuable
in the variety of lifes phenomena.
Lifshits considers the naturalistic literature of the end of nineteenth century as the
beginning of the decomposition of true artistic form and as the first step toward
Modernism, in spite of his respect for the forefathers of naturalism (Zola,
Goncourts, Hauptmann, and others). It was they who committed Adams sin in the
Eden of art.
Naturalism makes a merit of exactly what was a defect from the standpoint of
the former art, namely the absence of higher appraisal, elimination of any
sympathy, and antipathy towards the depicted phenomena, the rejection of an
internal norm, of separating good from evil, and of beautiful forms from ugly
ones. From the viewpoint of naturalism, all these distinctions have become
obsolete (Lifshits and Reinhardt 1974, 18, 19).
Ein Mann kann nicht wieder zum Kinde werden oder er wird kindisch. Aber freut ihn die Naivetat des
Kindes nicht, und mu er nicht selbst wieder auf einer hohren Stufe streben, seine Wahrheit zu
reproduzieren? Lebt in der Kindernatur nicht in jeder Epoche ihr eigner Charakter in seiner Naturwahrheit
auf? (Marx 1983, 45).
The term realism may be used in a wide sense, as the truth of displaying the actual world in its
inherent sensible form; and there is realism as a historical phenomenon, relating to definite literary-artistic
currents (Lifshits 1984c, 380).
123
A. Maidansky
Naturalism is an abstract realism, a dead and empty artistic form, having lost its
real substance.
In contrast, a fairy tale or icon, for all the irreality of their plots, may have a
deeply real sense, if they grasp the vital values of human beingif they exactly
render the difference between good and evil, the true and the false, the beautiful and
the ugly. Realism is not just exactness in depicting the outer world. It is the true
estimation of reality, expressed in the sensual forms which are derived from reality
itself.
A confusion of the beautiful and ugly, and, even more, removal of the border
between them, are the typical features of bad, false art, however much this art
operates with the most real images.
The artist as well as the scientist are called upon to search for the absolute.
Despite all the catchwords of our century, absolute beauty exists, just as absolute
truth exists,the young Lifshits postulated (Lifshits 1984a, 233). He conceives
these absolutes as the sums of all relative truths and beautiful images. Lifshits
sharply condemned any relativisation of the concepts of truth and beauty.
Relativism is a dialectics for fools.
Every work of art, even the most abstract, reflects something in reality. The
concept of reflection in Lifshits, and generally in Marxism, is a materialistic version
of Hegels category Reflexion. According to Hegel, Mind reflects itself in the
external, material world, whereas for Marxism it is Nature that reflects itself by
means of the human mind.4 Art is one of the forms of this reflection of nature in
itself, viz. its reflection in artistic images. An artist, like an actor, must be a voice
or herald of the very nature of things, Lifshits asserts.
I would note that one can say the same about a scientist. Hegel wrote that science
demands from that mind that it immerse (versenken) its freedom in the subject
matter and abstain from interrupting the immanent rhythm of concepts.5 The
striving of the mind to impose its own selfness on the subject is regarded by Hegel
as vanity, conceit (Eitelkeit). Lifshits rails against Modernism for the same sin.
A loving, honest portrayal of the real world was important for the old art. The
personality of the artist receded more or less into the background in the face of
his creation, surpassing, in this way, his personal level. In the newest art
matters are quite the opposite what the artist does, is ever more reduced to a
pure symbol, to a sign of his personality (Lifshits 1978, 30).
Along the lines of Hegels distinction of bad and true singularity,6 Lifshits
draws out a difference between genuine individuality creating a new universal
and stupid uniqueness with its dubious claim to be absolutely new. In modernistic
art, he sees a manifestation of the latterthe cult of pure subjectivity, deliberately
breaking all ties with objective reality, with true being.
4
The term nature is used here in an ultimate sense, including people, human society. Man is an
avant-garde of nature (Lifshits 2004, 121).
Sich des eigenen Einfallens in den immanenten Rhythmus der Begriffe entschlagen (Hegel 1970,
56).
6
Schlechte Einzelheit vs. wahrhafte Einzelheit, Individualitat, wahrhafte Subjektivitat. See: Hegel
(1971, 170).
123
Science and art perform one and the same task, they seek truth. Though, unlike
Hegel, Lifshits never considered cognition in artistic images as a lower stage in
comparison with logical thought. Both forms of cognition possess equal rights as
moments of truthtruth being understood as the conformity of a things
existence with its essence, i.e. as perfection, or something ideal. Lifshits calls such a
truth substantial, to distinguish it from formal truth as the correspondence
between thought and the facts of experience. The word pravda refers only to the
substantial truth. That is the truth of things themselves, reflected in the human mind.
Aesthetics is called upon to reveal the truth or falseness of a work of art. What is
the reality that has found its expression in this or that workis it genuine and
profound, or shallow and spectral (prizrachnyj), as the classic of Russian literary
criticism Belinsky expressed it? Quite often, as Lifshits writes, the subject matter
manifests itself to an artist from the side of its petty singularity, lacking a deep
connection with reality, and therefore bordering on complete disintegration, on nonbeing. Meanwhile, its formal side is in order, the artists idea is good, the execution
is faultless, only one thing is missingthat supreme power which makes the work
of art genuine.7 In Hegels lectures on aesthetics this supreme power was called die
Macht.
Sometimes an artist loses this very power, although all his technical skills remain
and are at his free disposal. Thus, Lifshits valued Solzhenitsyns first works
extremely highly, and recommended One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for
publication with the following remark: It is something more than literature It
would be a crime to leave this narrative unpublished. Solzhenitsyn was an
outstanding writer, as long as his hand was guided by life itself; but as soon as he
began to speak with his own tongue, he became free and miserable, as Lifshits
affirmed (Lifshits 1995, 236).8
There is something independent of an artists arbitrary will in his creative
work. And as long as he speaks, whether deliberately or instinctively, in the
name of this objective element, he feels within himself the blessing of this
miraculous objective power, and Heaven forbid that he lose it, like Samson
lost his hair (Lifshits 1995, 108).
These words of Lifshits are, to all appearance, a paraphrase of Belinskys views in
his work A Look at Russian Literature of 1847. From Belinsky he seems to adopt
also the concept of realism as a sense of truth. A philosopher speaks in syllogisms,
and a poet speaks in images and pictures, but they are saying the same thing,
Belinsky wrote. The poet, unlike the scientist, gives a true expression to life without
reasoning and arguing, he simply shows. Often he does not realise how he shows,
instinctively perceiving the truth of his time. And once he starts to argue logically,
to philosophise,then
he stumbles, and how he does so!.. And the mighty hero suddenly loses his
strength, like Samson after losing his hair, and he, who had been running
7
See: Lifshits (2001), 106 (the last, unfinished work of Lifshits).
A few pages in this collection of archival notes contain the most brutal ethical and sociological
assessments of Solzhenitsyns worldview.
123
A. Maidansky
ahead of all, is now is dragging himself along among the stragglers, in the
crowd of his former enemies (Belinsky 1941, 401).
At all times there have been weak writers who showed not so much reality as
themselves, their personal vision of the world. The ideology of Modernism turns
this imperfection into a virtue,that is why Lifshits regards modernistic art as false.
But that very illness of art reflects the ailing state of the modern world. In the
creative work of the best representatives of the avant-garde, this illness of being is
expressed and refracted through their personal traumas as well as in the distinctive
deformations of artistic form. As Lifshits puts it,
[t]he founders of Modernism in the past century were poets and painters of
great talent, and they created artworks capable of acting strongly on the mind
and senses of their contemporaries, despite the presence in their creative
activity of many symptoms of disease, and partly even due to this weakness. It
is enough to mention Baudelaire in poetry or Van Gogh in painting. There
exists a huge difference between their particular art, which seemed to be
hanging over an abyss, and the consequences, with which the possibilities they
discovered, were fraught (Lifshits 1988c, 432).
The late modernists transform this illness of art, and of social life itself, into a norm,
an example of style, or a standard. Feelings of suffering and weakness are replaced
now by the abstract insensibility of cubes and squares and even by a feeling of
satisfaction with free imageless creativity.
History
Lifshitss book Krizis bezobrazija (A Crisis of Shapelessness, 1968), as Dmitry
Gutov aptly remarks, called into question the whole aesthetic project of
Modernity. The avant-garde criticism of bourgeois normality is nothing other
than this very bourgeois principle, just turned inside out and made into an absolute.
That is the conclusion reached by Lifshits.
His train of thought is very similar to the criticism of crude communism in the
young Marxs manuscripts of 1844. Such a communism, with its abstract negation
of private property, is actually nothing else but universal private property (das
allgemeine Privateigentum), where, according to Marx, the entire world of wealth,
i.e. of mans objective essence, passes from exclusive marriage with a private owner
to universal prostitution with all society.9
In modernist art we see the very same abstract negation of the capital of
artistic forms, accumulated by classical art, and the equalisation of the rights of all
forms of the creative self-expression of personality (the universal prostitution of
artistic style). Modernism is a crude communism in the world of aesthetics.
9
So tritt die ganze Welt des Reichtums, d.h. des gegenstandlichen Wesens des Menschen, aus dem
Verhaltnis der exklusiven Ehe mit dem Privateigentumer in das Verhaltnis der universellen Prostitution
mit der Gemeinschaft (Marx 1974, 45).
123
There is no such formulation in Lifshitss works though. The philosopher himself

describes the blood relationship of avant-garde art with the spontaneous communist
movement by means of the category naked abstraction, adopted from Edmund
Burke.10 Both modernism and spontaneous, levelling communism are set in motion
by the energy of the naked negation of the past, of the historically established
status quo. That is why their ideals appear to be at variance with reality.
The abstract revolutionary frame of mind even in its best, fanatically honest
and sincere versions, preserves an abstract opposition of the ideal and reality.
But the opposition of the ideal and reality is alien or, so to say, contraindicated to the world of the aesthetic, to the artistic world. Such
revolutionariness (including the levelling communism which is bourgeois in
its objective content) is characterised by antipathy??? to the beautiful. At this
stage, revolution and revolutionary struggle are in conflict with the world of
art and poetry, with the entire aesthetic tradition (Lifshits 1988a, 301).
Being a result of the invasion of the negative, the abstract revolutionary frame of
mind into the world of art, Modernism marks a full break of the ideal with reality
the falsehood (nepravda). In this sense, Modernism is an art turned inside out, the
anti-art (Lifshits), or, to use Marxs term, the inverted form (verwandelte
Form) of mans aesthetic consciousness. The communist ideal of Marx demands a
sublation (Aufhebung) or appropriation (Aneignung) of all the actual wealth of
culture, having been accumulated in the form of private property.
In his letter To an Old Comrade Alexander Herzen insisted on the necessity to
preserve the cultural heritage of humanity when the revolution comes. Lifshits was
fond of repeating the words of Herzen: revolution must become a force that
stores, and not only be a sword that slashes, as the anarchist Bakunin wished to
see. Striking a blow to the old world, the revolution must save all that deserves to be
saved, and moreover, to cherish with care all that does not hinder, the manifold and
distinctive. Woe betide the revolution if it is poor-minded and wasted with artistic
sense, Herzen exclaims (1986, 536), as if he anticipated the coming era of ultrarevolutionary bezobrazie.11
In the eyes of Lifshits, the October Revolution amounted to a collision of
Bakunins passion for demolition and Herzens force that stores. Such a
psychological and aesthetic view of history has little to do with the materialist
conception of history. Lifshits sees in history a drama of ideals and passions,
without going into analysis of the productive relations and making no attempt to
deduce forms of social consciousness from the conditions of economic life, in the
spirit of Marxs analysis of the commodity fetishism. In Lifshitss works we find,
at most, appeals to real life, practice, social being plus references to class
10
Apparently, from here: But I cannot stand forward and give praise or blame to anything which relates
to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every
relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction (Burke 2005, 8).
11
The word bezobraznyj in Russian means ugly, shameful, and etymologicallyshapeless
(bezobrazie is an Old Slavonic calque for Greek aschemon). Lifshits uses this ambiguity in the title of his
book on Modernism Krizis bezobrazija.
123
A. Maidansky
roots of certain ideas, including the phenomenon of modernism. Here is a typical

example:
Bourgeois thought builds its anti-worlds, according to the general law that
makes it seek safety not in a system of positive values, but in the idea of
destruction, in the Herostratus complex. Modernism is precisely the form of
artistic consciousness that belongs to a new stage in the history of bourgeois
society, the stage of its decline (Lifshits 1988b, 441).
In Lifshitss writings, however, one cannot find any sound analysis of that new
stage. And lacking concrete scientific research into peoples material life, their
productive forces and productive relations, Marxism is degraded to a sheer
ideology.
It is not that Lifshits said absolutely nothing about material being. In one of his
works there is even a paragraph Economics of painting. We find there passages
concerning mans submission to his own machinery, a few lines about
dissolving any concrete activities in abstract labour, as is the nature of capitalism,
considerations on simulation, speculation, etc. (Lifshits and Reinhardt 1968,
162170). Lifshits uses these hackneyed plots and symptoms of the decline of
capitalism as premises for his syllogism concerning the crisis of modernism. But in
his discussion of Soviet art, even that feeble semblance of the materialist conception
of history disappears without a trace.
In The Wind of History Lifshits defends the aesthetic point of view from which
history appears like a practical implementation of higher ideas, in particular the
ideas of communism and revolution. Thus, the Platonic ideal of directly communal
order, for which there were no real conditions (!) in ancient times, appeared as a
historical force that survived the centuries. Hence the conclusion:
An idea can be timely and morally necessary, despite the fact that its
implementation in practice is impossible or unrecognizably far from our
assumptions (Lifshits 1984d, 297).
For Marx, of course, history is not at all the practical implementation of our ideas.
On the contrary, ideas are only more or less clear expressions of certain material
productive relations. Ideas, for which there are no real conditions, are nowhere
found in the real world.
The characteristic way of thought, and even literary style, of the Russian
revolutionary democrat is concealed under the surface layer of Marxism. Lifshits is
the direct heir of Belinsky, Dobroljubov, and Herzen.
The special favour directed to the thinkers of that circle is noticeable at every
step. Lifshits breaks the direct ban by Marx: I do not want to figure alongside
Herzen, never and nowhere;12 moreover, he represents Herzen as a peculiar
Russian prototype of Marx, writing off their longstanding feud as an effect of
mutual misunderstanding, which Lifshits regards as a tragedy, not a conviction.
Herzen, like Lifshits himself, did not engage in concrete economic studies. His
socialism was a pure philosophical theory. Perhaps, that was why Marx called
12
Ich mit Herzen nirgendwo und niemals zusammen figurieren will (Marx 1963, 434).
123
Herzen a socialist-dilettante. Marx gave similar estimates of the German true

socialists who turned socialism into philosophical fiction. And in my opinion,
Lifshits belongs to the same dilettantish revolutionary democratic tradition. His
times, however, were different. Soviet Marxism degenerated into the vulgar
ideology against the background of which Lifshitss writings appeared as an
unattainable peak of Marxist thought. And as concerns style, they had no rivals
indeed
Lifshits takes Pushkins words as a motto for understanding the history of
revolution: To realise the necessity and to forgive it in my heart. Repeating these
words over and over, Lifshits is ready to understand and forgive his motherrevolution for almost anything, including the blood, lies, and horrors of Stalinism.
He is convinced that the course the revolution took was not a mistake. There was no
alternative, in fact.
There is a deep reason, not a mistake, not simply somebodys villainous plan,
but the painful, contradictory march of history, an awareness of the lack of an
alternative. The further growth of the country could be brought about only
in a terrible, irrational, barbaric way in which great enthusiasm and dark
energy were intertwined (Lifshits 1995, 233).
Note that Lifshits regards the Stalin era as the further rise, and even moreas the
great step into the future (Lifshits 2012, 91). His editor and archivist Viktor
Arslanov makes a blunder when he attributes to Lifshits the assessment of 1930s as
Stalins Thermidor13 (Arslanov himself shares this assessment with Trotsky).
According to Lifshits, the historical analogues for Stalins revolution from above
(a term borrowed from Engels) are the plebiscite empire of Louis Bonaparte and
Bismarcks Caesarism. That was exactly the social revolution, and not a counterrevolution, not a Thermidor.14
The deity of revolution could not escape Golgotha: ecce Homo, crucify Him!
Hunger, terror, and oceans of liesHistory makes people pay that cruel price for the
coming flourishing of the human personality.
The formation of a fully developed and complete individual is a contradictory
historical process. The age of antagonism of forces is a necessary and
lengthy transitional stage full of all sorts of irregularities and recurrences. The
rise of the human personality is achieved at the cost of much cruelty (Lifshits
1984b, 391).
Well, where is it nowthat new, higher type of personality? It has turned out to be a
myth. In fact, millions of living human beings were sacrificed to the higher
interests of state, the superpower Soviet Union. And its own rise has appeared to
be very short-lived
As we can see, Lifshits absolves the communist revolution from sins of lying and
barbarism. He generously forgives them as a necessary evil. Nothing can be done,
13
See: Arslanov 2010, 338366. In the same volume, another author considers Stalins terror as a
perverse effect of the revolution (Pavlov 2010, 398).
14
For details, see: Maidansky (2015, 209220).
123
A. Maidansky
he says. Such is the irrational logic of historyforgive it in our hearts. But when
it comes to art, he does not tolerate lies. He demands from artists that they express
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He permits no assumption that
modernism is also a necessary, and therefore a justifiable, transitional stage in the
development of artthat such is the cruel cost of releasing the creative powers of
human masses. With this, degradation of the high classics appears to be inevitable,
just as the communist movement begins by levelling and humiliating the human
personality (as was demonstrated by the history of proletarian revolutions, starting
with the October revolution).
Marx considered crude, levelling communism as a necessary moment of human
emancipation and redemption, and as a necessary form and energetic principle of
the immediate future, but he also made the reservation that as such [crude]
communism is not an aim of human development, a form of human society.15 I
think, the same should be said about Modernism. It is an equally false or, in Marxs
terms, alienated and inverted form of the emancipation of artistic activity, but it is a
historically indispensable moment along the way of turning art into a personal
property of every individual.
The mission of modernist art can be expressed by paraphrasing Marxs famous
thesis: the artists have only portrayed the world in various ways, the point however
is to change it. Art will penetrate into everyday life, involving each and every
person in artistic creation, diffusing high and popular culture.
Art has renounced itself and wishes to be life itself, Lifshits comments,
sarcastically adding that in practice all these strange constructions made of iron,
glass, and wood were directly related not to the real needs of living people, but to
the afterlife history of painting (Lifshits 1979, 2627).
And what about the earthly history of revolution? Modernism and Stalinism are
set in motion by the same dark energy of negation. But if Stalin, in Lifshitss
opinion, has brought about the rise of the country, although by terrible and
barbaric means, then modernism was a sheer regress and degradation of mind. A
certain reactionary philosophy has taken place of the slain art, and nothing more.
It is the philosophy expressing the domination of force and fact over clear
thought and poetic contemplation of the world. The brutal breaking of real
forms means the eruption of blind, malicious will. It is the revenge of the
slave, his imaginary liberation from the yoke of necessity, a simple outlet
This description perfectly characterises the initial impulse of all proletarian
revolutions, too. The beautiful dream of pravda never comes true, but the revenge
of the slave and the breaking of real forms actually occur. Somewhat later the
broken social forms are restored in a surrealistically warped or hypertrophied form
(e.g. the socialist market or the Gulag). And in art, Modernism very soon gives way
to pseudo-realism, the false restoration of the real forms (Lifshits).
15
Der Kommunismus ist die notwendige Gestalt und das energische Prinzip der nachsten Zukunft, aber
der Kommunismus ist nicht als solcher das Ziel der menschlichen Entwicklungdie Gestalt der
menschlichen Gesellschaft. (Marx 1974, 546).
123
Following Stalins death, as soon as Lifshits was permitted to publish, his

pamphlet appears in Novy Mir journal in which he attacks Marietta Shaginian, the
author of Leniniana and Stalin Prize Laureate. Here Lifshits shows that the pseudorealism of the Stalin era, with its binary oppositions and atmosphere of epic delight,
dwells in the same land of myth as modernism. They are linked by an
exaggerated idea of the possibilities of the human will and the humiliation of the
past for the sake of present and future (Lifshits 1954, 206231).
Lifshitss pamphlet caused a flurry of polar emotions. The author was on the
verge of being expelled from the Communist Party.
But even more scandalous were his attacks against Modernism in the sixties. At
those times any criticism of the avant-garde art was interpreted as a resurrection of
Stalinism. The Soviet liberal intelligentia unanimously condemned Lifshits. He
carefully put the articles by his critics into a folder labelled Chorus of the
unhatched chicks.
An article Why am I not a Modernist? was written in 1963 for the journal
Estetika (Prague), and in Russian it was published only in the Autumn of 1966 in
Literary Gazette. Lifshits characterises Modernism as the Gospel of a new
barbarism. At the heart of modernistic art, he writes, are a cult of force and a taste
for demolition, and its main, final aim is to squash the worm of consciousness in
order to prepare the audience for appearance of a Savioursome Father of
Peoples or another political Messiah. In short, it is the art of the crowd, conducted
by means of suggestion, capable of running after the chariot of Caesar (Lifshits
1978, 52).
This neo-mythology is opposed to the logic of things themselvesrealism. With
the latter, reality is an acting subject, and thought is just an ideal function of reality,
an expression and reflection of reality in itself and by itself. Genuine art, on the
contrary, must clarify consciousness, expressing the real world in its own real forms,
as Lifshits insists. Lacking sensually perceived forms, our world is a dead
abstraction (Lifshits 1985, 18). He makes the reservation that he appreciates
sultry Matisse, tender Modigliani, and morose Picasso, but, historically, the very
trend they embody does great harm to art. Instead of truth about life, Modernism
invents a myth, thereby lying to people, and dimming the mind.
Among the modernists there occur persons of exceptional inner purity,
martyrs, even heroes. In a word, there occur good modernists, but there is no
good Modernism (Lifshits 1978, 4445).
In my opinion, Lifshits did not understand or, maybe, could not accept the fact that
Soviet socialism is a typically modernist project of world history. That was a
dictatorship of the mightiest of abstractionsthe State. Political revolutions, like
Modernism, are characterised by the cult of force and the taste for demolition,
and revolutionary heroes, like pioneers of the avant-garde, differ sharply from their
successors.
Lifshits struggled, with all his might and main, to separate the avant-garde art
from the revolution. His modern follower Dmitry Gutov perfectly shows that,
concluding that Modernism is the opium of the intellectuals, an illusory
123
A. Maidansky
alternative to revolutionthe expression of real squalor of the capitalist world and

the protest against this squalor (Gutov 2007, 140).
But what if the revolution itself has appeared as, in fact, nothing more than a pure
illusion of abolition of capitalism, private property, exploitation of labour, etc.? If
so, then Marxists, including Lifshits and Gutov, exactly like Modernists, take an
illusion for the truth of life
As Boris Groys shows, communism and avant-garde tried to solve one and the
same taskto form a new type of man-creator and the new society that plans and
paints itself with a clean slate.
That will to radical artificiality places Soviet communist project into the
artistic context. As its initiators expected, the Russian proletariat would be
freed from alienating labour, which it is forced to deal with in terms of
capitalist exploitation, and become a collective artist, creating the new world
and, at the same time, creating itself as a work of art (Groys 2013, 89).
Of course, that was a utopian project. As was Lifshitss hope that the October
Revolution would launch a new Renaissance, the speedy confluence of artistically
developed culture with the profound popular movement, proceeding from below
(Lifshits 1988a, 276). His expectations were not met. Nothing like the communist
Renaissance ever took place in a Soviet country, nor anywhere else in the world.
Against the background of triumphant modernism and pseudo-realism, even mass
culture seems to late Lifshits not so stupid and, in any case, the least of all the
evils that have befallen the art of our epoch. But even then the philosopher had not
lost his faith in and love of mother-revolution. He just sadly noted her
inscrutable ways:
Yet I had to go through some disappointment in my own illusions, but with no
bitter poison of scepticism. On the contrary, it was precisely the loss of
illusions, that is, gaining a deeper faith, a stronger belief that, to achieve the
goal, which was the centre of all my spiritual life, history has taken a very
complex and distant turn, and there remains much time at its disposal (Lifshits
1988a, 276).
Reflection
In the last years of his life, Lifshits designed an original metaphysical conception
that he named materialist ontognoseology. It is a kind of aesthetic interpretation
of the old materialist theory of reflection. Proponents of the latter linked the term
reflection to the psyche, seeking out proto-psychical and quasi-mental phenomena in nature. Lifshits imparts to this term an entirely different cosmic sense.
Reflection is a way of turning the abstract into the concrete, or converting an
indefinite universality, diffused in nature, into actual universality.16 The latter
16
Reflection in general, in the objective sense of the word, as a reproduction. Reproduction has a
cosmic sense, for in such a way the diffused universality is turning into the actual one (Lifshits 2010,
25).
123
is a holistic, individual, self-sufficient expression of the universal forms of being: for

example, a landscape as a concentration and actualisation of dormant elements of
nature; the living organism as a representative of its species and of life as infinite;
personality as a concrete expression of sociality.
Ontognoseological understanding of the category of reflection has very little in
common with the sensualist interpretation of the reflection principle in the works of
Plekhanov and Lenin.17 Lifshits also relies on the postulate that nature reflects itself,
but his particular interpretation of this reflection is much more subtle, if not to say
sophisticated. In his unfinished, posthumously published manuscript Dialogue with
Evald Ilyenkov we find the most detailed account of the foundations of
ontognoseology.
Lifshits suggests that talk of consciousness should start with an analysis of being,
because consciousness is a self-reflection of being, the inner side of some
material process. If we could understand that process, then we expose the nature of
consciousness. The pivotal point of Lifshitss ontognoseology is the distinction of
the infinite and the finite, the integral and the partial, or the big and the small
being of Nature-matter. Consciousness arises at the boundary between these two
modes of being, as their differential or the true middle (die wahre Mitte, or
Aristotles mesotes). Consciousness is the highest form of reflection of the infinite
within the finite. The ultimate task of consciousness is to disclose the absolute
content of reality, to manifest of the objective truth of being.
The absolute truth is the content of peoples subjective life in art, as well as in
other areas of their activities, not excluding the most practical ones. The
historical movement and class struggle in their entirely are performed within
the limits of its magnetic field, if we can speak of limits where life discloses its
infinite aspects (Lifshits 1985, 259).
Analysing any given phenomenon of consciousness, including works of art, or even
the entire artistic currents, the first step is to figure out which mode of being is
expressed in it. Is it a voice of infinite and eternal reality (the ideal, in
Lifshitss terms) or of particular facts and circumstances of our small being.
Lifshits assigns to the latter not only the physiology of the body with its natural
needs and cerebral neurodynamics, but the material conditions of social life, too.
Consciousness, entirely conditioned by small empirical beingso to say,
taken captive by its own body and by societyis bad, false, blind consciousness.
The classics of Marxism called this kind of consciousness ideology, and Herzen
described it as historical ravings. Being in fact a simple epiphenomenon, a
subjective experience of certain objective forces, blindly operating behind our
backs (Lifshits 2003, 92), it is accompanied by a pathologically acute feeling of
ones own freedom, of the independence of the conscious person from the outside
world.
Subjectivist philosophy is a non-critical self-reflection of that false consciousness. In this way its epiphenomenal status is set up for the true nature of
17
It is logical to suppose that the whole matter possesses a quality essentially kindred to sensation,
viz. the quality of reflection (Lenin 1968, 91).
123
A. Maidansky
consciousness, and the small being is perceived as the only available object of
consciousness. Vulgar Marxism, discovering the selfish class interests in
symphonies and poems, is smitten by the same blindness to the eternal, big being.
But where has man to seek for that coveted big being? We do not need to
transcend into another world, Lifshits answers. The small being reflects the big
being in a particular way, the infinite expresses itself in the finite. Hence, the task of
consciousness is to seek, within the field of our small being, events and situations
that are charged by universality. Granting his voice to these concrete,
individualised universalities, listening and giving utterance to the confession of
the world, man turns his consciousness into the mirror of objective reality:
To think means to make the object of thought think in us. To act freely is to be
the subject of a greater reality beyond us, almost to stand apart from ones own
self, not feeling oneself bound up with ones own small being, with ones
flickering existential Only relying on this broader reality, can one cross the
threshold of blindness, which is imposed on us by our empirical being
(Lifshits, n.d.).
These lines bear a distinctly Spinozist note: freedom is the immersion of thought
and action into the infinite reality, into the very nature of things. Reason has no
selfish logic, it is as universal as nature itself. The full description of reason
would be equivalent to building a model of the universe, which is the object of
thought. In this sense, thought is the attribute of nature, and not simply one of its
modes.
But in resolving the mindbody problem, Lifshitss ontognoseology openly broke
with Spinozism, aligning rather with La Mettrie and other materialist writers of the
eighteenth century who developed the theme of a causal link between body and
mind (Lifshits 2003, 123). In Spinoza, brain and conscious mind are two different
modes of being of one and the same thinga man. According to Lifshits,
consciousness is a product of the brain, the form in which brain is experiencing
for itself its own process of reflection of the external world.18
This statement is a cornerstone of the contemplative materialism (der
anschauende Materialismus), which Marx criticised in the Theses on Feuerbach.
Lifshits seems not in the least embarrassed by that. He is trying to spread the
brain explanation of consciousness across the world of human culture and, thus,
to give battle to the cultural-historical theory on its own territory. According to that
theory, defended by philosopher Evald Ilenkov and his associatesthe psychologists of Lev Vygotskys schoolconsciousness is a form of active communication
between man and man by means of tools and objects of labour. Consciousness is a
function of culture, not of nature. The genuine substance and subject of
consciousness is not an organic human body with all its neurons, but the artificial
body of culture.
To Lifshits, on the contrary, material culture is as if an extension of brain by
means of inorganic appendages (Lifshits 2003, 273). This cultural mediastinum,
rising up between consciousness and nature, on the one hand, enlightens
18
See: Lifshits (2003, 271).
123
consciousness, extending its independence from the natural ground, but on the other
hand it obscures consciousness by myths and other cultural stereotypes.
It is a terrible thing the bureaucracy of culture, from Egyptian hieroglyphic
writing and the clerical wisdom of Sumerian scribes to the ink culture, which
Herder complained of, and necrotic stamps of media in later times (Lifshits
2003, 274275).
Modernism also refers to the category of terrible things of culture. Abstract art
replaces reality with myths and tightly closes our consciousness within the small
being. For this reason, Lifshits refuses to consider Modernism as an ideal.
Criticizing the fetishism of culture, Lifshits keeps in mind Marxs communist
ideal. Communism is defined by Lifshits as an ideal society, corresponding to its
concept, as opposed to perverse relationships of the world of commodities (Lifshits
2003, 278). As soon as such a crystal clear form of social relations among people
will emerge, the bureaucracy of culture will disappear forever. Every mythology
will vanish like smoke, abstract art will go into oblivion, and realism will finally
prevail.
In general, Lifshitss ontognoseology can be described as the attempt to resurrect
naturalist ideas, traced to French enlighteners and Russian revolutionary democrats,
on Marxist soil. The project was left unfinished, but its main lines are visible clearly
enough. The search for higher truth, Naturwahrheit, was the soul, the driving force
of Lifshits work. In this respect, he was one of the staunchest and more talented
defenders of classical art and philosophy through the most difficult times of their
history.
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Pavlov, P. V. (2010). Obosnovanie tretego puti rossijskoj istorii i kultury. In: Mikhail Aleksandrovich
Lifshits (pp. 367404). Moscow: ROSSPEN.
123

DOI 10.1007/s11212-016-9266-5
Mikhail Lifshits and the Soviet image of Giambattista

Vico
Alexander Dmitriev1
Abstract Mikhail Lifshits interpretation of the scholarly work of the Italian

philosopher Giambattista Vico is analysed against the background of other Soviet
interpretations. M. Lifshits authored the introductory article for the first complete
translation of Vicos Scienza Nuova in 1940. In the second half of the 1930s, interest
in Vicos historical theory of knowledge was important for the struggle against socalled vulgar sociology in the field of aesthetics and literary criticism. Besides
this, Vicos theory of the historical cycle was close to the interests M. Lifshits and
G. Lukacs and their circle in Stalin-era Moscow. This interest was connected with
discussions about the preservation of the revolutionary impulse under the conditions
of state socialism. However, such an interpretation of Vico (considering him only as
a predecessor of Hegels and Marxs philosophy of history) restricted a wide
spectrum of his scholarly work. In particular, Lifshits, as an opponent of socialconstructivism tradition, ignored Vicos well-known doctrine of verum factum.
Keywords Soviet philosophy Lifshits Vico Marxism Hegel Ideology
Historical cycle
In the Russian context of the second half of the twentieth century, the major
principles of the interpretation of the image and heritage of Giambattista Vico were
mainly defined by Mikhail Lifshits, who was the author of the long introductory
article for the first complete edition of Scienza Nuova (The New Science), published
in Russian in 1940 (Vico 1940). However, why did Vico in particular appear in the
centre of Lifshits attention at the end of the 1930s? In an interview, Lifshits
recalled:
& Alexander Dmitriev

[email protected]
1
Moscow, Russia
123
A. Dmitriev
The translations of the works of Lessing, Winckelmann, and other authors,

whose works stand at the boundary of philosophy and aesthetics (Goethe,
Schiller, Vico), were prepared and printed by the publishing houses of
Academia and Izogiz [State Fine Arts Publishing HouseA.D.]. My task
was to prepare a general edition of these literary monuments. (Lifshits 1988,
282).
The figures mentioned in the quotation were the focus of the authors (first of all
of Gyorgy Lukacs and Mikhail Lifshits) of the journal Literaturnyi Kritik. Lukacs
and Lifshits and the other authors of the journal considered the quoted figures not to
be bourgeois ideologists but classical thinkers who were absolutely necessary for
the cultural self-consciousness of a new Soviet civilization (Clark 2011). For
instance, Lukacs linked them with his on-going critical work reconsidering the
Soviet literature of the 1930s and reflecting on the Russian cultural tradition in
general, via his publications on European classics (particularly in his introduction to
the Russian translation of the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller) (Sziklai
1992). Lifshits unpublished notes and drafts on Michel de Montaigne remained in
the archive. The latters Essais, as well as Vicos The New Science, were prepared
for publication in the 1930s; however, the Vico translation could only be published
without Lifshits article during the Thaw of the Khrushchev period.
The foregoing was an essential correction to the former aggressive militantideological attack on the capitalistic past during the cultural revolution at the
turn of the 1920s and 1930s. Later we will show that the figure of Giambattista Vico
occupies a special place in the ideological evolution of Mikhail Lifshits. His
interpretation of the Neapolitan philosopher was also part of more general process
of expropriation of Vico within the framework of Marxist historicism.
It needs to be underlined here that new Soviet ways of interpreting Vico, which
were already being established at the beginning of the twentieth century, affected
former models of interpretation of the Italian philosophers heritage in Russia, both
within the historicist approach (where the main issue was careful study of the past
context of his works) and the modernist approach (where why Vico? and why
is he important now? were central questions). The first tendency was predetermined by the works of the popular historian and Italianist, Aleksej Dzhivelegov, and
the legal scholar, Evgenij Spektorskij. The second, more common, tendency can be
found in the publications of the historian Robert Vipper and the neo-Slavophile
philosopher, Vladimir Ern.
Vipper wrote about Vico starting at the end of the nineteenth century. In the early
1920s, as professor of Moscow University, he tried to comprehend the experience of
the Russian Revolution through the prism of Vicos philosophy. As a result, he was
strongly criticised by Mikhail Pokrovskij and his disciples in the pages of bolshevist
ideological periodicals (Karev 1924, 262). However, Vico himself was not
considered a conservative. Vico was positively mentioned in Marxs Capital (with
regard to his thesis about people as creators of their own history) and in the
correspondence between Marx and Lassalle, where Marx particularly says that
Vicos work, in its early stages, contains F. A. Wolf (Homer), B. G. Niebuhr
(History of Roman Kings), the fundamentals of comparative linguistics (though in a
123
Mikhail Lifshits and the Soviet image of Giambattista Vico
fantastic vision), and generally many signs of genius (letter dated April 28, 1862).
These aspects provided safe conduct for the Italian philosopher under the new
conditions. Besides this, Vico was favoured with several substantive positive
remarks in Plekhanovs book, The Development of the Monist View of History.
In 1923, the translation of Lukacs important work Materialization and
Proletarian Consciousness was published in the Vestnik Kommunisticheskoj
Akademii. This article became central to his following famous book, Geschichte
und Klassenbewutsein (1923), where Vicos postulate regarding cognition
grounded in doing is connected with the entire course of development of European
thought from Descartes to Kants Copernican turn in philosophy.
The publication in the Arkhiv Marksa i Engelsa of Vladimir Maksimovskijs
(18871941) detailed article Vico and his theory of social cycles became the
major event in the reception of Vico in the 1920s. This academic text mentioned the
reworked character of the old French translation of The New Science and was filled
with quotations about Vico from the main Western works of Benedetto Croce,
Robert Flint, and others. The author, a graduate of Moscow University, an old
Bolshevik and a member of different opposition groups after the Revolution,
underlines in Vicos main book the ideas of social conflict, class struggle during
the transition from one phase to the next. Thereby he makes a tally of the Italian
philosophers views in light of the future views of Marxism (Maksimovskij 1928a,
8, 57, 6061). A detailed knowledge of Italian history and a familiarity with the
classical and most recent literature on the history of ideas allowed Maksimovskij to
present Vico in the light of the historical materialistic world view, absorbing him
into the context of that epoch and into the actual political and ideological life of
Italy in the first half of the eighteenth century. Maksimovskij insists that Vicos and
Machiavellis works have a secular basis and real political character in their vision
of history, and that Vico saw the struggle between plebeians and patricians as the
essence of Roman freedom (Maksimovskij 1928b, 1929, 13, 1930, 459).
Maksimovskijs article, The aesthetic views of Giambattista Vico appeared in
the mid-1930s in the above-mentioned authoritative journal, Literaturnyj Kritik,
where the works of Lukacs and his circle were regularly published. Here
Maksimovskij considers Vicos ideas about the origin of language and poetry and
shows that Vico has to be included among the founders of modern aesthetics. A note
is added to the article mentioning that it will be published as an appendix to the
Russian translation of Andrey Gubers Scienza Nuova, to be printed by the famous
Academia publishing house (Maksimovskij 1935, 27). Indeed, this publication
appeared only five years later, printed by Goslitizdat (the State Literary Publishing
House) in Leningrad in an edition of five thousand copies.
Finally, the young but already authoritative philosopher Mikhail Aleksandrovich
Lifshits wrote the editors preface to the Vico volume. Why Lifshits? He was not an
Italianist, but his text in particular brought popularity and significance to Vicos
text, which was considered to be more than an antiquated monument of thought.
Certainly, it should be remembered that the preface had very important functions in
the 1930s. A preface had not only to include the academic outline of a research
question but also to indicate the topicality of the subject for Soviet readers. Not
long before the publication of the preface, Lifshits published the book Voprosy
123
A. Dmitriev
iskusstva i filosofii (1935) in which a comprehensive article about Marx and the
fundamentals of Marxist aesthetics occupied the central place. A volume of Johann
Joachim Winckelmanns works was also published with an introduction by Lifshits
(1933).
The zenith of Lifshits intellectual career paradoxically coincided with the time
of Stalins Terror. Lifshits article about Vico, which was published in Literaturnyj
Kritik a year before the publication of The New Science, infuriated the orthodox
(Lifshits 1939). The head of the Union of Soviet Writers, Aleksandr Fadeev, and his
associates saw in this article empathy for the theories of historical cycles and the
reactionary ideas of Spengler and, potentially, support for the thesis about the
approach of Thermidor as a stage which inevitably comes after any revolutionary
breakthrough. A special decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union on literary criticism was prepared in 1941. Literaturnyj Kritik
was shut down, but no direct repression was directed against Lukacs, Lifshits, and
their group (Artizov 1999, 456).
In the text, Lifshits emphasises the popular origins of Vicos thought and his
vision of history magnificence from the point of view of the masses. He sees
Vicos main merit in that it can be turned against the positions of the newest
sociology of knowledge. Here Lifshits stays close to Maksimovskij, who also fought
the imposition of vulgar sociological schematics for the sake of a genuine Marxist
historicism. In particular, hostility towards sociology in historical research
increased from the mid-1930s under the sign of the struggle with the heritage of
Mikhail Pokrovsky. The ideas of Lifshits and his allies undoubtedly responded to
the tendency to restore history to its rights.
Along with Lifshits main work about Vico, another of Lifshitshis works
devoted to the Italian philosopher was published posthumously in the second
volume of his Collected Works Lifshits(both dated 1936). This article was devoted
generally to Vicos aesthetics. It should be remembered that the aesthetic aspect of
the Italian thinkers theories was the very subject of Maksimovskijs article on Vico
in Literaturnyj Kritik at the end of 1935. It is obvious that Lifshits work exceeds
Maksimovskijs in the depth of its analysis. In Maksimovskijs article, literally one
line is devoted to Hegel; however, for Lifshits, Vico, as a philosopher concerned
with art, can be understood only from a Hegelian perspective.
As distinct from Maksimovskij, who compares Vico with his contemporaries and
predecessors such as Bodin and Montesquieu, Lifshits sees in Vico a founder of the
historical theory of knowledge and an isolated thinker within his own epoch. In a
quite positive review of Vicos publication, in the pages of the journal Pod
znamenem marksizma, this strange formulation was marked as obviously lame, as
a new term which can only add confusion to the readers minds (German 1940,
203, 201). However, for Lifshits, Vico was important as a counterpoint to the
sociological outlook of Scheler and Mannheim (and the vulgar sociology of
Valerian Pereverzev)!
What is the historical theory of knowledge? It is that new science forecast in
the early eighteenth century by Giambattista Vico. Without it, it is impossible
to make the step from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom (namely,
123
the rational control of human society over the development of its own creative
forces), the step from hazy semi-consciousness to lucid comprehension of the
historical prerequisites of culture, to its self- consciousness. The new science
is the science of the future dialectics. (Lifshits 1948, 393)
The category of progress is at the centre of Lifshits attention. However, he sees
it not as a problem-free and unidirectional process, but as a crooked path with forks,
inescapable returns, repetitions and cycles. For Lifshits, Vicos approach to the
Enlightenment in particular has another value (not only affirmative)it is a view
from below which also considers the rights and presumptions of the reactionary
mass:
The Enlightener judges from the point of view of the developed individual
consciousness, Vico from the point of view of the great mass of people, which
is not always sufficiently aware, but is always concerned with matters of the
most genuine necessity, and is therefore rational in the historical sense of the
word. (Lifshits 1948, 403)
Vicos New Science [] is a fantastic anticipation of that task of
reconstruction of the history of human thought, science, and technique which
Lenin described as a continuation of the work of Hegel and Marx. Vicos
book embraces the history of the various sciences, the history of language, art,
and poetry, and of the childs mental development, the history of the state,
law, and material culture. All this is expressed in extremely naive forms,
profound thoughts are interspersed with all sorts of pedantic trifles, the
exposition is very confused; yet it is beyond doubt that the basic idea is a work
of genius. (Lifshits 1948, 394).
Both of Lifshits articles demonstrate a good knowledge of the literature of the
time, mainly Western, about Vico. In particular he mentions an important book by
B. Croce (Croce 1911). But if in Maksimovskijs works an academic approach to
Vico, combined with sociological conclusions and sometimes with artificial direct
convergences between Scienza Nuova and Marxism, prevails, then, Lifshits
detailed knowledge of the subject and erudition is buried in footnotes and comes out
in certain reservations. Among other examples, there is the casual mention of a
thesis, which, by the way, is contained in the unpublished article about Vico, On
the Genealogy of Morals of Nietzsche, a poor dilettantish toy in comparison to the
historical analysis of Vico (Lifshits 1986, 35).
Generally, as distinct from Maksimovskijs detailed historiographical endnotes,
Lifshits does not consider at all the former Russian tradition of the reception of the
Italian philosophers works in his article about Vico and in unpublished additions to
it. For Lifshits, this tradition was not important. He considered himself as standing
outside the Russian modes of interpretation. Also he could not cite the works of the
emigre Vipper or arrested Maksimovskij. The main means of understanding the
heritage of Vico, for Lifshits, is retrospective. Lifshits considers Vico as a
predecessor to Marx through Hegel, particularly emphasising the masterslave
dialectic in Vicos analysis of the collapse of heroic society (a reference to the
theory of gestalts of consciousness in Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit).
123
A. Dmitriev
Lifshits and his associates measured their surrounding Soviet and European
reality of the 1930s with their broad historiosophical measure of the great thinkers
of the past. For that reason precisely they were able to avoid a conjunctural and
simplified interpretation of history from the position of the ideological collisions of
the time. In 1934, in the pages of the Literaturnaja Gazeta, Lifshits argued against
Aleksej Dzhivelegovs view, which was stated in the afterword to the translation of
the works of Francesco Guicciardini (Lifshits 1934). There, the venerable historian
and researcher on Vico tried to show a proximity between Guicciardinis
aristocratism or pessimism and fascism. This dubious actualisation and black-andwhite division between progressive and reactionary were particularly criticised
by Lifshits (this review was even included in his Collected Works together with his
two articles about Vico).
During Stalins epoch, Lifshits and Lukacs especially underlined the importance
of Hegels category of reconciliation with reality, the fundamentals of which are
found in Vicos works. This concept enabled these philosophers to connect the idea
of the continuation of the revolutionary outbreak of 1917 with true Leninism,
particularly with Stalin (but not with Leo Trotsky or with any other oppositionists):
Vicos philosophy is based on a reconciliation with reality,1 within which he
discovers its rational course and ineluctable laws. This is the beginning of his
radical divergence from eighteenth century illumination and his approach to
Hegel. The most general trait of the Age of Enlightenment may be said to be
rationalism, the tendency to judge everything from the point of view of the
abstract demands of the understanding. In the name of civilization everything
which emerged from the sombre depths of the Middle Ages was contemptuously rejected. To the men of the eighteenth century bourgeois relations
seemed to be a law of rational nature. The class strife, the period of the French
Revolution, and the emergence of the bourgeois way of life dissolved the
illusions of the Enlighteners and evoked a great wave of political disillusionment. Hegel plays the same sort of role with respect to this epoch as did Vico
with respect to the Italian Renaissance. Both of them live within their
memories of the past revolutionary period and both reject the illusions of the
finite understanding and try to discover the rational kernel in the contradictions of real history. (Lifshits 1948, 396397)
Vicos anti-rationalism and his hostility to Cartesianism were re-examined by
Lifshits in favour of the Italian philosopher. His providentialism appears as a
reliable counterbalance to relativism and allows regularity to be found in the
unfolding historical process:
Vico takes an ironical attitude toward the occult wisdom of philosophers, has
more respect for the administrative wisdom of statesmen, but assigns the
highest place to the popular wisdom of the mass of people which makes
history with its hands, makes it unconsciously, along with many a prejudice
and superstition, many a wild and barbaric rite, makes it in the bloody and
1
Acquiescence in actuality (as translated in the English translation of Lifshits article) does not
correspond to the well-known Hegelian concept Versohnung in the original Russian text.
123
bloodless struggle around material property and power. Vico not only tries to
lay bare the natural laws in history, which are independent of the desires of
individuals; he also understands that the contradictory and complex course of
all human and civil things contains some implicit justification, some List
der Vernunft, as Hegel would say. Vico conceives of this justification as a
fantastic divine providence, and the philosophy of history as a rational civil
theology. (Lifshits 1948, 397)
It is very important to note that in Lifshits (1936) two texts, the well-known
principle of verum factum is not mentioned at all. But it was because of this
principle that Vico would be juxtaposed with Marx more than once in the second
half of the twentieth century (Morrison 1978; for more contextual interpretation see
Perez-Ramos 1988). It is understandable why: for Lifshits, as opposed to early
Lukacs in History and Class Consciousness, emphasising this formula would be
equivalent to moving towards romantic Fichteanism or social constructivism, which
Lifshits always opposed. In Soviet philosophy, this principle of cognition stressing
the primacy of activity became important for representatives of the following
generation, e.g. Evald Ilyenkov. Lifshits attitude to Ilyenkov was favourable from
the start, though Lifshits did not at all share Ilyenkovs views on the primacy of
activity.
In the late important collection of Lifshits works, Mifologija drevnjaja i
sovremennaja (1980), Vicos name appears more than once as a symbol of true
historicism in which, nevertheless, a very important anti-relativist point is included:
The painting of Rembrandt can be considered, because it is encoded within a
certain system of signs, as an expression of the interests of the seventeenth
century Dutch bourgeois. It can be said that this work of art expresses
northern German artistic will []
In fact, in front of us there is the disclosure of certain sides of eternal history,
Vicos storia eterna. Here, in front of us, there is verity in the form of
contemplation, seen once and understood with inimitable depth in the given
possible historical perspective; its name is Rembrandt. (Lifshits 1980, 523)
From Lukacs and Lifshits point of view on the idea of high realism, the bourgeois
writer Thomas Mann sees further and deeper, owing to his objective artistic method,
than the proletarian author of essays about factory life or even the pro-Soviet avantgardist Bertolt Brecht. This idea of the objective measure, which is more important
than momentary conjuncture, was very significant for Lifshits.
What, from our perspective, is the main deficiency of this most authoritative
Russian interpretation of Vico in the twentieth century?2 Vicos worldview is
reduced by Lifshits to a system where the informative and, on the whole, most
essential core (a comprehensive historicism and seeing history from below) and
the purely historical shell (providentialism, baroque rhetoric) coexisted as a
concession to place and time. Lifshits did not want to repudiate the historical
specificity of his hero (Vico was creative exactly when his pedantry was becoming
2
About another form of Vicos reception within Soviet humanities (Marr, Bakhtin, Freidenberg), see
Monas (1995), Perlina (2002, 82).
123
A. Dmitriev
poetry). However, in the last instance he came to present the author of Scienza
Nuova as the predecessor of Hegel, the landmark in the history of thought on the
way to Marxism. In this retrospective vision, Lifshits actually constates the
limitation of not only in Soviet but of almost any other orthodox Marxist
interpretation of Vico (as well as in the interpretation of any philosopher before
Marx). The same was true of Maksimovskij, in whose works Vico becomes a herald
of determinism: religion stayed aside from his scientific constructions, and in
general, attempts to connect Vicos theory with catholic belief have no basis
(Maksimovskij 1928a, 13).
Certainly, Lifshits interpretation of Vico can be read in an international context
as a kind of Marxist symmetrical response to Croces early twentieth century
interpretation. Such a forced secularisation of Vicos ideas was typical not only of
Maksimovskij, but also of Valentin Asmus, who was one of the leading specialists
on the history of modern philosophy.
The idea of the cycle, criticism of trivial progressivism, the danger of new
scientific barbarism, a sense of the profound plebeian Truth, and finally, already in
the post-Stalin years, images of the great conservatives of humanity3 (for whom
he felt a special respect: Plato, Vico, Hegel), all of which are found in Lifshits notes
from the archive, testify that Vico, for Lifshits, was not an ordinary author. Lifshits
article in the volume of the Russian edition of Scienza Nuova also testifies that this
work was far from being a mere publishing stint for Lifshits. In the middle of the
1960s, Lukacs proposed that an essay on Vico in be included in a volume of
Lifshits works to be published in German [Lifshits and Lukacs 2011, 109 (letter
dated 17 September 1966)]. A certain self-projection of Vicos fate can be found in
Lifshits late autobiographical notes, which were written on the fate of the
movement in the frightening tones of nostalgia of the people of the 1930s for late
Soviet liberals:
An absence of necessary connections, an inability to come to an understanding
with the chiefs, a pride of the great personality who had to grovel before
scholarly nonentities, prevented him from obtaining a position at the
Department of Law which was the most important at the University for those
times. In the last years of his life Vico exercized considerable influence and
enjoyed a significant circle of students to whom he privately taught the
fundamentals of his The New Science.
It is noteworthy that following the closure of Literaturnyj Kritik, interest in
Vicos philosophy of history was marked with a stamp of a certain unreliability.
Immediately after Stalins death, the literary marshal Aleksandr Fadeev notes:
For instance, certain literary discussions of 19391940 in the journal
Literaturnyj Kritik should be recalled, discussions during which the statements
by Lifshits about eternal categories of reality, about the theory of the cycle
were unmasked. As a confirmation of the idea of the cycle Lifshits cited Vico,
Heraclitus, and Ecclesiastes. But he passed over in silence the fact that one of
3
For an interpretation of Vico beyond the mood of his progressivism, see Lilla (1993).
123
the ideologists of decaying capitalism, Spengler, praised not accidentally

this reactionary idea to the skies in our time. It is needless to add how
antagonistic this idea was to our Marxist-Leninist worldview. (Fadeev 1953)
The confrontation with the new trivial progressivists (as Lifshits understood
them) of the post-Stalin period incited Lifshits constantly to return to Vico. In the
1960s to 1980s, Lifshits interpretation of Vico remained indisputable but at the
same time it was not adopted. For the late Soviet canon of history of modern
philosophy, represented by Valentin Asmus, Igor Narskij, and Nelli Motroshilova,4
Vico continued to be a peripheral thinker despite the publication of a small book
about him in 1980 by the Leningrad philosopher Mikhail Kissel in the popular series
Mysliteli proshlogo (Thinkers of Past; Kissel 1980). Kissel gives preference to an
analysis of the main aspects of Vicos scientific work rather than a re-actualisation
of Vico in the context of Marxism. It is an analysis of good quality, contextual, but
not nearly as masterly as that by Lifshits. The aesthetics of history, important for
Lifshits, focused, in the late Soviet context, on the romantics and J. G. Herder (here,
a consistent opponent of Lifshits, Arsenij Gulyga, played an important role).
Lifshits, together with his students, published a study devoted to the pure and
applied aesthetics of Winckelmann, Lessing, and Hegel. However, it was far from
the inspired philosophy of the 1930s.
In the last years of Lifshits life, old topics, with connections to Vico, remained in
his archival folders. Only recently, have these materials attracted attention. In an
interview near the end of his life, Lifshits explained his interest in Vico in these
terms:
It is impossible to consider the theory of the cycle as a simple delusion.
Actually, the dialectical thinking began with it. We find this theory in
Heraclitus, in thinkers of the Renaissance epoch. All in all, it was included in
Hegels dialectics. There is no dialectical development without a return to
itself. We call this the negation of the negation.
Certainly, I did not propagate the theory of the cycle, although it was
attributed to me for a quarter of the century. In fact, I claimed that progressive,
onward development has a dual, controversial character, that, according to
Hegels familiar expression, it is forced to work against itself. In other words,
there are moments of return and even cyclical moments, as Marx and Engels
remarked. To be sure, for them this meant stages and aspects of onward
movement. (Lifshits 1988 299)
The significance of Lifshits image of Vico goes far beyond the chronological
frames of the end of the 1930s or his personal ideological evolution. Be that as it
may, this image remained only within the framework of Soviet (and in part postSoviet) intellectual history. At the beginning of the Cold War (likely as a result of
the earlier cooperation of the allies during the Second World War) Lifshits article
about Vico, along with the article about Winckelmann, appeared in English
(Lifshits 1948). It was mentioned in the literature, but did not create a revolution
4
Cf. van der Zweerde (1997).
123
A. Dmitriev
in the study of Vico in the West. This was not because of a conspiracy of silence
on the part of the opponents of Marxism. Already at the end of the 1920s, the
Austrian social-democratic theoretician Max Adler was writing about Vico in the
spirit of Maksimovskij, emphasizing Vicos proximity to the Marxist understanding of history and to the social scientific interpretation of the evolution of
humanity (Adler 1929). The leader of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer,
appealed to Vicos ideas in his criticism of the Enlightenment and technological
rationality. He devoted a large chapter to Vico in his book Anfange der
burgerlichen Geschichtsphilosophie (1930). Like Lifshits, Horkheimer contrasts
Vicos serious appeal to the ancient myths with the one-dimensional rationalism
of Cartesians and with Hobbes criticism of prejudices (Horkheimer 1930).
However, Horkheimer is certainly more restrained than Lifshits in underlining the
magisterial line of the modern philosophy of history from Vico straight to Hegel
and Marx. Antonio Gramsci, in his The Prison Notebooks chooses a strategy
similar to Lifshitsthe renewal of the classicseven though, for him,
Machiavelli is much more important (than Vico) in the Italian intellectual
tradition. Gramscis main opponent in this reassessment was Croce (Rubini
2014).
From the 1960s to 1980s, in the renewed interest inf Vico in the West (of which
the protagonists were, among others, Hayden White and Edward Said) the Marxist
component is likewise important (Jay 1988). However, these writers, thinking in the
vein of the Frankfurt School and social criticism, are more interested in Vico and his
conception of praxis and social self-activity (Tagliacozzo 1983) rather than in a
materialist rethinking of his providential historiosophy, as in the case of Lifshits (his
late attention to the ideas of mesotes, the median way, etc.). Soviet scholars of the
1960s and 1970s (for instance, Leonid Batkin in 1976) did not attend international
conferences on Vico for ideological and censorship reasons (Tagliacozzo 1994,
176). In any case, at that time little attention was paid to Vico in the USSR other
than haphazard and chaotic but retrospectively important discussions by certain
Soviet philosophers (Mamardashvili, Iljenkov) and Althusser as well as Western
Marxists with regard to what Marxism owes to Today it can be said that Soviet
strategies of interpretation of the Scienza Nuova (in the works of Maksimovskij or
Kissel) seem not only ideologically, but content-wise outdated in comparison with
the work of Erich Auerbach on the aesthetic historicism of Vico in the 19201940s
(Auerbach 2013) or Isaiah Berlins interpretation (Vico as the Opponent of the
Enlightenment). For sure, the contextualising rather than modernising approach to
understanding Vico has gained the upper hand (including the Marxist interpretations
by Horkheimer and Gramscians) (Mali 2012). Lifshits vision is important not only
in order to understand the Italian philosopher on his own terms, but also in order to
interpret his legacy in the twentieth century as well as for the development of Soviet
thought in general.
Acknowledgements This research, carried out in 2015, was supported by The National Research
University Higher School of Economics Academic Fund Programme Grant No. 1505005. I thank
Anna Abakunova and Huseyin Oylupinar for important consultations during preparation of this text.
123
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DOI 10.1007/s11212-016-9268-3
Mikhail Lifshits logomythy: the art

of discrimination
Svetlana Klimova1
Abstract The article reconstructs an original concept of myth developed by

Mikhail Lifshits. He invented the term logomythia, as the art of discrimination,
to show the ambivalent nature of creative work, where archaic myth dies as a
historical nonsense and resurrects as a human meaning. Logomythia demonstrates
the overcoming of the irrational element in the life of societies by linking it to the
rational or meaningful content of artistic images. And, on the other hand, the
concept contains more than a hint of the crisis of rationalism in the twentieth
century which destroyed the harmony of man with nature.
Keywords Myth Marxist aesthetics Logomythia Spiritual-practical
consciousness Crisis and transition
Each time, when turning to the subject of myths and mythology, philosophy
reverts to the past, to its own roots. Starting from the eighteenth century, when
society found itself at a point of transition, a crisis, revealing the clash and conflict
between the values of the past and the future, philosophers tried to theoretically
interpret the contemporary situation through a mythological prism. As a rule, they
did this by adding romantic qualities to the myth and overstating its salutary
potential along this path. Beginning with the romanticism of Herder, Schelling, and
later of Hegel and early Marx, comprehension of mythology was identified as an
artistic, ethical revelation of folk wisdom, presented in various historical forms
and texts of culture. In this context a huge aesthetic and inner-moral significance
was attached to myth as it was regarded not simply as a means of consolidating
people, but also as an efficacious means of consolidating ideas and feelings,
strengthening the peoples spiritual roots.
& Svetlana Klimova
[email protected]
1
National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia
123
S. Klimova
It seems that even Soviet Marxism had a slight romantic touch: myths were not
only products of creative work of the people performing aesthetic or compensatory functions in culture. The encyclopaedia Mify narodov mira (Myths of the
Peoples of the World), published in two volumes in 1980 and edited by S.
A. Tokarev, was a unique attempt to represent the most important myths of the
peoples of the world, but likewise certain scientific theories, trends, and schools of
mythology studies. There were a number of Soviet scholars eminent in linguistics,
philology, and literature, who investigated myths and mythology. Prominent
examples are the representatives of the TartuMoscow School, such as Yu. Lotman,
M. Gasparov, V. Toporov, and Zara Mints. They maintained lively contacts with
representatives of French structuralist semiotics, especially the Tel-Quel group, and
of course the French scholars, obviously following in Levi-Strauss footsteps and
inspired by de Saussure, wrote some well-known works on the topic. Of the latter,
Roland Barthes Mythologies (1957) is perhaps one of the best known (see Gasparov
1996). The collections of this school included the works Ye. M. Meletinsky and V.
Ya. Propp who were successfully developing a structural-semiotic method. A
special place in research on mythology belonged to A. F. Losev, who defined myth
as a special type of symbol and mythology as a science capable of grasping both the
essence of an individual thing and the whole world in a special discourse.
At the same time, Mikhail Lifshits was developing his teaching in Soviet
philosophy. His conception was fully independent, Marxist, and simultaneously
corresponded entirely to structuralist tendencies. In addition, Lifshits was one of the
Soviet romantics, believing in the high significance of ancient mythology and also
in its positive educational role, in relation to his own time as well. Ye. Meletinsky
pointed out that for Lifshits myth was the reaction of poetry against prose: the
point of view of M. Lifshits is sufficiently original and interesting and is in essence
typically romantic (Meletinskij 1995, p. 149). This same thought was poetically
expressed by one of the few contemporary researchers of Lifshits mythology, L.
K. Naumenko, who pointed out that for Lifshits myth was a hot point of
contemporaneity (gorjachaja tochka sovremennosti), and he himself wasnt a
cold sage (Naumenko 2010, p. 91). It must be emphasized that Lifshits was not as
lucky as the representatives of the Tartu School or Losev due to the fact that this
aspect of his creative work has not attracted as much attention. This remains the
case today. In this article I will try to fill in this gap, even if only partially.
Sources of Lifshits conception of myth

In his work Antichnyj mir, mifologija, esteticheskoe vospitanie1 Lifshits developed
an original concept of myth, treating it as a form of social consciousness. On the one
hand, he proceeded from the dialectical materialist principles of historicity and
social practice; on the other hand, his arguments carried muted echoes of the French
and Russian Enlightenment of the eighteenthnineteenth centuries, and even
1
First published in the anthology Ideji esteticheskogo vospitanija, vol. 1 (Moskva: Iskusstvo 1973,
pp. 7113). Here quoted according to re-publication in Lifshits 1984.
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Mikhail Lifshits logomythy: the art of discrimination
twentieth century existentialism, notably the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert

Camus, and their precursor, Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Throughout this work Lifshits examines diverse theories of myth, beginning with
the classical ideas of Giambattista Vico, eighteenth and nineteenth century
Enlighteners and Romantics, Schellings aesthetic interpretation of myth, the
anthropological theories of evolutionists (Edward Taylor, Herbert Spencer, and
Emile Durkheim), and ending with the modern Western theories of Lucien LeviBruhl, Ernst Cassirer, Clyde Kluckhohn, Claude Levi-Strauss and others, that were
hugely popular in his time.
In one way or another he turned to various theoretical concepts describing the
mythological logic of primitive and ancient peoples. The effort to define myth with
reference to its inner logic is an important avenue explored by mythologists during the
twentieth century, an effort to which the Soviet philosopher contributed mightily.
While criticizing the incorrect theories of myth he very competently shows all
the merits of the ideas he criticizes, and these ideas often complement his own views.
The polemic revolves around the discussion of the conscious and unconscious
intent in ancient myths. Lifshits takes a highly critical view of the so-called
irrational Western theories of myth, being vehemently opposed to the theory of
Levi-Bruhl about the basic pre-logical and affective character of myth. The mistakes
of the Western opponents, who see in the logic of myth a mystical identification of
everything with everything, stem, in the philosophers opinion, from neglect of
dialectics which is concrete thinking teaching one to discriminate (Lifshits 1984,
p. 344). His theory of myth harks back not so much to the Marxist classics as to
Western scholars, above all the founder of structural anthropology, Claude LeviStrauss. The Soviet philosophers concept is highlighted by his sympathy for LeviStrauss and antipathy for Levi-Bruhl.
In Marxism, the treatment of myth is derived from two general premises: the
practical interpretation of the nature of consciousness and the critique of religiosity
as a false (illusory) consciousness that is overcome through the resolution of social
class contradictions. Indeed, Friedrich Engels declared mythology to be prehistoric
madness, a view Mikhail Lifshits could never agree with.
Engels wrote about historical nonsense. One cannot deny its existence in
historical times, even times close to ours. However, if there is a difference
between sense and nonsense, then the forms of historical being of humans,
expressive as they are, are not only relative. Any idioms pertaining to a given
time and environment contain general content which can be translated into the
language of rational thought (Lifshits 1984, p. 344).
Logomythy
Lifshits claims to possess the right theory of myth, its true logic which he
called logomythy (logomifija), i.e. the reason of myth, its underlying content
(Lifshits 1984, p. 366). The term cannot but evoke an association with Losevs
logos of myths: By mythology, inasmuch as we consider it to be a science, we
mean [] the logos of myths (Losev 1990a, b, pp. 162164).
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S. Klimova
Logomythia is defined first and foremost by the reflection of the universal

meaning of history lost in the waste of nature. The huge layer of historical or,
if you will, proto-historical life as reflected in mythology means more for the
fate of the human race today than many quick steps of mature society. Myths
are the first edition of humanitys intellectual vocabulary, to use Vicos
expression, and people will long, if not forever, continue to read them (Lifshits
1984, p. 366).
The philosophers logomifija seeks to overcome the somewhat schematic Marxist
approach which failed to explain the tenacity of myth-like structures of
consciousness throughout the history of spiritual culture, to explain and predict
the period of remythologization of culture, the mythological nature of political
ideologies, utopias, etc.(Naidysh 2004, p. 27).
Lifshits proves the ability of primitive people to think rationally (logomythically), and to grasp the general meaning not only of their lives, but of the
entire surrounding world.
In other words, while remaining distinct from rational thought, the forms of
peoples spiritual-practical life are not devoid of objective content that reason
can access (Lifshits 1984, p. 344).
A convinced materialist, Lifshits is fiercely opposed to the idea of collective pre(proto-)logical thinking. Proceeding from Malinowskis idea of the practical
functions of archaic myths, the Soviet philosopher reject Levi-Bruhls thesis that a
savage was incapable of telling the natural from the supernatural, naively combining
everything with everything (see Malinowski 1926).
Thus, for all the infinite transitions and shades of the living world the
difference between the two poles remains. We are told that people in ancient
cultures lived within a myth rather than choosing it as the plot of their stories,
which is why they were unsurpassed in this art. Is this true? The answer is both
yes and no. It is hard to live within a myth. The most backward of islanders do
not live in a myth when they build their canoes. They do it according to the
rules of primitive engineering craftsmanship as rational and not symbolic
animals. This has been proved by authoritative scholars such as Franz Boas,
Malinowski, and Reidin in their polemics against Levi-Bruhls hypothesis
about primitive thinking (Lifshits 1984, p. 349).
What for Malinowski, and still more so for Marx, is determined through practice,
i.e. active, transformative mastering of the world in the process of labour, is for
Lifshits a synonym of the sensual-rational world view or spiritual-practical
consciousness of the ancients (Lifshits 1984, p. 343). In his view, the key genetic
feature of myth is the ambivalent, dual element inherent in it and developing
according to the laws of logomythy.
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Cassirer, Lifshits, Losev

Lifshits is equally categorical in assessing the Ernst Cassirers concept of the
symbol which he describes as a panegyric to irrationalism. Defining man as a
symbolic animal Cassirer essentially reduced mythology to an abstract scheme of
a symbol that reflects only intuitive and emotional characteristics of primitive
thinking regardless of their substantive or ethical aspects. Indeed, according to
Cassirer, the symbolism of myth arises from the fact that concrete sensual thinking
(mythological thinking cannot be anything else) is only capable of generalizing by
becoming a sign, a symbol (Meletinskij and Tokarev 1991, p. 18).
One can go along with Lifshits that symbols, unlike myths, are less representative, are indifferent to good and evil, they are formal, reflecting only general
concepts through concrete forms, but not explaining life in a myth. Certainly, they
do not touch upon existential elements inherent in myth, which is imbued with
moral and deductive connotations, and serves as a form of consolidating society,
preventing its disintegration and spiritual and moral degradation (which to Lifshits
is its main function). However, it is hardly fair to Cassirer to claim that in his theory
any symbols of spiritual-practical consciousnessrites, ceremonies, personal
behaviour patternsmay become a dark force of historical madness (Lifshits
1984, p. 343)2 if their symbolic function is treated as an absolute and the rationalpractical function is minimized. Everything depends on the source of absolutization and goal-setting. It is not the German scholars aim to deny the rational
nucleus of myths, he merely believes the term reason to be insufficient for
encompassing the diversity of human culture, while animal rationale has more to do
with the moral imperative that runs counter to experience.
Reason is a very inadequate term to denote the forms of human cultural life in
all its richness and diversity. But all these forms are symbolic forms. Instead of
defining man as a rational animal we should define him as animal symbolicum.
Only in this way can we pinpoint his specific difference (Cassirer 1998, p. 472).
Ernst Cassirer, like Mikhail Lifshits, seeks a substantive method of discrimination
and not identification, albeit through symbolic forms. It is another question how he
went about this task: his Neo-Kantian approach undoubtedly differs from the
materialist view of Mikhail Lifshits, though not so radically, as we shall see anon.
Lifshits shares in many ways Losevs approach (see Losev 1982, 1990a, b)
although he does not directly refer to his conceptin that Losev (like Cassirer) did
not only link, but logically distinguished myth from symbol. For Losev myth is the
broadest category, it is life itself, although replete with deep symbolic content: it
cannot be seen as a fiction or a scheme of distorted (illusory) consciousness. A
symbol may come very close to myth and even merge with it (every myth is a
symbol), but not every symbol is a myth. It only becomes a myth when it ceases to
be a sign; conversely, an increased sign function destroys the symbol, sunders the
identity of the signifier and the signified, but without destroying the myth. Mikhail
Lifshits articulates this very idea:
2
Lifshits borrowed the expression historical madness from Alexander Herzen.
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S. Klimova
There is a huge distance between the conventional sign for conveying

information or a command and the spiritual-practical image of true content.
The attempt to erase this line (all too easily attributable to the conditions of the
twentieth century) constitutes the main weakness of various symbolic theories
of our times (Lifshits 1984, p. 343).
However, essentially neither the theory of Losev nor that of Lifshits contradict the
ideas of the German Neo-Kantian. In his essay Teorija mificheskogo myshlenija u E.
Kassirera, written in the 1920s, Losev pointed out that it was Cassirer who
formulated the true source of myth (Losev 1998, p. 751). Lifshits, in explaining
the concept of spiritual-practical character of the ancients (or spiritual-practical
consciousness or spiritual-practical life) which he described as a Marxian
concept, unexpectedly invokes the theorist of symbolism. Following the terminology of Ernst Cassirer one can describe the spiritual-practical forms of human
communication as symbolic forms (Lifshits 1984, p. 343).
As for the Marxian concept which the Soviet aesthetician alternately describes
as spiritualpractical consciousness or spiritual-practical life, one encounters
something similar in Marxs Grundrisse:
The whole, as it is represented in the mind as conceivable whole, is the
product of the thinking head which understands the world in the only way it
can, that is, a way that differs from the artistic, religious, practical-spiritual
mastering of the world (Marx 1983, p. 36; italics mine S. K.)3
Essentially, having clothed his thought in period garb (G. V. Plekhanov) Lifshits
does not only have the spiritual and the practical swap places, but interprets
spiritual-practical consciousness not as the mundane or day-to-day working life
of people, but only as artistic-mythological life. He departs from Marx even further
when he declares that there is about a myth something that is not hand-made as
in a butterfly or a wing (Lifshits 1984, p. 366).
Logomythy: duality of logos and mythos

For Lifshits, the key method of analyzing myth is genetic, which is why it does not
appear either as irrational or rational or the result of practice and labour relations,
but is something ambivalent and reveals the dual characteristics of all the myths of
the world. He is referring to the ambivalence of the up and down: of the lofty and
base, elevated and low (carnival-like), the sacred and the ugly, the cultural idol
and the trickster, etc. manifested in the art of ancient peoples not simply as a
fantastic reflection of reality, but as a convincing method of overcoming
meaninglessness and reviving universal human (existential) meanings. The duality
of mythological imagination is reflected even in the Platonic dialectic of logos
(truth) and mythos (invention). Logomythia is inherent in the contradictory plots and
3
Das Ganze, wie es im Kopfe als Gedankenganzes erscheint, ist ein Produkt des denkenden Kopfes, der
sich die Welt in der ihm einzig moglichen Weise aneignet, einer Weise, die verschieden ist von der
kunstlerisch-, religios-, praktisch-geistigen Aneignung dieser Welt.
123
ambivalent images of any myth. The fact that literary fiction and even philosophy
hark back to mythological imagery is also important.
One cannot deny that Geek mythology occupies the most comfortable perch
on the historical ladder. It is closer to its loftier heirs literature and
philosophy without forfeiting its originality that stems from its being based
on tales of hoary antiquity. In short, to borrow Aristotles idiom, it is the
mesotes of the system, the true middle which simultaneously represents the
akrotes, or the supreme (Lifshits 1984, p. 364).
In that sense his ideas are very close to the theory of O. M. Freidenberg:
It may look odd to us, but these struggling heroes, kidnapping one other,
represent an archaic form of our future abstractions, our philosophies and
epistemologies, the systems of our perception of the world (Freidenberg 1978,
p. 50).
A staunch opponent of any formalism, including the structural study of myths,
Lifshits unexpectedly finds himself on the same page with Levi-Strauss, having
discovered in his structural typology proof of the Hegelian idea of the universal
ascent of thought from the lower to the higher, from the abstract to the concrete.
After almost a century of derision of the savage philosopher Levi-Strauss proved
the capacity of the savage for abstract thinking (Lifshits 1984, p. 367),
classification, and generalisations. However, in Lifshitss opinion, the Frenchman
exaggerated the importance of his own mathematical discoveriesformalization
of primitive logicto throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Levi-Strauss uses the term primitive logic forgetting that this logic, in its
relentless consistency, represents a woeful shortage of logic. The childish
passion for formal structures is in inverse relationship to logomythia, that is,
the development of the more general meaning that makes the myth of
Prometheus and Heracles a phenomenon of concrete thinking, of logos, as it
was understood by the Greeks. The less formal the order, the more concrete
the content. This was how modern European thought developed after
Scholasticism (Lifshits 1984, p. 370).
The foregoing analysis has shown that when Lifshits attacks and criticizes, he does
not appear to be a hypocritical orthodox dinosaur who seeks to thwart new thinking.
His critique is at its most powerful when he inveighs against vulgar Marxists
whom he detested as much as he detested modernists of every stripe, waging his
battle on two fronts, albeit in accordance with the laws of dialectics. He often
dresses in Marxist garb the ideas of Russian and Western Enlighteners of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who opposed the dualism of spirit and matter,
idealized nature and its significance as a subject, and offered poetic panegyrics to
objective truth and beauty.
He denied a direct correlation between the level of economic and cultural
development and creative thought; logomythia reveals an inverse relationship: the
huge edifice of custom arises on a small economic basis. He sees the foundation of
the truth above all in nature as the generating element (echoes of Spinoza here). His
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S. Klimova
dialectic of nature is highly original since for him it is not only a kind force, as
with the French Enlighteners, it is also a dark force capable of revenge:
A substance that does not have the form of a subject cannot take revenge, but
man by his careless actions renders it active, or, to use Hegels words, turns
substance into a subject. Rather, nature itself at the level of human being
acquires subjective qualities, but it happens not in the human head taken
separately from the external object, but in the process of practical interaction
between man and nature (Lifshits 1984, p. 382).
In this interpretation there is no dialectical materialist interaction between man and
nature; on the contrary, through technology (a synonym of tampering with nature)
people develop a predatory consciousness seeking dominance. Nor does he agree
with the Marxist classics who maintained that all mythology overcomes and
dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the
imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them
(Marx 1973, p. 110).
On the contrary, Lifshits is convinced that such dominance is likely to provoke
a backlash, the revenge of nature on people who have come to think of themselves
as gods on stilts (Nietzsche). Another object of mythologisation is the moral
relations among people and the world of human experiences. The danger posed by
another and the revenge of nature are abiding subjects of discussion, aestheticisation, and assessment for Lifshits (he frequently uses examples from ancient
mythology). To him, the notion of harmony/disharmony between the micro- and
macro-cosmoses is key. Stripped of mysticism and deification, harmony arises not
only from genetic myths, but from logomythia itself which carries the notion of a
spurious world that lives according to the law of liberty inherent in the life processes
as their inner part, as the absolute truth and reasonable basis (Lifshits 1984,
p. 420).
It proves the ability of primitive humans to think in a perfectly concrete manner
(logo-mythically), to grasp the overall meaning not only of their own life, but of life
in nature and history even if it appears to be nonsense in terms of formal logic.
Behind the false form of mythical images lurks the true and eternal content and
profound existential meaning that are often more truthful than the formulas of cold
reason of modern scholastic thinkers.
Thus, logomythy demonstrates the overcoming or the irrationalnonsensical
element in the life of ancient societies by linking it to the rational or meaningful
content of artistic images. But on the other hand, logomythy contains more than a
hint of the contradictions, the crisis of rationalism and pragmatism in the twentieth
century, which in their real dominance ruthlessly destroyed harmony and the
spiritual kinship of nature, Cosmos, and man. The logomythia of the ancients is a
key to the description of the crisis of the Soviet mythology which first brought up
believers in the communist ideal by exposing them to lofty artistic myths about
justice and equality, and then turned everything into a historical madness of wars,
prison camps, and the massive silence of rock-hard Marxists.
123
Myth as filling up an epochal gap

Speaking about Greek mythology, Lifshits uses another key concepttransition
which he applies to Ancient Greece as a middle country (Herder) not only in the
geographical, but also in the historical and cultural sense. Transition is a key
characteristic of the myth as a special state of society faced with a choice of which
way to go. Greek mythology demonstrates the moment of an encounter (clash) of
the collective and the individual at a period when one era was already over and
another era had not yet taken shape. The myth fills the gap between already and not
yet, the unique ghastly gap4 (a synonym of transition) with wonderful artistic
images. In that sense myth is an analogue of an aesthetic attitude to reality (Nikolay
Chernishevsky comes to mind).
The language of the soul brought up in the spirit of the Greek paideia
consisted of the phenomena of the sensual world rigorously selected without
being turned into a scheme more appropriate in despotic states and softened by
the breath of the life of the Greeks as they approached the classic period Of
course, the Greeks, like any other people, could not live by art and poetry
alone. But their life, even in its most material forms, easily translated into
sensual images and the vivid aesthetic form was essential for all the
phenomena of antique culture, from economics to philosophy (Lifshits 1984,
p. 341).
Thus Lifshits does not consider myth to be an allegory, a system of signs, or a
symbol, but rather a whole, consisting chiefly of ethical and aesthetic reflection of
real life situations of archaic and ancient peoples. Myth as a synonym of collective
thought and life saves society from disintegration in transitional periods of its life;
aesthetic conservation of ethical traditions and customs results in clan consolidation:
for example, Greek myths protected society from the omnipotence of private
property and nascent individualism as well as against crude alienation from nature.
This was the conservative function of myths that is relevant at all stages in history
but especially in periods of crisis and transition. Myth is needed when it is necessary
to dampen the shock of societys transition from one state to another. This can be
described as a universal characteristic of mythology.
Ancient Greek myths (like all other myths) also demonstrate another important
function myth plays in a transitional period: it reflects in artistic forms not only
social cleavages and attitudes, but existential experiences, feelings, and emotions of
4
V. G. Arslanov uses Lifshitss mention of the concept of the gap to stress the proximity of his ideas
to post modernism and the concept of difference introduced by Jacques Derrida (see: Arslanov 2009,
pp. 93107). I am more inclined to think that by gap (schel) Lifshits meant the elusive point of balance
between opposing forces of life and consciousness, nature and society in a period of transition to a new
type of social organization that highlights the logical threads of any mythology rather than the battle
against logocentrism with J. Derrida and various discriminations used in Deconstructivism. Lifshits did
not mince his words in expressing his attitude to such fiddling with French words by the Derridas of
his time: The American ethnologist Paul Reidin writes that it is hard to explain why such notions as
representations collectives, participation mystique, mentalite prelogique, mythisches Denken have met
with such universal enthusiasm. To be sure, the reason is the times we have been living in for two
generations already. The latter is absolutely true of course (Lifshits 1984, 351).
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S. Klimova
individual people. A Greek was not only a creature of a polis capable of community
and solidarity with a collective, but an individual capable of suffering, compassion,
love, hatred, revenge, and self-sacrifice, like any person in any other era. It is
another question whether in a Greek myth life manifests itself as individual life at its
intersection with the life of a genus in the shape of sensual (plastic) images in art,
literature, philosophical poetry, and journalism.
Whenever a child encounters a wall (to borrow Dostoyevskys word) it
turns to a myth as the realm of freedom, the story of the free basis of all things
that in its position is entangled in a web of necessity. Myth is the kingdom of
freedom people find only in their fantasy and do not find in the dreary day-today reality (Lifshits 1984, p. 413).
The wall is a common metaphor of modern existentialism which describes a
situation when lifes issues cannot be resolved through the laws of formal logic
outside the self-generated myth about happiness and meaning. The realm of
freedom is the self-same nature which suddenly acquires a social and human
meaning (Lifshits 1984, p. 395), and the lofty myth that gives aesthetic shape to
the best ethical (collective) aspirations of people is a crucial element that pacifies
and harmonises a persons life. Such myths include the ideas of the kingdom of
freedom, communism, justice, eternal love and faith in the ultimate triumph of good
over evil.
Conclusion
The upshot is that myth can maintain the fickle balance in transitional periods only
if its content embodies profound ethical and aesthetic meaning that unites society
into a collective Self, i.e. when it grows out of the vital needs of people. In a
disintegrating autonomous world of consumption and total alienation it can crumble
overnight and become a historical nightmare. This is what happened in Russia a
couple of decades ago.
Leaning towards conservatism is fraught with the sway of historical madness,
demagogy, nationalistic excesses, and the dance of the possessed on the
historical bones of the ancestors; going to extremes in the latesttranshuman
myth-making threatens with the technological liquidation of living human being.
Lifshits bequeathed to us the idea of harmony of the micro- and macro-cosmos
which sees logomythy as the measure of man keeping peace with the Universe,
and as the harmonious unity of rational and emotional-sensual elements, ethics and
aesthetics, logic and myth. Any deviations are fraught with social, spiritual, and
man-made tragedies, and endless cycles of historical madness.
References
Arslanov, V. G. (2009). A.F. Losev i Mikh. Lifshits o Homere i drevnej mifologii (dve koncepcii
Absoljuta). In Voprosy filosofii, vol. 3.
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Cassirer, E. (1998). Izbrannoe: Opyt o cheloveke. Moskva: Gardarika.
Freidenberg, O. M. (1978). Mif i literatura drevnosti. Moskva: Nauka.
Gasparov, B. (1996). V poiskakh drugogo. Vostochnaya i evropeyskaya semiotika na rubezhe 1970
godov. In Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, vol. 14. http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/1996/14/gaspar1.html.
Lifshits, M. (1984). Antichnij mir, mifologija, esteticheskoje vospitanije. In M. A. Lifshits (Ed.),
Sobranie sochinenij (Vol. 3). Moskva: Izobrazitelnoe iskusstvo.
Losev, A. F. (1982). Znak, simvol, mif: Trudy po jazykoznaniju. Moskva: MGU.
Losev, A. F. (1990a). Dialektika mifa. Moskva: Pravda.
Losev, A. F. (1990b). Filosofija imeni. In A. F. Losev (Ed.), Iz rannikh proizvedenij. Moskva: Pravda.
Losev, A. F. (1998). Teorija mificheskogo myshlenija u E. Cassirera. In E. Cassirer (Ed.), Izbrannoe:
Opyt o cheloveke. Moskva: Gardarika.
Malinowski, B. (1926). Myth in primitive psychology. New York: Norton.
Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (Rough draft), trans.
Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Marx, K. (1983). Grundrisse. In K. Marx & F. Engels (Eds.), Werke. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. (Bd. 42).
Meletinskij, E. M. (1995). Poetika mifa. Moskva: Vostochnaja literatura.
Meletinskij, E. M., & Tokarev, S. A. (1991). Mifologija. In Mify narodov mira, vols. 12. Moskva:
Sovetskaja Ehnciklopedija.
Naidysh, V. M. (2004). Filosofija mifologii. XIXnachalo XX v. Moskva: Alfa-M.
Naumenko, L. K. (2010). Mifologija zhivaja i mertvaja. In M. A. Lifshits (Ed.), Filosofija Rossii vtoroj
poloviny XX veka. ROSSPEN: Moskva.
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DOI 10.1007/s11212-016-9265-6
Lifshits ontognoseology as a version of Lenins theory

of reflection
Elena Mareeva1
Published online: 2 December 2016

Abstract In Soviet philosophy, two versions of Lenins theory of reflection are

represented respectively by Mikhail Lifshits and Todor Pavlov. They both isolate
and juxtapose two dialectical elements: reflection and creativity. Within this
methodological dilemma, Lifshitss ontognoseology is an original doctrine of our
mirror attitude to the world whereby material being is the true subject, while man
is a tool of its self-reflection.
Keywords Ontognoseology Lifshits Todor Pavlov Reflection Being The
universal Freedom Culture Nature Mimesis Truth
The work of Mikhail Lifshits certainly does not fit into the narrow framework of
what is called literary criticism, art study, and even aesthetics. His realism theory
has to do, to use Lifshitss own expression, with issues of art in the broad sense.
Yet even this philosophy of art version has a more fundamental philosophical
basis whose essence is becoming clearer 20 years after his death. In effect, it is
materialist ontognoseology which Lifshits never publicly presented in a systematic
way, a task that was accomplished by V.G. Arslanov, who edited and published
Lifshits archival texts.
Material being: object and subject

The figure of Lifshits, as a metaphysician, stands out in bold relief in his manuscript
Dialog s Evaldom Ilenkovym. The author mentions his verbal innovation in
introducing the very term material ontognoseology (see Lifshits 2003, 169)
& Elena Mareeva
[email protected]
1
Moscow State Institute of Culture, Moscow, Russia
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E. Mareeva
which he opposes to the ontology of Nicolai Hartmann because of their differing

approaches to the problem of the identity of thought and being.
Lifshits proposes to throw overboard the traditional the gnoseological contradistinction between subject and object in which the truth is an accurate image of the
object on the side of the subject. Truth is the result of the self-reflection of being in
which the subject-object opposition is but a step on the path to their identity. This is
what sets ontognoseology apart. It is not the Hegelian Absolute Spirit, but nature,
matter that cognizes itself and achieves identity with itself through human reason
and activity.
Lifshits views all human activity, social practice, science, art and culture through
the prism of the concept of self-reflection of matter. Mimesis, reproduction,
repetition form the nucleus of his theory. This is the foundation, he writes, on
which grows the activity of consciousness, which, as we know, creates the world,
but it does so by replicating and reflecting reality (Lifshits 2003, 169).
The principle of reflection brings together all the aspects of Lifshitss teaching.
In general, his inquiries fit into the development of dialectical materialism after
the Second World War which proceeded from Lenins theory of reflection,
drawing above all on Materialism and Empiriocriticism and Philosophical
Notebooks. Although proceeding from the same source, ontognoseology differed
substantially from other interpretations of Lenins theory of reflection, for
example, the theory propounded by Academician Todor Pavlov, an influential
Bulgarian philosopher.
True, Todor Pavlovs monumental work on the theory of reflection, Teorija
otrazhenija, published in the USSR in 1936 and, in a second edition, in 1949, was
not announced as a development of Lenins theory of reflection. However, by the
time of Lenins centenary in 1970, work to develop this theory, to explain the latest
scientific discoveries and criticize the bourgeois theories of knowledge, was going
ahead full steam. The 1969 book Lenin kak filosof, edited by M. M. Rozental,
contains this passage in the section devoted to this problem:
Speaking about Lenins theory of reflection, we are aware that Lenin did not
create it from scratch, but merely continued and developed the views of K.
Marx and F. Engels under new historical conditions. However, Lenins
contribution to the issue is so great and significant that one can safely speak
about the Leninist theory of reflection as a new stage in the development of the
theory of cognition in dialectical materialism (Rozental 1969, 174).
This theory was set forth in the fullest form in the book Leninskaja teorija
otrazhenija i sovremennost (The Leninist Theory of Reflection and the Present
Time), published in 1969 as a team effort of Bulgarian and Soviet philosophers,
presided over by Academician Todor Pavlov.
In a certain sense Lifshits and Academician Pavlov elaborate, each in their own
way, the bedrock Leninist thesis of consciousness as the subjective image of the
objective world. Citing Lenin, Lifshits stresses that the difference between the
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Lifshits ontognoseology as a version of Lenins theory of
297
objective and the subjective is not excessive.1 By contrast, Pavlov was interested
precisely in the subjective element of the human reflection of the world, which made
him the target of criticism in his time by Bulgarian and Soviet comrades. The
preface to the second edition of Pavlovs Theory of Reflection reads, in part:
The authors concentration on the subjective aspect of mans cognition of
reality is so great that it sometimes produces language that may lead to
subjectivism (Georgiev 1949, xxvi).
While giving due to mans active attitude to the worldfrom practice to scientific
knowledge and artLifshits distinguishes in the cognitional process the understanding of a phenomenon and its essence. The subjective image of an individual
thing, delivered by our sensual perception, is one thing, while the knowledge of the
laws of the objective world, obtained by reason and science, is another thing.
Commenting on Lockes distinction between primary and secondary
properties of things, both Lifshits and Pavlov insist on the adequacy of the
perception of colour, taste, etc. But they diverge seriously over the issue of the
causes of the subjectivity of perceived images. Lifshits attributes subjectivity
above all to our bodily organization, invoking neurophysiology and other natural
sciences to bolster his argument.
If you do not find among neurons, etc. any image of a red body, there is none
inside that body, instead there is only movement and reflection (in the physical
sense) of waves of a certain length. (Lifshits 2003, 339).
Pavlov, to the contrary, first, emphasizes the subjective aspect of every
perception, and more broadly, of mans cognition of the world, and second, shifts
the accent from natural to social conditioning of human perception. Citing Marx to
the effect that the eye has become a human eye just like its object has become a
social, human object created by man for man,2 Pavlov stresses:
It is in the process of mastering (humanization) of nature that man
humanizes his own senses and brain, and accordingly his own sensual
perceptions and thought which for the first time become conscious in the full,
precise and true sense of the word [] That is why modern man can, for
example, see colours and shapes to such a degree and with such nuances that
not only animals, but even humans in eras when production and social life
were poorly developed could not attain (Pavlov 1949, 111).
Lifshits builds his dialectical ontognoseology into the tradition that runs through
the whole history of philosophy to the works of Lenin, seeing in the theory of
1
This is expressed in the following way in Materialism and Empiriocriticism: That the conception of
matter must also include thoughts [] is a muddle, for if such an inclusion is made, the
epistemological contrast between mind and matter, idealism and materialism, a contrast upon which
Dietzgen himself insists, loses all meaning. That this contrast must not be made excessive,
exaggerated, metaphysical (Lenin 1972, quoted from the Internet version in: https://www.marxists.org/
archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/four8.htm).
2
See Marx/Engels (1974, 540): Das Auge ist zum menschlichen Auge geworden, wie sein Gegenstand
zu einem gesellschaftlichen, menschlichen, vom Menschen fur den Menschen herruhrenden.
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E. Mareeva
reflection a Copernican revolution. Clearly, the revolution has to do not with the
problem of subjectivity of human perception, but with a more fundamental problem
of the nature of the subject of cognition. In ontognoseology the true subject is
material being whereas man is an instrument of its self-reflection. As Lifshits writes,
the identity is not between subject and object, but between the logical law of
being, its rational character, and our reason. More precisely, our reason is a
repetition, concentration, and a special way of expressing the rational
character of the world (Lifshits 2010, 18).
A key word here is concentration which prevents us from interpreting repetition
as banal copying. Lifshits frequently refers to the relations of modality in the
endless recreation of the world. The mechanism of this modality consists in the
fact that the diffuse and reified universality of the world is actualized in
increasingly clear and adequate forms. Man occupies a special place on this
dialectical ladder because in his social practice nature achieves maximum
concentration of its universal reasonable content. What is higher than the
individual? What is more fundamental than elementary matter? Lifshits asks
rhetorically. Thus the world of culture becomes part of gnoseology not by
transcending natural being, but by drawing closer (returning) to its essence. By
recreating nature in his social practice, man consciously isolates its laws and
creates its most accurate spiritual mirrors in science and art.
In recreating the objective world, consciousness derives from it the dormant
universality and makes it real by practically shaping it [] Mimesis with
regard to the external world acquires a kind of autonomy, consciousness
reproduces its own law which is the law of repeated reality (Lifshits 2010, 26).
On that point, Lifshitss ontognoseology directly challenges the theory of reflection,
as interpreted by Pavlov, and is indeed its antipode. Carried away by the common
enthusiasm for the creation of a new world, Pavlov sees reflection as primarily
the basis for the re-ordering of the world by man. Referring to the Communist
future, he writes:
And then human thought (scientific, artistic, etc.) will attain its final and
perfect dialectical character. And then human thought the product and
function of human and natural being and mans cause will itself finally and
completely emerge as the decisive factor, will completely and finally free
itself of blind social necessity and creatively change the world, man and itself
(Pavlov 1949, 111).
Understandably, Pavlov seeks to balance the pathos of freedom and creativity that is
akin to Fichtean activism by making objective necessity the foundation of mans
subjective activities. The creative force and effectiveness of consciousness, he
stressed, must be achieved not by negating matter and its objective necessity, but
through objective cognition (reflection) and their real mastery (see Pavlov 1949,
112).
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It will be seen that, in Pavlov, man is not an instrument of self-reflection and selfknowledge of nature, but an independent subject that transforms it. Methodologically, the difference between the interpretations of the Leninist theory of reflection
by Lifshits and by Pavlov is that the former considers creativity as part of the selfreflection of nature while the latter, on the contrary, considers the reflection of
natural being to be part of mans creative activity.
It is worth noting that the problem of linking the theory of reflection and the
subjects activity in cognition and practice gained a new relevance in the post-war
years in connection with the debate around so-called creative Marxism, promoted
by the Yugoslavian journal Praxis (19641974). The Praxis school that sprang up
during that period survived until the collapse of Yugoslavia.
The section of the book Lenin kak filosof (1969) which is devoted to the Leninist
theory of reflection, highlights the danger of opposing the activity of the subject to
the reflection of objective reality.
This is the true meaning of the attacks on the theory of reflection not only by
bourgeois philosophers, but also by those Marxists who seek to correct the
Marxist-Leninist theory of reflection. Thus, for example, in maintaining that
no version of the reflection theory (not even an improved one) can be
harmonized with the Marxist theory of man as an active practical being, the
Yugoslavian philosopher Gajo Petrovic separates human activity and the value
of that activity which only brings practical results when it is based on an
accurate reflection of reality, thus committing an unpardonable sin against
Marxism (Lenin kak filosof, 180).
For Petrovic, one of the leaders of the Praxis School, the concept of practice in the
early works of Marx did not dovetail with any version of the theory of reflection.
But this is precisely what Todor Pavlov, who was thoroughly conversant with
Marxs early manuscripts of 1844 as early as the 1940s, sought to do. Already in the
1940s he was criticized for being inclined to subjectivism on account of his attempt
to incorporate early Marx into the theory of reflection.
For his part, Lifshits opposed the pathos of the idea of the radical transformation
of the world, and he did so not only by criticizing modernist art (see Gutov
2005, 2007). He stresses that, according to Lenin, the criterion of practice is flexible
and relative. In effect, Lifshits offers his own interpretation of the Marxian first
Thesis on Feuerbach according to which the object, reality, and sensuality should be
regarded not as an object of contemplation, but as human sensual activity, practice
in a subjective way. Lifshits writes:
How can one put a thing in the position of a mirror of other things? This is the
problem of an active and adequate consciousness. This means considering an
object not only in the form of an object, but in the form of a subject, in a
practical way. Practice must turn an object into a subject, reveal in us its
subjective properties, in other words, make it a mirror (Lifshits 2010, 42).
Conspicuously absent here is Marxs emphasis on human sensual activity. Without
it, practice is anything but transformation of an object by a subject. On the contrary,
through a paradoxical swapping of roles the object is put in the position of the
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subject, which in this capacity forms its reflection in us. What is left of practice,
whose mechanism is expressed in the dialectic of objectifying and de-objectifying
(VergegenstandlichungEntgegenstandlichung), is only de-objectification, as seen
from notes in Lifshitss archive.
It is true that objectification poses a threat to the theory of reflection. Lukacs,
too, failed to show how these concepts agree. That calls for the concept of an
objective mirror of which objectification is a continuation (Lifshits 2002,
112).
Lifshits is ready to admit that objectification is an inalienable part of human activity,
but only if objectification merely continues but does not change nature. In other
words, mans practical activity put through the crucible of ontognoseology, loses its
creative character. While Pavlovs version of the reflection theory makes human
creativity productive, in Lifshits it is reproductive only. Nature itself creates while
practice based on mimesis is incapable of generating new forms of being. Where
that happens we get something stillborn, a product of arbitrary deviation from the
truth.
Freedom on the border between big and small being

In Lifshitss ontognoseology, spiritual culture, like culture in general, is but a
mirror or rather a kaleidoscope of mirrors in which nature looks at itself to
fathom its own truth. Mirrors can be big and small, true and false (crooked)
and there can also be true mirrors of false reality.
Lifshits agrees that nature would not be complete without man. What makes his
principle of reflection in his realism special is that a work of art acquires
significance by being provoked by reality, or more precisely, by the maturity of
objective relations. As he writes following Diderot and Lenin, the property of being
reflectable or thinkable inheres in natures being.
The truth as a product of consciousness that has become part of being in the
broad sense of the word, if only by dint of its small being, would be
impossible if objective reality did not meet it half-way, demanding conscious
expression and practical action (Lifshits 2003, 154).
A great work of art is the result of the marriage of big and small being when a
creative genius, endowed with exceptional sensitivity, acts as a tuning fork for
being, revealing points that are charged with universality, in which the very
material substance of the world becomes the subject and is revealed in its
characteristic, expressive, and original situations (Lifshits 2003, 168).
Being such a tuning fork, an artist can rise above the limitations of private life,
individual physiological and psychological features. Lifshitss position is remarkable in that, beginning from the critique of vulgar sociology in the 1930s, he refers a
persons class position to manifestations of mans small being, because it is a
fragment of the struggle of social egoisms. Vulgar sociology, in stressing the
determination of consciousness by circumstances and the environment, tacitly
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admits the dependence and finiteness of consciousness. However, an outstanding

artist is one who in a situation of dual determination does not express small being
that stands behind him, but consciously recreates the universal being that faces
him and that has come to mature expression in the forms of the spirit: philosophy,
science, and art. The most powerful pages in Lifshitss art criticism are devoted to
great characters who can defy physical, social, and material needs.
Lifshits agrees that great art can express the contradictory nature of life, as Lenin
pointed out in his article Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution. In
that case the artists own frame of reference is crucial. Balzac, who called himself
the secretary of French history, accurately portrayed false reality. But Lifshits
stresses that artistic images can become true mirrors of the delusions of life when
the artist, rising above his individuality and narrow class being, becomes part of the
broader Being. This is how he assesses the essence of Critical Realism following
Belinsky and Dobrolyubov.
Answering the call of Being, the artist, according to Lifshits, rises above the
mundane circumstances. But just how independent is the artist in this transcendence? Maksim Gorky writes:
I did not wait for outside help and did not count on a stroke of good luck [] I
realized early on that man is moulded by his resistance to the environment
(Gorky quoted by Lifshits 2003, 27).
Gorky, a revolutionary romantic, was referring to mans ability to determine his
own destiny. But does man have a chance not only to resist, but to change the
circumstances and give a new look to natural and social being?
The great role of human consciousness lies in the fact that it has burst through
the dam of its own limitations and ideally has achieved equality with the
infinite material world outside us (ibid.).
Consciousness bursts through the dam within itself, rises above the limitations of
being, but does not change reality itself. In other words, freedom according to
Lifshits, is not freedom to, but at best freedom from, to use Erich Fromms
expression. Equality with the material substance, according to ontognoseology, is
not connected with creativity when substance transforms itself through material
transformative activities of man as the subject. The grandeur of humanity lies in
breaking through the dam of one kind of dependence for the sake of a different,
more fundamental dependence that Lifshits defines as dependence of a higher
order. But how to break through the dam not only within oneself, but in the limited
being in the absence of transformative activity which solves both tasks together and
is, in this capacity, defined as revolutionary practice in the Theses on Feuerbach?
When human activity is devoid of productive characterthrough inventions, art,
and political decisionsa miracle usually takes its place. One finds these motives in
Lifshits. Where internal life is not the product of certain conditions, Lifshits notes, it
possesses the miraculous quality of responsibility to the truth of the surrounding
world and is, at least potentially, the true consciousness in science, art and moral
relations among people (Lifshits 2003, 120). Here we face an antithesis: on the one
hand, dependence on the absolute truth, which may or may not exist, and on the
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other hand this modality turns even moral responsibility into a miraculous quality
of our personality.
But does it follow, asks Lifshits, that individual consciousness has its little
corner of subjective freedom independently of being?(Lifshits 204, 313) Again,
this is a rhetorical question prompted by the concept of freedom as a deviation from
the need for natural and social order. What Lifshits refers to in this context as
relative freedom and relative autonomy cannot be an instrument for changing
being itself. Relative freedom offers only a corridor which man uses to advance
towards the Truth.
Lifshits writes: It takes luck chance to join true being, to become its organ
(Lifshits 2004, 313). Therefore, in describing the mechanism of becoming part of
true being Lifshits defines not the parameters of freedom, but the behaviour of
being that offers a relative opportunity to make a choice. Being meets free
consciousness half-way. It must have a corresponding relief (coaction, Grace in
Christianity) (ibid.).
For Lifshits, mystical parallels on the issue of freedom are not accidental, which
is why his ontognoseology looks more contradictory.
The content of consciousness is broader than consciousness proper, and what
it cannot accommodate, the infinite, appears as irrational, as eccentricities and
quirks (the irrational according to Freud).
And he goes on:
In our soul there are limits, censorship by which we forcibly limit the content
of the infinite and thus make it more accessible (Lifshits 2004, 292).
The latter sentence implies the eternal challenge to reason which irrationalists have
always passed off as reason. If the absolute truth defies reason, there is something
not quite rational in it. Similarly, for Lifshits, in the light of the infinity of being the
foundations of the world are not quite rational, and reason cannot be the sole tuning
fork of the diffuse universality of the world. This is particularly true of the
paradoxes of history and culture which reach out to infinity.
On true and distorting mirrors of spiritual culture

The sigh of an oppressed creature, the moaning of the soul tormented by the
horrors of a class civilization or the cruelty of nature, Lifshits writes, is also a
mirror, a reflection of this world. But the trauma of consciousness is not the same as
the consciousness of trauma. The concept of reflection is more relevant with regard
to an imputed picture of the world. (Lifshits 2003, 32).
One form of the consciousness of trauma is the artistic reflection of the
contradictions of modern civilization in the manner of the etched types of
Russian literature such as oblomovshchina (after Ivan Goncharovs novel Oblomov),
the dark kingdom (after Nikolay Ostrovsky), tolstovshchina (after Tolstoy), etc.
With regard to universal forms of social life and thought Lifshits uses the concept of
real abstraction, comparing such abstractions with Platos chariot allegory. But
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the horses allegory is not an image of the trauma of history abstracted from its
own course. Platos world of ideas deals with eternal and perfect models whereas
oblomovshchina and tolstovshchina, with all their contradictions, cannot be
perpetuated, and of course they have no prototypes in nature.
The principle of non-resistance to evil is more than a sigh of an oppressed
creature. Tolstovshchina is the real-life choice of the followers of Count Tolstoy.
The truth of such abstractions does not consist only in their being mirrors. The
reality of these living types consists in the fact that they do not merely reflect
history, but take part in it. In this capacity the mirrors of culture do not fit into the
general schemes of the reflection theory, which is particularly apparent in the case
of objective and subjective products of fantasy.
According to Lifshits, fantastic images, in terms of their artistic value, can be
more powerful than the reproduction of the external aspects of life. Even historically
limited forms of art may isolate and highlight rather than obscure things. Another
version of such fantastic images is Greek idealism, beginning with Socrates and
Plato, in which, as Lifshits writes, a false expression of the truth of being did not
prevent these delusions from delivering huge benefits to humanity.
The fantastic image, a distorting mirror of being, such as the vulgar
sociology of the 1930s, is a different case. Philosophical systems, expressing the
arrogance of the collective subject concerning its capacity to create and recreate
reality, are distorting mirrors. The fate of Kants doctrine is a highly revealing
example. The virtue of the Kantian philosophy, Lifshits believes, is that in addition
to the empirical subject he introduced the transcendental subject thus imputing
qualities of the subject to external reality.
Does it not negate the rights of the human subject? The conventional wisdom
has it that it does. In reality genuine subjectivity is not reduced to empirical
singularity, but predating the corporeal form is played out with respect to the
infinite external world and, one may even say, is born within it (Lifshits 2014).
This is a debatable interpretation of Kants transcendentalism. Nevertheless,
according to Lifshits, personality here is already perceived as one facet of the
Universe. Neo-Kantians moved in the opposite direction recognizing the
objectivity of the world of culture as the antipode of natural being. On this count,
Neo-Kantianism can be considered to be one of humanitys collective dreams.
Society, communication, culture are not a subjective human convention. It is
in itself a reflection, reproduction of the universality of the world, which alone
makes it possible (Lifshits 2004, 240).
Lifshits invokes the concept of a blase collective subject to describe not only the
theory, but the practice of the embodiment of the dark images of collective
fantasy where arbitrariness brings forth cultural forms that are not viable.
It is interesting that in opposing the distorting mirrors of subjectivism Lifshits
enlists the support of natural sciences. At various periods of his work he tries to use
natural sciences as a foundation of ontognoseology. The mechanism of change and
natural selection, he believes, can be the true mirror of the birth of the new in
history. Agreeing that new types of being arise as deviations from the norm, through
123
304
E. Mareeva
anomaly, through the particular and the partial, Lifshits extends this principle to any
type of relations, the history of the economy, art, and so on.
Indeed, history by deviating from its previous type, by uncertain change and
natural selection forms itself into a system to become Vicos eternal history
(Lifshits 2003, 1845).
Thus elements of Darwinism creep into ontognoseology. Occasionally, even
Lifshitss exquisite taste seems to fail him.
Community in nature, is a phenomenon that predates and does not post-date
the individual Therefore social phenomena reminiscent of society in nature,
reminiscent of colonies of polyps constitute a reception of an earlier stage. An
angle from which to analyze sociality with ants and bees. The inclusion of
unity of individuals whereas in reality there is no genuine individuality, in
higher animals sociality is either undeveloped or is developed much less
This tendentious approach leads to paradoxical results. Where, according to Popper,
it is but one step from an amoeba to Einstein, so, according to Lifshits, the distance
between the sociality of polyps and the Bolshevik Party is not all that great.
We see that Lifshits has sympathy for the prospect of deriving the social from the
biological, history from the outcomes of natural selection. While the transition from
the animal kingdom to humanity is a leap, for Lifshits there is no element of
negation in such a leap. But human forms of life arose to compensate for mans
animal inadequacy which is why the social and the biological are antagonists. Todor
Pavlov also, in his own way, notes the negative aspect in understanding the essence
of man. The fact that the opus magnum Leninskaja teorija otrazhenija i
sovremennost, edited by Pavlov, was published on the occasion of the centenary
of Lenins birth meant that his position was accepted as the official position. The
versions of the reflection theory presented in it by Pavlov and other contributors
placed accents in ways that were unacceptable for Lifshits. The section Reflection
and Creativity reads in part:
This means that acting according to the laws of nature people simultaneously
go beyond the framework of natural existence, enter a form of life activity that
is different from nature, namely, society which assumes various forms in
history, history being the true act of the birth of man.
And further along:
The essence of practice is that in the process each time it has to transform the
given conditions into conditions of their self-negation, supplanting them and
giving birth from them to a new reality (Leninskaja teorija, 584).
It would be no exaggeration to say that Todor Pavlov and Mikhail Lifshits
demonstrate opposite trendsone subjectivist and the other objectivistin their
interpretation of Lenins theory of reflection as a distinct phenomenon in Soviet
philosophy. They isolate and juxtapose, even though not in a banal form, two
dialectical aspects of the Marxist concept of practice, namely, reflection and
123
305
transformation. Todor Pavlovs version of the reflection theory was officially

approved while Lifshits ontognoseology went into the philosophical underground.
Their comparison shows that there was more than meets the eye in the development
of Lenins theory of reflection in the USSR.
References
Georgiev, F. I. (1949). Vstupitelnaja statja. In T. Pavlov (Ed.), Teorija otrazhenija Osnovnye voprosy
teorii poznanija dialekticheskogo materializma. Moskva: Izdatelstvo inostrannoj literatury.
Gutov, D. (2005). Die marxistisch-leninstische Asthetik in der postkommunistischen Epoche. Michael
Lifshits. In B. Groys, A. von der Heiden, & P. Weibel (Eds.), Zuruck aus der Zukunft.
Osteuropaische Kulturen im Zeitalter des Postkommunismus (pp. 709737). Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Gutov, D. (2007) Marksistsko-leninskaja estetika v postkommunisticheskuju epokhu. Mikhail Lifshits. In
Svobodnaja mysl, Vol. 2, pp. 125141.
Lenin, V. I. (1972). Materialism and Empiriocriticism. In Collected works, Vol. 14, Moscow: Progress
1972. Here quoted according to the Internet version, in: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/
works/1908/mec/four8.htm. Accessed 25. 6. 2016.
Lifshits, M. A. (2002). Lukacs. In Voprosy filosofii, 12.
Lifshits, M. A. (2004). Chto takoe klassika? Ontognoseologija. Smysl mira. Istinnaja seredina, Moskva:
Iskusstvo XXI vek.
Lifshits, M. A. (2010). Varia. Moskva: Grundrisse.
Lifshits, M. A. (2014). Bytie i soznanie. In http://mesotes.narod.ru/lifshiz/bitieisoznanie.htm. Accessed
11.11.2014.
Marx K., & Engels, F. (1974). Werke, 43 Bde., Erganzungsband, Erster Teil, Dietz Verlag, Berlin/DDR.
Pavlov, T. (1949). Teorija otrazhenija. Osnovnye voprosy teorii poznanija dialekticheskogo materializma.
Moskva: Izdatelstvo inostrannoj literatury.
Pavlov, T. (Ed.). (1969). Leninskaja teorija otrazhenija i sovremennost. Moskva, Sofija: Nauka i
iskusstvo.
Rozental, M. M. (Ed.). (1969). Lenin kak filosof. Moskva: Politizdat.
123

DOI 10.1007/s11212-016-9267-4
Mikhail Lifshits and the fate of Hegelianism in the 20th

century
Annett Jubara1
Abstract In his essay Das literarische Erbe Hegels (The fate of Hegels literary legacy, 1931) Lifshits addressed the fate of Hegelianism in the first third of
the 20th century. He observed a struggle surrounding Hegels heritage between
Marxism on the one hand, and Neo-Hegelianism or ,,the Hegel renaissance on the
other hand and came to the conclusion that the only legitimate Hegel heir is
Marxism. According to Lifshits, Neo-Hegelianism exploits the Hegelian state to
justify the modern power state by illegitimately shifting the meaning of the
Hegelian concept of the state. Thanks to Koje`ves philosophy, a diffuse yet profound Neo-Hegelian influence continues to have an impact on modern thinking,
which gives cause in this essay to examine Lifshits verdict on the illegitimacy of
the Neo-Hegelian Hegel heritage by confronting his argumentation with Koje`ves
Neo-Hegelian concept. So, this essay will update Lifshits perspective on the fate of
Hegelianism and broaden it beyond the horizon that was available to Lifshits.
Keywords Marxism Hegel renaissance Neo-Hegelianism Koje`ve Bourgeois
Citizen (citoyen) Hegelian concept of the state Modern power state
Lifshits addressed Hegel time and again throughout his life; and his was an interest
of many facets. It ranged from addressing Hegels theoretical philosophyin
particular questions concerning truth and the ideato working on Hegels
philosophy of art. I am concerned with another aspect of this engagement with
Hegel, viz., Lifshits view of the fate of Hegelianism in the first third of the 20th
century, considered from todays vantage point.
Lifshits was an observer and participant in a struggle surrounding Hegel; a
struggle which became the subject of Lifshits essay Das literarische Erbe Hegels
& Annett Jubara
[email protected]
1
Germersheim, Germany
123
A. Jubara
(The fate of Hegels literary legacy), written in 1931 (Lifschitz 1988). In this
struggle, Lifshits takes sides and comes to a conclusion which at first appears trivial
since it is what would be expected from a Soviet Marxist author, namely that
Hegels only legitimate heir is the proletariatthat is to say, Marxism or the
revolutionary wing of the labor movement. Less trivial, however, is how Lifshits
justifies the legitimacy of a Hegel heritage by referring to very specific aspects of
Hegelian philosophy that are still of interest today. To come right to the point, these
aspects are related to the Hegelian concept of the state.
The struggle surrounding Hegel which Lifshits addresses took place during a
German Hegel renaissance that firmly opposed the Marxist reception of Hegel. This
Hegel renaissance picked up on the impulses of a renewed focus on Hegel known as
Neo-Hegelianism, which began in Germany around 1900 and then spread to other
European countries, and it had a profound impact on thinking: for example, the
influence it had on German sociology1of the time is considerable; an influence that
has its origins in the break of German Neo-Hegelianism with the Absolute Spirit.
With this break, the focus moved to the Objective Spirit and estrangement
became firmly established. Hegels understanding of estrangement is the separation
of the subject as self-consciousness and the object as the outer world. It is only by
means of religious reconciliation with reality which comprehends this philosophy
in the Absolute Spiritthat sublation of this separation is possible. If reconciliation
and comprehension do not occur, separation persists and estrangement can be
declared as the human normal state in the modern age.2 Yet from a genuine
philosophical standpoint, what remained of this Neo-Hegelianism following its time
of origin and blossoming during the first third of the 20th century? While German
Neo-Hegelianism practiced philosophical abstinence due to a critical (Neo-Kantian)
view of metaphysics, the Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Koje`ve was a NeoHegelian who not only presented an original and refreshing interpretation of the
Hegelian Philosophy of Spirit (during the famous lectures he held in Paris from
1933 to 1939), but also was able to provide productive stimuli for significant
philosophical discourses beyond the limits of a direct interest in Hegel.
Koje`ve thus inspired various changes in recent intellectual history, including the
run-up to French Postmodernism (Bataille3) and the anti-positivist turning point in
psychoanalysis (Lacan4). He conveyed through an exchange of ideas5 with the
father of American Neo-Conservatism Leo Strauss the last great legitimating
ideology; one that is still in effect today, despite frequent critique by opponents
within his own camp, namely that of American Imperialism (Fukuyama 1992).6 All
As with Hans Freyer (See: Freyer 1930). Freyer as well as his pupils Arnold Gehlen and Helmut
Schelsky, who were associated with the right-wing intellectual milieu, influenced the development of
sociology in post-war West Germany.
As in: Freyer 1955.
Agamben describes the theoretical relationship between Koje`ve and Bataille in: Agamben 2004.
For more see: Roudinesco 1993.
Which is reflected in Koje`ves critique (Koje`ve 1950) of the book by Leo Strauss (Strauss 1948).
Francis Fukuyama was a student of Allan Bloom who studied under Strauss.
123
of these changes, as varied as they might have been, share the formal commonality
that in their respective fields, they set the course for further developments.
Neo-Hegelian thought plays a role in contemporary discourses that, though not
always explicitly, have recourse to Hegel. This diffuse yet profound Neo-Hegelian
influence continues to have an effect today and gives cause in this essay to examine
Lifshits verdict on the illegitimacy of the Neo-Hegelian Hegel heritage by
confronting his argumentation with Koje`ves Neo-Hegelian concept. I intend, in this
essay to update Lifshits perspective on the fate of Hegelianism during the first third
of the 20th century (as far as it is related to the aspect mentioned above) and
broaden it beyond the horizon then available to Lifshits. The question is therefore
whether or not the Neo-Hegelianmore specifically: the Koje`vianHegel heritage
is legitimate.
In what follows I will first present and then criticize Lifshits discussion about the
illegitimacy of the Neo-Hegelian Hegel heritage which he contrasts with what he
considers to be the legitimate Soviet Marxist Hegel heritage. (I) This presentation
will then be applied to Koje`ves Neo-Hegelianism in order to answer the question
whether or not Koje`ve is a legitimate Hegel heir. (II)
I
Lifshits about the illegitimacy of the Neo-Hegelian Hegel heritage
In his essay mentioned above, Lifshits first outlines the background of the Hegel
renaissance of his time. Hegel, states Lifshits, presented the contradictions of civil
(bourgeois) society and tried to solve them in an idealistic state cult. This did not
please the German Liberals (Karl v. Rotteck, Karl Theodor Welcker)they
protested in the name of individualism, freedom and humanism against the
cruelty of Hegelian progress. During the emerging era in the wake of the defeat
of the 1848 Revolution, Rudolf Haym declared that Hegel, whom he accused of
state glorification and even deification, was finished. In the subsequent 50 years,
it was only Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who maintained Hegels best traditions.
They had even come into conflict with Wilhelm Liebknecht who, in true liberal
style, stigmatized Hegel as the discoverer and glorifier of the Prussian idea of the
state, as a Prussian; a judgment which was met with fierce resistance from Marx
and Engels. Yet despite their objections, the liberal assessment of Hegel took hold in
Social Democratic literature. The Reformistsspecifically Eduard Bernstein
preferred Kants teachings of endless progress to an unattainable goal.
Now (1931), states Lifshits, the tide has turned. Liberalism is no longer the
dominant ideology. Post-war society has lost its faith in endless progress and in
formal democracy; Neo-Kantianism is suffering a defeat. The search for a new
metaphysics has become fashionable and Hegel has been commemorated by both
the bourgeoisie and in Social Democratic circles: On the occasion of his 100th
birthday, the Social Democratic Prussian Cultural Minister Adolf Grimme declares
Hegel to be a living presence. A philosophical neoclassicism goes hand in hand with
a Hegel renaissance and a resurgence of Neo-Hegelianism.
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A. Jubara
What, asks Lifshits, is the meaning of this pendulum swing in the history of NeoHegelianism? The new era of Imperialism, he states, is distinguished by a quest for
dominance instead of freedom and this marks the end of old Liberalism. The sought
for dominance is that of an oligarchy that exploits the masses disenchantment
with bourgeois democracy in its own interest; disenchantment which manifests itself
in anti-democratic and anti-liberal resentment. According to Lifshits, elements of an
anti-democratic and anti-liberal contemporary ideology transit seamlessly into
fascism. These elements are also accompanied by both a bourgeois and Social
Democratic critique of Manchester Liberalism from the standpoint of state
capitalism adorned with socialist rhetoric. Active state intervention in economic
life now seems desirable, while protecting private life from state intervention seems
to no longer be necessary. Hegel becomes relevant once again as the dogmatist of
the power of the universal over the individual and of the power of the state over
private life.
This state capitalism adorned with socialist rhetoric merits a more detailed
examination. Wording in which rhetoric plays a prominent role often represents a
makeshift solution on Lifshits part. This term obscures what Lifshits is not able to
articulate clearly or explain at that particular point. A circumstance which seems in
this case difficult for Lifshits to explain is a similarity established during the Age of
Imperialism: the similarity between bourgeois and Reformist Socialist (Social
Democratic) ideologies on the one hand and in turn their similarity, which he leaves
unmentioned, to the Revolutionary Socialist (communist or Soviet) ideology on the
other hand. The latter manifests itself in what Lifshits calls rhetorical justification
of state capitalism (which, as Lifshits leaves out, was called socialism in the
Soviet Union), that of a powerful state (Machtstaat) and the power of the
universal. Lifshits attempts to identify, beneath this superficial similarity, essential
differences between revolutionary Socialism-Marxism on the one hand and
reformist Socialism and bourgeois ideology on the other. For him, the ideological
watershed lies, in this essay at least, among the different references to Hegel by
means of which he distinguishes the legitimate from the illegitimate heirs of Hegel.
Illegitimate heirs are for Lifshits the contemporary bourgeois and Social
Democratic ideologies that, he claims look back to Hegels critique of Liberalism
(one influenced by the resonating impression that terror had left behind) resulting in
his idealization of a state superior to all individual interests. According to Lifshits,
both pick up this element and distort it: Hegels state cult (Staatskult) had nothing to
do with contemporary social demagogy. The contemporary idea of a modern power
state, writes Lifshits, is instead the fruit of a regressive metamorphosis of the state
as it had been presented in the Hegelian Philosophy of Right. Neo-Hegelianism
exploits the Hegelian state to legitimize the modern power state. In the protocols
from the first Hegel Congress (Wigersma 1931) to which Lifshits referred in his
essay, he finds a critique of individualism based on Hegel as well as arguments
made for the primacy of the state over private interests. At first, these arguments
bring Hegel, Robespierre and Bonaparte to mind. Yet according to Lifshits, they
have a completely different meaning for the Neo-Hegelians. It is exactly this shift in
meaning that is illegitimate according to Lifshits.
123
What constitutes this illegitimate shift in meaning? To answer this question,

Lifshits chooses theapparentdetour of discussing the character of Hegels Early
Theological Writings (Hegel 1966/1961). This approach implies that Lifshits did not
see a break between the early and the late Hegel; for Lifshits, the Early Writings and
the Hegelian Philosophy of Right are integrated into one continuous theoretical
development.
While the Neo-Hegelians suggested a purely theological or even mystical
meaning of the Early Writings, Lifshits emphasizes the Writings particular
characteristic of discussing political issues in a religious form. For Hegel, it was a
matter of folk religion in the Early Writings that he wanted to oppose to positive
Christianity. The latter together with belief in otherworldly salvation is private and
egoistic, while in folk religion the demos of the ancient polis has elevated itself over
the private sphere in a movement that Hegel presented as exemplary to his
contemporaries. In this religious political sphere, the bourgeois has elevated himself
to the status of citizen. He has elevated the private person to that of the political
universality of a free people.7 The positive religion (ecclesiastical Christianity) is
for the young Hegel a mirror of feudal hierarchical conditions in which private
interests dominate over universal interests. Folk religion, in contrast, is for him the
religion of free republicans. Hegel was glorifying the modern conditions that were
emerging across the Rhine in terms of antiquity. This glorification, states Lifshits,
neglects the real economic character of these modern conditions but is correct in a
world-historical sense: here Hegel formulated the utopia of a free people who had
overcome within itself the opposition of the bourgeois and the citizen.
Contemporary Neo-Hegelianism by contrast, states Lifshits, adopts Hegels
opposition of universal and egoistic interests and reformulates it as an opposition of
the state and the masses. This is what proves their illegitimacy for Lifshits since this
state is a civil state (here civil is understood as bourgeois, not as citizen) which in
itself is particular as a state representative of egoistic private interests; a pseudo
universal. In the twentieth century, continues Lifshits, the struggle against particular
interests is not directed against the interests of single individuals who together form
the masses, but instead against the owners of monopolistic private capital who are
currently selling the people (Lifschitz 1988, 50). This struggle is being led by
the proletariat, the current defenders of the true universal. With this postulate,
Lifshits essay comes to an end.
The proletariata legitimate heir of Hegel?
This conclusion, although faithful to Soviet ideology, carries a shrill discord which
points back to the problems that Lifshits covered up at the beginning with the
makeshift term rhetoric, namely the state capitalism adorned with socialist
rhetoric (see above). What this conclusion does not address is how the proletarian
class struggle against monopolistic private capital behaves in relation to the
7
Rousseaus opposition of the concepts bourgeois and citoyen in Le contrat social is decisive
here. To highlight this opposition, I will use the English term bourgeois for the concept of bourgeois
and the term citizen for the concept of citoyen (and not the term citizen for both concepts as is
sometimes the case in English).
123
A. Jubara
phenomenon of state capitalism. This is because the established system at this point
in the Soviet Union, the state of the proletariat, was nothing other than state
capitalism.
There is, however, one difference between Western and Soviet state Capitalism.
The first is distinguished by the close relationship private enterprises (capital)
maintain with the state and by more or less direct state intervention in
entrepreneurial activities. (One example was the centrally administered economy
with private property in Germany during the Nazi era.) In Soviet-style state
capitalism by contrast, the state is the monopolistic capital owner. Is it therefore
possible to argue that it is the representative of the true universal?
Capital organized by the state, regardless of the concrete form of organization (as
state control of individual capital or where the state is the sole or main capital
owner) does not embody universal interests but instead economic interests.
Economic interest is simply another term for egoistic private interest. Capital
interests are always economic, i.e. egoistic interests, regardless of whether it is a
matter of private capital or state monopoly capital. This is because the interests of
(state) monopolistic capital do not represent a universalization of individual
interests. Such universalization can only be achieved by rational political means.
Submission to capital interest in contrast is submission to a blind, unconscious force
and it excludes political mediation of interests. This was clearly demonstrated by the
repressions beginning in 1937 which ushered in a brutal industrialization of the
Soviet Union; one which disregarded and devastated individual human lives. As this
demonstrated, Soviet state capitalism was also not the power of the universal.
History has rebutted Lifshits postulate: The proletariat has also proven to be an
illegitimate heir of Hegel.
Today, after a further, presently more neoliberal metamorphosis of capitalism, it
has become evident that the primacy of economic, egoistic interests progressively
undermines and destroys the political community that made it possible to develop
and articulate universal interests in the first place. In Germany, this was made very
clear some time ago by a discussion about market compliant democracy
(Altenbockum 2012) and is reflected currently in the discussion about the
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU, the USA
and additional states with its negotiations behind closed doors to be concluded
without consideration of the will of the general public. The capitalist state was and
isalso in its now historical socialist forma state of egoistic private interests,
i.e. economic interests, which is virtually the opposite of the Hegelian citizen state
in which power embodies the universal. The Hegelian state was and remains a
utopia; a desideratum.
II
Is Koje`ves Neo-Hegelianism a legitimate heir of Hegel?
What role then does the notion of the state play in Koje`ves Neo-Hegelianism? How
do matters stand with the legitimacy of his being an heir to Hegel? Does Lifshits
123
statement about Neo-Hegelianism in general apply to him? Does he adopt the

opposition of universal and egoistic interests from Hegel and reformulate it as the
opposition of the state and the masses even though this state as state representative
of egoistic private interests itself is something particular and thus a pseudouniversal?
According to Koje`ve, at the End of History (after Napoleon had completed the
French Revolution) a world has emerged of slaves without masters/masters without
slaves, a world in which the working bourgeois is enslaved by capital. This
enslavement by capital must be overcome; and this is not possible without a fight or
without the risk of life. Yet there are no longer masters to struggle against. The fight
therefore cannot be a class struggle since the working bourgeois is neither master
nor slave, he isbeing the Slave of Capitalhis own Slave. It is from himself,
therefore, that he must free himself (Koje`ve 1980, 69). He must stop working for
property as such, for capital: one can also (and this is, according to Koje`ve, the
definitive Hegelian solution to the problem) work based on the idea of the
community, of the state: one can (and one must) work for the state (Koje`ve 1980,
6465).
Liberation from capital is brought about by terror according to Koje`ve. The
working bourgeois turned revolutionary must introduce death into his existence
(Koje`ve 1980, 69). It is in terror that the final state develops, i.e. the state that
places the final liberation from enslavement by capital on the agenda, viz., the
Napoleonic Empire. This means that permanent terror and senseless beheading
comes to an end when all actors submit to state force (a monopoly on the
legitimate use of physical force Gewaltmonopol des Staates). The result is the
emergence of a state in which every individual is recognized in his absoluteness; a
state that guarantees life, security, freedom and (private) property. In the French
Revolution, according to Koje`ve, the working Bourgeois () were first
revolutionaries and then citizens of the universal and homogeneous state (the
Napoleonic Empire). The working Bourgeois, to become a () Citizen of the
absolute State, must become a Warrior. This warrior existence is a specific
one: it takes the form not of risk on the field of battle, but one of risk created by
() Terror (Koje`ve 1980, 6869). Through his transformation to citizenin the
purgatory of terrorthe working bourgeois frees himself from himself and works
henceforth for the state.
In the quote above, the bourgeois is brought into opposition with the citizen: The
bourgeois becomes a citizen by overcoming being a bourgeois in the sphere of the
universal (in contrast to the bourgeois constraint in egoistic private interests). This
corresponds to the notion of elevation to political universality of a free people
from Hegels Early Writings as it is also presented by Lifshits. The Napoleonic
statei.e. the modern constitutional stateis for Koje`ve the state of the citizen
which is superior to the private sphere of the bourgeois. So far, one can say, Koje`ve
remains a true Hegelian; and his modern Napoleonic State is the Hegelian
citizen state.
Yet is the modern state in fact the political universal in the sense of Hegels Early
Writings? To answer this question, I would like at this point to broaden the horizon
123
A. Jubara
with an outline of Marxs discussion regarding the problematic nature of bourgeois

and citizen.
Excursus: Marx on bourgeois and citizen
For the early Marx (On the Jewish Question, 1843/1844), it is precisely the
liberation and transformation of the bourgeois to the citizen as also mentioned in
Hegels Early Writings, which is insufficient and incompletean emancipation that
is merely political. Political emancipation divides man into a member of civil
(meaning bourgeois) society who lives in a world of egoistic, hostile individuals
on the one hand and into an abstract citizen, the moral person, on the other. What
Hegel presents as an elevation, is portrayed as an overcoming and transformation by
Koje`ve but is a division for Marx. Political emancipation must, according to Marx,
be supplemented by human emancipation, in which the real, individual man
overcomes the division by re-absorbing the abstract citizen into himself. Human
emancipation is accomplished when man recognizes his own powers as social
powers which he no longer separates from himself in the form of political power
(i.e. the state).
An approach to implementing this human society without a state was the project
of council communism (which was historically never successful), in which the
communards administrate their working capacity at a grassroots and direct
democratic level and distribute the products according to the principle of fair
wages. All complex questions of a community are to be solved at a grassroots
democratic level, which inevitably leads to differences of opinion. Yet how are they
to be resolved? Since the community is immediately human, then anyone who
objects to the currently prevailing view automatically becomes a misanthrope or an
enemy of the people; and again one has the reign of virtue and terror with its
endless orgies of violence.
The elimination of the difference between civil society and a political state
[] is not only not possible, it is also not desirable. If in fact the decisions
necessary in society are not taken by representative bodies that are political (as
in:[] withdrawn from civil society and therefore, from a Marxist perspective, foreign and existing outside the material sphere of human life) but are
instead established on the basis of binding, grassroots democratic discussions
and therefore by society as a whole, criticism of them (these decisions/A.J.)
becomes criticism of the people itself; i.e. it becomes subversive (de Berg
2007, 234-235).
Council communism, one might argue, has never been able to stand up in
practice and prove whether or how it would function. Although this is true, it is only
because when it was successfulduring the October Revolutionit invariably and
immediately bred terror which replaced council rule with dictatorship. This scenario
is not a chance accident, but is instead inevitable due to the inherent paradox of
immediate popular sovereignty, as already outlined by Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit in light of the course of the French Revolution.
123
Further development of the problem in Marxs theory (outline)

Another solution is indicated soon after by Marx in The Communist Manifesto
(1847/48) where he speaks of nationalization as a communist demand. The
proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the
bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e.,
of the proletariat organised as the ruling class (Marx and Engels 1906, 4445).
Here political power is being used to intervene forcibly in the economic sphere of
egoistic private interests and to make the working bourgeois work for the state.
This is what Koje`ve so bluntly describes as a purgatory of terror. Marx provides not
only the council option but shortly after in the development of his theory also the
state communist option (or state socialist, the terms communism/socialism are
interchangeable in this case). This means the nationalization of civil (bourgeois)
society as opposed to the sublation of the political state to which the early Marx
aspired (for more see: de Berg, 234 ff.), and it is, as shown above, merely another
form of state capitalism.
As their theory developed, Marx and Engels moved away from this faith in the
state.8 A third approach by the later Marx9 begins to take shape, yet in the twentieth
century it was neither recognized nor acknowledged as an independent solution;
neither within the labor movement, nor in Marxist theory and not by Lifshits. It
never played a relevant role. Marxs critique of political emancipation directed his
focus away from the contradictions between civil (bourgeois) society and the state
to the contradictions within civil society itself, i.e., to political economythe sphere
of egoistic individual interests. The early Marx had come to the conclusion that
political emancipation (the rise of the constitutional state) was not sufficient.
Nowfor the later Marxpolitical emancipation should no longer be supplemented or overcome with human emancipation. It is rather economic servitude
by capital, as the later Marx would saythat must be overcome. However it is no
longer a matter, as it was for Marx in the Communist Manifesto, of recourse to
political power to intervene in the economic sphere; nor is it, as Koje`ve states, a
matter of a purgatory that sublimates the bourgeois into the citizen. It is more a
matter of change in the economic sphere itself, in the sphere of work; a change that
is more than just subordination to the political sphere as postulated by Koje`ve. This
insight is the actual beginning of Marxs new draft of a theory that is no longer leftHegelian, no longer philosophical and no longer communist (in the sense of The
Communist Manifesto). It is a draft of a social theory that takes shape as the Critique
of Political Economy. Marx had drawn up some approaches in this area which were
far from consistent and in need of development within the framework of a critical
social theory. The quintessence of these approaches lies in the insight that it is first
radical change in the sphere of work that would make it possible for a form of
social life mediated essentially by labor to be replaced by of a form of life in
8
For more on the discussion among contemporary Marxists concerning faith in the state in early
works by Marx and Engels see: http://www.marx-forum.de/marx-lexikon/lexikon_s/staatseigentum.html
(21.03.14).
Since 1859, when he published A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (first in German
Zur Kritik der politischen Okonomie).
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A. Jubara
which labor does not play a socially mediating role that would allow for the
constitution of another form of social mediation(Postone 1993, 361). Social
life could be mediated in an overtly social and political fashion. In such a society,
a political public sphere could play a more central role than in capitalism (Postone
1993, 361362), since it would be free from the constraints of utilization and the
enhancement of value as an end in itself. Such a political sphere would be a true
polis, a state as the sphere of the spirit in the Hegelian sense.
In the draft of this critical social theory (A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy) lies Marxs actual anti-idealist turning point. Whereas Hegel felt
that the spirit had now (during his lifetime) attained absolute self-knowledge and
that this self-knowledge only needed to be realized, Marx sees enormous
obstacles standing in the way of such a realization. These obstacles are the
contradictions within civil (bourgeois) societyin the sphere of egoistic private
interests; i.e. economic interests. They condense into a blind spot in selfconsciousness, into a sphere in which human conditions are mystified, fetishized
and obscure. The economy is anything but rational; here ones own actions appear
foreign. The solution to these economic problems for Marx requires that the
socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulate their interchange with
Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the
blind forces of Nature. () But it (the sphere of material production, A.J.)
nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of
human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom (Marx 1999,
571). It is only this kind of association of producers that would allow something like
a Hegelian citizen state to even become a possibility beyond production. This
association is not be equated with the transfer of means of production to state
propertyeuphemistically called public property (Volkseigentum) as experience
has shown with state socialism. If association and nationalization were (had
been) one and the same, then there should never be wage labor, money or capital in
state socialism.10
Koje`ve between political emancipation and nationalization
Yet Koje`ve is not interested in the later Marxs economic research, nor does he
pursue the early Marxs idea of human emancipation, i.e. council communism.
He instead alternates between two other solutions to the problem: One is the
political emancipation that Marx deemed to be insufficiently qualified, i.e. the
constitutional state which also complies with Hegels line of thought in his Early
Writings. The other (which was not discussed in this essay; see for this: de Berg) is
nationalization, or state capitalism called socialism (which is in principle
identical to Marxs proposed solution of nationalization in Communist Manifesto).
The role that he attributes to terror indicates a notion of the constitutional state
evolving into a state capitalist social state. Based on the reasons listed above and
10
As is known, institutionalized Marxism-Leninism argued its way out on this point by stating that there
should be two phases of social development, the first was called socialism (=state capitalism) and
the second should someday be communism (=association). It seems to me, that the status of this
statement was however an excuse and/or a deference to the Greek calends.
123
keeping in line with Lifshits, this nationalization must be characterized as pseudouniversality.

Summary
It is possible to say in summary that, for both Koje`ve and Lifshits, it was a matter of
the realization of the utopia of the Hegelian State. In this respect, neither theory is a
more legitimate heir to Hegel than the other.
Yet for both thinkers, there are factors which Lifshits criticized as social
demagogy: Lifshits glorifies the Soviet power state whereas Koje`ve glorifies the
Napoleonic, i.e. the western imperialist power state as being a Hegelian-type
state, as a sphere of the universal.
As Hegelians, however, they are merely reiterating a gesture from Hegel whose
state theory was an answer to the problem that had been posed and left unanswered
by the revolution, namely that of the political realization of freedom (see: Ritter
1965). The revolution as negative freedom yields the fury of destructionterror
which in turn incites the forces of restoration to spring into action. This conflict
between revolution and restoration has rocked Europe (and today the entire
Europeanized world) ever since the French Revolution and has yet to let it come
to peace. At the end of his life, Hegel arrives at the conclusion that revolution is the
problem that will be passed on unsolved to future generations. The solution to this
problem lies for Hegel in the state constitution: Where freedom is made the legal
basis, the state must be conceived as the realization of concrete freedomit
becomes a constitutional state.11
This is the only way to understand Hegel in Elements of the Philosophy of Right
(1820): the state is the realization of the ethical idea and is the world that the spirit
has made, which is why the state should be revered as an earthly divinitywords
that Haym criticized and rejected as deification of the state. Also Hegels famous
reference to what is rational (reasonable) is real (actual) and what is real (actual) is
rational (reasonable) (in his Preface to Elements) sometimes was misunderstood
as glorification of the current Prussian state as the realized ethical idea. Accepting
the current Prussian state was more a case of Hegels realism; and with it one has
to keep in mind that Hegels party was that of Prussian Reformers, not Prussian
Restoration.
Fluctuating between an ideal of actual popular sovereignty and declaring
(glorifying) the modern state as the realization of the ethical idea, as Lifshits
detected in Hegels Early Theological Writings, is a characteristic both of Hegelian
thought itself and of later Hegelianism. This characteristic appears in both Koje`ves
Neo-Hegelianism and in the Hegel-Marxism of Mikhail Lifshits. This fluctuation
indicates an unsolved problem of modernity, whereas the formulation of this
problem is the actual Hegelian heritage.
11
This relation is presented in detail by Joachim Ritter (Ritter 1965).
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A. Jubara
References
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Altenbockum, J. V. (2012). Marktkonforme Demokratie? Oder demokratiekonformer Markt? Frankfurter
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de Berg, H. (2007). Das Ende der Geschichte und der burgerliche Rechtsstaat. HegelKoje`ve
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Freyer, H. (1930). Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft. Logische Grundlegung des Systems der
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Freyer, H. (1955). Theorie des gegenwartigen Zeitalters. Stuttgart: DVA.
Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. New York: Free Press.
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Berlin. In H. Nohl (Ed.), (Unaltered reprint) published by J. C. B. Mohr in 1907 in Tubingen,
Frankfurt/Main: Minerva. In English: Hegel, F. (1961). On Christianity. Early Theological Writings,
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Hegel, G. W. F. (1991). Elements of the philosophy of right. Ed. by Allen W. Wood, (H. B. Nisbet,
Trans.). Cambridge: University Press.
Koje`ve, A. (1950). Laction politique des philosophes. In Critique, 41, 4655 and Critique, 42, 138154.
Koje`ve, A. (1980). Introduction to the reading of Hegel: Lectures on the phenomenology of spirit. New
York: Cornell University Press.
Lifschitz (t.i. Lifshits), M.A. (1988). Das literarische Erbe Hegels. In Id., Die dreiiger Jahre.
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works/1859/critique-pol-economy/index.htm. October 22, 2016.
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Im Auftrag des Internationalen Hegel-Bundes. Tubingen-Haarlem.
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DOI 10.1007/s11212-016-9264-7
Lifshits and Ilyenkov on the nature of the ideal

Sergey Mareev1
Published online: 2 December 2016

Abstract This article compares the concepts of the ideal proposed by two prominent Soviet Marxists: the contemplative concept (Lifshits) and that based on the
activity approach (Ilyenkov). The former derives the ideal, along with man himself,
from nature and the latter derives the ideal from the dialectics of labour which
generates man, his feelings and thoughts and the higher forms of cultural being.
Keywords Marxism Dialectics Lifshits Ilyenkov The ideal Labour
Activity Contemplation Practice Culture History
A masterpiece usually denotes a work of art. A masterpiece is the supreme model
with which the concept of the ideal and the category of the ideal are associated.
Plato compares the eternal ideas with models that guide the master, the Demiurge
(Timaeus 28 a). But is nature itself capable of creating masterpieces or is the ideal a
product of human labour only? This is the key point in the argument between
M.A. Lifshits and E.V. Ilyenkov on the problem of the ideal. Lifshitss article Ob
idealnom i realnom exposed these differences soon after Ilyenkovs death. The
publication of the entire manuscript by Lifshits under the title Dialog s Evaldom
Ilenkovym (see Lifshits 2003) moved this problem to the focus of the discussions
among their successors today.
Lifshits was at one with Ilyenkov in criticising the subjectivist treatment of the
ideal. But he believed that Ilyenkov had stopped short of recognising the objective
existence of the ideal in nature.
This is not sufficient for a more complete definition of the ideal, but the first
step is of paramount importance, i.e. the idea that seems to challenge the
& Sergey Mareev
[email protected]
1
Moscow International Higher Business School MIRBIS, Moscow, Russia
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S. Mareev
common notion that the ideal world belongs to the world of objective things
and relations and not to formal-logical or socio-psychological phenomena of
consciousness. Ever since the times of William of Occam and the innovators
of the late Middle Ages, the ideal has been referred to the world of the human
intellect and, more broadly, to the subjective life of people (Lifshits 1984,
121).
It is known that Occams razor cut off Platonism with its objectively existing ideal
entities. But whence come the ideas in our heads? This was the question with which
all European philosophy, up to Hegel and Marx, had been struggling.
Lifshitss article Ob idealnom i realnom and Ilyenkovs well-known work The
Dialectics of the Ideal (Ilyenkov 2014) oppose the view that reduces the ideal to the
images of our consciousness, to subjective-psychological phenomena. Both Lifshits
and Ilyenkov see the ideal as an objective reality. Both reject the vulgar
juxtaposition of the ideal, as some subjective view, with the material as objective
stuff. But how is the ideal represented in the real world? And why does Lifshits
reproach Ilyenkov for subjectivism, albeit in a very mild form?
Let us note right off that the essence of the differences between them lies in the
understanding of objectivity. According to the most common definition, objectivity
or objective reality is what does not depend on our consciousness. And yet not only
the laws of nature, but the laws of the state are independent of our consciousness. As
Hegel noted, in Plato the ideal is presented above all as the organisation of society,
the State.1 The state opposes individual citizens and their consciousness as
objective reality, because we cannot say that the state exists only in our heads. This
reality is of much greater concern for us than nature. The interpretation of Platos
objective idealism that places his ideas in nature only, in the place above
heaven (hyperouranios topos), is very vulgar. Like the God-Demiurge, they exist
there in order to provide grounds and sanctify the existence of the ideal in society, in
the State.
This is the interpretation of the objectivity of the ideal that we find in Ilyenkovs
work, with the exception, of course, of the Demiurge and other Platonic bits.
Ilyenkov links the objectivity of the ideal with the objectivity of culture. A man
does not live in nature, but in culture. Nature, as Marx would say, is given to man
through natural science and industry.
Lifshits associates the problem of the ideal with what has realised its objective
measure:
Whether our thought wants it or not, it cannot do without such models of
realising the general. We call somebody a true friend or a true patriot to
indicate that they are the implementations of a certain perfectio or an ideal, as
distinct from false friends or sham patriots or at least those who have not
manifested themselves characteristically, but only in a latent, vague and
confused form that has not reached the threshold of universality (Lifshits
1984, 125).
1
Hegel (1971, 106): Platon erschien die Realitat des Geistesdes Geistes, insofern er der Natur
entgegengesetzt istin ihrer hochsten Wahrheit, namlich als die Organisation eines Staats.
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In the opinion of Lifshits, nature itself creates masterpieces which embody the
ideal. In short, the ideal exists in everything, it exists in the material world and in
consciousness, it exists in society and in nature or else it does not exist anywhere
(Lifshits 1984, 123). In society and in nature this needs to be stressed. In the case
of nature we are talking about the ideal forms and relations among material things
which in themselves are not substance, but certain limits of what our sensual
perceptions give us through experience (ibid.) In science, such limits are usually
identified with the laws of nature expressed through scientific abstractions. Lifshits
cites some examples:
Such ideals are the ideal gas, and the ideal crystal, real abstractions that can be
approximated in the same way as a polyhedron with an infinitely increasing
number of sides approximates a circle. (ibid.).
The laws of nature turn out to be not scientific but real abstractions at the basis of
things whose ideal character is proved by the fact that they are not substantive.
Lifshits stresses that infinity as the ideal limit has not been seen or heard or smelled
by anyone. Interestingly, the Last Mohican of the Russian Silver Age, Aleksey
Losev, adduces a similar argument to prove the ideal character of the laws of nature:
All bodies fall. But the law that causes bodies to fall is not itself falling
anywhere and in general is not a body that one can smell or touch. On this
point, Platonism is irrefutable (Losev and Takho-Godi 1993, 9293).
Platonism, according to Losev, is irrefutable because everything that is not material
is ideal. Thus physicalism, which identifies matter and substance, connects with its
opposite, mentalism, but while in Plato things and ideas belong to two worlds, in
Losev the ideal laws order things from within nature.
Lifshits also recaps on what todays Marxists could usefully borrow from
Plato. But in the article Ob idealnom i realnom he invokes, first of all, Hegel
arguing that reality must correspond to its concept. The latter sets an ideal limit
towards which reality tends in the process of maturing. True cognition is cognition
of the true in reality, he writes, and accordingly the scientists intellect reflects real
abstractions produced by nature.
But while for the development of science the most important thing is that reality
should ascend to the level of being reflected in scientific abstractions, what about the
maturity of society that enables it to grasp the essence of things? Why was it that the
law of gravitation was discovered not before and not after but during the age of
industrial revolution? The laws of mechanics have always existed, but mechanics
was developed only in modern times.
On the face of it, these are elementary Marxist truths about the interconnection
between the development of science and mans productive activities. Industrial
history, according to Marx, is an open book of human psychology. If somebody tells
us that this was what early Marx wrote, we may point out that the same was
repeated by the later Engels:
Both natural sciences and philosophy have so far totally neglected the study of
the influence of mans activities on his thought. They know, on the one hand,
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only nature, and on the other hand, only thought. But the most essential and
immediate foundation of human thought is precisely the change of nature by
man and not nature as such, and human reason has developed even as man was
learning to change nature (Engels 1974, 498).
Citing examples from the history of science, Lifshits sidesteps this aspect. But while
with Lifshits scientific abstractions directly express the truth of being, in Ilyenkov
the prerequisite of all scientific abstractions is the process of abstraction, i.e. the
identification and generalisation of the laws of nature in the process of mans labour
activities. In this context the original abstraction of humanity is the instrument of
labour.
According to Ilyenkov, not nature as such, but only practice, transforming nature,
can extract the universal natural forms and turn them into necessary forms of human
activity. Labour is Marxisms bedrock concept. According to Ilyenkov, the process
of idealisation of reality begins in mans labour activities that transform the material
world. In labour the material and the ideal, the objective and the subjective are not
only neighbouring opposites, but conjugates. In labour they transform into each
other, and this is the basis of Ilyenkovs understanding of the ideal.
The ideal form is the form of a thing created by social-human labour,
reproducing forms of the objective material world, which exist independently
of man. Or, conversely, the form of labour realised in the substance of nature,
embodied in it, alienated in it, realised in it and, therefore, presenting
itself to man, the creator, as the form of a thing or as a special relationship
among things, a relationship in which one thing realises, reflects another, in
which man has placed these things, his labour, and which would never arise on
its own. This is why man contemplates the ideal as being outside himself,
outside his own eyes, outside his own headas existing objective reality. It is
only because of this that he frequently and easily confuses the ideal with the
material, assuming those forms and relations between things that he created
himself (Ilyenkov 2014, 76).
If the ideal is generated in the practical activity of man, then it does not and cannot
exist before the emergence of the world of culture. The counter-argument that the
forms of culture, and therefore the ideal, are already present in nature potentially
means that culture and nature are essentially identical, and differ in form only. So,
the essence of man is already present latently among animals, and vice versa, human
cultural life actualises the essence of the amoeba. Such a reductive logic was alien
to Ilyenkov. He sees the essence of man exactly in labour, where natural laws
become the principle of transforming human activity, eo ipso acquiring the ideal
form. James Watts double action steam engine is based on the laws of nature and
yet it cannot exist in nature. This difference is only the tip of the iceberg which,
however, hides a whole range of disagreements between Lifshits and Ilyenkov.
In Lifshits opinion, human labour does not so much transform as reproduce, not
so much create as simply confers a cultural form on natural processes. Thus, man
merely transfers the ideal from nature into culture. From where could human
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labour derive something ideal, he writes, if it did not constitute a stylisation of the
processes of nature that is useful for the social man?(Lifshits 1984, 123).
For Ilyenkov, on the contrary, it is important to understand the creative essence
of labour, i.e. how man, transforming nature, at the same time idealises it. In labour,
the aim is to produce a utilitarian material object, but the ideal is also present, first,
at the stage of setting the goal, because labour is purposeful human activity, and
second, as the sign of the practicability of activity that endures in the shape of a
finished product. The ideal is born through labour in the form of the goal as an
image (model) of the future product. Paraphrasing Marx, one can say that mans
work differs from that of a bee in that human activity bifurcates into the opposites of
the material and the ideal in this initial cell. And the ideal is a necessary moment of
material activity.
On the other hand, man as the subject of labour approaches pristine nature in
terms of the models already generated by practice. We refer to the ideal in nature as
that which approximates manufactured objects, and thereby the models in our head.
When shipbuilders choose the wood for making a mast they look above all for a
straight tree. They usually choose the pine-tree which grows straight. The ship
carpenter can say that the pine-tree is an ideal mast. He looks at the tree through the
prism of his goal and the future result. This brings about a situationparadoxical
for common sensewhen it is not the ideal in man that reflects the material, but
vice versa: the ideal in nature turns out to be a reflection of what is in our head
and in our labour activity. The turnaround of the ideal and material in the dialectics
of labour, in the practical relationship of man and the world, goes a long way to
explain the source of mystifications of philosophical idealism. The dialectics of the
ideal and the material is what is conspicuously absent in Lifshitss work: with him,
these opposites do not morph into each other.
In his article Ob idealnom i realnom Lifshits quotes Ilyenkov:
Man exists as man, as the subject of activity directed at the surrounding world
and at himself for as long as he actively produces his real life in forms created
by himself, by his own work (Ilenkov 1974, 194).
It is in labour, in real transformation of the surrounding world and of oneself as
its metamorphosis, Ilyenkov goes on, that the ideal is born and is functioning,
that reality, nature, and social relations are idealised, that the language of
symbols as an external body of the ideal image of the outside world is born.
Herein lies the mystery of the ideal and herein lies its solution (ibid.).
Ilyenkov obviously links here, yet again, the origin of the ideal to mans labour
activity through which both nature and social relations are idealised. It also
produces symbolic forms that mediate collective activities in which the ideal
becomes the content of the cultural product.
Lifshits seeks to reduce Ilyenkovs view of the ideal in the form of a symbol.
Quoting Ilyenkov, he states that one body, while remaining itself, constitutes the
being of another body and its ideal being as such, being that differs from its
immediate corporeal form. This, Lifshits stresses, is the source of the ideal
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S. Mareev
according to Ilyenkov. Thus is born the ideal, he states referring to Ilyenkov. It

exists where one body, for all its material character, becomes the symbol of another
body (Lifshits 1984, 122). What message does Lifshits seek to convey here? That
Ilyenkovs ideal is generated not through labour, but through symbolic activity.
Thus, Lifshits withdraws the central link, viz. the concept of labour, from Ilyenkovs
theory of the ideal, and then he propose to take as its basis some derivative concept.
Lifshits maintains that, in Ilyenkov, only the things that man turns into symbols of
other things are ideal.
One cannot understand Ilyenkovs dialectics of the ideal without the historical
activity approach. Otherwise it looks like a strange conglomeration of symbols, as
happens in Lifshits. The latter notes, that among the things that mediate the
individuals, producing their own social life, Ilyenkov includes
the words of language, books, statues, temples, clubs, TV towers and (most
importantly) the instruments of labour, beginning from a stone axe and a bone
needle to a modern automated factory [] But embodying mans purposive
activity in a temple or a statue is very different from embodying it in the
products of material production including the tools of such production down to
a modern automated factory. You yourself say that there is a fundamental
difference between material and intellectual labour (Lifshits 2003, 4589).
While labour is an original form of human activity, its division into mental and
physical labour, and accordingly the distinction between material and mental
production, is a product of history. The opposition between material and mental
activities arises not directly from the division of labour but from its alienation.
Looking at the world of someone who works with a shovel or even the work of an
automated factory operator it is hard to say that they represent something ideal. The
ideal element has long gone from this labour turning labour into a purely physical
and even physiological process. Labour, after elevating man above nature, ended up
by dragging him back there. The worker has again become a dumb animal. But that
is alienated labour, or, as Marx put it, it is abstract labour, no more than the release
of physical and mental energy.
This situation produces a juxtaposition and even a gulf between material and
mental production. It appears that for Lifshits material production is only possible in
the alienated form in which the ideal element has been extinguished.
Material production is a self-developing process independent of our will in
which the inventions of the human mind embodied in drawings are only Ideell,
that is, the abstract aspect of an integral process. For all the importance of
science in this process, it cannot be said that the history of industry is the
history of inventions (Lifshits 2003, 261).
Obviously, slaves could not invent anything. It was the system of slavery that
created the gap between material and mental labour. Freedom in this context
migrated entirely into the realm of mental production. But this does not mean that
slavery should be perpetuated if the arts, science, and philosophy are to flourish.
Still less is it grounds for maintaining that only mental labour generates the ideal. As
Lifshits writes,
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[] mental labour is the domain of freedom par excellence, and when, owing
to historical circumstances, it is governed by the laws of material productive
labour, i.e. becomes a necessity in the direct economic sense of the word, it
does not in principle correspond to its true nature. In mental activity society
achieves a higher degree of ideal, although already Adam Smith noted with
surprise that the servants of the ideal, that is, scholars and writers were more
prone to quarrel and show ill will towards one another. But that paradox needs
to be considered more carefully. Immediate productive labour as the sphere of
material necessity inherently is less inclined to what may be called the ideal in
any sense of that word (Lifshits 2003, 262).
We see that the link between mental activity and material practice, according to
Lifshits, can only be forced by circumstances. By transforming nature, man
improves his material status whereas the ideal meaning of his life lies above
practice: in philosophy, science, and most notably in the arts which recreate the
ideal content of Being. Therefore it is clear that, according to Lifshits, the problem
of the ideal is resolved not through labour but through contemplation.
In Ilyenkov, man acts freely not when he imitates nature, even in its supreme
manifestations, but when he transcends nature. Beginning from the creative
synthesis of natures pure forms that are rooted in the foundations of cultural life
with its objective laws and ending with the aesthetic norms and the moral
imperative.
Man has undoubtedly crossed the boundaries of nature. But he has been able to
do so only by not living according to the laws of nature, but according to social
laws, including morality which does not exist without free choice. He has become
the master of nature, including the nature of his own organic body, by turning it into
a tool for achieving human goals. If the ideal is generated in physical activity as an
image of the goal, it is there that one should look for the sources of the ideal in the
relations among people who no longer live in herds or flocks, but in a collective
where the moral imperative is to treat the other as the goal,never as a means.
Morality is based on a similar dialectical turnaround when the animal instinct and
selfishness are replaced by conscious altruism as the necessity of sacrificing myself
for the sake of another. Such is the sense of Kants categorical imperative. But
Lifshits here is looking, once again, not for differences but for similarities, declaring
that the love of scorpions presages Romeo and Juliet (Lifshits 1984, 130).
However, this makes one think not of Marx but rather of Konrad Lorenz who
regards human aggression as a continuation of animal aggression. Where is the ideal
here?
On a large scale Lifshits fails to cope with the dialectics of the objective and
subjective, culture and nature. He suspects that behind the dialectical elements of
Ilyenkovs concept of the ideal there lurk concessions to subjectivism. What is
dialectics for Ilyenkov appears to be a serious mistake for Lifshits. This applies
above all to the essence of man as the subject of activity. At this point the circle of
reflection is broken. According to Lifshits, unless one recognises that humanity
stylises nature the inevitable conclusion is that man can project and impose on the
world arbitrary subjective schemes of action.
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S. Mareev
Both in nature and society, Lifshits writes, there is an orgy of what is

unreasonable, cruel and ugly. Lifshits speaks not only about the ideal, but also
about good and evil inside nature that is outside humanity and predates humanity.
But when we impute moral characteristics and ideal values to pristine nature, as
Lifshits does, anthropomorphism is inevitable. The tiger is as much part of nature as
lightning because both can kill man. But to accuse lightning of being cruel is as odd
as accusing the axe with which a sacrificial animal is slaughtered. In ancient times
this was how people tried to absolve themselves of guilt.
One can call a tiger cruel only metaphorically as an image of human cruelty.
Nature can be kind or cruel only with regard to man. Hegel wrote that when a
criminal is judged by a human court, thereby his human dignity is recognised: an
animal is never judged, it is simply killed. Feeling pity for a slaughtered animal or,
for example, disapproving of the behaviour of a domestic dog is another matter.
In this case we treat in human terms those who have already been drawn into the
world of culture, those with whom we relate. But ascribing human features to nature
in general and calling it to account reveals a mythological attitude to it. The same
happens to the ideal.
A seafarer would say: the wind is ideal for putting out to sea, because it is fair
and moderate so it is not going to tear the sails and the tackle. If it does tear the sails
it ceases to be ideal. Things in nature are only ideal because they ideally meet some
human need, correspond to our activities. This is the essence of any human
invention. It becomes ideal when its external and internal forms correspond to the
exigencies of mans work. Incidentally, using wind as the prime mover in sailing is
also an invention, and one of the most significant inventions at that. What is ideal is
the technique of the use of that natural element.
Strictly speaking, it is not the wind, the fire or the stars that are ideal, but the
cunning (List), as Hegel put it,2 the techniques that people have used to harness
wind, fire, the ox, and now nuclear energy. The efforts and the degree of the
transformation of the forces of nature of course differ in these examples. But it is
important that they are ideal only to the extent that they contribute to the human
good, although in themselves they are merely material. This is not to say that the
ideal is subjective, that it is only in the head.
On that issue Lifshits again faces a dilemma. The ideal is generated either in the
head or in nature. If its cause is not in the head then it is in nature. But that again
ignores the mediating stage of practice that transforms nature in what can become
the possession of a clever head. According to Marx, in the process of material
production people produce not only boots, canvasses and other material goods, but
their own social relations. Indeed, people produce not only their social relations, but
also the science of nature, its main concepts that are beyond the mental reach of
such a Marxist as Lifshits.
Lifshits balks at the idea that practice is the beginning of the ideal, practice that
transforms nature into culture and that ideal values are ascribed to nature only when
2
Hegel (1987, 190): Ehre der List gegen die Macht, die blinde Macht an einer Seite anfassen, da sie
sich gegen sich selbst richtetsie begreifen, sie als Bestimmtheit fassen, gegen diese tatig seinoder sie
als Bewegung eben in sich selbst zuruckgehen machen, sich aufzuheben [].
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it is drawn into culture in one way or another, that is, into production, seafaring,
trade, international communication, etc. The sun ensures the life of plants and
animals, including the cultural animals. In agricultural civilizations it is the main
deity. It is ideal precisely because it corresponds to human good. But in the absence
of rain, the sun brings evil and therefore ceases to be objectively ideal for us. Hence,
the sun is ideal not in itself, but only for us, and the whole of nature can be ideal
only for us, not in itself, as Lifshits supposes.
For him it is important that our head may contain all sorts of rubbish that does not
correspond to the truth and objective reality. In order to distinguish what is only in
the head from what is objectively ideal Lifshits introduces a terminological
distinction, utilising the difference between the German adjectives ideell and ideal.
He claimed that the distinction was first drawn by Marx who in his study of the
value form allegedly used only the term ideell. And he argued that in all the
excellent quotations about the ideal, cited by Ilyenkov, Marx used das Ideelle and
not das Ideal.
Having analysed Marxs original texts, Andrey Maidansky demonstrates that
such an assertion is incorrect: two quotations, cited by Ilyenkov, contain the term
ideal (as an adverb and an adjective). And in other works, beginning from the Paris
manuscripts of 1844, Marx used the term ideal to characterise money. Marx,
unlike Lifshits, did not limit the category of ideale to something that evokes
admiration and was in no hurry to dismiss all the ugly things as material
relations (see Maidanskij 2012, 1239). It is worth noting that Lifshits failed to
find even a single case where Marx uses the term das Ideal to refer to the highest
form of manifesting the real. And Marx never mentioned the existence of the ideal
in nature either.
Of course, one should distinguish the ideal in our head, i.e. the truth that
corresponds to objective reality, from what does not correspond to anything real.
The latter may be termed, for example, as mental. A thought can be false, and
then it is not ideal. The terminological differences between das Ideelle and das
Ideal, introduced by Lifshits, look like a purely scholastic issue. But within the
concept of the ideal, proposed by Lifshits, it is part of the critique of Ilyenkov who
allegedly imputes the true ideal to false ideas and non-genuine being. Indeed, the
example of value which is represented in the commodity only ideally (Marx),
given by Ilyenkov in his article Dialectics of the Ideal, is not exactly felicitous.
Until a commodity has been sold, its value exists merely as a price. Ilyenkovs
critics latched on to this asking where he found the ideal here.
Let us approach the problem from another direction and ask, what is an ideal
poison and an ideal medicine? Does a medicine, used as a poison, cease to be ideal?
We have already said that, even a natural thing or object becomes ideal only with
regard to our needs. The purpose can make an object truly ideal, but it is another
question whether this attitude to the object is based on the world of culture, in which
every creation bears the imprint of production activity, and that the form of activity,
posited as the form of a thing, always involves an element of idealisation of nature.
The concept of evil genius expresses this contradiction connected with the course
of history in its alienated form.
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S. Mareev
The question of the truth value of our concept divorced from practice, Marx
wrote, is purely scholastic. Scholasticism in general begins where issues are isolated
from material practice. The question of the ideal, like the question of the truth, is
also a practical and concrete historical question. The same holds for the questions of
value, money and wealth.
The dialectics consists in that one and the same thing can be used for good or evil
purposes. The embodiment of value is money, gold, but here even the size of the
sum matters. In Platos ideal republic artisans need coins to exchange their
products for other products. Money as a means of exchange serves the Good and
therefore is ideal. By contrast, gold and silver as a means of exchange in
international and overseas trade where goods are bought to be sold is another matter.
As a means of enrichment, money, according to Plato, introduces hostility and
discord, and therefore it is evil. Excessive wealth of some people generates poverty
of other people at the opposite pole, and in that sense it is material. Plato defines the
ideal and material in accordance with whether a thing contributes to the idea of
Good. Money and wealth are like matches with which one can make a fire to warm
oneself or set a neighbours house on fire. Nevertheless in human culture matches
are a great good, otherwise people would still be extracting fire from pieces of flint
stones.
Thus the boundary between the ideal and the material is not a boundary between
the ideas in our head and objective reality. Lifshits rightly remarks: is an ideal friend
ideal only in my head? If you tell the woman you love You are my ideal which is
only in my head, your chances of winning over that woman are nil. But in
Ilyenkov, unlike Lifshits, an ideal friend, an ideal woman, an ideal ship objectively
exist not in nature but in culture. We can talk about the ideal in nature only when it
is involved in culture, even if only in our understanding. Then our concept becomes
ideal, albeit only in our head.
In a letter addressed to M.G.Mikhailov, Lifshits makes this comment concerning
Ilyenkov:
Although he has borrowed a great deal from me and Lukacs, on the other
hand, especially at the later stage, he became close with psychologists who are
ignorant of philosophy. They invented the concept of activity which to them
is the same as the pineal gland was to Descartes, i.e. a cross between mind
and matter. But such a thing does not exist, and activity is either material or
mental. I seek a solution to the problem of the ideal elsewhere and my advice
is to take a few more lessons in the materialist dialectics of Plato (Lifshits
2003, 3301).
Here the difference between Lifshits and Ilyenkov is carried to the point where it
diverges from the entire cultural-historical theory which in our days is represented
L.S. Vygotsky, A.N. Leontyev, and E.V. Ilyenkov. But psychologists have not
invented the concept of activity. Its origin should be traced not to vulgar
materialism, as Lifshits improperly does, but to the dialectical ideas of the German
classics. In Kant, thought and cognition is not a passive mirror that reflects the
external world but, on the contrary, a process of active construction. The pioneer of
the cultural-historical tradition, L.S. Vygotsky, following Marx, refers to the
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material and transformative character of the activities that form the basis of our
mentality and thought.
Lifshits derives the ideal, and man himself, from nature, whereas Ilyenkov
derives it from the dialectics of labour, because man himself, his feelings and
thought, and the higher ideal forms of cultural being arise within the labour process.
Hence Lifshitss solution of the problem of the ideal is contemplative and
Ilyenkovs is activity-based.
References
Engels, F. (1974), Dialektik der Natur. In K. Marx & F. Engels (Eds.), Werke (43 Bde., Erganzungsband,
Erster Teil). Berlin: Dietz Verlag, DDR.
Hegel, G. W. F. (Ed.). (1971). Vorlesungen uber die Geschichte der philosophie II. In Werke (20 Bde.,
1971, Bd. 19). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1987). Jenaer Systementwurfe III. Naturphilosophie und Philosophie des Geistes. Felix
Meiner: Hamburg.
Ilenkov, E. V. (1974). Dialekticheskaja logika. Moskva: Politizdat.
Ilyenkov, E.V. (2014). Dialectics of the Ideal. In A. Levant & V. Oittinen (Eds.) Dialectics of the ideal
(A. Levant trans.). Leiden, Boston: Brill.
Lifshits, M. A. (1984). Ob idealnom i realnom. Voprosy filosofii, 10, 120145.
Losev, A. F., & Takho-Godi, A. A. (1993). Platon. Aristotel. Moskva: Molodaja gvardija.
Maidanskij, A. D. (2012). Idealnoe u Marksa: Audit prekrasnykh citat. In E. V. Ilenkov (Ed.)
Idealnoe, myshlenie, soznanie (vols. 1, 2, pp. 1239). Moskva: SGA.
123

DOI 10.1007/s11212-016-9262-9
Hegels spirit, Marxist aesthetics and Stalinist

restoration: the tragic philosophy of history of Mikhail
Lifshits
Vesa Oittinen1
Abstract The article focuses on one highly idiosyncratic trait of Lifshits reading of
Hegel, namely his assertion that the epoch of Restoration during which Hegel
produced his main works was analogous to the period of the 1930s in the USSR. In
both cases, constructive tasks came to the fore as the fermentation of the revolutionary era waned. On this assumption, Lifshits built up his idea of a Restauratio
magna, which should serve as the guiding star of cultural politics. In fact, Lifshits
came very near to rehabilitating of Edmund Burkes views about the conservation of
cultural heritage, which is highly problematic in light of his initial Marxist
convictions.
The Restauratio Magna project

During his years of isolation, Lifshits worked on many fields of aesthetics, literature
theory, and philosophy. According to Arslanov (2010, 5), a glance at the materials
in Lifshits archive soon convinces one that he actually was the creator of a new
system of views, which he modestly called everyday Marxism. There were other
labels for the new interpretation of Marxism put forth by Lifshits, such as
ontognoseology or theory of identities (teoriya tozhdestv). Arslanov goes even
so far as to propose System of Transcendental Materialism as a name for
Lifshitss philosophy (ibid., 5).
In this paper, I will, however, focus on only one particular aspect of Lifshitss
pursuits, namely on the ambitious historico-philosophical project which grew out of
the theory of art and culture presented in his writings of the 1930s. Its main
& Vesa Oittinen
[email protected];
http://www.helsinki.fi/aleksanteri/
1
Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 42, 00014 Helsinki, Finland
123
V. Oittinen
inspiration came from Hegel, but not from Hegel the logician. Instead, it was Hegel
as the philosopher of historical reconciliation (Versohnung) who was important for
Lifshits. In its aspirations, this project went much further than Lukacss attempts to
make Hegel useful for Marxism, and the fact that its main contours were discernible
already in Lifshits early works published in the 1930s is an indication that his
collaboration with Lukacs did not necessarily mean that he shared the same
position.
Later, Lifshits dubbed his project as Restauratio Magna, with an obvious hint to
Bacons programme of the augmentation of sciences, Instauratio Magna. That
Lifshits saw himself as a reformer of Marxism comparable to Bacon as the
renovator of the sciences, shows the degree of his ambition. But whilst Bacon aimed
at a revolution of the sciences, Lifshits goals were rather the other way round: the
question was how to preserve, maintain, and nurture the cultural heritage threatened
by the Revolution.
Lifshits Restauratio Magna project is quite unknown even to those few who
have read and appreciated his work in Marxist aesthetics. Lukacs did not comment
on this. The first who noticed its existence seems to be the Hungarian philosopher
Sziklai (1990, 92 ff.) who, in a book on Lukacss Moscow period, published in
Hungarian in 1987 and in German a bit later, in 1990, noted the peculiar view
Lifshits had of Hegel in his articles from the early 1930s. For example, in the essay
Estetika Gegelya i dialekticheskii materializm, published in the journal Proletarskaya literatura in 1931 (republished in Lifshits 2012a, b), Lifshits first drew
attention to the utopian socialist Saint-Simon, who, writing in 1813, following the
turmoils of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, asserted that the
humanity is now entering the period of a positive system. The order of the day is
to begin with scientific research which shall replace the revolutionary experiments.
Saint-Simon had thus, according to Lifshits, quite accurately formulated the task
which Hegels philosophy had to solve. In the foreword to the Science of Logic,
which Hegel wrote in 1812 at about the same time that Saint-Simon was working on
his system, he says:
However, once the substantial form of the spirit has inwardly reconstituted
itself, all attempts to preserve the forms of an earlier culture are utterly in vain;
like withered leaves they are pushed off by the new buds already growing at
their roots [] On the other hand, it seems that the period of fermentation
with which a new creative idea begins is past. In its first manifestation, such an
idea usually displays a fanatical hostility toward the entrenched systematization of the older principle; usually, too, it is fearful of losing itself in the
ramifications of the particular [Ausdehnung des Besonderen] and again it
shuns the labour required for a scientific elaboration of the new principle and
in its need for such, it grasps to begin with at an empty formalism. The
challenge to elaborate and systematize the material now becomes all the more
pressing. There is a period in the culture of an epoch as in the culture of the
individual, when the primary concern is the acquisition and assertion of the
principle in its undeveloped intensity (Hegel 1969, 2627; cf. Hegel 1999, 67
for the original).
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Hegels Spirit, Marxist Aesthetics and Stalinist
I apologize for the long quotation, but it is justifiable, since Hegel here expresses the
main point which became the cornerstone of Lifshits own historico-philosophical
theory. Hegels philosophy of history is essentially a theory of a post-revolutionary
age, when the time of fermentation already belongs to the past:
The heroic period of the new order is thus finished. Now the task is to
constitute the bourgeois society and bourgeois state, to restore the order which
is necessary for the success of men of practical business [vosstanovit
porjadok, neobkhodimyi dlya preuspevaniya delovykh lyudei]. The constitutional administration, promised by Robespierre, obtains its prosaic realisation.
Coming in lieu of the revolutionary system, it has to take care mainly of civic,
but not of public freedom, and guarantee that the government does not
interfere in the business of private persons (Lifshits 2012a, b, 58).
As Sziklai (1990, 93) comments, Lifshits sees the actuality of Hegel in the fact that
he represents the German theory of the French Revolution and thus at the same time
is a theoretician of post-revolutionary times. The Marxist thinkers of today, too,
have no other task than to be philosophers of a post-revolutionary situation,
according to Lifshits. There is a direct analogy between the age of the Restoration
and the thirties in the Soviet Union. Both are periods of construction which began
following the negative and destructive period of the Revolution.
Lifshits does not, however, push this analogy too far. While for Hegel the
bourgeois revolution ends in reconciliation with reality (the famous Hegelian
Versohnung), for the Marxists historical dialectics develops instead through the
aggravation of contradictions until they find their solution in a revolutionary turn:
Hegel did not and could not carry to the end the idea of how contradictions
generate development. The social antagonisms he noted obtain their most
complete form in the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and proletariat.
They are solved in the real historical struggle between these contraries, in the
movement towards the dictatorship of the proletariat and the liquidation of
social classes. To understand this means already to accept the viewpoint of
Marx. Hegel was, in a sense, the antipode to Marx exactly because this way of
resolving the contradictions did not exist for him [] Thus, the philosophy of
Hegel became a theoretical justification of the idea that the revolutionary
process comes to a halt in its bourgeois phase (Lifshits 2012a, b, 6263).
Lifshits thesis, that the period inaugurated by the great leap of 19291930 in the
Soviet Union, when Stalin ended the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the period of
five-year plans started, is analogous to the Restoration period following the French
Revolution, seems to have been derived from his theory of art as well as from
discussions of the late 1920s. Lifshits developed his aesthetics as a critique of and
an alternative both to the attempts to reduce the theory of art to a mere sociology
and against formalist views on the tasks of art. The Proletkult movement, which
drew on ideas of Aleksandr Bogdanov, Lenins old adversary, preached a more or
less total break with all the old culture. In the Soviet Union, they declared, a quite
new culture must be built on purely proletarian foundations. These declarations
unquestionably exhibited analogies with similar tendencies during the most radical
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V. Oittinen
phases of the French Revolution, when it was suggested that allfeudal culture
should be abandoned and churches and other monuments were vandalised.
Both Lenin and Lunacharskii, the Peoples Commissar for Culture, expressed
doubts with regard to the ultra-leftist tendencies. In October 1920, Lenin worked on
a draft of On Proletarian Culture, in which he stated that the task of Marxism is not
to break altogether with the past, but to absorb and preserve the heritage of previous
ages:
Marxism has won its historic significance as the ideology of the revolutionary
proletariat because, far from rejecting the most valuable achievements of the
bourgeois epoch, it has, on the contrary, assimilated and refashioned
everything of value in the more than two thousand years of the development
of human thought and culture. Only further work on this basis and in this
direction, inspired by the practical experience of the proletarian dictatorship as
the final stage in the struggle against every form of exploitation, can be
recognised as the development of a genuine proletarian culture (Lenin 1973,
316).
Lenins idea of Marxism as the quintessence of all previous cultures was intended as
an argument against the negative and nihilistic tendencies of the Proletkult and
similar ultra-leftist currents, that is, it was presented as an argument in a concrete
political situation. Lifshits, however, though adhering in the main to the views of
Lunacharskii and Lenin, takes the idea much farther. Actually, he turns it into a
historico-philosophical thesis in a way that goes far beyond what Lenin intended.
He is influenced not only by Hegel, but even by Giambattista Vico, about whom he
published an extensive essay in 19361937 and whose circular philosophy of history
seems to have much impressed him.1
In retrospect, in an interview with Laszlo Sziklai, conducted in November 1978,
Lifshits asserts that, in fact, it is not quite in order to see him as an aesthetician only.
I wanted to show that in Marxism as a world-view there exists an aesthetic, or if
you like, a moral-aesthetic tone, the absence of which is sometimes so pretentiously
lamented. This aesthetic moment in Marxism should not be understood as
something belonging only to some special craft:
Actually, I meant by aesthetics something else it is a kind of a philosophy of
culture, or putting the point more exactly, I had the ambition to put forth a
Marxist philosophy of history in a popular form [] [It was] a historical
world-view, a vision of the internal structure of human history as a totality, a
totality which develops in a contradictory way (Lifshits 2012b, 80).
I do not deal in my paper further with Lifshits study of Vico, since it is the subject of Aleksandr
Dmitrievs paper in this SEET issue. It should be noted, however, that a synthesis of Vicos cyclical
philosophy of history with Hegels theory can be construed rather effortlessly. For Hegel, too, the
previous stages of human history tended to repeat themselves laterbut on a higher level of development,
so that the movement of history took in Hegel the shape of an upward-going spiral. For Lifshits it must
not have been very difficult to use both Vicoan and Hegelian elements for his own idiosyncratic concept
of history.
123
Lifshits thus says outrightly that his intention has been to create a philosophical
synthesis of world history on the basis of the experience of the October revolution
a synthesis which, obviously, is not of the same character as offered by historical
materialism. In the same interview, Lifshits stresses that his and Lukacs interest in
Hegel was not of the same sort as that of Deborin and his disciples, who in the
canonical histories of Soviet philosophy are dubbed as Hegelians or dialecticians (in contrast to the Mechanists).
I disliked (as did Lukacs by the way) the Deborin school, as it was kind of
Katheder-Marxism2 [] Our interest in Hegel was of quite different character.
For us, what was important in the doctrine of the German thinker was its real
content and deeply tragic attitude towards the events of the French Revolution
and the post-revolutionary epoch. All this had much in common with the
problems which people encountered in trying to understand the huge historical
changes of our days (Lifshits 2012b, 8384).
The problem Lifshits here is referring to can be described briefly as the problem of
the relation between a pars destruens and pars construens in a revolutionary
process. In its initial phases, the revolution (both the French and the October
Revolution) acted in a destructive manner, dismantling the ancien regime. Of
course, they introduced new principles of social life, which were better than the old
ones, but at the same time these principles were still presented in an abstract
manner:
I repeat once more: this was expressly the problem of limiting the new which
was abstract and moving to newness of a kind which comprises the whole
fullness of life. Revolutionary declarations must be turned into flesh and blood
[] and they must cover the wholeness of the everyday existence of men, they
shall not remain abstract promises or, as the famous adversary of the French
Revolution, Edmund Burke said, a naked abstraction (Lifshits 2012b, 86).
It seems that the mention of Edmund Burke is here not fortuitous. The name of
Burke crops up here and there, although rather sparsely, in the oeuvre of Lifshits,
and mostly in a positive or at least neutral connotation. Burkes critique of the
excesses of the French Revolution, especially in its Jacobine phase, is a direct
parallel to Lifshitss own critique of the Proletkult and other forms of ultra-Leftism
in Russia of the 1920s.
In the same interview with Sziklai, Lifshits returns once more to his and Lukacss
attitude to Hegel:
Thus, my views on Hegel in the beginning of the 1930s were not scholarly
[] The way Lukacs and I related to Hegel in this period had a serious
content: we wanted to follow a Leninist tradition in analysing the questions of
socialist revolution [] The total negation of everything old should be
replaced by a more constructive period, which actually would deepen the
revolutionary process, although it outwardly might seem like a restoration of
2
An allusion to the German expression Kathedersozialisten, which meant academic bourgeois Marx
scholarship.
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V. Oittinen
the old National Defence, autarchy, introduction of the principle of cost

accounting(Lifshits 2012b, 87).
Some problems arise here. First, it is true that Hegels stance on Versohnung did not
mean that he accepted the Restoration. This is a legend put forth by the German
liberal Rudolf Haym in his biography of Hegel 1857 and later repeated in the
Anglophone world with, if possible, yet a stronger bias against Hegel by such men
as Bertrand Russell or Karl Popper. Current research (Charles Taylor, Terry Pinker,
Charles Pippin) has been able to show that Hegels social philosophy should be
understood above all as a theory of modernity, a theory of the modern state and
modern subjectivity. Reconciliation is for Hegel no more than the way in which
the modern worldthe principle of freedomhas become reality. For Hegel,
modernity is the ultimate goal of the World Spirit, which always finds its way,
despite accidental disturbances. In the realised modern world (Hegel thought this
realisation was accomplished already in his times), the present guise of the Spirit
includes in itself all the previous levels (die gegenwartige Gestalt des Geistes
alle fruheren Stufen in sich begreift; Hegel 1848, 98). One does not, however, find
in Hegel the sort of dialectics of Revolution and Restoration that Lifshits ascribes
to him. Hegel does not understand the modern world as a dialectical synthesis of
the excesses of revolution, on the one hand, and the reactionary measures of the
Restoration, on the other. Rather, both the revolution and the restoration are for
Hegel something accidental compared with the Spirit itself, which, as the principle
of freedom and self-consciousness, forms the substance of modernity. One could say
that, for Hegel, the emergence of modernity was an irreversible process, and it was
exactly for this reason that it was impossible for the Bourbons to undo the
achievements of the Revolution; the present guise of the Spirit did not allow a
simple return to the ancien regime.
A further problem in Lifshitss interpretation of history is that it is questionable
whether one can call the Great Turn of 1929/1930 the beginning of a constructive
era only. True, the First and then the Second Five-Years Plans were launched and
the whole country became an immense building site. The Stalinist cultural policy
made an abrupt end of avant-gardist and other Leftist experiments and declared a
return to more traditional forms in art, literature, and architecture. However, at the
same time the mass liquidation of the kulaks and forced collectivization led to the
destruction of the Russian countryside that was so severe that Russia is still
suffering its consequences. In this respect, Lifshitss analogy with the Restoration
period in Europe clearly does not work. It is impossible to speak of the 1930s as an
attempt to return to peaceful old times.
It seems to me that Lifshits here was in a way captivated by the conceptual
apparatus of the Marxism of the 1930s. If the concept of modernity denotes the
continuity of historical process, it was just this concept which was absent in the
Marxism of that period. It knew only the idea of rupturethe October Revolution as
the break between two socio-economic formations, capitalism and socialism.
Lifshits was quite right when he sensed the one-sidedness of such a view of history
as a discontinuous sequence of revolutions and transitions from one economic
formation to another. However, he does not seem to have clearly posed the question
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of the moment of continuity in history, its substance so to say. Only much later,
in the early 1980s, and quite independently of Lifshits ideas, there emerged in the
Soviet Union a discussion about the insufficiency of the so-called formational
approach (that is, the sequence of socio-economic formations of primitive
communism, ancient slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism) for the analysis of
historical processes. I cannot here go into the details of this interesting discussion;
suffice it to say that the proposal was to describe the discontinuous side of human
history by means of the received Marxist theory of socio-economic formations
(separated by revolutionary breaks), whilst the continuous side of history should
be conceptually captured by the categories of culture and civilisation (for example,
the Greek and Roman cultural tradition continues to our day despite the violent
breaks at the level of the socio-economic formation).3
How Marxist was Lifshits?

In a recent study, Jubara (2010, 301, 303) sees Lifshits as representing an
independent Marxist position, according to which, in the course of his
alternative assessment of the October revolution, he retreats, in principle, from a
Marxist position to a Hegelian one. Lifshits was concerned with the place of the
revolution in the history of the Spirit, the Hegelian Geist, whose general line of
development is expressly progress in the consciousness of freedom, as the
famous formulation in the Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History
states. Lifshits viewpoint is, in other words, differs from the doctrine of Historical
Materialism, which focuses on the development of the material basis, the forces of
production and social institutions. To put it succinctly, Lifshits is pursuing a kind of
Marxian metaphysics of history, which seems to approach, if not quite transgress the
boundaries of what could be called Marxism proper. His recurring allusions to
Burke indicate that there are strong centrifugal forces in action within his
conception, which threaten to break out from their Marxian casing.
In her paper, Jubara discusses briefly the problem of classifying Lifshits as a
Marxist, but refrains from drawing any final conclusions. She restricts herself to the
observation that Lifshits was in obvious disagreement with Soviet Marxism. On the
other hand, Lifshits seems to take Hegel much more positively than did Marx. For
Marx, the concept of revolutionary praxis was central, a concept we do not find in
Hegel, and which is absent from Lifshits, too. Thus, Lifshits Hegelian Marxism
falls behind Marx paradigm change and is therefore, notwithstanding Lifshits
intentions and proclamations to the contrary, idealism (ibid., 303). Although the
question remains open, where exactly lie the roots of Lifshitss idealism,4 I think
3
Some results of this discussion were summed up in the book of Mchedlov (1980), which was translated
into German in the GDR (Mtschedlow 1983).
4
To my mind, it is not the disregard of the Marxist concept of practice per se which makes Lifshits into
an idealist, but rather his strangely Platonist theory of ideas (for a would-be Marxist indeed strange),
which he developed more in detail in his latter-day polemics with Evald Ilyenkov. According to Lifshits,
ideas have an objective existence in nature outside us. It is, obviously, this theory that he sometimes
called ontognoseology, suggesting that ideas must have an ontological grounding in non-human nature,
123
V. Oittinen
Jubara is right in claiming that Lifshits did not sufficiently take account of the
epistemological break between Hegel and Marxa drawback Lifshits shares by
the way with Lukacs. Instead of a historical-materialist analysis of the French and
Russian Revolutions we thus get a more or less Hegelian metaphysics of history.
Lifshits himself was convinced that he represented the Marxian tradition in a
more authentic way than his colleagues in the Soviet ideological establishment. In a
note preserved in his archive he wrote:
There is a Restauratio Magna already in the Communist Manifesto. It is you
(that is, the bourgeoisie who thinks that it sustains traditions) who dissolve it.
You are criminals. The economic explanation and political development of
this [] Revolution as the preserving force. I was the only one in my day,
who understood this. Lukacs?, Yes, in part5
Lifshits is here referring to the initial pages of the Communist Manifesto, where
Marx and Engels note that the bourgeoisie has not only revolutionised the
instruments of production, but destroyed all the idyllic and patriarchal relations
between men and tore away the familys sentimental veil; in other words it has been
acting as a destructive force and dissolved all traditions. Dialectically, Lifshits now
sees the Revolution as an antithesis to the destruction evoked by the bourgeoisie.
In this paper, I can only briefly dwell on the problems of Lifshitss esoteric
philosophy of history. A thorough assessment is difficult due to the fact that not all
the materials from the Lifshits archive have been published. It seems that a large
part of the manuscripts in Lifshits Nachlass consist of fragments and notes only, the
interpretation of which is a difficult task. Obviously, one can get a rather good
picture of the quality of the archive materials from the volume Chto takoe klassika?
(2004) compiled by Viktor Arslanov. In the foreword Arslanov (2004, 7) warns
readers that it demands no less effort than reading Derrida or Deleuze. Actually,
it demands much more, since the book is a patchwork of small notes, often written
down in elliptic sentences and difficult to interpret as their context is not always
clear.
However, the hitherto published materials allow at least some comments. One
problem relates to the question of analogies. It seems that the basis of Lifshits
philosophy of history consists of analogy judgements. Such judgements are rather
commonplace in speculative theories of history, for example in Arnold Toynbee, or
in the different brands of geopolitics operating with analogies between the
behaviour of political states and biological organisms. While analogical judgements
are not to be rejected outright, since they can of course give useful popular
illustrations of facts, their use, however, introduces a non-scientific and arbitrary
element into theories. Lifshits (2012b, 85) seems to have been conscious of this
problem, since in one passage in the long interview with Sziklai he defends his use
Footnote 4 continued
a grounding which he seems to have interpreted as a kind of pre-existence of ideas ante rem. Here I
cannot go into details, but see: Lifshits (2003).
5
A fragment from the Lifshits archive, with the title Revolyutsiya kak sila khranitelnaya, published in
Nezavisimaya Gazeta 3. XI. 1995, cited here according to Mareeva et al. (2001, 234).
123
of analogies by referring to Lenin, who in some of his writings in 1921 had

compared the situation in which the Bolsheviks were then with the situation of the
Jacobins in 17931794.
However, there is a big difference between Lenins analogies and Lifshitss
philosophy of history. Lenins analysis of the situation in 1921 was restricted to the
similarities in the political and tactical alternatives of the Jacobins and the
Bolsheviks, so to say to the formal side of the matter. In a like manner, military
strategists can compare the battles of Alexander the Great with those of Napoleon,
despite the huge differences in the historical circumstances. In Lifshits case it is
otherwise. For him, the analogies between French and October Revolutions are not
formal, but essential, they constitute the core of his philosophy.
Another problem with Lifshits is, as I hinted above, that the Marxist conceptual
apparatus of the 1930s was not as developed as it is today. For example, Marxs
Grundrisse was unknown to Lifshits and Lukacs when they wrote their seminal
works of the 1930s. In short, the Marxism of those times still carried in many
respects the signature of the theoreticians of the Second International, who had
interpreted it as a mainly economic doctrine and a general theory of social evolution
in an nearly Darwinian sense, and the so-called vulgar sociologism of the 1920s
in the Soviet Union was hardly improvement. That both Lukacs and Lifshits tried to
correct this kind of Marxism with a considerable dose of Hegelianism is entirely
understandable. However, Lifshits seems to have remained in the spell of vulgar
Marxism at least in that he admitted that the class point of view should be applied
to the analysis of literature and art. In order to avoid the class reductionism which
remained a danger in this kind of analysis, he took pains to specify that a great
novelist like Balzac could nevertheless write works of universal significance
despite (vopreki) his class sympathies. However, the categories of despite and
thanks to (blagodarya), which the Techenie often used in the disputes of the
1930s, are, in the last analysis, not very convincing and they do not seem able to
grasp adequately the character of great literature and art.
In other words, it seems that the idea that products of culture may exhibit a
universally human (in Russian: obshechelovecheskii, in German: allgemeinmenschlichthere is no good English equivalent to this term yet, although all-human
and panhuman have been suggested) character, did not occur to Lifshits. The
universally human character of art and culture would follow from the fact that it
is produced by what Marx in the Grundrisse called general labour (allgemeine
Arbeit) and thus is not stigmatised by class divisions. I do not dwell further upon
this point here, but refer the reader to the theory of culture of another Russian
Marxist, Vadim Mezhuev, which to my mind provides a better grasp of the Marxist
account of culture.6
Lifshits critique of vulgar sociologism which sought to reduce the essence of art
to the social position of the artist (so that, for example Tolstois work was seen to
convey the voice of Russian land-owning gentry) was, of course, motivated.
However, the peculiarity of his position seems to be that he develops his argument
6
For Mezhuev, see e.g. my review of his recent books (Oittinen 2009), where I point to some further
problems in Mezhuevs theory, too.
123
V. Oittinen
almost exclusively at the level of an aesthetic and historico-philosophical theory.

This lends to his ideas a speculative tone, and in this respect Lifshits really is not
very far from Hegel. But for a would-be Marxist it seems indeed strange, that
Lifshits does not, as far as I can see, emphasize the material determination of
cultural and historical processes. Lifshits thus is not a historical materialist. It goes
without saying that Marx was not a vulgar sociologist, but he saw nevertheless the
material basis of history in production and human labour. This dimension is mostly
absent from Lifshits aesthetics and theory of culture.
The gravest problem of Lifshits theory of history, howevergrave, of course,
only if we want remain in the orbit of Marxist or at least emancipatory social
theoryis, as I have indicated, the tendency to bring Marx together with the archenemy of the French revolution, Edmund Burke. It is mainly this aspect which raises
doubts about Lifshits Marxism. Indeed, recalling that Marx (Marx 1952, 157), in
his main work Capital, described Burke as a celebrated sophist and sycophant
and laudator temporis acti against the French Revolution, it would be difficult to
find any common point of reference between them.7 So it seems that by embracing
Burke, Lifshits definitely leaves Marxism behind.
We might, of course, first try a lectio benevolens and interpret Lifshits stance in
such a way that he is regarded as one of the first theoreticians who detected the
limits of Marxism as soon as it is seen in light of the post-capitalism. From this point
of view, Marxs theory is not able to describe adequately the realities of a postcapitalist society. After all, Marxism emerged as a critical theory of capitalism, and
it is well known that Marx himself, when asked to sketch the contours of a socialist
society, sarcastically replied that it is not his business to write recipes for a future
kitchen. In other words, one might argue that Lifshits has in a way foreshadowed
the position which later, in the 1970s, was held by some West German Capital
logicians. They asserted that Marxs theory and method are so intimately
intertwined with their object, capitalism, that they will disappear together with it.
This would, actually, be a Hegelian interpretation of the historical role of theories
and ideas. Hegel famously asserted that every system of thought is bound to its own
epoch and cannot exceed its limits: Die Philosophie ist ihre Zeit, in Gedanken
erfasst. However, the theory of historical materialism clearly is a theory of history
which encompasses several social formations of different epochs, not only the
capitalist period. If we assume that Marxism is not a critical theory of capitalism
only but has a social philosophy whose validity transcends the boundaries of a
single social formation, we cannot accept the interpretation that, with his theory,
Lifshits found a limit to Marxism. True, in a post-capitalist society Marxism may
(actually, it must) have a face different from that which it has under capitalism, but
it is not eo ipso turned into another kind of theory.
7
I have come across only one study only in which this impossibly sounding task is attempted, namely
Ruth Bevans Marx and Burke (see Bevan 1973). In order to reconcile Burkes and Marxs views, the
author points out that both thinkers shared an empiricist approach towards history and both likewise
denounced the liberal Enlightenment idea of the free individual as a starting-point of historical
explanation (Bevan 1973, 7778). To find these and further similarities in Marx and Burke, Bevan
must, however, turn a blind eye to the fact that these thinkers came to their results from quite different
positions.
123
Because Lifshits did not put forth his Restauratio Magna project in a distinct
manner, but developed it mainly in notes written for himself only, its problematic
character has hitherto eluded the attention of thoserather fewwho have studied
his works more extensively. The student of Lifshits, Viktor Arslanov, for example,
draws the following consequence from the project:
In Lifshits conception of a Restauratio Magna one can see essential
similarities not only with Antiquity, but even with the medieval Christian
world-view. In fact, the philosophy recommended returning not only to
Aristotle, but to the Ptolemaic world picture, too, which was the official
cosmology of the Middle Ages (Mareeva et al. 2001, 305).
Such assertions equate Marxism with a kind of philosophia perennis, which indeed
is a sum of eternal truths with the unchanging validity from the beginning of time.
True, Lenin spoke, as well, of Marxism as the quintessence of all previous culture,
but it is hardly believable that he would have accepted an interpretation, according
to which we should return to the Ptolemaic geocentric picture of the world (to boot,
in its medieval form, supposing crystal spheres moved by the angels).
Lifshits never published a coherent presentation of his historico-philosophical
project, which he in later years began to call by the presumptuous name Restauratio
Magna. Actually, in contrast to Jubara, who here is more cautious, I would assert,
that Lifshits theory of history is in its very core un-Marxist. The concept of a
Restauratio Magna brings to the theory the idea of a philosophia perennis, an
eternal component.
Of course, it would have been difficult to publish, in the Soviet Union, a book
containing such a striking reformulation of basic ideas of Marxism. It thus remained
an esoteric theory, which Lifshits mostly kept to himself and put down in only
private comments in his notebooks. Neverthless, this theory of history exerted its
influence in the exoteric published writings of Lifshits. It must be seen as the
background of most of what Lifshits has written and managed to publish in
questions of literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. It explains, too, his tirades against
modernist art, which otherwise seems so inexplicable, because differing so much
from the received views of the Left. Once we understand that Lifshits interprets
culture and the cultural heritage as, so to say, a paradoxical symbiosis of the views
of Marx and Edmund Burke, we can see the hidden reason of his logic.
References
Arslanov, V. G. (2004). K chitatelyu etoi knigi. In M. Lifshits (Ed.), Chto takoe klassika?. Moskva:
Iskusstvo XX vek.
Arslanov, V. G. (2010). Ot redaktora. In V. G. Arslanov (Ed.), Mikhail Aleksandrovich Lifshits.
ROSSPEN: Moskva.
Bevan, R. (1973). Marx and Burke. A revisionist view. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Publ. Company.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1848). Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Geschichte. In G. W. F. Hegel (Eds.),
Werke (Freundesausgabe), Bd. IX, 3. Berlin: Aufl.
123
V. Oittinen
Hegel, G. W. F. (1969). Hegels science of logic (A. V. Miller, Trans.). London New York: Allen &
Unwin/Humanities Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1999). Wissenschaft der Logik, I. In Hauptwerke in sechs Banden, Bd. 3, Hamburg:
Meiner Vlg.
Jubara, A. (2010). Universalism in cultural history and the meaning of the Russian Revolution: on some
aspects of cultural theory in the work of Mikhail Lifsic. Studies in East European Thought, 62.
Lenin, V. I. (1973). On proletarian culture. In Collected works, 4th ed. (Vol. 31). Moscow: Progress
Publishers.
Lifshits, M. (2003). Dialog s Evaldom Ilenkovym. Moskva: Progress Traditsiya.
Lifshits, M. (2012a). O Gegele. Moskva: Grundrisse.
Lifshits, M. (2012b). Nadoelo. Moskva: Iskusstvo XXI vek (quoted as Lifshits 2012 b).
Mareeva, E. V., Mareev, S. N., & Arslanov, V. G. (2001). Filosofiya XX veka (Vol. 1). Moskva:
Akademicheskiy proekt.
Marx, K. (1952). Capital (Vol. I). Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.
Mchedlov, M. (1980). Sotsializm stanovlenie novogo tipa tsivilizatsii. Moskva: Politizdat (new
expanded edition with the same title, Moskva: Progress 1983).
Mtschedlow, M. (1983). Sozialismus - ein neuer Zivilisationstyp (Vol. 3). Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Oittinen, V. (2009). [Review of:] V. M.Mezhuev, Marks protiv marksizma. In Voprosy Filosofii (Vol. 3,
pp. 176179).
Sziklai, L. (1990). Georg Lukacs und seine Zeit. 19301945. Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau Vlg.
123

DOI 10.1007/s11212-016-9269-2
Interview with Sergey Horujy

Kristina Stoeckl1 Alexander Michailowski2
AM: We are presently preparing, here at the Institute for Human Sciences, the
translation of several essays by Bibikhin (2017). One of them is the essay For
Official Use Only from the book Another Beginning (2003). In this essay, Bibikhin
describes the mechanism of scholarly production in the context of the INION, the
Institute for Social Sciences, during the late Soviet period. The essay starts with a
somewhat mysterious phrase: The authorities began to look for an alternative
ideology to Marxism very early. Already in 1973, we knew that the military
political strategists were planning to abandon Marxism and replace it with
Orthodoxy as the ideological support of the Soviet army. Could you say the same
about yourself, namely, that you knew, at that time, that the Soviet nomenclature
was conducting this exploration of alternatives to Marxism?
SH: I am not part of this we. I knew nothing of such plans by the Soviet
authorities or top military leaders, and, moreover, I dont believe that there were
such plans. Immediately after the fall of the communist regime a big part of the
soviet nomenclature started to proclaim themselves to be champions of Orthodoxy
and the Church. But this took place following five years of perestroika and sharp
criticism of soviet ideology, when the demise of the latter was evident. However, in
This interview was held in March 2015 during the visit of Sergey Sergeevich Horujy to the Institute of
Human Sciences in Vienna. It was conducted by Kristina Stoeckl and Alexander Michailowski.
& Kristina Stoeckl
[email protected]
Alexander Michailowski
[email protected]
1
Department of Sociology, University of Innsbruck, Universitatsstrasse 15, 6020 Innsbruck,

Austria
School of Philosophy, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Building

21/4 Staraya Basmannaya str., Moscow, Russia 105066
123
K. Stoeckl, A. Michailowski
the 70s this was hardly a real perspective, and I think that as a rule, members of the
nomenclature were still convinced of the strength and stability of soviet ideology,
even if many of them were not enthusiastic adepts. They could not see any serious
need to look for an alternative to this ideology; on the contrary, they had serious
reasons to hold on to it. For instance, the role and activity of the USSR on the world
scene was strongly dependent on the close ties with Marxist parties and movements
all over the world. Could they reject all this?
As for my views at that time, around 1973, I also didnt doubt that the
nomenclature and, in particular, military political strategists are in overwhelming
majority loyal adepts of soviet ideology and therefore very far from planning any
radical alternatives to it. And Im sure this view was largely shared in the milieu of
the Church people and Christian intellectuals, to which both Bibikhin and I
belonged.
AM: But what was the motivation for the statement by Bibikhin?
SH: I cannot speak for him. As a guess, this statement and its we could refer to
another milieu to which Vladimir Veniaminovich was connected, that of Moscows
liberal philosophers, in particular, from the INION, the Institute for Social Sciences,
whose activity he describes in the text you are quoting. This circle included also
party members, people with some inside knowledge. They knew much better what
party leaders were up to, and perhaps they could imagine such a shift and discussed
it during their table conversations (or rather kitchen-talk in the style of the soviet
intelligentsia). But still I think that the plans for such a shift were mostly the fruits
of their imagination and wishful thinking.
AM: In his book The Russian Party (Moscow, 2003), Nikolaj Mitrokhin claims
that in 1974, in the second issue of the underground journal Moskovskij Sbornik,
which appeared under the heading The problems of the nation and religion, the
real author of the article Lev Karsavin. A biographical sketch, published under
the pseudonym S. Glebov, is you. Is Mitrokhin right, and if yes, what can you tell us
about your collaboration with Leonid Borodin, the editor of this journal and leader
of the nationalist Russian Party?
SH: In the beginning of the 70s I was writing my first philosophical texts. They
were devoted to Russian religious philosophy, to Florensky, Karsavin, etc., and they
were of the kind that was not only unpublishable, but severely persecuted in the
USSR of that time. Thus it is only through the Samizdat, through underground
journals of the dissident movement, that they could find their way to readers. I
collaborated with this movement, but only to a restricted extent. Undoubtedly, I
shared its general anti-totalitarian and anti-communist positions, and I considered it
a kind of moral duty to support it. But, having first-hand knowledge of it and being
personally acquainted with many of its leaders, I saw clearly that the crude reality of
the movement, its representatives, its ethical atmosphere often did not correspond
fully to its high principles and goals. Moreover, I was very absorbed in my work in
quantum field theory and didnt think it was worth sacrificing this work for the sake
of dissident activity.
As a result, it was a distant relationship. One can say that I did not include myself
directly in the dissident movement but was part of its supportive milieu. For
instance, it was known that I was well acquainted with Russian emigre literature,
123
and so I used to draw up lists of books that should be ordered from the West and
brought to the Soviet Union. Long lists of philosophical and theological titles. And
you see, from time to time these lists of mine really went through and the books
arrived and could be read and used.
AM: But what about your article in the Moskovskij Sbornik and your
collaboration with Leonid Borodin?
SH: While I was not fascinated by the general atmosphere of the dissident
movement, at the same time I had a quite high opinion of some members of this
movement. Some were rather close acquaintances. In the first place I must name
here two persons who were among the leaders of two opposite trends or wings.
Sergey Grigoriants was one of the leaders of the European-oriented dissidents, while
Leonid Borodin belonged to the leaders of the opposite so-called nationalist or
Russian Party trend in the dissident movement. One could say probably that both
were my friends. For example, they both came to see me just few days before they
were arrested. Usually people like them knew quite well that they would be arrested.
And it makes a difference whom you choose to see in the last days of your freedom.
Such meetings create a link and leave a mark.
Now, as I said, my texts could only go to the Samizdat, and since Leonid was
publishing some underground journal (I cant remember whether I saw any issue of
it), I gave him some of them. And I dont know what happened afterwards. I
disliked the idea of a pseudonym, but on the other hand I understood very well that I
couldnt publish under my real name, so I just didnt put any name on these texts.
There were several such texts: one on Florensky, one on Karsavin. Then there was
one samizdat project (not connected with Borodin) about which I knew a bit more, it
was the collection of articles called Slovo (Word), dedicated to some anniversary of
the priesthood of father Alexander Men. I wrote a text about the concept of the
symbol especially for this project. I know that it was published, but I never saw the
book.
AM: So you are telling us that you dont know all your pseudonyms?
SH: Exactly. I dont know. But from your question I gather that this text about
Karsavin, under the pseudonym Glebov, must be by me. You see, if the publishers
had told me that I had to choose my pseudonym, I probably would have decided to
use my real name.
AM: How do you feel today about your collaboration with Borodin?
SH: As you see, my participation in Borodins projects was quite insignificant
and was based entirely on our warm personal relationship. My texts were
philosophical. I never read his journals and we never discussed their ideological
platforms (although I suspected that probably I would not subscribe to them). But in
no way did this mean that it was all the same for me with which texts mine were
grouped. No. It means that, having personal confidence in Leonid, I admitted a
priori that his selection would be good quality and would not propagate something
disgusting and unworthy.
I had the same kind of feeling about Grigoriants as well. And it is characteristic
that in the post-soviet period my relationship with both of them did not continue.
Something had finished. And the main element in this something is perfectly
123
obvious: of course, it was the feeling of fraternity in common resistance to

totalitarianism.
AM: Your book After the break. Ways of Russian Philosophy (St.-Petersburg,
1994) includes a chapter entitled The Looters. In a footnote you write that this
essay is a reply to an extensive essay by Professor M., devoted to criticism of
Russian idealist philosophy. Can you explain to us the context of this article? In
the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a rediscovery of the Silver Age of Russian
philosophers. You contributed to this rediscovery and wrote about the urgent need
to find historical memory, bridge the gaps, and fill in the blank spots in our spiritual
history. You also spoke of the need to return the people to their cultural heritage
in its entirety. What are the difficulties and dangers linked to such a program?
Twenty years have passed since the publication of this book. Can we consider this
task fulfilled, or do we have to make additional efforts?
SH: First, about the context. In the early 90s, I had been asked by a big publishing
house to write an internal review of a huge manuscript The Downfall of Russian
idealism, in order to decide whether the book should be published. The author,
Prof. V. Malinin, was unknown to me, but he was a big figure in communist
ideological bodies. The book was a very long survey of Russian religious
philosophy in the style usual for such surveys in soviet philosophy and combining
throughout ignorance with vulgar rudeness. However, the high-ranking author was
late with his big work. The time was no longer soviet, religious philosophy suddenly
became fashionable and was praised, and now publishers needed texts proving not
the downfall, but the triumph of Russian idealism. Thats why they invited me as an
unofficial and non-Marxist expert in religious thought. My review (included in my
book) was, of course, sharply negative and often of a caustic style. I was told later
that it came as a big surprise to the author. Having read it during his visit to the
publishers, he turned red and left the place with threats and curses.
Thus the chapter you mentioned is a kind of farewell to the Soviet epoch. Your
following questions refer to the next period. One of the great public campaigns of
the first post-Soviet years had the title the return of the forgotten names. It was an
important effort to retrieve the thought of the philosophers of the Silver Age, who
are really the most considerable Russian philosophers up to this very day.
Undoubtedly, the Russian Silver Age was a cultural phenomenon of world
importance. And therefore the return of this thought from nearly complete oblivion
was a good thing. But there were also difficulties and dangers in this project.
AM: This is precisely the point of my question.
SH: I would say that the difficulties and dangers lay not so much in the reception of
these texts as in the very process of their return. The Return of the forgotten names
was, from the very start, organized and dominated by the official Soviet philosophers,
whose duty not long ago was not just to criticise, but to distort and banish Russian
religious philosophy. For years and years these people had earned their bread by lying
about Russian religious thought. They didnt understand it. But because of the
positions they held, they lead the process of the return of forgotten names.
AM: You say that this process started in the early 1990s?
SH: Actually it started even earlier, in the late 1980s. I can reconstruct the
chronology with quite some precision, because I was involved in it from the very
123
first stages. It started in 1988 or 1989 and then it proceeded in very quick tempo.
There is a famous anecdoteit seems that it is not invented, but realthat the last
decision made by the Politburo of the Communist Party, before it was dissolved,
was the decision to organise a big campaign to publish Russian religious
philosophers.
AM: This Return of the Forgotten Names worked through the journal Voprosy
filosofii.
SH: Yes, this journal was the centre of the campaign. It was the chief periodical
of soviet philosophy and it has preserved this standing in the post-Soviet epoch. By
the irony of fate, for a while its principal mission became the propagation of Russian
religious thought. To ensure success of the mission, a new secretary of the editorial
board was appointed who was the son of one of Gorbachevs closest collaborators.
And as early as 1989 the big publishing project was launched, in the first place the
book series devoted to works of Russian thinkers, religious philosophers. The series
continues to this day, although it ceased to be in the focus of public attention long
ago. Its volumes are not of rigorous academic standards, but still they gradually
achieved a decent level of the textological work and commentary, and the people
who prepare them are usually sufficiently expert.
Thus the project was a success, but on the whole the big boom around Russian
religious thought produced very mixed results. Throughout the period of Eltsins
Russia there were lots and lots of lies, falsities, ambiguity and, of course, crude
incompetence. As I said, the leading roles in the process had been seized, firmly and
everywhere, by former communist functionaries.
KS: So you are telling us that at the time when Russian religious thought finally
could emerge from the underground of Soviet society to public consciousness, it
was not you and your kindthe religious dissidents who had cherished this legacy
and kept it alive for decadeswho led the process, but it was the Communist Party?
SH: Not quite so. Of course, the Communist Party as such had lost its leading
role, but a very big part of its functionaries left its ranks in time and succeeded in
taking leading positions in all important fields. In particular, a great many
proclaimed themselves, as I said above, to be champions of Orthodoxy and the
Church. As for the ideological functionaries, they easily preserved their leading
posts within the machinery of philosophical (as well as cultural) life, changing
communist slogans to primitive Orthodox twaddle. They were, of course,
incompetent and unable to do any scholarly work in the field of religious thought,
but still they headed all big and important projects in this field, while real experts
were exploited for the concrete (and often hard) work for a song. They were also
active and energetic in hunting for huge grants, both Russian and foreign, presenting
projects with extremely noble and pious titles and goals. They started organizing
lots of programs, events, and institutions directed to such goals. For example, I was
once approached by a strange person who introduced himself as the head of the
World Congress of the Holy Trinity and Sobornost. Using Christian terms like
words from a poorly learned foreign language, he invited me to join his congress.
Later I found out that this person was a professor at a KGB academy.
123
All this faked spiritual activity made the situation extremely mixed and muddled
and nasty smelling. It was a problem to find in this stuff real and valuable elements,
but such elements were also theremalgre tout!
KS: What does your story teach us about todays situation? You know that
President Putin recently quoted Berdyaev and Ilyin in his speeches.
SH: One more thing that must be said here: In spite of all the nasty things that I
described, the main task was to have the texts published, to make accessible to the
public what had been forbidden for many, many years. And this task was fulfilled
quite successfully. Now the entire body of texts of Russian religious philosophy is
easily accessible for anybody interested. In that sense, the return of forgotten
names was indeed successful.
KS: But what about the reception?
SH: Well, exactly, the reception is quite a different problem. The texts are
accessible, but what next? Next it might very well turn out that they are not needed.
Evidently, the problem of reception has two different aspects, namely, the reception
of individual thinkers and the reception of the tradition as a whole, the phenomenon
of Russian religious philosophy in its entirety. Taking the first aspect, I would say
that today for each of the big figures of the tradition the reception is quite different.
Philosophers are bright individuals and each of the towering figures of the Silver
Age has his own destiny in our times. Vyacheslav Ivanov, for example, has a very
happy destiny. There is a good academic community around him both in Russia and
abroad. This community is more or less united, there is not much difference whether
members of this community work in Russia or in Berkeley or elsewhere. They have
regular meetings, they communicate with each other. Florensky also has a rather
self-reproducing community of scholars who study him and publish his works. Ilyin
is again a slightly different case; he became the chief author of the nationalist
circles. Losev has an excellent centre in Moscow, which coordinates all the work on
his heritage. Karsavin has a small community as well. Berdyaev is still another story
(after decades of immense popularity he is not so lucky today), and so on. So there
is a set of individual receptions and, on the whole, there are some experts and some
continuing lines of research on each of the major figures of the tradition.
In contrast to this, with regard to the second aspect I would say that the rich
phenomenon of Russian religious philosophy as a whole still lacks a full and
consistent reception. One serious reason is that this philosophy is of a mixed nature,
combining properties of Western philosophy and Byzantine thought, which is
deeply different from the former in its constitution and discourse. (In particular, it
comprises a different relationship between philosophy and theology.) What
Byzantine thought is still not sufficiently understood and is actively investigated
at present; as a consequence, the nature of Russian religious philosophy is also not
yet sufficiently understood. Another reason is that at present the philosophical
situation both in Russia and on the global scale is not very creative. Missing in
contemporary Russian philosophy is the capacity to generalize for which reason it
seems unable to create a sound conception of the big phenomenon of Russian
religious thought in all its complexity and entirety.
The absence of a meaningful reception of its past stages is a big obstacle to the
further development of Russian philosophy. Because of this absence, when young
123
people today become interested in Russian religious thought, they organize

discussion groups on sophiology, on name-praisingall very old phenomena that
ended about one century ago! But in order to move on, we would first have to prove
receptive to what came before.
KS: Let us move from philosophy to society, politics, and the Russian Orthodox
Church. The Patriarchate of Moscow has experienced a sharp revival during the past
25 years, acquiring ever more public visibility and wealth, enlarging its base of
believers and the number of more or less well-educated clerics, some of whom have
studied theology abroad. This revival of the ROC initially seemed to extend also to
religious intellectuals, who came out of a very different religious experience during
the Soviet period. I am thinking in particular of the legacy of Alexander Men, at the
margins of the official Church. You yourself, for example, became a member of the
Biblical-Theological Commission. In recent years, the situation seems to be
changing again and for an outside observer like me the nationalist wing inside the
Orthodox Church appears to have gained an upper hand and access to politics. My
first question is, do you agree with this assessment, and secondly, how do you
evaluate and explain it? What has gone wrong, and why does Russian Orthodoxy
today appear destined to repeat the split of the 19th century between free thinking
religious intellectuals and an official Church tied to the state?
SH: As nobody can now deny, there is indeed a general shift to nationalism, antiwesternism etc. This shift is imposed from above, by the state power, and it takes
place everywhere in Russia. The Church cannot be an exception. What is more, the
Church always had its own reason for and its variety of nationalism: in Russia, as in
almost any Christian country, pious people are much inclined to believe that their
country is the most Christian or even the only Christian country on the planet. But
nevertheless the main priority of the heads of the Church was always to ensure the
unity of the Church and not let some group or wing, be it nationalist or ecumenist,
conservative or liberal, to become totally dominant. I dont think that this priority is
rejected today.
On the other hand, the balance between groups can shift within certain limits.
One of the factors in this shift is the changing character of Church intellectuals. It
was traditional in Russian political discourse to liken or even to equate intellectuals
with the intelligentsia. However, these notions are not identical at all. The
intelligentsia was a specific social group with its own independent ideas, ethics, and
style, which was at the same time in liberal or revolutionary opposition to the
official establishment of both Church and state. Its members could be religious (and
the religious intelligentsia did play an important role in the last prerevolutionary
decades), but as a rule they were neither fundamentalist nor nationalist. Now this
group has disappeared (though there may be a few insignificant relics, such as the
followers of Fr. Alexander Men), but intellectuals, i.e. educated persons, have not;
quite the opposite, their number grows. The average level of theological education
and erudition has steadily grown in the recent years and it continues to grow. The
growth and development of theological education is a fact, but this process does not
necessarily contradict the growth of nationalism. There are ever more people in the
Church who are erudite, not badly educated, and are at the same time nationalists,
monarchists, or sometimes even Stalinists. So nationalists can very well be
123
intellectuals, and, vice versa, intellectuals can be nationalists. You see, the dividing
lines are not here, these two things are perfectly compatible.
KS: But what is incompatible then? Are there dividing lines that structure the
religious discourse into a liberal, reformist camp and a conservative, nationalist
camp?
SH: Of course, there is inevitably some structuring, but in the changing modern
reality its principles may change too. Sure, some universal principles are always there:
for instance, in the ROC, as in any religious society at any period, there are
fundamentalist (conservative, nationalist, anti-secular) and liberal (reformist, open to
dialogue) groups and trends. Today, as we already said, the fundamentalist trend is
growing and prevails. As for new principles, one very old dividing line is becoming
much more visible and important in the last years, under the present Patriarch: the
division between the rich and the poor, the rich hierarchy with its surroundings and the
majority of the poor clergy, paid miserably and dragging a heavy burden of evergrowing payments to higher ecclesiastic authorities. This greed for money is a new
feature closely connected with the new status of the Church.
After the fall of the monarchy and the Church Council in 19171918 the ROC
ceased to be the Synodal Church and restored the Moscow Patriarchate. Then after
the fall of the Soviet regime it ceased to be totally controlled by the secular state. As
a result, a certain new kind of relation of the Church and the state has emerged in
which the Church is much less subordinate to the state and included into its
mechanism. As before, it gives all its support to the state, but now it has the freedom
of choice (at least relative) and this support is not taken for granted. It means that
the Church has now some power of its own, and it wants very much to increase this
power. It wants to be a strong and independent ally of the state garnering all the
possible profits of its support of the latter. And a strong power is always greedy for
money and wealth.
Thus the striving for power and wealth is now very visibly high on the list of
priorities of the heads of the ROC. Quite close partnership with the secular
administration on all levels is very visible too. Moreover, as everywhere throughout
the country, the Church is affected by the enormous over-bureaucratization and
formalization of its life, bordering on absurdity. All these striking features are at the
forefront, but, in contrast to them, it is not so easy to see, which place is given to
properly Christian and spiritual values and goals.
Inevitably, this glaring predominance of quite worldly and dubious goals and
interests should sooner or later result in the loss of the spiritual authority of the
Church, disaffection with the Church by wider and wider strata, and the decline of
public support of the Church. The rise of these phenomena is already quite evident.
KS and AM: Sergey Sergeevich, thank you for this conversation.
Acknowledgements The authors acknowledge the European Research Council grant ERC STG 2015
676804 for the publication of this interview.
Reference
Bibikhin, V. (forthcoming 2017) Der andere Anfang. In A. Michailowski (Ed.). Matthes & Seitz, Berlin.
123

Mikhail Lifshits - An Enigmatic Marxist - 2016

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Stud East Eur Thought (2016) 68:241246

Mikhail Lifshits: an enigmatic Marxist

Published online: 16 November 2016

& Vesa Oittinen

Mikhail Lifshits: an enigmatic Marxist

Mikhail Lifshits: an enigmatic Marxist

Stud East Eur Thought

An interview with Dmitri Gutov

Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

& Andrey Maidansky

Belgorod State University, Belgorod, Russia

An interview with Dmitri Gutov

An interview with Dmitri Gutov

Lifshits projects on modernism the analysis of religion conducted by Marx in the

entered the VKhUTEMAS at a moment in the 1920s when modernism was at an

An interview with Dmitri Gutov

Thus, the Greek ideal of Winckelmann, Hegel, Marx, and Lifshitswhich of

Stud East Eur Thought

The aesthetic realism of Mikhail Lifshits: art, history

Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Abstract The aesthetics of Mikhail Lifshits may be characterised as a quest for

The truth seeker

& Andrey Maidansky

The aesthetic realism of Mikhail Lifshits: art, history and

The eminence of ancient art, according to Marx, is a direct expression of those

The aesthetic realism of Mikhail Lifshits: art, history and

See: Lifshits (2001), 106 (the last, unfinished work of Lifshits).

The aesthetic realism of Mikhail Lifshits: art, history and

There is no such formulation in Lifshitss works though. The philosopher himself

roots of certain ideas, including the phenomenon of modernism. Here is a typical

The aesthetic realism of Mikhail Lifshits: art, history and

Herzen a socialist-dilettante. Marx gave similar estimates of the German true

For details, see: Maidansky (2015, 209220).

The aesthetic realism of Mikhail Lifshits: art, history and

Following Stalins death, as soon as Lifshits was permitted to publish, his

alternative to revolutionthe expression of real squalor of the capitalist world and

The aesthetic realism of Mikhail Lifshits: art, history and

is a holistic, individual, self-sufficient expression of the universal forms of being: for

See: Lifshits (2003, 271).

The aesthetic realism of Mikhail Lifshits: art, history and

Stud East Eur Thought

Mikhail Lifshits and the Soviet image of Giambattista

Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Abstract Mikhail Lifshits interpretation of the scholarly work of the Italian

& Alexander Dmitriev

The translations of the works of Lessing, Winckelmann, and other authors,

Mikhail Lifshits and the Soviet image of Giambattista Vico

Mikhail Lifshits and the Soviet image of Giambattista Vico

Mikhail Lifshits and the Soviet image of Giambattista Vico

Mikhail Lifshits and the Soviet image of Giambattista Vico

the ideologists of decaying capitalism, Spengler, praised not accidentally

Cf. van der Zweerde (1997).

Mikhail Lifshits and the Soviet image of Giambattista Vico

Stud East Eur Thought

Mikhail Lifshits logomythy: the art

Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Abstract The article reconstructs an original concept of myth developed by

National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

Sources of Lifshits conception of myth