Russian Studies in Philosophy

ISSN: 1061-1967 (Print) 1558-0431 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/mrsp20

Teodor I. Oizerman: His Scholarship and Stages of

His Intellectual Evolution

Ilya T. Kasavin

To cite this article: Ilya T. Kasavin (2017) Teodor I. Oizerman: His Scholarship and
Stages of His Intellectual Evolution, Russian Studies in Philosophy, 55:2, 89-97, DOI:
10.1080/10611967.2017.1313652

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Russian Studies in Philosophy, vol. 55, no. 2, 2017, pp. 89–97.
© Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1061-1967 (print)/ISSN 1558-0431 (online)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10611967.2017.1313652

ILYA T. KASAVIN

Teodor I. Oizerman: His Scholarship and

Stages of His Intellectual Evolution

The article discusses the intellectual biography of Teodor I. Oizerman.

The main stages of the formation and development of Oizerman’s
philosophy are considered within the context of the historical changes
of twentieth-century Russia. The author identifies five main stages of
Oizerman’s philosophical evolution and offers an overview of the main
ideas that define each of these stages.
Keywords: Teodor I. Oizerman, intellectual biography, history of
philosophy, Marxism

Teodor I. Oizerman was born on May 14, 1914 in the village of

Petroverovka, in Kherson Governorate (Russian Empire), into a Jewish

English translation © 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, from the Russian text
I.T. Kasavin, “Teodor Oizerman: napravleniia issledovanii i etapy intellektual’noi
evoliutsii.” Originally published as: I.T. Kasavin, “Put’ cherez stoletie. Filosofskii
podvig Teodora Oizermana,” Voprosy filosofii, 2014, no. 5, pp. 32–37. Published
with the author’s permission.
The text was researched, composed, and edited under the auspices of a Russian
Science Foundation grant, project no. 14-18-02227, “Social Philosophy of Science:
A Russian Perspective.”
Ilya Teodorovich Kasavin, doctor of philosophical sciences, professor, and a
corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is head of the
department for social epistemology of the Institute of Philosophy, Russian
Academy of Sciences, and chair of the philosophy department at N.I.
Lobachevski Nizhniy Novgorod State University. E-mail: [email protected]
Translated by Peter Golub.

89
90 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

family. His family soon moved to Novomoskovsk, a small town near

Dnepropetrovsk (now Ukraine), where his father, a trained mathematics
teacher, served as the director of a private school. A deeply religious man,
he was appointed the director of a public boarding school after the Russian
Revolution. When the civil war broke out, he acted as the head of a Jewish
self-defense detachment. The father was a very well-known and highly
regarded person in his town, and when he died, his funeral was attended
by over a thousand people. Oizerman’s mother was a math schoolteacher,
teaching at the same school as his father. Todik—as his family called him—
was a precocious reader and loved to borrow adventure books from the town
library. This had a negative effect on his school performance: instead of
studying multiplication tables, he was reading Fennimore Cooper and Mayne
Reid. When the boy was held back from advancing to second grade, his
parents were extremely concerned. The father explained to the boy that the
son of the principal had to be an excellent student, and his mother, being a
brilliant methodologist, showed him the beauty of mathematics. This
approach worked, and Todik began to show interest in study. When his
father suddenly died from typhus, acquired on a work-related trip, the
young boy was still not introduced to Judaism or to Yiddish. And because
his mother was indifferent to religion, he remained outside the Jewish
tradition. Shortly after his father’s death, Todik, along with his mother and
younger sister, Vera, moved to Dnepropetrovsk.
Until the fourth grade he was not a particularly outstanding student.
However, by that time he was already writing poetry and prose, and even
tried unsuccessfully to publish his own immature work. After witnessing
the heroic rescue of a dog during a Dnieper River ice flow, he wrote a
highly emotional story, which attracted the attention of a schoolteacher.
That greatly encouraged the boy and he decided to devote himself to litera-
ture. At age twelve, he went through a kind of intellectual initiation when he
discovered Plato’s dialogues and read them with great enthusiasm. When I was
the same age, Teodor Ilyich tried to arrange the same initiation for me. However,
he was very disappointed when I failed to fully comprehend Plato.
The milieu of Oizerman’s formative years was imbued with the spirit of
collectivization at the factory, the construction site, the field, and even the
desk. He began to emerge as a talented stylist and polemicist within the
literary groups he organized and patronized. Thus, the twelve-year-old boy
believed himself to be fated for the career of a great writer, remembering
his mother’s translating of his name from the Greek—God’s gift.
It is worth noting the diversity of the boy’s interests. In addition to his
preoccupation with literature, he designed a camera, performed experiments
in biology, physics, and even hypnosis, studied Esperanto, learned to paint,
 VOLUME 55, NO. 2, 2017 91

loved hiking, and was obsessed with the living paintings of Mary Pickford
and Douglas Fairbanks in the first 1920s cinemas.
Concentration is often incompatible with wide-ranging interests.
However, by the fourth grade, Teodor began taking seriously his self-
education and studies. He succeeded in becoming not only an excellent
student, but the very best in the school. In 1929, Oizerman graduated from
high school with the highest academic performance score (98 percent); yet
his letter of reference noted: “unfavorable attitude toward the Soviet
government.”
This was retribution for his unorthodox poems in the school newspaper
and the unauthorized trip to the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, which led
him to skip a day of school. The path to academia was closed. However,
higher education did not appeal to the budding writer. Instead, he wanted to
participate in socialist industrialization and to acquire the necessary experi-
ence. Along with his friends, he entered the Dnepropetrovsk Steam-Engine
Factory Vocational School, and was proud of wearing overalls and asso-
ciating with the working class, the most important class according to the
official dogma taught in schools.
Thus, the young man entered adulthood with a breadth of interests, a
nonreligious upbringing, extensive literary knowledge, an ability to focus,
and inspired by official ideology despite his initial negative experience. At
this point in his life, he was a steam-boiler operator and freelancer for the
factory newspaper Parovoznik. He would go on to graduate from the
factory preparatory school, publish in Moscow’s main periodicals, matri-
culate to the philosophy department at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy,
Literature, and History, experience success and failure in the literary field,
and finally decide to become a scholar and college teacher. T.I. Oizerman
became who he was not so much because of, but in contrast to the
surrounding social reality. The years of the personality cult, the turmoil of
the Great Patriotic War [World War II], and the difficulties of transitioning
to peacetime did not divert him from his chosen path.

Stages of philosophical evolution

How did Oizerman, who began his adult life as a laborer with literary
ambitions, eventually matriculate to the philosophy department of the
Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History? The determining
reasons for this are difficult to judge. It is clear that Moscow offered many
opportunities for the young man from the province. An important role may
have been played by the relatively comfortable student housing (only
92 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

fourteen beds per room!). His abandonment of the life of a laborer could be
explained by the fact that a writer must not only experience life (in order to be
able to describe it), but also to grasp the primary causes of phenomenon, that
is, to at least in part be an investigator and philosopher. In one way or another,
the nineteen-year-old Oizerman—who had almost been announced an enemy
of the people, lived at the forefront of the ideology of his time, and learned a
profession that one friend described as “more dangerous than that of a fighter
pilot”—became a philosopher. Now, more than eighty years hence, it should
be possible to describe his path. With all the potential drawbacks of such a
description, I will distinguish five periods in the development of Oizerman’s
thought in the context of diverse social realities.
The first stage can be described as enthusiastically apologetic. It is char-
acterized, on the one hand, by the study and exposition of classical Marxism,
and on the other, by an intellectual confrontation with surrounding reality. The
enthusiasm of the time made it possible to perceive reality as something not
quite real, as it seemed a random distortion of true being. This period spanned a
decade, from 1936 to 1946, in which Oizerman published popular articles in
Bolshevik, articles that resembled those published in other Soviet journals
marked by the agitprop of the bunkers and trenches of World War II. “The
doctrine of Marx is omnipotent because it is true” was the ideological credo of
this stage of Oizerman’s evolution. In the distant future he would subject this
position to merciless criticism. Then, however, this helped him survive during
a time of social absurdity when his friends were being imprisoned and forced to
confess crimes they had not even contemplated.
After the war came the second phase associated with the negation of certain
idealist illusions to which reality was categorically opposed. However, he had
not become yet entirely conscious of the radical divide between Marxist theory
and its political practice. An alternative to political dissidence was work that
researched the real history of Marxism and its major premises. His Moscow
University lectures on the history of Marxist philosophy were combined with
work on the multivolume History of Philosophy, as well as articles on Kant,
Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Underway was a process of reflection that for
many years would determine the theoretical interests of the scholar. This process
was guided by the questions: Why did Marx and Engels become Marxists?
Where did their ideas originate? The mere posing of these questions—which
suggested that the conclusions of the founders were not inevitable and that their
theories were contingent upon historical, and to some extent random, events—
was already an undertaking that under Stalinism could have cost the author
dearly. At that time, dogmatists and ignoramuses abounded in the faculty and
maintained their status (and hindered research) with denunciations to the Central
Committee and in some cases to Stalin himself. The general political situation in
 VOLUME 55, NO. 2, 2017 93

the country was escalating. Nevertheless, Oizerman escaped the fate of many of
his contemporaries, and was able to defend his doctoral dissertation in 1951.
(The story of the tenuous balance of this achievement I leave to other scholars.)
The result of this stage was manifested in two books published in 1955: Razvitie
marksistskoi teorii na opyte revolutsii 1848 goda [The Development of Marxist
Theory on the Experience of the 1848 Revolution] and Nemetskaia klassiches-
kaia filosofiia—odin iz teoreticheskikh istochnikov marksizma [Classical
German Philosophy—One of the Theoretical Sources of Marxism.] He also
stopped lecturing on the history of Marxism, became head of the Department of
the History of Foreign Philosophy, and switched to the study of modern Western
philosophy. Soon Oizerman’s work was translated into other languages, making
him perhaps the most well-known Soviet philosopher abroad.
Of course, the division of Oizerman’s work into five distinct stages is
conditional. Formirovanie filosofii markhsizma [The Forming Process of
Marxist Philosophy] (Moscow, 1962), the work that marked the real climax
of his study of the history of Marxism, would appear only seven years later.
The book was so rigorous and novel, both in approach and formulated
ideas, that it immediately attracted the attention of Russian and foreign
scholars alike. Translations into other languages followed the next year. At
forty-eight years old, Oizerman became a contemporary classic. The book
received both the Lomonosov Prize and the Russian State Prize, and most
importantly it brought Oizerman real recognition, even fame.
The author, who was always critical of his own results, considered the
outcome (on which another would have contentedly settled) as a challenge.
Yes, Marx became a Marxist; this is an established fact. Yes, it was possible to
reveal Lenin’s conception of the three sources and three components of
Marxism. However, it was necessary to gain a deeper understanding of
classical German philosophy and its predecessors; and this had to be achieved
against the background of the fight against the contemporary “bourgeois”
philosophy and ideology, contrasting the brilliance of the classics against
contemporary conceit. This produced numerous articles and pamphlets criti-
cizing neo-Thomism, neo-positivism, existentialism, and Western sociology
and aesthetics. In those days such criticism was, among other things, the only
way to convey Western philosophical ideas to a readership for whom the
original Western works were inaccessible.
Thus, it could be said that the third stage of Oizerman’s philosophical
development began in the early 1960s, when the Khrushchev Thaw was
still felt, but the Brezhnev era was already looming. This is when he
launched serious work on the history of Western philosophy, the work
that coincided with the expansion of the Department of the History of
Foreign Philosophy at Moscow State University. At this point, Oizerman
94 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

began to understand the history of philosophy as a theoretical enterprise. He

published a book Filosofiia i istoriia filosofii (1968) [Philosophy and
History of Philosophy] and the seminal article for this period, “O smysle
voprosa ‘chto takoe filosofiia?’” [The Meaning of the Question: What Is
Philosophy?] was published in Voprosy filosofii (1968, no. 11). He worked
on two problems critical to the theory of dialectical materialism: the nature
of truth and the specifics of everyday consciousness. For this period, his
research and writing on the history of philosophy corresponded with the
preparation of the first multivolume Russian edition of Kant and work on
the first Sovetskaia Filosofskaiia Entsiklopedia [Soviet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy]. These projects would bring Soviet philosophy serious inter-
national recognition. Meanwhile, his reflections on the history of philoso-
phy led Oizerman to the idea of the necessity of meta-theory—a theory of
the nature of philosophy and the characteristics of the historical-
philosophical process. Similar ideas were being discussed in the West,
and Oizerman actively participated in these discussions.
This idea, or more precisely this new historical-methodological orientation,
marks the fourth stage of Oizerman’s intellectual biography. The process of the
development of philosophy is what determines the nature of philosophy:
philosophy is defined not by the logic of generic difference, but by the
theoretical conclusions of its history. The justification of this thesis was carried
out in two monographs, which turned Oizerman from a historian of Marxism
into a theoretical philosopher. The books with the modest titles Problemy
istoriko-filosofskoi nauki [The Problems of the History of Philosophy]
(1968) and Glavnye filosofskie napravleniia [Main Philosophical Trends]
(Moscow, 1971) opened a new chapter in the Marxist understanding of the
nature of philosophical knowledge. Proof of this was Oizerman’s election to
the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1966) and an invitation to give a
plenary talk at the World Congress of Philosophy in Vienna (1968). Around
the same time, he started working at the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR
Academy of Sciences. In Germany, not just translations, but comprehensive
volumes of Oizerman’s original work were being published. As a visiting
professor, Oizerman lectured and conducted research in European universities.
Though not holding any high-rank administrative positions, he nevertheless
received wide international recognition.
This period found a logical conclusion in the work co-authored with
Alexei Bogomolov, Osnovy teorii istoriko-filosofskogo processa (Moscow,
1983) [translated into English: Principles of the Theory of the Historical
Process in Philosophy, Moscow: Progress, 1986] and a collection of articles
edited by Oizerman, Filosofiia epokhi rannikh burzhuaznykh revoliutsii
[The Philosophy of the Period of the Early Bourgeois Revolutions]
 VOLUME 55, NO. 2, 2017 95

(Moscow, 1983). This period could have lasted much longer had it not been
for the social reality and its demands, which “helps science forward far
more than ten universities” (Friedrich Engels). Perestroika was under way
and it heralded a new era.
Of course, over half a century, a scholar usually builds enough momentum
to be primarily preoccupied with his or her own problems and challenges, so as
not to immediately respond to the challenges of social development.
Oizerman’s main books and articles on a wide range of philosophical problems
continued to be revised and published. However, with the appearance of his
article “Strategiia uskoreniia: filosofskie i sotsialogicheskie problemy” [A
Strategy of Acceleration: Philosophical and Sociological Problems] (Voprosy
filosofii, 1986), it became clear that Oizerman was trying to conceptualize the
new reality. Recall the policy of accelerated socioeconomic development
advanced by Mikhail S. Gorbachev at the April 1985 Plenum of the CPSU
Central Committee; this was an attempt to renew the stagnating USSR econ-
omy using old methods. The end of this strategy was marked by the Chernobyl
disaster. Together with the entire country, Oizerman realized that the party was
incapable of true reform—new forces and new ideas were needed.
This is the beginning of the incubation period. Oizerman takes a kind of
timeout in order to reflect on the situation. During this time, there are occa-
sional flashes of something new, but they are obscured amid continuing
publications on familiar subjects. First, we see a discussion of certain existen-
tial themes, which is natural against the background of sharp social change.
For instance, in 1988 Oizerman published the article “Unikal’nost’ chelove-
cheskogo bytiia” [The Uniqueness of Human Existence] (in Chelovek i mir:
suschnost_’ otnosheniia, protivorechiia i perspektivy razvitiia [Man and the
World: the Essence of the Relationship, Its Contradictions and the Perspectives
of the Development], Moscow, 1988),which was immediately translated into
French and English and in 1990, he published “Mysli, aforizmy” [Ideas,
Aphorisms] (Voprosy filosofii, 1990), which surprised many both in terms of
its content and style. Eventually, the time he allowed himself to revise his own
theoretical system came to an end. Twilight was imminent—the owl of
Minerva was calling.
A month before the August coup, in the Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences
of the USSR (which a year later become the Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences
of the Russian Federation), Oizerman published the article “Ostautsia li
neizmennymi zakony kapitalizma?” (1991) [Do the Laws of Capitalism
Remain Unchanged?], marking the beginning of the fifth stage of his philoso-
phical development. Shortly before, the journal Communist (an ideological
mouthpiece of the Communist Party) was renamed Svobodnoe slovo [The Free
Word], and Oizerman began to publish there a series of articles, which
96 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

established a theory of self-critical Marxism. These include “Izmeniaetsia li

marksistskoe ponimanie sotsializma” (1991) [Is the Marxist Conception of
Socialism Changing?], “Printsipial’nye osnovy samokritiki marksizma”
(1993) [The Fundamental Principles of Marxism’s Self-Critique], “O leninskoi
interpretatsii marksizma” (1996) [On Lenin’s Interpretation of Marxism],
“Marksizm i utopizm” [Marxism and Utopianism] (1998) and “Marksizm
kak ideologiia” (1999) [Marxism as Ideology]. At the same time, in Voprosy
filosofii, Oizerman published articles in which he reinterpreted the foundations
of dialectical and historical materialism. Finally, on the eve of Oizerman’s
ninetieth birthday, the expansive monograph Marksizm i utopizm (2003)
[Marxism and Utopianism] was published, demonstrating that age has not
hindered the work of the influential scholar.
The outside observer can only speculate about Oizerman’s inner trans-
formation regarding philosophy, Marxism, and the society in which we live.
Ideas that for decades could not be fully expressed now have ample room
for development; however, even during censorship, his ideas retained their
significance and responsibility. His new and even too audacious (according
to many of his colleagues) ideas as always remain grounded in empirical
and historical research. Amid the slogans, quarrels, and cacophony that
erupted in the humanities during that era of lax standards, his approach
seemed an anachronism. Oizerman found himself between Scylla and
Charybdis. The orthodox Marxists criticized him for revisionism and
betrayal of ideals, while the liberals believed that Marxism did not deserve
such close academic scrutiny, that it should just be discarded and forgotten.
However, there were many academics who did appreciate Oizerman’s
philosophical accomplishments, and a scholarly discussion of his ideas
began on the pages of serious peer review journals. Meanwhile, despite
his old age, Oizerman continued his research, and with enviable reg-
ularity penned (he did not use a computer) new work. This included a
book, Opravdanie revizionizma (2005) [A Defense of Revisionism],
which provided a reinterpretation of the Marxist currents that Lenin’s
light hand had branded and removed from the academic sphere.
Oizerman showed the universal and positive aspect of revisionism with-
out which scientific development would be impossible. This was fol-
lowed by Kant i Gegel’. Opyt sravnitel’nogo issledovaniia (2008) [Kant
and Hegel. A Comparative Study], which summarized many years of
Oizerman’s research in history of philosophy. In 2008, Oizerman became
the first (and still the only) philosopher to win a Triumph Award, a
major Russian nongovernmental prize of intellectual and business
community.
 VOLUME 55, NO. 2, 2017 97

His ninety-seventh birthday marked the publication of another major

work, which justified his understanding of the nature of philosophical
knowledge, Ambivalentnost’ filosofii (2011) [The Ambivalence of
Philosophy]. This came amid publication of two volumes (Metafilosofiia:
teoriia istoriko-filosofskogo protsessa (2009) [Metaphilosophy: a Theory of
the Historical-Philosophical Process] and Vozniknovenie marksizma (2011)
[The Emergence of Marxism]) totaling more than 1,000 pages. These
volumes represented a rethinking of ideas he was continually working on
for nearly fifty years. In 2012, he published Razmyshleniia. Izrecheniia
(2012) [Reflections. Dicta], and although it seemed like his immediate
goals had been accomplished, he was already thinking about the publication
of his collected works. They appeared in 2014 commemorating the 100th
anniversary of his birth.
***
Teodor I. Oizerman recently left this world shortly before his 103rd
birthday, while working on his memoir. The following selection, which
certainly cannot fully cover his philosophical achievements, is thought to
be representative of his work. It includes the main results of his reinterpre-
tation of Marxist philosophy, a fragment of his historical-philosophical
theory, and a comparative analysis of the philosophy of Kant and Hegel.

ORCID
Ilya T. Kasavin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1233-3182