by Alexey Zhavoronkov
In his speech during the conference of the Russian Society of Political Theory in Svetlogorsk on February 9 2024, the Governor of Kaliningrad Oblast Anton Alikhanov named Kant “one of the spiritual makers of today’s West”, directly responsible for Russia’s war against Ukraine. In solidarity with this official position, government-loyal Russian philosophers have swiftly delivered justifications for this argument, calling for a reinterpretation of Kant’s thought from the perspective of Russian philosophy – and for a break with the ‘Western’ Kant studies.
Immanuel Kant has been, for a long time, among the most popular Western philosophers in Russia. Before the 1917 Revolution, his works had a significant impact both in the liberal and conservative circles of Russian intellectuals. Even during the Soviet era, when references to Hegel and Marx had an obligatory status while references to Kant did not, his works enjoyed wide popularity inside and outside of academia, especially since the publication of a six-volume edition of his works in the 1960s. Kant’s texts were frequently referenced, and the Russian edition of his collected works was prepared by the leading scholars of that time. After the fall of the USSR, Kant scholarship always remained at the forefront of Russian studies in the history of Western philosophy.
April 22 2024, marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Immanuel Kant, who spent most of his life in Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad). Initially, this occasion was the reason for planning the 2024 Kant Congress to take place in Königsberg, where the German philosopher’s legacy plays a deeply symbolic role in the city’s cultural life. A special decree concerning the planned celebration was signed by Vladimir Putin himself on May 20, 2021. On a recent occasion, Putin even named Kant, together with Berdyaev, among his favorite philosophers, even though, contrary to Ilyin and Schmitt as his real sources of inspiration, the remark on Kant was most likely made just out of politeness (as in the case of Berdyaev, whose political philosophy is a terra incognita for Putin).
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has brought many changes on the level of cultural and academic cooperation, among them the relegation of the Kant Congress from Kaliningrad to Bonn. Still, the change in the attitude of Russian officials against Kant was initially not visible to the naked eye, even though the Russian political trends indicated that Kant could be at any time marked as a ‘foreign agent’ of the ‘collective West’. As the preparation of a new official ideology is already on the way, Russian authorities feel it is time to reevaluate the Western ‘ideological baggage’. Anton Alikhanov, the self-proclaimed herald of the upcoming changes, previously contributed to the financial support of the upcoming anniversary celebrations of Immanuel Kant and is a crucial member of the organizational committee for the anniversary events in Kaliningrad. These circumstances, however, did not impede him from reversing his opinion on Kant, whom he previously, in a meeting with Putin in September 2022, called a “great German philosopher” (but also a “Russia’s subject”, as per the popular narrative based on Kant’s purely formal oath of allegiance to the empress Elizabeth during the occupation of Königsberg by the Russian army). Now Kant is suddenly among the culprits for the First World War and for Russia’s war against Ukraine, as his philosophy has allegedly separated the German ‘will’ from the ‘highest values’. Moreover, for Alikhanov, Kant is also “at least partially responsible” for the “global chaos” we see in today’s international politics.
Under today’s circumstances, these radical claims could not remain unheard by the ‘sovereign’ Russian intellectuals whose current main goal is a timely and thoroughly positive reaction to the statements and decisions of Russian officials. Indeed, just a couple of days after Alikhanov’s speech (which made rounds primarily in the German and French media), philosopher Anatoly Chernyaev, representing the radical right circles around the Zinoviev club, has published an article in the newspaper Vedomosti. The title, Auf Wiedersehen, Kant, represents Chernyaev’s general sentiment of settling all accounts with Kant’s philosophy and decimating it to the point of leaving only some elements that fit the profile of Russian philosophy. The text begins with a recapitulation of Alikhanov’s speech and a statement about the duality of Kant’s role in Russian intellectual history, as there were both those who criticized him (thinkers such as Vladimir Ern, Evgenii Troubetzkoy, or Pavel Florensky) and those who were fascinated by his philosophy (among them Nikolai Karamzin and the Kant scholar Arseni Gulyga). In other words, Kant’s philosophy was always “a battlefield” of interpretations among Russian intellectuals. In the next part, Chernyaev takes on the events of recent years, stating that, in today’s light, Kant’s thought is applied as an ideological weapon, both by the ‘collective West’ and by the ‘fifth column’ of intellectuals inside Russia. To prove his point, he uses the example of the contemporary German philosopher and Kant scholar Ottfried Höffe, who is among the organizers of the initiative “Philosophers for Ukraine”. Another ‘agent of foreign influence’ from Chernyaev’s perspective would be Gerfried Horst, founder of the Society of Friends of Kant and Königsberg, who, for a long time, advocated the idea of renaming Kaliningrad back to Königsberg. Also mentioned by Chernyaev were projects of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, among them the German-Russian Kant edition (which I, like many of my colleagues, consider the best Russian academic edition of his works). According to Chernyaev, the practical consequence of these arguments should be a radical reevaluation of Kant’s thought, as the latter – for instance, Kant’s concept of enlightenment – can only be useful to the Russian audience as a subject of criticism from the perspective of Russian philosophy. However, it remains unclear whether Chernyaev means its history in general or the emerging contemporary project of Russia’s ‘sovereign’ philosophy.
It is undoubtedly striking how Kant, who gave birth to the idea of eternal peace, can be painted as a warmonger with just a few logical leaps, without a single reference to a specific argument or concept from his works. What we can infer from similar manifestos of Russian ‘sovereign’ philosophers is that, apart from the idea of a peaceful coexistence of nations, the most important subject of Chernyaev’s criticism is most likely not Kantian universalism in general (as its critical assessment is itself a prominent part of the history of Western philosophy and social sciences) but rather Kant’s idea of enlightenment as the abandonment of the state of self-incurred immaturity. Indeed, the ideal of a ‘sovereign’ Russian philosophy, which is tailored to the circumstances of the war, is the ability to obey the ruler under all circumstances (something that can, for instance, hardly be classified as a genuine form of contemporary conservatism). This ability is obviously irreconcilable with Kant’s ideas of the public use of reason and free thought.
From a general perspective, the described developments do not look like isolated accidents (as another example of random and inconsequential statements from Russian officials) since they perfectly fit in the antiliberal profile of contemporary Russian politics. Moreover, it even appears somewhat odd that Kant, a thinker representing the liberal tradition in the history of political thought, was a subject of interest and praise from Russian officials for so long. Perhaps the image of Kant as a ‘big thinker’ who is allegedly a ‘Russian citizen’ was, until recent times, considered more lucrative than the prospects of including him in the image of the ‘collective West’.
Like in other similar cases of eclectic statements from Russian officials and ideologists, their anti-Kantian rhetoric has several historical parallels and sources of inspiration. The first parallel resonates with current trends in the official narrative, which often refers to 19th-century concepts and examples, particularly those connected to nationalist ideas and movements. An integral part of this historical context is the philosophical critique against Kant’s concept of cosmopolitanism in the light of the development of nation state philosophy (from Fichte to Hegel and Herbart). While neither Alikhanov nor the Russian ‘sovereign’ philosophers mention Fichte or Hegel in this regard, their arguments are consonant with the positions of contemporary far-right ideologists, such as Dugin. One can, for instance, refer to Dugin’s recent essay, where he portrays Hegel as a strong opponent of civil society (and of Kant’s idea of cosmopolitanism in the form of ‘liberal globalism’), connecting an apocalyptic description of the contemporary multipolar world to Hegel’s concept of the end of history.
A more obvious source, directly used by Chernyaev and pointed out by other commentators, is Vladimir Ern’s anti-Kantian essay From Kant to Krupp (От Канта к Круппу, 1914), which establishes a causal relationship between German militarism during the First World War and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. For Ern, Krupp’s guns, the jewel of the German military production, are the offspring of Kant’s ‘phenomenalism’ (meaning his opposition of phenomena and noumena). Disregarding the complexity of Kant’s understanding of religion (and, even more obviously, Kant’s criticism against a purely technological development of mankind), Ern is focused solely on his goal of connecting his understanding of Kant’s rationality as a radical denial of god’s existence with the hybris of the German militaristic culture. It is symbolic that this old text is dug out during another war and is, once again, used in a propaganda campaign. (On a side note, the same reasoning that blames specific philosophers for cultural and political trends leading to bad decisions reminds us of another example – the campaign against Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, organized by the British media during the First World War.)
There is still another element in the anti-Kantian rhetoric used by Russian officials and ‘sovereign’ intellectuals – one that is part of the Soviet legacy from the late Stalin period. The anti-cosmopolitan (de facto antisemitic) campaign in the USSR, which began shortly after the end of the Second World War, had, among others, an academic direction which manifested in sharp criticism against specific ‘bourgeois’ philosophers responsible for the ‘idolization of the West’. Among these was Immanuel Kant, whose concept gave the campaign its name. Chernyaev’s idea that we should only use Kant to emphasize the independent, non-Western origins and traits of Russian philosophy echoes the core principles of Zhdanov cultural doctrine that provided an ideological foundation for the anti-cosmopolitan campaign. On the academic level, the doctrine was exemplified by Zhdanov’s harsh criticism against Georgiy Aleksandrov’s textbook History of Western European Philosophy (1945) and the subsequent 1947 debate at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (today’s Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences) – a sequence of events that was closely observed in the West and even retold in a CIA report from a later period.
Should we expect another anti-cosmopolitan campaign about 80 years after the first one? And would this campaign spell the end for the Russian Kant studies in their ‘non-sovereign’ form? These developments are not impossible, as we already see examples of defamation and persecution of scholars working in the fields of (bio)ethics, sociology, and political philosophy. Still, a large-scale campaign explicitly aimed against Kant scholars seems rather improbable. On the other hand, during this year of Kant’s 300th anniversary, we should expect more of such news from Russia as examples of the government’s increasing grip on academia – and a manifestation of explicit political use of philosophical concepts (something highly uncommon for today’s Europe).