Russian philosophy of history

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrzej Walicki
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
World View ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Russian Philosophy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Russian Intelligentsia ◽  
Secular Religion ◽  
Russian Idea

In his classic book The Russian Idea Nikolai Berdiaev pointed out that ‘independent Russian thought was awakened by the problem of the philosophy of history’. It was because educated, Westernized Russians needed an answer to the problem of Russia’s whence and whither: Who are we? Where are we going? What is Russia’s place in universal history? There were many reasons for this passionate search for the meaning of history. It was a means to define Russia’s national identity. It expressed the deeply felt need for modernization, stemming from increasing awareness of the contrast between Russia’s political power and its social backwardness. And – above all, perhaps – it was a result of the disintegration of Russia’s ecclesiastical culture, serving as a substitute for a religious world-view. The central place in this secular religion of history was occupied by the notion of progress. It showed a direction, thus answering the ‘cursed question’ of what was to be done; therefore, the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia saw the commitment to progress as the most important constitutive part of its self-definition. But many conceptions of progress could also function as a secular theodicy, or rather historiodicy, explaining and justifying the sufferings of the past and present as a necessary price for the triumph of truth and justice in the future. Even more: in a historically retarded country the idea of inevitable stages of development could serve also as a justification for suffering in the immediate future, providing arguments for the view that present individuals, and entire generations, had to sacrifice themselves for the earthly salvation of their descendants. Hence it is understandable that the idea of inevitable, universal progress found in Russia not only enthusiastic advocates but also powerful critics.

Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Prevailing View ◽  
The Way

At a time when the Union between Scotland and England is once again under the spotlight, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland examines the way in which Scotland’s national heroes were once remembered as champions of both Scottish and British patriotism. Whereas 19th-century Scotland is popularly depicted as a mire of sentimental Jacobitism and kow-towing unionism, this book shows how Scotland’s national heroes were once the embodiment of a consistent, expressive and robust view of Scottish nationality. Whether celebrating the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, the reformer John Knox, the Covenanters, 19th-century Scots rooted their national heroes in a Presbyterian and unionist view of Scotland’s past. Examined through the prism of commemoration, this book uncovers collective memories of Scotland’s past entirely opposed to 21st-century assumptions of medieval proto-nationalism and Calvinist misery. Detailed studies of 19th-century commemoration of Scotland’s national heroes Uncovers an all but forgotten interpretation of these ‘great Scots’ Shines a new light on the mindset of nineteenth-century Scottish national identity as being comfortably Scottish and British Overturns the prevailing view of Victorian Scottishness as parochial, sentimental tartanry

scholarly journals The Difficulty of Historical Work in the Nineteenth-Century Museum and the Thackeray Novel

2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
The Past ◽  
Important Impact ◽  
Full Reconstruction ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times

This essay suggests that conservation debates occasioned by the democratization of the nineteenth-century museum had an important impact on William Makepeace Thackeray’s reimagination of the historical novel. Both the museum and the historical novel had traditionally made it their mission to present the past to an ever-widening public, and thus necessarily to preserve it. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum and the novel also shared the experience of seeming to endanger precisely what they sought to protect, and as they tried to choose how aggressive to be in their conserving measures, they had to deliberate about the costs and benefits of going after the full reconstruction (the novel) or restoration (the museum) of what once had been. The first part of this essay shows how people fretted about the relation of conservation, destruction, and national identity at the museum, in The Times and in special Parliamentary sessions alike; the second part of the essay traces how Thackeray drew on the resulting debates in novels including The Newcomes (1853–55) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), as he looked for a way to revivify the historical novel after it had gone out of fashion. He invoked broken statues and badly restored pictures as he navigated his own worries that he might be doing history all wrong, and damaging its shape in the process.

Refiguring Ethnicity through Kazak Genealogies

1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilda Eitzen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
The Past ◽  
External Conditions ◽  
Common Parlance ◽  
Financial Power

In Kazakstan, as the meaning of Soviet citizenship recedes into the past, the question of Kazak identity comes to the fore. The framing of Kazak national identity is generally configured in relation to the Three Zhuzes, in common parlance referred to as “hordes” but more properly translated “hundreds.” Multiple means of defining Kazak ethnicity emerge either to challenge or reinforce legacies of the past. Traditional concepts of the past may alternately reinforce or break away from stereotypes informed by Russia, by the “civilizing” factors of Islam, or by the nineteenth-century imperial West, depending upon external conditions of military or financial power.

„Das Neue und Immergleiche“. Benjamin, Nietzsche und die ewige Wiederkehr

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Brusotti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Change ◽  
Central Place ◽  
The Other ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
The Past ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

AbstractAfter discovering the short cosmological treatise L’éternité par les astres at the end of 1937, Benjamin ‘constellates’ the author, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, with Baudelaire and Nietzsche under the sign of eternal recurrence. From then on, eternal recurrence is given a central place in Benjamin’s analysis of modernity. Under many aspects his thoughts are rooted in the dramatic years in which they were developed: a conception of myth problematic in itself is misapplied to Nietzsche, the analogy with Blanqui’s cosmology leads to misunderstandings, and Benjamin does not grasp the connection between a task relevant for himself, the redemption of the past, and Zarathustra’s thought of eternal recurrence. Nevertheless, this constellation charged with tension is theoretically productive. Benjamin interprets the two faces of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence in the context of his own theory of the structural change of experience in modernity. On the one hand, eternal recurrence is linked in multiple ways to the new forms of technical reproduction and compulsory repetition arising in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, it is assigned the task of compensating for an irretrievable loss. Is this compensation thoroughly illusory? Or does it contain a ‘motive of salvation’? Guided by these questions, the paper investigates the ‘polyphony’ of Benjamin’s remarks on Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence and their heuristic potential.

Buddhist Apologetics and a Genealogy of Comparative Religion in Siam

Numen ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thongchai Winichakul
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Comparative Religion ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Theravada Buddhism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Integral Component ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
First Time

Contemporary identity in Thailand is prominently configured through an allegiance of reformed Buddhism with the modern Thai state. What is not well understood, however, is the centrality of “comparative religion” to the construction of this naturalized religionationalist identity, for interreligious study in Siam has been an integral component of modern Thai identity since the mid-nineteenth century. First, the emergence of “religion” as an object of study in modern Thailand is explored here, in an effort to detail the genealogy of this field for the first time. The articulation of Thai religious identity is identified as a response to intellectual challenges from colonial influences, especially the reproofs of Buddhism by Christian missionaries and Orientalist scholarship on religion. Thai Buddhist intellectuals responded to these challenges by robustly countering that Theravada Buddhism was, in fact, superior to Christianity and other religions. Finally, I explore the contentions between the Thai Buddhist apologetics and their opponents as a genealogy of the knowledge in comparative religion in Siam over the past century and a half. Given this genealogy, the field of comparative religion in Thailand is revealed as being far from a disinterested pursuit of knowledge; rather, it is part of the formation and reaffirmation of Thai national identity.

scholarly journals Early Slavophilism and European philosophy: the problem of correlation

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 05003
Author(s):  
Marina Shirokova
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Related Question ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Russian Philosophy ◽  
The West ◽  
Philosophical Concept ◽  
European Philosophy ◽  
Classical Philosophy

The article examines the question of the degree of influence the Western philosophy has on the philosophical concept of the founders of Slavophilism and the related question of the degree of independence of the philosophy of the Slavophils. The view is expressed that the problem of national identity, which became key to the Slavophile authors, was actively discussed at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the countries of Europe and from there penetrated into the Russian thought. It is said that the Slavophiles used the categorical apparatus and methodology of German classical philosophy, primarily the ideas of Hegel and Schelling. A comparison of the views of representatives of Slavophilism and Western European romanticism is conducted. The author concludes that the influence of Western philosophy on the concept of Slavophiles is undeniable, but the complex of Slavophilism ideas cannot be considered secondary to European ideas. The Slavophiles saw their task in creating an independent Russian philosophy, in which the synthesis of the cultures of Russia and the West on the basis of common moral values could be achieved.

History, the Peasantry, and the Polish Nation in the Thought of Michal Bobrzyński

1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Pajakowski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Imagination ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
National Community ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Face

The most important historical works of today are those that take the past of a single nation and state as their subject, for the nation and the state are the highest natural, independently developing organism that humanity has yet achieved.Like most nineteenth-century historians, Michal Bobrzyński directed his research to the study of his nation's past and especially to the development of political institutions. History, for him, served to enhance a sense of nationhood among his readers by deriving lessons from the experience of the national community and providing a basis for present political activity. As a politically engaged historian, Bobrzyński faced serious issues of the need to reorient Polish national identity and to refashion the historical imagination to meet the needs of his people in the face of the political situation in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

History, philosophy of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Graham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
World History ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Western World ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Past

Philosophy of history is the application of philosophical conceptions and analysis to history in both senses, the study of the past and the past itself. Like most branches of philosophy its intellectual origins are cloudy, but they lie in a refinement of ‘sacred’ histories, especially those of Judaism and Christianity. The first major philosopher to outline a scheme of world history was Immanuel Kant in The Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784), and German Idealism also produced Hegel’sLectures on the Philosophy of World History (1837), a much longer and more ambitious attempt to make philosophical sense of the history of the world as a whole. According to Hegel, history is rational, the working out, in fact, of philosophical understanding itself. The accelerating success of natural science in the nineteenth century gave rise to a powerful combination of empiricism and logical positivism which produced a philosophical climate highly unfavourable to Hegelian philosophy of history. The belief became widespread among philosophers that Hegel, and Marx after him, had developed a priori theories that ignored historical contingency in favour of historical necessity, and which were empirically unfalsifiable. Karl Popper’s philosophy of science was especially influential in converting philosophy of history to a new concern with the methods of historical study rather than with the shape of the past. Two rival conceptions of historical method existed. One tried to model explanation in history on what they took to be the form of explanation in science, and argued for the existence of ‘covering laws’ by which historians connect the events they seek to explain. The other argued for a distinctive form of explanation in history, whose object was the meaning of human action and whose structure was narrative rather than deductive. Neither side in this debate was able to claim a convincing victory, with the result that philosophers gradually lost interest in history and began to concern themselves more generally with the nature of human action. This interest, combined with a revival of nineteenth-century German hermeneutics, the study of texts in their social and cultural milieu, in turn revived interest among analytical philosophers in the writings of Hegel and Nietzsche. The impact of continental influences in philosophy, art criticism and social theory was considerable, and reintroduced a historical dimension that had been largely absent from twentieth-century analytical philosophy. In particular, the formation of fundamental philosophical ideas began to be studied as a historical process. The Enlightenment came to be seen as a crucial period in the development of philosophy, and of modernity more generally, and with this understanding came the belief that the contemporary Western world is postmodern. In this way, social theory and the philosophy of culture in fact returned, albeit unawares, to the ‘grand narrative’ tradition in philosophy of history.

The Formation of the Historiosophical Discourse in Russiaat the Beginning of the 19th Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 122-131
Author(s):  
Irina F. Shcherbatova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Russian Philosophy ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Russian History ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Russian Idea ◽  
The French Revolution

This article argues that by 1830s historiosophical discourse in Russia had be­come both a specific genre and a type of ideology. The article outlines the spec­trum of philosophical approaches to history within this genre and ideology. It ar­gues that the defeat of the Decembrist revolt led to the formation of a particular negative interpretation of Russian history amongst Russian philosophers of that time. The author offers an analysis of works by Dmitry Venevitinov, Ivan Kireyevsky, and Pyotr Chaadayev written in the late 1820s and in the early 1830s. These texts allow us to explore the genealogy and distinctive style of Russian philosophy of history. Nikolay Karamzin’s interpretation of history as governed by providence proved to be the most influential interpretation of the 19th century. Pyotr Chaadaev’s historical pessimism and Ivan Kireyevsky’s opti­mistic messianism were both influenced by Karamzin’s humanist anthropology. All these thinkers were looking to determine the meaning of Russian history, and this very task inevitably entails rhetorical and ideological constructions. Russian messianism and the popular Russian idea of the decay of Europe were inspired by the conservative reception of the French revolution by religious thinkers in Europe. This messianic philosophy of history was expressed in a very non-schol­arly discourse and was interwoven with ideas of teleology and providence to­gether with some superficial comparative observations. There is a striking simi­larity between philosophy of history in the 1830s and the philosophy that was developed by the authors of the Vekhi collection in the early 20th century.

scholarly journals Argentine Cinema and National Identity (1966-1976)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolina Rocha
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
High Expectations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Film ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Left And Right ◽  
Film Genres

Argentine Cinema and National Identity covers the development of Argentine cinema since the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, a period that has been understudied. Marked by tumultuous political events, these decades witnessed debates about Argentina’s modernity and tradition that affected film production and consumption. Two film genres, the historical film and the gauchesque— a genre based on outlaw gauchos was crucial for nation-building in the nineteenth century—generated great local interest and high expectations among film producers and distributors. The notion of national identity guides the analysis of certain emblematic films that were well-received by domestic audiences and engaged with the issue of Argentine identity. This manuscript investigates the way Argentine cinema positioned itself when facing the competition of glossy American films by representing the past and the heroic founding figures so as to bridge the stark divisions between the Argentine left and right in the late 1960s.

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