Essays on Russian Intellectual History (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 563 Leopoldo-Eulogio Palacios, "Le visage et son annulation"; Karl O. Kurth, "Die Interjektion als Mittel der Wortbildung"; and Georgi Schischkoff, "Kybernetik und Geisteswissenschaften ." I have given the author's names and the titles of the essays in this group merely to illustrate the wide range of "problems" here discussed. Of special interest , however, is the fifth and last group of essays: "Mediziner haben das Wort." Schopenhauer's philosophy is here seen in a way that is both novel and suggestive-ranging from an analysis of pain and of dreams (in connection with Schopenhauer's conception of "the world as idea") to Schopenhauer's view of the world of the physician. The book includes a list of the published works of Arthur Hiibscher (1921 to 1972) and refers to the forthcoming "I-Iandschriftlicher Nachlass" of Schopenhauer (Vol. IV, Parts I and II) and of Schopenhauer's "SLmtliche Briefe." W. H. WERKMEISTER Florida State University Essays on Russian Intellectual History. By Joseph T. Fuhrmann, Edward C. Beck, and Leon I. Twarog. With an Introduction by Sidney Monas. (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1971. Pp. 123) The most useful thing in this book is the Introduction by Sidney Monas. Without this, it would not be a book at all but merely the printed juxtaposition of three papers written without reference to one another on completely separate topics, of very disparate intentions, quality, and length. Monas manages to give a description and justification of these papers in his Introduction which brings them tenuously together (and thus greatly strengthens the volume). The first paper by Joseph T. Fuhrmann, "The First Russian Philosopher's Search for the Kingdom of God," is the longest in the book, the most carefully written, 'and the best researched. It does not break any new ground, but it gives a sound and thorough summary of the thought of that most enigmatic and neglected of Russian philosophers, Gregorii Sawich Skovoroda. There are a few errors (such as the false attribution of a quotation in note 120 on p. 63), but on the whole the reader is most favorably impressed by the comprehensive scholarship and the good judgment of the author--and is thus pleased to be able to add this piece to the very slender bibliography of serious writings on Skovoroda available in the English language. The second essay in this volume, "Vladimir Soloviev's Christian State in the Christian Society," by Edward C. Beck, is less imposing in length and less impressive in scholarship . A large part of it is nothing more than a paraphrase of Soloviev's essay, "Veto Christlichen Staat und der Christlichen Gesellschaft," as it was published in the German translation of N. Hoffmann in Leipzig in 1907. It might be of interest to Soloviev scholars and whatever readers of Russian Orthodox theology may still share Soloviev's personal dream of "a universal Christian Society which was to be ruled by one secular and one ecclesiastical authority" (p. 94), but this is not a very large company. The propagation of Christianity throughout the world and the construction of a society founded upon and united by the explicit avowal of Christian doctrine and Christian beliefs is not a prospect that is either particularly appealing or particularly realistic in the second half of the twehtieth century. We all share, no doubt, a certain theoretical interest in speculating, just for the sake of speculation, about what the proper Christian attitude ought to be towards all those institutions, including jails, armies, governments, courts, etc. which go to make up any developed society. But what we have here is hardly more than an uncritical, unsystematic, and partial list of Soloviev's personal opinions about what a truly Christian society, if one were ever to come into existence, would 564 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY look like. In order to be of contemporary interest for social philosophy, such speculation would have to be both more specific and more developed than Soloviev (and Beck) have left it. One wonders, for instance, how seriously to take Soloviev's notion that the true Christian society will be divided into three classes which mirror the three ancient IndoEuropean and Platonic castes, namely: (1) "the people in...