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5 / T H E “ Q U E S T I O N O F T H E S O U L ” I N T H E A G E O F P O S I T I V I S M O N F E B R U A R Y 8 , 1 8 6 3 , T O L S T O Y J O T T E D I N H I S D I A R Y, “ O R I S H O U L D F O R get that I have body and soul in me, and only remember that I have a body with nerves. That’s a success for medicine, but for psychology just the opposite .”1 This comment, for all its brevity, encapsulates some of the major tensions and concerns of the positivist era, including a fundamental shift in the discourse on man that was taking place at the time. Tolstoy’s note not only captures the growing materialist orientation of contemporary science and culture, where nerves (a part of the body’s physiology) have usurped the role of the metaphysical soul, but also alludes to the rivalry between medicine and psychology over discursive authority on human nature.2 The competition between the two disciplines noted by Tolstoy, provoked by the positivists ’ reduction of psychology to physiology, culminated in the 1860s and 1870s and, in literature, endowed the two ancient models of lovesickness with a new relevance. In this charged atmosphere, the two opposite approaches to the spiritual malady of love assumed not only philosophical or aesthetic but also ideological dimensions, and the question of the therapy (or solution), as in the title of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), resonated powerfully with contemporaneous political concerns. The same idea that was a source of epistemological optimism and artistic inspiration for the Sentimentalists—the union of body and soul and the cult of nerves as the intermediary between the two realms—provoked a ver1 2 3 itable “culture war” in post-reform Russia. Russian radicals and their press organs (the Contemporary [Sovremennik] and the RussianWord [Russkoe slovo]) promoted Feuerbachian anthropology, philosophical materialism, and the cult of the natural sciences, while more conservative or religious thinkers and writers advocated dualism or spiritualism; evoked the vitalist principle in science, with its idea of a distinct life force governing organic bodies, whose functioning therefore cannot be reduced to physical-chemical processes; and, naturally, sought a metaphysical foundation for psychic life. “The questions of the soul, its modifications and its states, as well as the questions of the relationship of psychic phenomena (dushevnykh iavlenii) to the bodily organism and its various parts are too closely connected with numerous questions about our existence and our civilization and perhaps for this reason they raise a whole series of passions and prejudices,” the theologian and philosopher Pamfil Iurkevich commented in 1862.3 Iurkevich lamented the ongoing politicization of this complex philosophical and scientific problem, which “has become in our contemporary literature a banner, by which each party with foolish ease identifies its own and uncovers its adversaries,” but his own participation in the debate, ironically, contributed to the polarization of this issue along ideological lines.4 Chernyshevsky and Iurkevich Iurkevich (1827–74), then a little-known professor of Kiev Theological Academy , himself had opened the debate on the “questions of the soul” in his tract The Heart and Its Significance in Human Spiritual Life, according to the Teaching of God’s Word, published in the academy’s periodical in 1860. In this work, the Kiev theologian revives the ancient rivalry between brain and heart for the status of the seat of the soul. While contemporary physiology tends to locate the center of all life and psychic activity in the brain, the Biblical tradition, Iurkevich argues, has always rightly maintained that the heart is the true seat of the soul. The brain is indeed the center of human rational faculties, but, Iurkevich insists, the human psyche cannot be reduced to thinking alone. He accepts the physiological evidence that places psychic activities (dushevnye deistviia) in the brain but objects to the logic that assigns, on this basis, the seat of the soul to the brain: “Even though the activity of the brain is the necessary condition for the soul to give birth to sensations and concepts, we do not see, however, that it necessarily follows from this that the soul must, for this purpose...

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