Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia (review)

The thesis of this lucid, partisan book is that "Russia was never in a Western, Cartesian sense a culture of reason, but in all its philosophical forms it was a culture of hope." By "reason" Chamberlain means logical argument, enlightened self-interest, Social-Darwinist competition, but most of all, radical doubt, understood as the sole legitimate route to knowledge. By "hope" she means wholeness, intuition, personalism, self-sacrifice, a thirst for utopia, but most of all, cooperation and trust postulated as the primary ground of knowing. This binary (analytic versus synthetic, Descartes's Method versus Pascal's leap of faith) is blunt but functional. Throughout her story, the anxious thread is Hegel. Hegel promised order and wholeness, but was Russia qualified to provide her own synthesis? One that avoided the cyclically destructive dialectic of the progressive West? As a "naive" nation, perhaps she could. This dream was fatal, Chamberlain says, for facts began to be subsumed by values and "exactly Hegel made it possible to believe in the not-yet-real." The Russian Enlightenment followed rather than preceded the Romantic Absolute and never wholly displaced it.

Why partisan? If there is an imbalance in Chamberlain's account, it is her indifference to the religious dimension. Theological issues are either invisible or linked with mysticism, "mystical anarchism," postmodernism, even magic, as undisciplined impulses of the mind and heart. What counts as responsible philosophy for Chamberlain is the quest for a coherent sociopolitical whole. Thus Lenin is allotted a fascinating pivotal chapter because he would rid Russia "of all the dreaming and uncertainty that passed for philosophy." This imbalance is all the more odd since one of the best chapters, "Rejecting the View from Descartes," argues forcefully that Pascal's Wager is the Russian way. And yet Russia's great Silver Age spiritual thinkers are all reduced to "philosophical anarchists" for whom "to believe in God was a way of being at ease with worldly disorder." Even the charismatic Soloviev emerges as limp, blurred, and humorless, his Christianity flattened and his appeal unexplained. The author admits that she finds herself "defining as Russia's richest heritage ideas which, to my classical Western cast of mind . . . seem uncommonly dangerous."

Chamberlain's view is deeply influenced by the resolute secularism of her mentor Isaiah Berlin, whose profile is everywhere conspicuous and whose "aversion to religious thought" is openly confessed. This bias is productive. It permits Chamberlain to take seriously figures usually dismissed as raving nihilists (Dmitri Pisarev), populist dreamers (Pyotr Lavrov), or cynical opportunists (Lenin). She is stunning on Dostoevsky's doubts. She sees clearly that since materialists in Russia were not empiricists, idealists had to carry the torch of democratic tolerance. But her bar is a high one. The ideals of agonistic liberalism, after all, are part of the "culture of reason." And a "culture of hope," in her reading, must prove its mettle in the sociopolitical and ethical spheres unsupported by religious faith—or else fail. Many great Russian thinkers would not accept the terms of this test.