Ian Buruma

Avishai Margalit
Occidentalism

One cannot imagine anyone nowadays bringing a bust of Schelling to Russia (or anywhere else for that matter), but that is what Ivan Kireyevsky did. Schelling was lionized and idolized in Russia in a way that is hard to understand now. Indeed, he was revered by such radical thinkers as the saintly anarchist Kropotkin, quite as much as by a reactionary thinker like Pogodin (the kind of reactionary who gives reaction a bad name). What did these men find in Schelling?

German Romanticism, unlike other forms of Romanticism in western Europe, was not just a literary and artistic movement; it had intense political and social implications. In his Naturphilosophie, Schelling paints the universe as a living organism, behaving in a goal-directed manner. This is a complete reversal of Isaac Newton's idea of nature as a mechanism, directed not by goals, but by forces and causes. Schelling's organic notion was a means of doing away with the calculating mind of the West and provided the idea of society as a living organism, driven by communal goals. This was the antithesis of the liberal notion of a society made up of individuals bound by contract.

Schelling's ideas of the universe were very much in tune with the Slavophile mood. Society, to the Slavophiles, corresponded to the church, or religious community, as a divine-human organism. An often-used word for this was sobornost. Sobor was the church council, and the verb sobirat meant 'to unite'; thus the original ecclesiastical idea was the unity of the believers in the mystical body of Christ. Kireyevsky spoke of 'integrality.' In any case, inspired by Schelling's ideas, Russia was seen as the opposite of Western society, as represented by England, Holland, or the French republic.

In his New Principle in Philosophy, Ivan Kireyevsky made clear distinctions between the mind of the West and the mind of the rest—Russia, of course, being the paradigmatic non-Western mind. The West, in Kireyevsky's way of thinking, was built on rotten foundations: spiritually, on scholastic rationalism as adopted by the Catholic church; politically, on Roman and Teutonic conquests that formed the political order of Europe; and socially, on the Roman idea of absolute property rights, which Kireyevsky saw as an incipient form of individualism. He identified the mind of the West with abstract, fragmented reasoning, cut off from the wholeness of the world. The organic Russian mind, on the other hand, is guided by faith and able to grasp the totality of things.

Kireyevsky targeted both rationalism and reasonableness as pernicious elements in the Western mind. The two are easily conflated, but not in fact the same. Aristotle, in Kireyevsky's view, was responsible for molding the mind of the West in the iron cast of reasonableness. It was a good thing, however, that he failed to transmit this idea to his most illustrious pupil, Alexander the Great, who was great precisely because he was after glory, and not after the petty ideal of being reasonable. Reasonableness, says Kireyevsky, is nothing but the 'striving for the better within the circle of the commonplace.' Reasonableness is timid prudence, an appeal for intense mediocrity, based on trite conventional wisdom, the opposite of true wisdom. It is the fear of being original, lest one is perceived as an extremist, the worst thing one can be in the cowardly West. Reasonableness is the epitome of the non-heroic mind, excoriated by not just Russian Slavophiles such as Kireyevsky but a host of antiliberal thinkers, many of them German, who, as we have already noted, despised the merchant and worshiped the hero.

Many of us might think that being reasonable suggests prudence, stability, and having a modicum of foresight. It also suggests willingness to listen to reason and to act for clear reasons. In this sense it means the same as being rational. But Kireyevsky, as well as other Occidentalists after him, viewed prudence as timidity, stability as dullness, and foresight as seeking an uninspiring, sheltered life. Kireyevsky found all that in Aristotle, since Aristotle took common beliefs and common sense seriously, and Kireyevsky interpreted Aristotle's golden rule as a rule for avoiding extremes and seeking the average, which is another name for mediocrity. Thus Kireyevsky turned Aristotle into the first philosopher of the bourgeois mind, which is nothing but the mind of the West.