Abstract
At the beginning of the twentieth century, “monism” became a key term in political debates across Europe. The term was seized upon by social reformers and revolutionary visionaries of all stripes and, in Russia and Germany in particular, there was a pronounced tendency to yoke monism to socialism. Maxim Gorky (1868–1936), the “poet of the proletarian revolution,” even said: “For me, the value of Bolshevism resides in its being the creation of monists.”1 And the Social Democratic member of the Reichstag Heinrich Pëus (1862–1937) stated in the organ of the German Monist League The Monist Century: “Social Democracy strives for a specific form of life, monism for a specific method of thinking and living. Both, however, will always remain friends.”2 Nevertheless, this pledge was accompanied by a certain reservation: “Monism is not beholden to social democratic views. Rather, it has the right and is obligated to make the Social Democratic Party aware of the dangers, the ‘inevitable evil’ that party brings with it.”3
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Notes
Heinrich Pëus, “Monismus und Sozialdemokratie,” Das monistische Jahrhundert 2 (1913): 25–29, 29.
Aleksandr Bogdanov, Empiriomonizm: Stat’i po filosofii, vol. 2 (Moscow, St. Petersburg, 1904–1906), 47.
“Every difference become the center of the world, and precisely that makes the world necessary: for every system/environment difference, the world integrates all the system/environment differences that a system finds in itself and its environment.” Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1993), 208.
See V. L. Kign, “Positivizm v russkoj literature,” Russkoe bogatstvo 3 (1989): 3–41, 12; I. A. Golosenko, “Istoričeskie sud’by idej Ogjusta Konta,” Sociologičeskie issledovanija 4 (1982): 146–152, 147.
See T. Pavlov, “P. D. Jurkevič v Moskovskom universitete,” Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta: Serija Filosofija 3 (2007), 97–108.
See Michail Agurskij, “Velikij eretik: Gor’kij kak religioznyj myslitel,” Voprosy filosofii 8 (1991), 54–74, 63.
For Russian biocosmology, see Michael Hagemeister, “Die ‘Biokosmisten’— Anarchismus und Maximalismus in der frühen Sowjetzeit,” in Studia Slavica in Honorem Viri Doctissimi Olexa Horbatsch, part 1, vol. 1 (Munich, 1983), 61–76.
Andrej Platonov, “Ėfirnyj trakt,” in Andrej Platonov. Sobranie sočinenij, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1984), 151–220, 158.
See Igor J. Polianski, “Das Lied vom Anderswerden: Lysenko und die politische Semantik der Vererbung,” Osteuropa 10 (2009), 69–88.
Trofim Lysenko, “über den Stand der biologischen Wissenschaft,” Neue Welt 17 (1948), 66–92, 82. The inheritance of acquired characteristics had been advocated at the beginning of the twentieth century by Paul Kammerer (1880–1926), a regular contributor to the journal of the German Monist League The Monist Century. His concept of heredity became a hallmark of monism through his article Monist and Dualist Genetics, where Kammerer represented positions advanced also by Ernst Haeckel. Paul Kammerer, “Monistische und dualistische Vererbungslehre,” Das monistische Jahrhundert 7 (1912), 225–235. (For a more detailed discussion, see chapter 6 in this volume.)
Vadim Safonov and Aleksej Ruseckij, “Nauka o žizni,” Znanie-sila 9 (1948), 1–11, 2.
See Kirill Rossiianov, “Beyond Species: Il’ya Ivanov and His Experiments on Cross-Breeding Humans with Anthropoid Apes,” Science in Context 15 (2002), 277–316.
“The Soviets focused on the primordial attachments of kinship and projected them as the dominant symbol for social allegiance.” Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 114, 116.
M. I. Astvacaturov, “O psichosomatičeskom vzaimootnošenii pri zabolevanijach vnutrennich organov,” Kliničeskaja medicina 9 (1934), 1268.
Cp. K. I. Platonov, Slovo kak fiziologičeskij I lečebnyj factor (K fiziologii psichoterapii) (Char’kov, 1930), 9.
N. N. Petrov, “Voprosy chirurgičeskoj deontologii,” Vestnik Chirurgii 2/3 (1939), 237–242.
Contrary to the “localistic pathology” of Rudolf Virchow, who forgot the “whole human being” and his status subjektivus behind the “locus morbi,” Roman Lurija advocated a “monistic understanding of the organism” in which the somatic and psychic were not split and in any case not opposed to each other. Rather they needed to be conceived of as an “inseparable chain of processes closely interwoven with each other.” Roman A. Lurija, Vnutrennjaja kartina bolezni i iatrogennye zabolevanija (Moscow, Leningrad, 1935), 15.
N. N. Petrov, “Popytka fiziko-bologičeskogo obosnovanija morali,” Kubanskij nau čno-medicinskij vestnik 1 (1921), 3–17, 14.
See Wilhelm Ostwald, “Euthanasie,” Das monistische Jahrhundert 7 (1913), 69–174.
See Žižilenko, Prestuplenija protiv ličnosti (Moscow, Leningrad, 1927), 12.
Detlef Pollack, “Auf dem Weg zu einer Theorie des Staatssozialismus,” Historical Social Research 28, no.1–2 (2003), 10–20, 16.
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© 2012 Todd H. Weir
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Polianski, I.J. (2012). Between Hegel and Haeckel: Monistic Worldview, Marxist Philosophy, and Biomedicine in Russia and the Soviet Union. In: Weir, T.H. (eds) Monism. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011749_9
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