Death

Abstract

Giving the commencement address at Harvard University on June 8, 1978 Alexander Solzhenitsyn was keen to impress upon his audience the West’s spiritual degeneracy. He duly employed a paradox that one might entertain as dialectical. He claimed that the Soviet dictatorship had engendered a high spiritual level among the Russian folk precisely because they had been forced to suffer so much. That is: “Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive.” He did not pursue this line of thought stringently and recommend yet more suffering for the Russian people together with something similar for us, in the expectation that they would rise to a yet higher spiritual level and that we would escape our own benighted state. But he did use this strangely perverse first principle to attack what the godless call secularism and he, surely suspecting that many among his audience were vulnerable to the charge, chose to call “humanism.” It is fair to see this as an assault on principles that go back to Kant and the Enlightenment. Certainly it is striking that, unintentionally or otherwise, Solzhenitsyn evoked the same teleological and thereby narrative categories that we have already met in that context. Also notable is that although he was much concerned throughout the address with “man’s responsibility to God,” he left the Deity unnamed, but heavily implicit, when he produced his clinching teleological proposition: “If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die.”