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1 results

  • 4 - Russian ethical humanism: from populism to neo-idealism

  • Edited by G. M. Hamburg, Claremont McKenna College, California, Randall A. Poole
  • Book:
    A History of Russian Philosophy 1830–1930
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    22 April 2010, pp 90-108

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the ethical humanism of the two greatest theorists of Russian populism, Pëtr Lavrovich Lavrov and Nikolai Mikhailovskii. Lavrov's sympathy for utilitarian ethic was part of his genetic account of a humanistic morality. Lavrov believed that the central concepts of ethics were human dignity, development, critical conviction, and justice, concepts that remained at the center of all his philosophical and literary activity. Like Lavrov, Mikhailovskii placed the highest value on the all-round development of the individual. The chapter explores how these figures were themselves eclipsed at the turn of the century by philosophical thinkers of a younger generation, whose critique of positivism took them from revisionist Marxism to neo-idealism in search of the true nature of ethical values. The aim of ethics is neither the happiness of the individual nor even of the species, but the cultivation of the spirit that is the ground of absolute human value.