Towards the Spiritual Convergence of America and Russia: American Mind and Russian Soul, American Individuality and Russian Community, and the Potent Alchemy of National Characteristics
- Автор: Lapeyrouse Stephen Ludger
- Год: 1990
- Язык: английский
- ISBN: 0-9628048-0-0
- Жанр: История
Электронная книга - «Towards the Spiritual Convergence of America and Russia: American Mind and Russian Soul, American Individuality and Russian Community, and the Potent Alchemy of National Characteristics». Краткое содержание книги:
“If my efforts in this work are adequate to the task, I wish to make substantial intellectual contributions towards a clear description of how essential and profound a spiritual, philosophical and psychological relation exists, between characteristic highest (“vertical”) conceptions and aspirations — and tasks — of Mankind in America and Russia. The hope is that such understanding could contribute, essentially, towards a clearer, creative, and mutually-beneficial spiritual orientation — in thoughtful and heartful individuals of both nationalities — which might lead to a more conscious spiritual meeting of “Russian” and “American”; and thereby, possibly, promote an alchemical blending of the American Mind and Russian Soul, American Individuality and Russian Community. Such a greater clarity towards a greater spiritual realization, and more complete wholeness, in some men and women of each country, and thereby, perhaps, in portions of Mankind as a whole.” — the Author
The “Hillside Chapel”, built for the Concord School of Philosophy during the same year that Dostoyevsky was completing The Brothers Karamazov (1880, the year before his death), was topped by a small cross, on its simple wooden structure. But the inner life beneath it, was predominately one of the mind; especially in comparison to that of those deeply religious, seeking souls, beneath the Russian Crosses and Icons of Optina Pustyn Monastery. Yet still, it must be firmly recognized; many of the best, creative spirits of each country, sought spiritual sustenance, understanding, knowledge and wisdom, in that source which was their nations’ own. However profoundly different, in content, character and spirit, these two spiritual sources and styles were from each other, in themselves; each seemed, to most of those who participated in them, in each of their respective lands, more than less an inherent, natural, ennobled (and ennobling), complete and whole pursuit of the best and highest of the inner life of Man.
The contrast here is strong and pronounced, and since it can lead into deeper insight and broader understanding in regard to the history, reality and distinctiveness of American Mind and Russian Soul, let us consider more fully the two quotes above. Comparing the idea and philosophy of Man in each, will contribute much toward comprehending the difference of the predominately “horizontal” character of American mental life, and the “vertiсаl”-tending Russian soulful search for spirit.
The quote above, from The Brothers Karamazov, comes from “Alyosha Karamazov’s manuscript” of Father Zossima’s words. As the elder Zossima bespoke it: man’s true home is not on this earth; it is, rather, in the “higher heavenly world”. Indeed, even for the very inner life of man, “the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds”, and mankind can never come to a full understanding or peace with life in this earth, for “much is hidden from us”, and it will only be understood in the life “hereafter”, where man will be able to behold and understand from the “other worlds”. Here clearly, is a “vertical”, perhaps one could say, “theo-centric” comprehension of life and mankind. One that is in dramatic contrast to that one so well described by Princeton University President McCosh, regarding the Concord School’s life and purpose, as well as the role of philosophy in America.
In President McCosh’s description, there is no glimpse or sense of any other life — than that in this world. His entire conception stands without any conception of the presence or necessity of any life “hereafter”; of any divine, higher, inner life of man; or of any “Eternal Judge” above. All of his ideas exist, comfortably inbounded, within the “horizontal”; it is anthropo-centric, not theocentric; mundane, not otherworldly. With no Creator God considered in attempting to understand the meaning of life (“what we are about”), or the purpose and goal of human civilization and development (“what is the value of our civilization, and toward what ideals are we working”); some position to balance and contrast the “genius of materialism” must be held. And this is found in the assertion of “the supremacy of the mind”. A theocentric “old monarchy” of philosophy being presumably too severe and tyrannical [180] for a “republic of philosophy, a federation of thought”; and the “influence of Mill, Spencer, and Darwin, and the ‘genius of materialism’” being, presumably, too anarchic, undignified and immoral; it is to the “personality, mind, the soul, the main thing for which all exists”, that one should look for a center and source in relation to which to understand life and human existence. It is not that the mind of Man has already simply made sense of life and this world; and is satisfied. The questions of life, and the necessity of their pursuit, are recognized and acknowledged. Man must, in order not to “drift blindly”, “seek through philosophy [read intellectual understanding] the one central principle on which the world, the universe, rests”. But, in the conception of man here assumed, this can be done only by and through “the original undimmed source of all philosophies, viz., the mind itself”.
Clearly here, the answers to the ultimate questions of life, world, and man, are to be sought for, in, and by way of, the mind of Man; no conception of a “precious mystic sense of our living bond with the other world” enters into such a “horizontal” anthropology. Even though McCosh, a Scottish Philosopher, cites Emerson as to the centrality of the “personality”, his thought hardly allows sufficient ‘height’ to include this Transcendentalisms idea of the “Soul”, with its relation to the higher life of spirit The “vertical” in Emerson’s conception of Man, is indeed a spiritual escape from the confines of an intellectual “horizontally” of this world; but Emerson’s mind was, and is, less common in America that McCosh’s. McCosh’s description of the inner content and purpose of philosophy, and the Concord School, is typical of an almost unconscious assumption, and tendency, in the intellectual life in America, that the thinking mind, is able, of itself, to fully understand the world, ascertain meaning in human existence, and give order and direction to human endeavor.
Transcension of Mind, Catharsis of Soul
The idea of an intellectual “republic of philosophy, a federation of thought”, and a “horizontal” interpretation of the world, is very typical and characteristic of the intellectual, spiritual and cultural life of the USA — and much of the West. This is, predominately, a life and realization of the Mind of Man, living in the earthly, material world, which is here in nourishment Emerson’s summons, for the aristocratic “American Scholar”, and the dignified humility of a “newborn bard of the Holy Ghost”, is one clear voice of articulation, which calls individuals in America, to strive to escape from both the limitations and confines of the rational mind, and any exclusive and ignoble interests in the mundane world. This is certainly a call to “inner greatness”; and one of which James Truslow Adams was well aware. It is a call seen from within the American character, culture, nation and people — towards the highest spiritual achievements of Man in America. Without some such awe-filling central challenge and core, for the inner life (both of the heart and mind) of the individual, the society and the culture — around which they may orient themselves, with, at least, a humble agnostic reverence towards the ultimate, great questions and mysteries of life — a people and civilization shall surely dissipate into some essentially meaningless, earthliness of body, mind and soul. Such is a real spiritual dis-ease.
Of Russia, in the late nineteenth century, on the contrary, one could not say that there was present, among its creative, spiritually-tending individuals, the unconscious presumption, or strong, pervasive tendency, to imagine, that the mind of man, by itself alone, was adequate either for the inner life, or for an understanding of life and world [181]. The Brothers Karamazov — In so far as it was (and is?) a work which is essentially characteristic of Russia, and Russian inner life — Is a good example, which makes abundantly clear the impossibility of any such interpretation. Indeed, the battle between the secular, agnostic mind of the West, and a struggle in the human depths of the Russian Soul for a true morality, is one of the central themes of this work [182]. The struggle in the human soul is between the most noble and the most base impulses. In this inner struggle, the human soul may degrade or ascend. The ideal of man, for Kireyevsky and Khomyakov, bore their call for the purification, the catharsis of the soul unto spirit.
[180] Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote recently, in his The Cycles of American History, of Solzhenitsyn: “…Solzhenitsyn’s faith is suffused…by the otherworldly mysticism of the Russian Church — a mysticism that reflected the political absolutism of Russian society. By Russian religious standards, earthly happiness is nothing compared to the divine judgement…
He comes, moreover, as a messenger of God. ‘Truth eludes us,’ he said at Harvard, ‘if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit.’ He has concentrated with total attention and does not doubt that the truth is his. But the notion of absolute truth is hard for Americans to take. If absolute truth exists, it is certainly not confided intact to frail and sinful mortals.
If prophecy is one Christian virtue [which it is not, except in a secular sense of the word; it is properly, a gift; ed.], humility is another. Knowing the crimes committed in the name of a single Truth, Americans prefer to keep their ears open to a multitude of competing lower-case truths. Ours has been a nation of skepticism, experiment, accommodation, self-criticism, piecemeal but constant reform — а collection of traits repugnant to the authoritarian and messianic personality, but perhaps not too bad for all that” (p. 116-7)
There is very much here for contemplation and insight.
[181] However this certainly was true for some portions of the intelligentsia, e.g. Marxists, nihilists, materialists.
[182] Not only did Ivan Karamazov’s mind break from what could well be diagnosed as a “Westen”-induced “brain fever”; but did Dimitri Karamazov, indeed, escape to America, rather than go to Siberia; he would surely have found, even the best and brightest at the Concord School of Philosophy, inadequate to his and Grushenka’s Russian souls.