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

Self-Reliance, Sobornost,

Whatever the differences and similarities were, and are, as to the details of die inner alchemy of man towards some “self-renovation”, completion, sapientia, or deification; for the American Emerson, and the early Russian Slavophiles, there is one essential and profound distinction which seems essentially and pivotally characteristic for each of these peoples. And that concerns the understanding and evaluation of the individual, in relation to the community, the society in which they live. If there would have been little disputation by Emerson with Kireyevsky’s goal of the “integral personality”; their recognition and appraisal of the individual stands in deep contrast. Yet, in Kireyevsky’s and Khomyakov’s highest conception of the individual vis-a-vis the community, lies a profoundly encouraging and enlightening complementarity to Emerson’s conception of the individual as a “sovereign state”.

Kireyevsky returned from Central Europe, as did a number of Russians, with experience of the isolation of the individual in the societies of the West He, and others, attributed this to the predominance of “rationalism”, in the inner life of the individual; as an organizing principle in society (“not community” [192]); and, in complement to the primarily secular emphasis and interest in the life of “this world”, as the basis for a philosophy of man, society, civilization, nature, etc. Kireyevsky could hardly be accepting of a Jefferson; as he found even Schleiermacher incomplete.

Kireyevsky came to herald the idea of the Russian “obschina” and “mir” [193], and the deep soul which was common to all mankind, in regard to the realities of life, in this world, and the next The “obschina” was a small peasant community conceived to be “organically” ordered according to age-old customs, traditions, and religious Orthodoxy; it was not at all, some rationally organized society. It was, ideally, a community of shared land and property, customs, ways and manners, etc; in other words, a communal brotherhood. It was governed by the “mir”, a group of elders who settled controversies for the benefit of the entire community according to age-old customs, etc. Thousands of such communities were imagined to make Russia into one great community, one great “mir”. And it was this conception of community, and the whole, healthy individual in the community, which Kireyevsky embraced of Russia’s life and history, in order to describe a healthier individual and social order, than he had experienced in Central Europe. Community — organic, customary, traditional community — came to be contrasted to the rational individual and the rationally organized societies in the West Emerson had rejected common society in his embrace of the noble individual. And though both Kireyevsky and Emerson rejected a mundane, secular conception of man and society, for a “vertical” one; Kiryevsky called for a higher community.