Russia under the Old regime

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Everything fitted together; nothing was accidental: intelligence merely had to grasp how phenomena related to ideas. 'I owe to Schelling the habit I now have of generalizing the least events and the most insignificant phenomena which I encounter', wrote V.F.Odoevskii, a leading Schel-lingian of the 1820s.' In the late 1830s when Russian intellectuals became drunk on Hegel, the addiction acquired extreme forms. Alexander Herzen, having returned from exile, found his Moscow friends in a kind of collective delirium:

Nobody at this time would have disowned such a sentence as this: 'The concrescence of abstract ideas in the sphere of the plastic represents that phase of the self-questing spirit in which it, defining itself for itself, is poten-tialized from natural immanence into the harmonious sphere of formal consciousness in beauty'... Everything that in fact is most immediate, all the simplest feelings were erected into abstract categories and returned from thence as pale, algebraic ghosts, without a drop of living blood... A man who went for a walk... went not just for a walk, but in order to give himself over to the pantheistic feelings of his identification with the cosmos. If, on the way, he met a tipsy soldier or a peasant woman who tried to strike up a conversation, the philosopher did not simply talk with them, he determined the substantiality of the popular element, both in its immediate and its accidental manifestations. The very tear which might rise to his eye was strictly referred to its proper category: to Gemiith or the 'tragic element in the heart'.10

Secondly, and only slightly less importantly, Idealism injected into philosophy a dynamic element. It conceived reality, both in its spiritual and physical aspects, as undergoing constant evolution, as 'becoming' rather than 'being'. The entire cosmos was evolving, the process leading towards a vaguely defined goal of a perfectly free and rational existence. This 'historicist' element, present in all Idealist doctrines, has become ever since an indispensable ingredient of all 'ideologies'. It gave and continues to give the intelligentsia the assurance that the reality with which they happen to be surrounded and in varying degrees repudiate is by the very nature of things transitory, a stepping stone to something superior. Furthermore, it allows them to argue that whatever discrepancy there might exist between their ideas and reality is due to the fact that reality, as it were, has not yet caught up with their ideas. Failure is always temporary for ideologues, as success is always seen by them to be illusory for the powers that be.

The net effect of Idealism was to inspire Russian intellectuals with a self-confidence which they had never possessed before. Mind was linked with nature, both participating in a relentless unfolding of historical processes; compared to this vision, what were mere governments, economies, armies and bureaucracies? Prince Odoevskii thus describes the