Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/34

8 Peter's example in pushing the work of enlightenment; the west needed knowledge, but Russia needed enlightenment; Černyševskii felt that his own mission was that of publicist, and a publicist is "not a professor, but a tribune or advocate."

Černyševskii does not conceive the enlightenment as the propagation of a civilisation taken bodily from the west, and he accuses Herzen of a desire for such "civilisation snatching." Enlightenment signifies the getting rid of a false outlook on the universe, signifies a new civilisation on a materialistic basis. The German [Feuerbach] had indeed laid the foundations of this materialism, but the Russian would be its universal Aristotle. Realism notwithstanding, we discern here a species of popular messianism, even though it be only in the sense of Hegel or Feuerbach, each of whom proclaimed his philosophy the terminus of human thought.

Černyševskii frequently speaks of himself as a rationalist. Following the French usage, he employs the term with the connotation of reasonableness, but he also has in mind rationalism in the eighteenth-century sense of an unrestricted belief in reason, so that he deliberately attacks (in theory!) the life of feeling and emotion as "romanticism" and "sentimentalism." Černyševskii's rationalism is dogmatic in the sense in which that word was used by Kant; Černyševskii accepts Feuerbach's philosophy quite uncritically, he believes in Feuerbach.

Černyševskii takes Kant's subjectivism less to heart than his Russian predecessors had done. Putting this "metaphysical nonsense" aside, he passes directly to the order of the day. But in thus rejecting subjectivism, he rejects criticism as well. I mean that his belief in Feuerbach is not objectivist merely, but uncritically objectivist.

OR Černyševskii the ethical consequence of the "anthropological principle" is the recognition of determinism as valid alike for the life of the individual and for society and history, and in the second place the proclamation of egoism as the basis of ethics.

In 1860 these doctrines were no novelty in philosophy and ethics, but nevertheless Černyševskii's use of them exercised a profoundly stirring influence upon his Russian contem-