Alexander Herzen was the illegitimate son of a Russian aristocrat. Although raised in wealth and spared no expense in education and upbringing, he sensed that he lived in a world apart from his family. He had few playmates and spent most of his time with his German mother and his tutors. During the course of his life he would be banished to Siberia by the Tsar and eventually flee Russia to live in exile first in Paris, then Italy, Switzerland, and, finally, London. Kelly’s book seeks to describe a side of Herzen rarely revealed, his affinity for the natural sciences and, particularly, biology. Kelly, in fact, paints many of Herzen’s ideas on the process of history as influenced by the budding evolutionary theories in science, well preceding the publication of Darwin. As a young man, studying at Moscow University, he was influenced by the ideas drifting into Russia from the West. He claimed, “the cult of the French Revolution is the first religion of a young Russian; which of us did not secretly possess portraits of Robespierre and Danton?” But even more lasting, Herzen was influenced by the Romantics, who challenged the notion of the Enlightenment’s universal ideas. He was also well read in their precursors: Giambattista Vico, the pietists Johann Hamann and Johann Herder, as well as Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, and others who were affiliated with the German Sturm und Drang movement. From them he picked up notions of cultural pluralism and history as contingent on life’s unpredictable mysteries, instead of progressing ever-forward in a single path towards a predestined goal.
Among Russians, the scientist, M. G. Pavlov, was an early mentor. “Science without philosophy is by no means devoid of value, but philosophy without science is impossible.” Herzen, himself, would later claim of some philosophies, "you often see that in idealism all nature is forced into one brilliant hypothesis; idealists prefer to mutilate nature rather than their idea.” Herzen described his own early ideology, “we preached a constitution, a republic…. but more than all else, we preached hatred for all forms of violence, for all forms of tyranny practiced by governments.” He took from Francis Bacon a devotion to the inductive method and a respect for empiricism. However, Herzen still felt, “there’s no true life without faith.” He would later be influenced by Leroux, Hegel, Belinsky, and especially Proudhon, whom he would collaborate with on pamphlets while in exile, all the while disagreeing on the most fundamental of issues. However, there was always a mutual respect. Proudhon espoused the view, “let us not set ourselves up as apostles of a new religion, even if it be a religion of logic or of reason. Let us welcome and encourage all protests…. Let us never consider any questions exhausted, and when we have used our very last argument, let us begin again, if necessary, with eloquence and irony.”
Herzen was a materialist, who believed in living life for this world. He claimed, “true Christians could regard all that was done to them with indifference: life for them was an inferior staging-post on the road to the Kingdom of God, where labors will be rewarded. We don’t look at life like that. Our faith is too shaky, we see weakness in what they regard as strength.” On Russia, he often mused about the vanity of the superfluous man- the general breed of Russian gentry. “We are either animals or ideologists, like my sinful self. We either do nothing at all or everything under the sun.” But he was nothing if not a realist. “Let us not aspire to the existence of pure intelligences; let us learn to live sensibly within our given reality.” He believed in human agency as moving the flow of history and, therefore, he believed in contingency as shaping the fate of mankind. “There is something about chance that is intolerably repellent to a free spirit: he finds it so offensive to recognize its irrational force, he strives so hard to overcome it, that, finding no escape, he prefers to invent a threatening fate and submit to it. He wants the misfortunes that overtake him to be predestined- that is, to exist in connection with a universal world order; he wants to accept disasters as persecutions and punishments: this allows him to console himself through submission or rebellion. Naked chance he finds intolerable, a humiliating burden: his pride cannot endure its indifferent power.”
Herzen wants us to live in the present, instead of always sacrificing the moment to some mythical future to come. “If one looks deeply into life then, of course, the supreme good is life itself, whatever the external circumstances may be. When people come to understand that, they will also come to understand that there is nothing more foolish than despising the present for the sake of the future. The present is the true sphere of existence. Every instant, every pleasure must be grasped, the spirit must constantly open itself, absorb all that surrounds it and pour its own being into its surroundings. The aim of life is life itself. Life in that form, at that stage of development at which a creature finds itself. Thus the aim of man’s life is human life.” Above all, he wants to live through action along with thought. “Do you truly want to condemn human beings alive today to the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others some day to dance on…. or of wretched galley slaves who, up to their knees in mud, drag a barge…. with humble words ‘progress in the future’ upon its flag?” In living for the moment man is fulfilling his destiny and creating a unique history for himself. It is in humility and humbleness that the present humanity lays the groundwork for the future. “If only people wanted…. instead of liberating humanity, to liberate themselves, they would do much for…. the liberation of man.”
Herzen stood in contradistinction between both the Russian Slavophiles who sought a return to a mythical Orthodox past and the Russian Europhiles who sought to mimic the Enlightenment philosophers. For Herzen, man “wants to be neither a passive grave-digger of the past, nor the unconscious midwife of the future.” Unfairly he was painted by both camps as a member of the other. He would vehemently decry both, “I am even less a patriot than I am a liberal.” Herzen was humble as to what the present actually should entail. “I’m not a teacher but a fellow seeker. I won’t presume to say what must be done, but I think I can say with a fair degree of accuracy what must not be done.” Herzen, although a radical, was, in many ways, a man of the middle, viewed with skepticism by ideologues on all sides. “Could you explain to me why belief in God is ridiculous and belief in humanity is not; why belief in the kingdom of heaven is silly, but belief in utopias on earth is clever? Having discarded positive religion, we have retained all the habits of religion.”
Herzen despised the entire bourgeoisie class for their meanness, their vulgar aspirations, and their “hidebound philistinism.” He mourned “the narrowing of men’s minds and energies, of the obliteration of individuality, of the ever increasing shallowness of life, of the constant exclusion from it of general human interests, its reduction to the interests of the countinghouse and bourgeois prosperity.” However, he did not think much of the proletariat either. The masses “are indifferent to individual freedom, liberty of speech; the masses love authority. They are still blinded by the arrogant glitter of power; they are offended by those who stand alone. By equality they understand equality of oppression…. They want a social government to rule for their benefit, and not, like the present one against it. But to govern themselves doesn’t enter their heads.” He later admits, however, that his tastes are bound to be different, but no better, than those of the herd. “You grieve for civilization? So do I. But not the masses, to whom it has given nothing except tears, hardship, ignorance and humiliation.”
Herzen, above all, believed in a kind of humanist realism. Humans should not aspire to perfection that was contrary to their nature. His ethical beliefs stated, “that nature obeys no plan, that history follows no libretto; that no single key, no formula, can, in principle, solve the problems of individuals or societies; that general solutions are not solutions, universal ends are never real ends, that every age has its own texture and its own questions, that short cuts and generalisations are no substitute for experience; that liberty- of actual individuals, in specific times and places- is an absolute value; that a minimum area of free action is a moral necessity for all men, not to be suppressed in the name of abstractions or general principles so freely bandied by the great thinkers of this or any age, such as eternal salvation, or history, or humanity, or progress, still less the State or the Church or the proletariat.” Herzen warns of importing a determinism into both the natural sciences and history. “That fatalism that…. speculative philosophy has imported into history as it has into nature. What has existed certainly had reasons to exist, but that in no way means that all other combinations were impossible; they became so through the realization of the most probable chance, that’s all one can concede. History is far less determined than is usually believed.”
His cultural pluralism also allowed him to see Russia in a unique light. He laments, “sadness, skepticism, and irony: these are the three chords of the Russian lyre.” But he does not see blindly aping Europe as the answer either. “Europe has not resolved the antinomy between the individual and the State, but at least it has posed the question. Russia is approaching the problem from an opposing direction, but has also not resolved it. In confronting this question we stand on a ground of equality…. Russian history has been the development of autocracy and authority, as the history of the West is the history of the development of liberty and rights.” When he started his newspaper in exile, The Bell, he set forth a three point “minimum program” that advocated emancipation with land, the abolition of corporal punishment, and an end to censorship, eventually also adding also openness in court procedures. He later viewed these aims as quite modest, but he felt, “thought must take on flesh, descend into the marketplace of life.” He also admitted that he felt like, “a stranger at home and a stranger abroad.”
The constancies in Herzen’s life were his fights against established authority and against the impossible utopia, while giving mankind as much space as possible to live up to its potential and to fulfill any of life’s varied possibilities. Kelly posits, “if he is to be associated with any retrospectively constituted tradition, it is with a small minority of thinkers who opposed deterministic systems of post-Enlightenment rationalism while keeping an equal distance from the limitless subjectivism of Romantic revolt, and who began to map out new approaches to problems of history and society free of teleological assumptions. Like Mill, Herzen stressed the importance of the inductive methods of the natural sciences as a corrective to thinking that approached such problems from the narrow perspective of predetermined goals.”
To the end, Herzen was nothing if not practical. “We try to impose our wishes, our thoughts, on our surroundings and these attempts, always unsuccessful, serve to educate us…. Life realizes only that aspect of an idea that falls on favorable soil, and the soil in this case doesn’t remain a mere passive medium but adds its sap, contributes its own elements.” He warned of pushing the revolution ahead of the pace of the masses that “the people’s conservatism is harder to combat than the conservatism of the throne and the pulpit.” He also sought to scientifically probe for answers, not just sling slogans at his adversaries. “To deny false gods is necessary, but not sufficient: one must look beneath their masks for the reason for their existence.” However, he never lost his revolutionary fire. “We do not build, we destroy; we do not proclaim a new revelation, we eliminate the old lie.” Herzen, himself, felt of his life’s quest, “since the age of thirteen.... I have served one idea, marched under one banner- war against all imposed authority- against every kind of deprivation of freedom, in the name of the absolute independence of the individual. I would like to go on with my little guerrilla war- like a real Cossack- auf eigene Faust (on my own initiative)- as the Germans say.”
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