Scientific and philosophical potential of Soviet Marxism

Abstract

The article examines the difficulties of a methodological and ideological nature that arise in the study of the history of Soviet philosophy. The idea is that both official Marxism, adopted in the USSR as an academic philosophy and enshrined at the level of Soviet ideology, and various currents of non-Marxist philosophy that existed in the Soviet Union in the second half of the twentieth century, are equally valuable for understanding the integral philosophical culture of this period. The task of the researcher, who has set himself the goal of an adequate and comprehensive study of the history of Soviet philosophy, is, according to the authors of the article, to find and describe the fundamental semantic gaps, thanks to which the necessary theoretical and creative potential is constantly preserved in the philosophical culture. In the article, by analyzing the problems of the Leningrad school of philosophy of science, an attempt is made to find such a gap in the official Soviet philosophy. Justifying the thesis that the opposition of the official and unofficial lines of the development of Russian thought in the Soviet period, leading to the prioritization of one of the traditions and the refusal to recognize the significance of the other, is unacceptable and theoretically incorrect, the authors come to the conclusion that at the basis of Soviet philosophical culture lie the problems of freedom, man and creativity. During the “thaw”, these problems initiated the development of such new disciplines as Marxist anthropology, culturology and philosophy of science. From this point of view, the Leningrad School of Philosophy of Science resulted from the scientific and philosophical potential of Soviet Marxism.