In the field of the philosophy of nature Soviet thinkers have evidently been somewhat more original, as Western scholars acknowledged. Graham notes that:
despite the bureaucratic support of the Soviet state for dialectical materialism, a number of able Soviet scientists have created intellectual schema [sic] within the framework of dialectical materialism that are sincerely held by their authors and that, furthermore, are intrinsically interesting as the most advanced developments of philosophical materialism. These natural scientists are best seen, just as in the case of the fourteenth-century scholastic thinkers, not as rebels against the prevailing philosophy, but as intellectuals who wish to refine the system, to make it more adequate as a system of explanation.46
At first glance this testimonial may not seem, to the Soviet reader, a very flattering one, but Graham is trying to underline the merits of the Soviet philosophy of nature. An important factor needs to be mentioned here. Engels’s theory of the dialectics of nature, being most remote from the interests of the social struggle, was the least distorted aspect of Marxist theory in Soviet textbooks. These ideas were not subjected to any special ‘reworking’ — unlike, for example, the Marxist theory of the state. It was thus possible to do serious philosophical work, up to a certain stage, on problems of the natural sciences within the framework of the official ideology. Doubts exist, to be sure, as to the correctness of Engels’s approach to the study of nature. These doubts were voiced by Lukács and by the Praxis philosophers in Yugoslavia (who saw in Engels’s ideas a revival of Hegel’s philosophy of nature), but in my view their attacks on Engels were groundless, dogmatic and extremely abstract. In any case, the fruitful development of Engels’s ideas by Soviet scholars can serve as a very strong argument against the views of the Praxis group.
Dialectical materialism, based on the ideas of Hegel and Engels on the philosophy of nature, was a powerful weapon in the hands of scientists battling against Lysenkoism. It is interesting that in the discussion about genetics both Stalin and Khrushchev showed themselves equally hostile to materialist dialectics (just as the Soviet system as a whole, with its single party, which rules out any possibility of the dynamic resolution of contradictions, is ignorant of the dialectical principles of history and is consequently doomed to eventual collapse). The lack of dialectical thinking on the part of the rulers obviously set them against scientific cognition, which requires that the world be seen in all its contradictoriness. It is therefore not surprising that in scientific debates the rulers often supported plainly un-Marxist views, and the fact that these views turned out to be ‘also’ incorrect produced a particularly grotesque situation. ‘Nothing in the philosophical system of dialectical materialism lends obvious support to any of Lysenko’s views’, observes Graham.47 It was no accident that such a prominent role in the fight against Lysenko was played by the Marxist dissident Zhores Medvedev. In situations like these the ideas of Engels, even if debatable, proved their scientific worth and ideological usefulness. Thus the dialectics of nature is used by scientists for theoretical self-defence against the voluntarism of the statocracy and is a genuinely living doctrine in the USSR. ‘Marxism as methodology and socialism as the structure of social life are not the political ideas which Soviet scientists believe because of official education only’, Zhores Medvedev rightly observes. ‘These ideas have a logic and scientific appeal which could attract scientists — and not in the USSR alone.’48 Graham came to similar conclusions:
Marxism is taken quite seriously by some Soviet scientists, less seriously by others, disregarded by still others. There is even a category of Soviet philosophers and scientists who take their dialectical materialism so seriously that they refuse to accept the official statements of the Communist Party on the subject: they strive to develop their own dialectical materialist interpretations of nature, using highly technical articles as screens against the censors. Yet these authors consider themselves dialectical materialists in every sense of the term… I am convinced that dialectical materialism has affected the work of some Soviet scientists, and that in certain cases these influences helped them to arrive at views that won them international recognition among their foreign colleagues.49
On the whole, Graham evaluates very positively the results of the development of dialectical materialism, and hopes ‘the day will come when… further development of dialectical materialism can take place under conditions of free debate.’50 When that day arrives, Graham considers, the Western scientific world will be able properly to estimate the achievements of the Soviet philosophy of nature.
New ideas in the sphere of the dialectics of nature influence only indirectly the development of social thought in our country. The most original ideas, in my view, relate nevertheless to the philosophy of culture. I have already spoken about the role of cultural traditions in the fight for spiritual emancipation. The rapid growth of the science of culture in the USSR seems therefore not to be accidental.
The point of departure for the beginning of intensive culturological research was the appearance of M. Bakhtin’s theory of dialogue. Bakhtin’s ideas were actually formed as far back as the 1930s, but they became known to wide circles of the intelligentsia only much later. ‘In the sixties and seventies,’ wrote the prominent dialectician V.S. Bibler in his Myshlenie kak tvorchestvo [Thinking as Creativity],
the attention given in philosophical literature to the problems of dialogue as the basis of creative thinking sharply increased. The role of a sort of culturological introduction was played here by the works of M.M. Bakhtin, especially Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (republished in 1972). What counted here was that Bakhtin’s books themselves became a most serious cultural event, which in many ways determined the direction of the thinking of a wide variety of theoreticians in the most diverse spheres of research — in philosophy, linguistics, art history, logic… But, besides this, Bakhtin’s books ‘entered into our language, our thought’: written much earlier, they unexpectedly became a typical phenomenon of the present cultural epoch. Alongside Bakhtin’s books, both before their republication and after, there appeared and arc appearing books, articles and symposia devoted to the same problem — dialogue as a cultural phenomenon.51
Bakhtin’s basic principles are simple enough: ‘Other people’s consciousnesses cannot be contemplated, analysed, defined as objects, as things — one can commune with them only through dialogue.’52 One can understand a person only through conversation with him, putting one’s own questions to him and answering his. But this applies also to works of art, to philosophical treatises past and present — to culture in general, as a sphere of subjective activity. In ‘studying’ our interlocutor through dialogue, however, we at the same time get to know ourselves. Furthermore, the measure of our self-knowledge corresponds to the depth of our penetration into the soul of ‘the other’. This, strictly speaking, is the departure point of the entire culturological school.
It must be appreciated that the concept ‘culture’ is used here in a rather broad sense. In his lecture on Bakhtin, Bibler defined it as a sort of historical ‘sediment’. Culture is everything we have inherited from past epochs, from social formations that no longer exist. To it belong philosophical works, art, traditions, the people’s historical experience, science and the level of technology that has been attained. In so far as all this can be looked at and studied as a whole, we can speak of ‘culture’. This approach makes the theory of culture a very important element in sociohistorical theory. It is quite natural that the culturological school should be in resolute opposition to the official ‘received wisdom’, the whole essence of which comes down to the ‘fitting’ of all historical facts into a previously given schema.