The Mystery of the Intelligentsia
Mikhail Epstein
Russia’s transition to private ownership is usually understood as the privatization of property. But there is another side to this process which is no less important: the privatization of knowledge. And if the result of the first privatization will be the disappearance of such historical categories as the “people [narod]”, then the result of the second will be the disappearance of the “intelligentsia.”
The debates over the people and the intelligentsia, which have been going on for over a century now, have become particularly heated since the late 60s – early 70s[1]. The intelligentsia proclaimed itself “men of the air [liud’mi vozdukha]”, “men from nowhere” (Grigorii Pomerants) and denied its umbilical link with the body of the people, and what is more, blamed the people for its opposition to all progressive educational reforms, starting with Peter the Great, as a result of which there appeared this dark, inert mass, the “people”, which historical changes can affect only by force. On the other hand, the defenders of the people (Aleksander Solzhenitsyn) blamed the intelligentsia for ceasing to serve the people and handing it over to destruction by the Bolsheviks, and what is more, for nursing the monstrous idea of a totalitarian state and bringing it to life. In one version, it happens that the persecuted, heterodox intelligentsia is the victim of the people, who have no need for unfettered artistic creation, who do not read Pasternak, but wittingly condemn him, but yet unanimously applauded the establishment of the party and the state. In another version, the robbed and physically extirpated people is the victim of the intelligentsia, who foisted its parasitic ideology on the people and calmly live at the expense of the perpetual laborer, exhausted in the fields under the ideological surveillance of the ruling “educational disease [obrazovanshchina]”.
These debates have now become extremely sharp and the question already stands as this: who will bury whom first? Will the intelligentsia scatter the people to private industries, farms and firms? Or will the people, striving for great power, wipe the intelligentsia from the face of its much-suffering earth?
But this is an idle debate in as far as the intelligentsia and the people cannot exist without each other, are correlative within the same conceptual system. The criterion of private property in particular allows us to determine that the people and the intelligentsia in Russia are not all that alien to each other. And if their historical existence is fated to come to an end, then both would end at the same time – with a precision down to the minute.
Everyone knows that the Russian people wound up being devoted to communal forms of ownership longer than other European nations, and for this earned the praise of the Russian intelligentsia, the slovophiles as much as the westernizers (from Khomyakov to Herzen, from Lev Tolstoi to the Socialist Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks). That the ancient commune was still holding on boded well that it was already able to grow strong in the virgin soil of socialism. And there you have it, this conversion from “still” to “already”, from peasant indigence to socialist virtue became the intellectual task of the intelligentsia.
It would appear that the intelligentsia is by its nature inclined to individualism, to isolation from the popular masses. But in this lies the distinction between the Russian intelligentsia and the West’s reasoning elite – communality, atomized and scattered in the form of individual existences, none the less remains a form of consciousness. The intelligentsia is the stratum of people that, in contradistinction to western intellectuals and professionals, thinks within [predel’no] general categories. Any narrowly professional conception, when it falls into a cultured milieu, is instantly collectivized [obobshchestvlyaetsya] and becomes a sort of general principle of thought. Thus, the Russian intelligentsia of the 19th century intellectually collectivized Darwin’s theory of evolution and Marx’s political economy and turned it into a “guide to action”. The intelligentsia’s passion is generalization [obobshchenie], to subsume life’s private events to general ideas, which turn out to be the regulator of social existence.
The word “intelligentsia” itself, translated from the Latin, means “speculation [umozrenie]”, “the mind’s ability to generalize and systematize ideas”. In this meaning, the word “intelligentsia” (and similarly “intelligibility [intellegibel’nost’]” – the mind’s ability to understand [umopostigaemost’]) was used by European philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries, including Kant and Hegel, but only in Russia did the abstract capacity of the mind become the designation for an entire social stratum, which passionately gave itself over to the occupation of generalization. Not to physics, or economics, or philosophy, or theology, that is, not to any professional generalizations in the sphere of the individual sciences, but precisely to generalization as such, for everyone and about everything. It is only natural that as a result of such generalization there arose “truth for everyone”, “art for everyone”, “property for everyone” – the ideology of collectivization, which easily found material support for itself in the people’s communal way of life.
It turns out that the people and the intelligentsia, with all their discrepancies, make a whole: (a) living communally and (b) thinking collectively[2]. And any sort of privacy, concealment and isolation [privatnost’, sokrytost’ i obosoblennost’] provokes irritation and is subject to being smoothed down to universal norms. And if the peasants envy their enterprising neighbor who has escaped from general poverty to a separate property class, then the educated person despises the honest professional who has buried his head in test-tubes and microscopes and has no desire to solve the world’s problems. The battle with “philistinism”, that is with a narrow, professional range of interests and with an isolated, business-oriented mindset which knows its, albeit very small, place – this is the favorite pastime shared by the people and the intelligentsia. In their proverbial language of generalities, this dislike for community is vituperatively called “hiding in your shell [zabit’sya v skorlupu]”, “It’s not my problem [moia khata s kraiu]”, “blood is thicker than water [svoia rubashka blizhe k telu]”.
Strictly speaking, this is the only way that a communist government can be constructed: it supposes at the same time the communal aspect [obshchezhitel’nost’] of the masses and collectivization [obobshchennost’] of ideas which are guided by these same masses. For even at the head of Plato’s ideal state stand, not professionals, not craftsmen, but “wise men”, omniscient ideologues and methodologists who hold in their hands the key at once to all sciences as well as all avocations. Their sacred duty and right was to show artists how to paint pictures, generals how to wage war, and cobblers how to make shoes. And so the collectivization of knowledge at the very top of the state pyramid exactly corresponds with the collectivization of property at its popular base.
In the West, despite all attempts to knock together a stratum of the intelligentsia from the lumpen-intellectuals of the left, this stratum still does not take shape. The criteria of professionalism are too high for thought, in general and about everything, to be able to enjoy any sort of social prestige. This means that philosophers can go about their business in their departments, but will not leave the confines of their academic circle: Neither politicians, nor journalists, nor businessmen will begin to pay any heed to them. And even his colleagues will hardly ever start listening attentively to the philosopher, with his equanimous readiness of one who thinks about Zen Buddhism and structuralism – he leaves the boundaries of his personal sector, of his intellectual business, almost as a dentist would begin performing heart surgery. His style of easy and superficial generalities is learned [slozhit’sya] from the journalists, however, this is understood to be a dubious privilege of the journalist’s transitory profession: generalizations of this sort do not survive the date on the front page of the paper, no one remembers them and no one makes programs for social reform from them.
This is why Russian intellectuals get so depressed in America when they run across such narrow private niches in the minds of their new compatriots. Indeed, the mindset of the communist party niche, of the all-controlling Politburo, where questions of animal husbandry, space rocketry, and the education of school children in the arts are all resolved at the same time, is closer to the collectivizing consciousness of the intelligentsia then the dry schema of modest specialists. And there is also missing that most sacred and accursed “people”, whose scale of intellectual meditations would be thrown in with the “ancient fates” as it deserves. If the people did not exist, it would be worth it for the intelligentsia to invent it. Otherwise, who would there be to think about? Whose fates to decide? Whose communality to measure out with the measure of their generalities?
But if the concept of “the people” is a projection of the collectivized consciousness of the intelligentsia, then the intelligentsia is another existence [inobytie] of the people. For what is an intellectual? It is an altogether educated [gramotnyi], altogether cultured person, regardless of his profession. Such an abstract presentation of education [gramotnost’] and culture [kul’turnost’] could only arise in an uneducated and uncultured milieu. For the most slightly educated artisan or tradesman there is no altogether cultured person, an “intellectual” – there is a man of a different culture, a different profession: engineer or journalist, scholar or politician. Cultivation as such is another existence of the absence of cultivation. In this sense the “intelligentsia” is an abstraction of knowledge engendered by ignorance, or non-knowledge [neznanie], just as the “people” is an abstraction of existence engendered by non-existence. The intelligentsia, as a pole of pure and universal consciousness, feels itself to be superfluous in this life and endows its antithesis – the people - with completeness of existence. Two abstractions reciprocally project their “non” onto each other. And in a certain sense they form a complete and balanced system. It is apparent that the tragic element of this system is the impossibility of any confluence of the intelligentsia and the people; its deeply hidden tragic element is the chimericalness of these formulations, which do not develop and split apart from themselves, but are produced disinterestedly, abstractly, as a “non” one for the other. As long as the intelligentsia exists, it will project outside of itself an abstract existence of the people and will itself be produced by it as an abstract sphere of knowledge.
The tragedy of Russia lies in the fact that it has remained too long a country of abstractions. Meanwhile in history, and not just in cognition, there operates the law, formulated as long ago as Hegel, of ascent from the abstract to the concrete. And when Russia becomes, in the Hegelian sense, a “concrete” country, a country of private property and private knowledge, both of its abstractions will be destroyed in and of themselves. In there place will arise something simpler, and at the same time more complex: a man who knows his humble place in existence, an intelligent “philistine”, who does not permit himself the sins of generalizing and collectivizing, who thinks concretely and lives “individually”.
March 1993
Transl. Tom Dolack
[1] These debates can be traced through the articles “The Man from Nowhere” by Grigorii Pomerants (1969) and “Repentance and Self-Limitation as Categories of National Life” by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn (1973), which were followed by lengthy polemics, from the “pluralists” and “conservatives”, and carried into the 1980s and picked up by the Soviet press of the glasnost era.
[2] True, the people think concretely, in contradistinction to the intelligentsia, and the intelligentsia is inclined to individualism as a way of life, in contradistinction to the people. But, after all, it is more essential for the people to be, and for the intelligentsia to think, which means, for the most part – in communality of being and generality of thought – they coincide. Imagine a man who lives individually, and thinks concretely – the result is the chief enemy of both the people and the intelligentsia: the philistine [meshchanin].