Vasilij Vasil'evič Sokolov (1919 - 2017) Russisch filosoof was in zijn tijd dé scholar van de Sovjet Unie over #Spinoza [2]

Vasilij Vasil'evič Sokolov,
still uit video opgenomen door M.S. Naydenkina
voor de Stichting Mondelinge Geschiedenis.

In vervolg op het eerste blog over deze hier onbekende Russische Spinoza-geleerde, breng ik hier de passage over Sokolov uit het review “Spinoza East and West: Six Recent Studies in Spinozist Philosophy, “ [in: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol 58 #22(13, June 1961), 346-355, cf. pdcnet en jstor - het PDF is hier te vinden], waarin George L. Kline o.a. de inleiding op de vertaalde Spinoza-editie besprak die ruim 60 bladzijden besloeg, van

V. V. Sokolov, "Mirovozzreniye Benedikta Spinozy," [Benedictus Spinoza’s wereldvisie] Benedikt Spinoza: Izbrannyie proizvedeniya (ed. Sokolov), two volumes (Moscow: Gosudarstven- noye Izdatelstvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1957). Vol. I, pp. 5-66.

V. V. Sokolov, though still in his thirties, is probably the leading Spinoza scholar in the Soviet Union today. The older Soviet Spinozists, who were active in the debates of the 1920's and 1930's, either are dead or have fallen silent. It was Sokolov, in 1955, who published an article on Spinoza's ethical and social theory, breaking a Soviet silence of some fifteen years.[1] The two-volume edition of Spinoza's Selected Works, which Sokolov has edited with evident care, is a notable event in Soviet philosophy. No work of Spinoza's had been printed in the Soviet Union since 1935, when a Russian translation of the Theologico-Political Treatise appeared. The Ethics, last published in 1933, had long been out of print. The Political Treatise had never been published in the Soviet Union, the last Russian edition of this work having appeared in 1910! All of these, plus the Short Treatise, the Improvement of the Understanding and the Correspondence, are included here, in revisions of earlier Russian translations. Sokolov himself has supervised fresh translations of the Principles of Descartes' Philosophy (of which an earlier translation had appeared in 1926) and of the Cogitata Metaphysica (which apparently had not previously been published in Russian). This new edition, totalling over 1,300 pages, was printed in an edition of 30,000 copies! We may hope that eventually a Soviet Spinozist as sympathetically penetrating as Hallett or as acutely critical as Kolakowski may be inspired by these newly available translations to add a fresh chapter to the Spinoza literature.

Sokolov himself makes no claim to originality. He is concerned rather to sketch Spinoza's position in ontology,[2] epistemology, philosophical psychology, ethics, and social philosophy. He finds Spinoza "essentially" a materialist and atheist; but he rejects Plekhanov 's extreme position, widely endorsed by Soviet philosophers of an earlier generation, which viewed Spinozism as materialism in "theological trappings" and called Marxism a "variety of Spinozism" (p. 25 S). In his article of 1955 Sokolov had characterized Spinoza's substance as the material first-principle ("pervoosnova") of the phenomenal world.[3] In 1957 he is more cautious, pointing out that Spinoza himself equates substance not with matter but with nature as a whole, including, as Spinoza says, "praeter materiam alia infinita.”[4] Sokolov 's considered judgment seems to be that Spinozism is "the highest stage in the transformation of pantheism into materialism" and that the "pantheistic form" of Spinoza 's "materialist content" reflects essential features of his philosophy (pp. 14, 216 S).

Sokolov is rather more doctrinaire about Spinoza's "atheism." His 1955 article concluded with the remark that Spinoza was an atheist, though not a consistent one. He now claims that "the concept of God has no positive content in Spinoza and plays no role in explaining the phenomena of the world," adding that Spinoza had cut the root of the religious world view and prepared the in- tellectual soil for more consistent materialist doctrines, including ultimately, dialectical materialism (pp. 32, 40, 65 S). Like Barstok, though in a less polemical tone, Sokolov repudiates those " bourgeois " commentators who have interpreted Spinoza as an idealist, pantheist, or mystic.

Sokolov's Marxism is fairly unobtrusive; he sketches the eco- nomic, scientific, and artistic developments of seventeenth-century Holland, but does not explicitly claim-as many earlier Soviet commentators had done-that Spinoza was an "ideological representative of the rising bourgeoisie." He limits himself to the more moderate claim that Spinoza undertook to "provide a foundation for the already formed morality of bourgeois society" (p. 15 S). (As we shall see, a similar claim is made both by Kolakowski and by Feuer.) Sokolov is not wholly free of Marxist-Leninist oversimplification and distortion-e.g., he calls Galileo, Bacon, and Locke "materialists" (pp. 6, 8 S). But, aside from the programmatic tendentiousness already noted, his interpretation of Spinoza's philosophy is questionable only in detail. Thus he writes that Spinoza's substance is characterized by "eternity in time and infinity in space" (p. 20 S), thus equating "eternity" with "enless temporal duration," an equation which Spinoza is at pains to deny. The same error is apparent in Sokolov's characterization of duration as a "component part" of "eternity" (p. 51 S).

---

[1] "”Eticheskiye i sotsiologicheskiye vozzreniya Spinozy," Voprosy filosofli, No. 3 (1955), pp. 59-72. (A German abstract of this article will be found in Wilhelm Goerdt, Fragen der Philosophie, Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1960, pp. 278-284.) The last Soviet monograph on Spinoza, by Ya. A. Milner, had appeared in 1940. During the 1940's encyclopedia articles and brief sections in histories of philosophy were devoted to Spinoza; one or two Spinoza dissertations were defended, but remained unpublished. Sokolov 's article was the first, to my knowledge, in the post-war period. For details of the earlier Soviet controversies, see my Spinoza in Soviet Philosophy, London and New York, 1952, especially pp. 1-47.

[2] An interesting sidelight is Sokolov 's systematic and unapologetic use of the terms "ontologiya" and "ontologicheskii." "Metaphysics" still has negative, "anti-dialectical," overtones for a Marxist-Leninist, but "ontology" now seems quite acceptable.

[3] Barstok puts the matter even more misleadingly: Spinoza, he writes, "considers the one material substance-nature-as primary, and consciousness as its essential property" (p. 30 B).

[4]  Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, VI; quoted p. 20 S. Cf. also Letter 73 to Oldenburg.