The Thinking Reed

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.

Bakhtin and the Culturological School

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