HOLISM AS THE KEY CODE OF RUSSIAN MENTALITY: BETWEEN TOTALITARIANISM AND COSMISM

Abstract

The modality in which today's Russian society has revealed itself to the world community and history has raised many questions, including those for Russian intellectual reflection. In seeking answers to these questions, the author turns to the deep foundations of Russian mentality, which, in her view, provide a cognitive background to the ongoing processes characteristic of the current state of Russian public consciousness, and hold the key to understanding the socio-political and spiritual-moral catastrophe that has unfolded across the post-Soviet space. Among the most crucial mental-historical frameworks, the cultural-worldview principle of holism stands out—regarded by the author as the key code of Russian mentality. It manifests in corresponding ideas, perspectives, assumptions and presuppositions within both philosophical and everyday consciousness. The direct focus of this article is the expression of this principle in Russian social philosophy, particularly in the works of the Slavophiles (especially A.S. Khomiakov) and S.L. Frank. In their writings, the idea of holism is embodied in the concept of sobornost’ (conciliarity). First articulated by the Slavophiles, it finds its most comprehensive sociological formulation in Frank’s work. The article explores the ontological, epistemological, anthropological and axiological dimensions of holism/sobornost’. It demonstrates that the worldview-and-value-based significance of holism resists a definitive assessment. Its philosophical-worldview extremes are represented, on the one hand, by totalitarianism—embodying the principle of total suppression of the individual by the societal whole—and on the other, by cosmism, the idea of human unity whose horizon extends beyond the limited world of everyday existence into the infinite universe of time and space.