by Rudolf BALANDIN, journalist

"Life is a goal, means, cause, and action... it is an eternal worry of an active, strenuous substance, trying to find an equilibrium so as to lose it again..."--wrote Alexander Herzen in the mid-19th century. 2012 is a year of the 200th birth anniversary of this outstanding Russian writer, philosopher, and revolutionary. It may seem disputable today, but lessons of his creative work are rather topical for our time.

Herzen was greatly esteemed in the USSR due to Vladimir Lenin, who, a hundred years ago, devoted to him an article, full of revolutionary goal. Herzen's books were published in big editions. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1952) wrote more about him than about Goethe.

Moreover, the writer and philosopher Herzen--the founder of an ideology of populism--was in the focus of attention also of Russian thinkers, who did not share his views, in particular, for Konstantin Leontyev and Nikolai Berdyaev. In 1902, the philosopher and theologist Sergei Bulgakov (then only trying to blaze the trail from materialism to idealism) published a detailed essay "Herzen's Mental Drama". Another religious philosopher Vasily Zenkovsky in his History of Russian

Philosophy (Paris, 1948) dedicated a whole chapter to Herzen.

The famous naturalist and thinker Vladimir Vernadsky (full member of Petersburg AS from 1912) wrote in his diary in 1893 about a visit of Leo Tolstoi. In the course of the talk Vladimir Vernadsky mentioned Herzen as a realist and philosopher of science. Tolstoi, who had not read his works before, took two volumes of his memoirs My Past and Thoughts. Returning them, he noted that he was greatly impressed by him: "It is a third of the whole Russian Literature."

Nevertheless, in the past two decades Herzen's works were almost not mentioned in the works of national authors. As if his heritage is not of interest. How to explain this fact? Let's discuss this problem.

WORKS AND DAYS

Alexander Herzen was born on March 25, 1812, in Moscow, and was an illegimate son of a rich landowner Ivan Yakovlev and Louise Haag, a native of Stuttgart (Germany). His makeup name is a derivative from German Herz (heart); he was, as was said at that time, "a child of love".

Herzen felt his strange status in the family and society as "illegimate". This fact affected his viewpoint. He was "a stranger among his people", worked out a sense of self-respect from childhood, independence and audacity of thought. He sympathized with serfs and dreamt about their freedom. In the library of his father he read the works of French enlighteners. "Political dreams,--he recollected,--occupied my mind day and night."

From adolescence he was fond of Voltaire, Schiller, Shelling. As he himself admitted, he loved mockery and irony. And added: "but I never held the Gospels in my hands with cold mind." He passionately and attentively thought over different ideas in search of truth.

He and his friend Nikolai Ogaryov (poet, publicist) in Moscow (Vorobyevy gory) swore to dedicate their lives to liberation of Russian people. Later on he wrote: "As a boy of 14, I swore (after the execution of leaders of the December uprising) to take vengeance for the executed and doomed myself to the struggle against the throne and the altar... 30 years later I was under the same banner."

Herzen graduated from the physico-mathematical department of Moscow University. At 22 he was arrested for free-thinking and exiled for 6 years; he lived in Perm, Vyatka, Vladimir, returned to Moscow as a revolutionary democrat. He wrote in the exile Notes of a Young Man, published in 1840-1841 under the pen-name Iskander. The famous Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky marked them as "full of wit, feeling, originality and ingenuity, attracting general attention."

In the exile Herzen married a very religious woman Natalya Zakharyina, prone to mysticism and occultism. Her world outlook was alien to him: he was a man of keen intellect, learned natural sciences and philosophy. Though he understood limitations of the scientific method. Perhaps, under the influence of his wife, he wrote in the diary in late December 1844: "Natural scientists know a lot, but there is something in all this they don't know--and this is more important than what they know."

In Russia in the 1840s Herzen published two remarkable works: Dilettantism in Science (1843), and Letters on Studies of Nature (1845-1846). In 1847, he and his family went abroad and didn't return. In 1853, he founded in London "Free Russian Typography", where he finished his collection The North Star, which continued the tradition of Decembrists, and newspaper Kolokol, calling for overthrow of serfdom and autocracy.

Herzen's most remarkable work is My Past and Thoughts (1852-1868), containing reminiscences and meditations. According to Yakov Elsberg, a Soviet literary critic, this "brilliant work... is a kind of artistic encyclopedia about Russian ideological life." Moreover, Herzen demonstrated an intellectual and political situation in Western Europe in the mid-19th cent. using concrete examples and bright portraits of contemporaries. For example, he met British socialist-utopist Robert Owen (1771-1858), the banker James Rothschild (1792-1868). The latter impressed him as a man of action possessing a sense of own importance due to his enormous capital.

My Past and Thoughts contains an episode from his life. Tsarist top officials tried to disinherit Herzen. But Rothschild was on his side. And so, as Herzen wrote: "A month or so later, Nikolai Romanov, a 1st class merchant from Petersburg, afraid of competition and publications in Vedomosti, paid, on Rothschild's order, illegally stopped money payments and interest and percentage on percents, pleading ignorance of laws, which he actually could not know due to his social status."

According to Vladimir Putintsev, a Soviet literary critic, "profound historism of My Past and Thoughts, realism of artistic image, make this work unique, a kind of phenomenon in world literature." The author himself regarded his work as a "reflection of history in man, who got on its path by chance."

PHILOSOPHIC SCEPTIC"

Herzen's example shows conventionality of division of thinkers into opposing groups: idealists and materialists, "Westerners" and Slavophils, conservatives and revolutionaries. He, as a materialist, strived to explain the world on the basis of experimental knowledge and logic, without reference to the miracle and authority of any books or personalities. But he took into consideration an indisputable fact: existence of intellect. If we take the latter as an accidental possession of the World, the image of the mechanical Universe would look wretched and senseless.

According to Herzen, "in general materialists could not understand objectivity of intellect... They believe that being and thinking either disintegrate or act on each other externally." Like Hegel he acknowledged

intellect as a natural and integral quality of reality. Though it remains unclear, how did he imagine consciousness in Nature without man?

Leaving behind his youthful belief in general progress, Herzen concluded: "There is much accidental, stupid, unsuccessful and mixed in nature and history." And this is an initial mystery of being. Science is vainly trying to understand it. According to him, "each sphere of natural sciences leads to heavy consciousness that there is something elusive and incomprehensible in nature".

The same thoughts shared also Vladimir Vernadsky: "We know only a small part of nature, only a small part of this incomprehensible, unclear and all-embracing mystery."

As a continuation of Herzen's words, Vernadsky wrote: "I am a philosophic sceptic. This means I believe that there is no philosophical system... that can reach the general obligatoriness, which is achieved (only in some definite parts) by science."

"Science and Nature--Phenomenology of Thinking"--this is the title of Herzen's article from the cycle Letters About Studies of Nature. It may seem many decades later, after colossal achievements of science and technology of the 20th century, that his views of nature and its cognition have hopelessly become obsolete. But that is not so.

"Man is not outside of nature and is only relatively opposed to it, not in fact,--wrote Herzen,--were nature really opposing intellect, everything material would have been absurd, pointless."

And again we can turn to Vernadsky: "In essence, man, as a part of the biosphere, only compared with observed phenomena can judge about the Universe." And also: "Scientific thought of mankind works only in the biosphere and in the course of its manifestation at last transforms it into noosphere, geologically embraces it by intellect."

Herzen says almost the same: "Nature has no power over thought, while thought is power of man... Nature's life is continuous development, development of the abstract, simple, incomplete, spontaneous into concrete, complete, complicated... All strivings and efforts of nature and in man, they are striving to him. They flow into him, as into the ocean."

These words express outlines of the noosphere concept, put forward in the 1930s by Vernadsky: scientific thought organizes terrestrial nature, as if catching up and directing its artistic efforts to creating more perfect terrestrial cover. This is how the unity of natural science and nature manifests itself, is not it?

However, Herzen principally disagreed on this problem with Vernadsky and contemporary advocates of the noosphere concept.

"Man ignored the rights of nature,--wrote Herzen,--and without pangs of conscience destroyed everything he didn't need, and used all he needed. <...> He could not remain in initial agreement with nature, with the phenomenal world; he bore in himself an embryo, which, while developing, had, like a chemical reagent, to decompose its harmonious existence with nature... Man's dual nature lies in the fact that he above his positive being cannot but become negative to being; he breaks away not only from external nature, but even from himself... Thus, any kind of separation and egoism are contrary to the world order."

Herzen's opinion may seem dubious: "Ancient philosophy fell due to the fact that it never broke away abruptly and deeply from the world, as it did taste neither sweetness nor bitterness of negation, did not know all power of human spirit, concentrated in itself, only in itself."

Man's estrangement from environment took place simultaneously with the development of natural science. "A new man,--wrote Herzen,--broke away from nature so that he cannot easily come to terms with it."

Why is this process still on in spite of remarkable successes in the cognition of biosphere? Why the life

sphere on the planet does not pass to a higher level of organization, but grows scanty, gets contaminated, becomes degraded? In general, the answer is simple and Herzen himself noted this fact: man's egoism, opposing the "Divine medium"--an expression of the French anthropologist, philosopher and theologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), who was engrossed only in creating prosperity for himself.

IDEALS AND REALITY

Leaving behind autocratic serf Russia, Herzen lived in Western countries of bourgeois democracy, hoping to see enlightened society, professing high ideals of freedom, fraternity, equality, justice. He felt bitter disappointment. Western Europe lived on other principles.

Herzen criticized Slavophils for pinning their hopes on autocracy and Orthodoxy. But after suppression of the 1848 revolutionary movement in France, he got disappointed with "Westerners". He was confident that in Europe "all is in the hands of the merchant" (plus a banker). He wrote: "The poor have to buy by all means, while the rich have to store and increase their property; the flag, which is hoisted in the market to open trading, became the banner of a new society. Man de facto became a part of property; life became a continuous struggle for money... All parties and shades little by little divided into two main groups in the bourgeois world: on the one side, petty bourgeois owners, stubbornly refusing to get rid of their monopolies, on the other side--poor bourgeois, who are trying to snatch their property from their hands, but cannot, i.e. on the one side--stinginess, on the other--envy."

Religious philosophers found comfort in Christian faith. Such withdrawal from controversial and absurd world did not satisfy Herzen. His intellect, after a serious school of natural science, was striving to get objective conclusions, based on facts. But they were distressing: nature is not subordinated to general intellect; society's paths are inscrutable; the fate of a personality, doomed to inevitably die with a dubious hope for immortality, is tragic. That's why he rejected the faith, which instilled a hope to beg for and obtain a place in the other world.

Like an ancient hero, Herzen tried to vindicate dignity of the personality. This was an honest and brave choice. "In addition,--wrote Vasily Zenkovsky, proceeding from other premises,--the ardent defense of freedom and irreproachable following of the requirements of the code of morals combined in Herzen with deep aesthetic feelings."

Besides, personal tragedies also affected his world outlook. Three of his children died in Russia. In 1851, his mother and son died in a ship wreck; a year later died his wife. His views on the world as a supremacy of not only "divine order and wellbeing", but also of chaos, accidents and misfortunes turned out to be true.

According to Sergei Bulgakov, Herzen "could be satisfied with any Europe and in general with any reality, as no reality can hold an ideal, which Herzen tried to find." And one more thing: "Herzen becomes short-tempered and unfair to the West, he rushes from one extreme to another and, burning his old gods, curses them and complains loudly."

Bulgakov wrote this in 1905. The events of two world wars showed how aggressive and cruel the ruling regimes can be in many countries, when it concerns benefits and material well-being for oneself at the expense of others. Herzen prophesied not progress but degradation of bourgeois democracy--the triumph of greedy aggressive petty bourgeoisie. Was Bulgakov right when he assumed that Herzen rushed from one to another, throwing down his former idols? His real idols always were Freedom, Truth, Justice. He never gave them up.

The ideal exists one should strive for, at the same time understanding that it is impossible to embody it fully in the real World. The problem is whether we are approaching it or moving away from it. And Herzen clearly realized: in Western industrial civilization there had occurred a catastrophic substitution, instead of high moral ideals there prevailed vile material interests.

"The petty bourgeoisie,--he wrote,--is a last word of civilization, based on absolute autocracy of ownership...

In the lower middle class there completely disappear personalities..." Aristocrats and proletarians have one ideal: a rich petty bourgeois. This is a bourgeois democracy, supremacy of mediocrity.

Bulgakov saw "greatness of Herzen as a writer and man... in that dauntless audacity, which was felt in his denunciation of civilization, not impressed by its splendor, its great historical past and modern successes."

For the past century and a half Herzen's idea was confirmed in full. Technical civilization is actually oriented to the petty bourgeois, greedy for consumption of material goods, satisfaction of primitive instincts.

FAITH, HOPE

AND SENSE OF LIFE

Predicting serious social cataclysms, Herzen pointed out one of their main reasons--increasing self-consciousness of oppressed classes. "The force of social ideas is great, especially from the time, when they became clear for the real enemy; the enemy according to the existing civil order was a proletarian, a worker, who experienced the bitterness of that form of life and who did not taste all its fruits."

It seemed as if he was ready to stand under the red banner with the words on it "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" But, no. He understood that the petty bourgeoisie (meaning insatiable philistines) is outside classes and social strata.

Herzen had no illusions in relation of the time of supremacy of new ideas: "Socialism will develop in its all

phases till extreme consequences, till absurdities, then again from the titanic chest of revolutionary minority a cry of negation will be heard and again a mortal fighting will begin, and socialism will take place of the present conservatism."

Brought up in the best traditions of Western European culture, Herzen was a Russian thinker, who, by his cast of mind and character, strength of mind, discomfort, striving for unattainable ideals. His ideas found response in minds of some Russian people from "high society".

Prince Pyotr Kropotkin* (1842-1921), a future outstanding geographer and geologist, anarchist, recalled that in 1859, during an expedition to Siberia, he read avidly The North Star. "The beauty and power of Herzen's works, strength of his thoughts, his profound love for Russia seized me. I read and read again these pages, full of intellect and deep feeling." Kropotkin found "a complete collection of revolutionary editions of Herzen in London" in the house of General Boleslav Kukel, at that time acting head of staff of the Eastern-Siberian military district.

Long years of emigration helped Alexander Herzen understand that a bourgeois revolution substitutes a knight by a merchant and a banker. He thought that Russia would face a socialist revolution, not a bourgeois one. And he turned to be right. He denounced the idea

* See V. Markin, "Prince Pyotr Kropotkin in Britain", Science in Russia, No. 4, 2003.--Ed.

of historical progress: life is accomplished in the present as an improvisation. All depends on people's behavior, their goals. Future is uncertain. Universal harmony is an illusion.

Herzen believed in Russian people, community, fraternal mutual assistance. He hoped that Russia would build a society of workers and creators, not of philistines. In practice this experiment was a failure. Not due to economic reasons. The winners were ideals of consumer civilization.

"The personality is a peak of historical world, it attracts all and everything,"--wrote Herzen. The personality changes--transforms society. When the spiritual base begins rotting, a catastrophe becomes inevitable both for an individual and for people. No material goods are able to put it off, no incantations and prayers can remedy this.

Technological progress promotes degradation of nature and personality, if it results only in increasing of material wants. Only spiritual culture and high moral standards can stem this process. Such is the main lesson of life and creative work of Alexander Herzen. His prophetic ideas can become salutary not only for Russia, but for global civilization too.