“To Understand Russia”? Question about Russia as a Philosophical Problem

Abstract

The aim of this article is to identify and explain the cognitive possibilities which—for the sake of analysis of the questions about Russia and the efforts to “understand Russia”, for centuries central to the Russian intellectual and cultural tradition—are offered by the post-Kantian philosophical perspective. The fundamental research method is the analysis of texts in which representative members of the Russian philosophical and broader intelectual-cultural tradition undertake selfcoqnitive attempts, asking questions about Russia. The analyses which I have undertaken, show that in the post-Kantian theoretical perspective it is possible to strive for recognition of the basic assumptions, structures, properties and conditions of the sense-making processes, which are invisible for such a subject, which is directly involved in a specific cognitive relation. It is then possible and required to determine which forms and structures can appear—and why—within those basic assumptions or conditions as important—from the perspective of subject, object or axiology—the recognition of factors, conditions and limits of heterogenization of the basic structural and substantial solutions, the recurring relations of senses and the types of their specifications, and the scope and methods of permitted self-problematization. In conclusion, I wish to state that the questions about Russia are, therefore, truly questions of their authors about themselves and their way of understanding the world.