The Six Decades of Friendship

Abstract

The article combines a memorial intonation and a disciplinary diagnosis: through the figure of Nelly Motroshilova and the lens of sixty years of friendship with her, the author shows how Russian philosophy came out of the shadow of Eurocentrism to an intercultural approach. The author recalls her own path in life which was closely connected to that of Motroshilova: from postgraduate studies at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences to heading the departments, authoritative publications and awards. Everyday life – strict regimes, queues, communal apartments, “home” intellectual circles, holidays and charades – humanizes the academic world. The academic line of this article is a criticism of Hegel’s Eurocentric history of philosophy, which for decades excluded the East thought from the canon of the intellectual heritage of the world. The author enumerates counterarguments and alternative traditions: Glasenapp’s judgments on Hegel; the critical remarks of Schelling and Schopenhauer; the motif of “family resemblance’ in Nietzsche; assessments by Max Müller and Hesse; Leibniz’s warnings and the idea of philosophia perennis. The key turn happened on the international stage: the Hawaiian conferences of East-West Philosophers, Moscow forums, the academic series “Comparative Philosophy”, joint publications, thanks to which comparative philosophy has grown to an intercultural one. The author articulates three strategies of intercultural philosophical work: a “shortcut” to expanding horizons without changing the episteme; the “long way” of learning and living in other people’s conceptual worlds; the “third way” of creative synthesis, where solutions to generally significant problems are born. Next to all of this is a personal portrait of Motroshilova: an erudite and polemicist, the author of bestsellers on Hegel, Kant, Husserl and Heidegger, the executive editor of innovative textbooks, a participant in sharp ideological discussions. Her reading of Hegel is not about the closure of the canon, but about the “real universal process of interaction and complementarity”, in which philosophies cease to be hierarchies and become polylogues. The result is a manifesto of methodological courage: to recognize multiplicity without dissolving differences; to learn together while maintainingan argument; to build a philosophy capable of dealing with global risks today.