What Is Enlightenment: Alexander Herzen’s Answer to the Kantian Question

Abstract

Studies of the reception of Kant’s enlightenment concept in Russia have so far been limited to one work by Victor Kaplun on Alexander Radishchev. Later figures in Russian intellectual history have not attracted the attention of researchers, firstly because it is believed that Russian thinkers of the 19th century were influenced by other, non-Enlightenment philosophical movements, and secondly, because there is no consensus on whether the 19th century in Russia can be considered part of the history of the Russian Enlightenment project. In the contemporary historico-philosophical narrative, Alexander Herzen is presented primarily as an anti-Kantian who followed an intellectual path from Voltaire, Rousseau and Schiller through Schelling, Saint-Simonism and Fichte to Hegel and Feuerbach. To demonstrate the inconsistency of this established stereotype, I analyse the sources from which Herzen could have learned about Kant’s philosophy, the place that Kant’s concept of enlightenment occupied in Herzen’s reflections, and which of Kant’s conceptions he used to construct his own project.