Asmus, Valentin Ferdinandovich

« Asmus, Valentin Ferdinandovich (1894-1975) One of the most accomplished thinkers in the Soviet Marxist tradition, Asmus wrote extensively in many areas of philosophy, and was widely regarded as the Soviet Union's principal Kant scholar.

Early in his career, he became associated with the influential school of 'dialecticians' led by A.M.

Deborin and produced a number of significant writings in the history of philosophy.

When Deborin and his followers were condemned as 'Menshevizing idealists' in 1931, Asmus shifted the principal focus of his work to aesthetics and logic.

His 1947 textbook of formal logic subsequently became the principal text for logic instruction in the USSR.

Throughout his long career, Asmus experienced a number of political difficulties.

Nevertheless, he avoided imprisonment and published consistently, though he was never permitted to go abroad.

His importance in Russian philosophy derives not so much from the significance of his theories, but from his role in preserving philosophical culture in Russia through the Stalin period.

He aspired to high standards of scholarship and worked hard to foster the study of logic and the history of philosophy.

The breadth of his interests and his excellence as a teacher made him an inspirational figure to the young scholars striving to revive Soviet philosophy in the 1960s. 1 Life V.F.

Asmus was born in Kiev.

In 1919, he graduated from Kiev University, where he studied with V.V. Zenkovsky and A.N.

Giliarov.

Asmus taught philosophy and aesthetics in Kiev for a number of years, until he was appointed to Moscow's Institute of Red Professors in 1927.

There his expert appreciation of the history of philosophy made him an ally of the school of 'dialecticians' led by Abram Deborin, which dominated the Soviet philosophical institutions at that time.

Asmus participated in the dialecticians' controversies with Soviet positivists, or 'mechanists', and in the later conflicts with Party activists 'on the philosophical front' that led in 1931 to the dissolution of Deborin's school.

Although condemned as a 'Menshevizing idealist' and temporarily denied the right to teach, Asmus was spared the fate that befell many Deborinites in the purges, probably because of his 'non-Party' status.

As Soviet philosophy increasingly became an instrument for the propagation of Party ideology, so Asmus shifted the focus of his work to aesthetics and the philosophy of literature, becoming a member of the Writer's Union in 1935 and completing his doctoral dissertation on 'Aesthetics in Classical Greece' in 1940, the first thesis to be defended at Moscow's Institute of Philosophy.

Asmus could not, however, elude political controversy altogether. In 1938, he was endangered by his former association with Bukharin, though he fortuitously escaped arrest.

And in 1944, Asmus was among the authors of the third volume of the Istoriia filosofii (History of Philosophy), edited by G.F.

Aleksandrov et al., which the Central Committee withdrew from publication because its sympathetic treatment of German idealism was deemed inappropriate in the climate of anti-German feeling provoked by the Great Patriotic War.

It was fortunate for the contributors that they had earlier received the Stalin prize for an earlier volume. Thereafter Asmus, who had been a professor at Moscow University since 1939, sought refuge in its Department of Logic where he made an important contribution to the development of formal logic in Russia.

He returned to the history of philosophy only after the Stalin period.

A close friend of Boris Pasternak's, Asmus is reputed to have influenced the philosophical content of Doctor Zhivago.

In 1960, he was once again embroiled in controversy when he gave a eulogy at Pasternak's graveside.

Asmus continued to work actively in philosophy until his death. 2 Ideology, culture and explanation Among the works which brought Asmus into the limelight was his debate with the mechanist A.

(Sandor) Var'iash, published in Pod znamenem marksizma (Under the Banner of Marxism) (in 1926-7).

In his Istoriia novoi filosofii (History of Modern Philosophy) (1926), Var'iash argues that if Marxism is to provide a consistently monist account of reality, it must explain how all forms of ideological activity, including literature, science and philosophy, arise from specific socioeconomic relations.

By this, Var'iash means not just that philosophical or scientific theories cannot be understood without reference to the historical circumstances of their emergence, but that both the content and the logical structure of theories are ultimately causally determined by the forces of production.

Var'iash's work examines how such causal relations can be traced.

In reply, Asmus maintains that Var'iash succeeds in demonstrating only that, for any era, a correspondence exists between the social needs defined by the relations and forces of production and the general themes of scientific research.

Asmus argues that it is in principle impossible to derive the logical characteristics of a theory from considerations about the socio-historical conditions of its production, and that Var'iash's position must ultimately collapse into a disastrous relativism, for unless we distinguish between the 'genetic' analysis of a theory's origins and the logical analysis of its content, the concepts of proof and truth will be undermined.

In addition, Asmus rejects Var'iash's view that the causal determination between 'economic base' and 'ideological superstructure' proceeds only in one direction.

The controversy is sometimes portrayed as a conflict between Var'iash's 'vulgar sociological' approach and Asmus' cultured historicism.

This is misleading, for Var'iash was aware of his position's counter-intuitive aspects and developed his case with considerable ingenuity, while Asmus was sometimes overconfident in his arguments, no doubt because he knew they would find favour with the Deborinite orthodoxy.

Nevertheless, the debate is testimony to the vigour and seriousness of Soviet philosophy in the 1920s, and illustrates Asmus defending the irreducibility of cultural phenomena against positivist or crude Marxist conceptions, a position which became a leitmotif of his work. 3 Philosophy and its past One theme prominent in Asmus' dispute with Var'iash is the nature of philosophy's relation to its past.

For Asmus, Marxism represents the outgrowth of a long historical development and incorporates insights from many philosophical positions.

The history of philosophy is not simply a history of previous error. Accordingly, Asmus sought throughout his career to uphold standards of historical scholarship in philosophy, both in his own writings on ancient, early modern and nineteenth-century Russian philosophy, and in the many collaborative projects in which he was engaged.

He was particularly well known for his studies of Kant, for whose thought he had a special affection.

Asmus' approach to the history of philosophy is exemplified by his Ocherki istorii dialektiki v novoi filosofii (Essays on the History of Dialectics in Modern Philosophy) (1930).

Here he argues that dialectic represents a method of cognition, designed to capture how development occurs through the resolution of contradiction.

Asmus traces the origins of Marx's conception of dialectic in the work of Descartes, Spinoza, Kant,. »