The First Edition of “The Justification of Good” (1897): Contemporaries’ Response. Part 4

Abstract

The article continues the systematic review and analysis of newspaper and magazine responses to the first edition of the main work of V. Solovyov on moral philosophy “Justification of Good” (1897). The fourth part of this series of articles examines critical attacks on this book by representatives of the left, presumably Populist camp of the Russian press and public thought. It describes in detail critical responses of such authors as the regular columnist of the newspaper “Novosti”, literary critic Evgeny A. Solovyov, an anonymous review published in the journal “Russian Thought”, the reviews by the positivist philosopher Pavel V. Mokievsky in “Russkoe bogatstvo” and by the religious idealist Akim L. Volynsky in the “Severnyi vestnik”. It is noted that the main tone of criticism from the left was the assertion that the philosopher took the position of a conformist acceptance of the state and the church in their existing forms. Based on the consideration of all the above responses, the article concludes that none of the aforementioned critics tried to understand the essence of V. Solovyov's views. For most of the left-wing critics, any correlation of philosophy with religion, at least in its traditional forms, was unacceptable. It is argued that certain objections of V. Solovyov's critics on the left against his concept of moral philosophy were not without persuasiveness, which the philosopher had to take into account in the second edition of his work.