The Embers of Memory

ABSTRACT This article, for which the focus is an intellectual autobiography, examines the development of worldview of a young person who graduated from the Moscow University Faculty of Philosophy in 1970. It highlights the main socially significant events of those times, events that determined the formation of the sociopolitical views of youth who did not accept Soviet ideology. It presents the reading circles and interactions of that period and tells of the outstanding Russian philosophers of the 1960s–1970s under whose influence this professional development took place. It considers the main topics of the key scholarship in philosophy, as well as the dynamics of research interests and problems. Particular attention is paid to the story of the originality of work by the Moscow Methodological Circle, led by Georgy P. Shchedrovitsky. The circle’s main task was to put all acts of reasoning and mental operations—naming, defining, describing, building ontological models and theoretical constructions, and so forth—under reflexive control. This was, to some extent, reminiscent of the inquiries of Western analytical philosophy, which made it a “suspicious” activity in the ideological sense in the Soviet Union. Cognition as a whole no longer seemed a “reflection” of reality, as had been proclaimed in the leading epistemological understanding of Marxist–Leninist philosophy. However, this also reflected the desire of intellectuals of the sixties and seventies to rationalize all social life as a whole. These dreams of “rationality” manifested at the time in the development of relevant topics in disciplines such as epistemology, in philosophy and methodology of science, and in sociological and psychological research. The author tells how the discussions of methodological problems of historical reconstruction began from positions like these. The discussion of discourse on knowledge in the humanities required not only intellectual audacity but social audacity as well. These discussions took place in informal, home-based seminars and represented a marginal, “clandestine” phenomenon.