Philosophical Arabesques

Bukharin’s Philosophical Arabesques was written while he was imprisoned in the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, facing a trial on charges of treason and the likelihood of execution. After the death of Lenin, Bukharin co-operated with Stalin for a time. Once Stalin’s supremacy was assured he began eliminating all potential rivals. For Bukharin, the process was to end with his confession before the Soviet court, facing the threat that his young family would be killed along with him if he did not.

While awaiting his death, Bukharin wrote prolifically. He considered Philosophical Arabesques as the most important of his prison writings. In its pages, he covers the full range of issues in Marxist philosophy—the sources of knowledge, the nature of truth, freedom and necessity, the relationship of Hegelian and Marxist dialectic. The project constitutes a defense of the genuine legacy of Lenin’s Marxism against the use of his memory to legitimate totalitarian power.

Consigned to the Kremlin archives for a half-century after Bukharin’s execution, this work is now being published for the first time in English. It will be an essential reference work for scholars of Marxism and the Russian revolution and a landmark in the history of prison writing.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Voice from the Dead by Helena Sheehan

Editor’s Note

Foreword

Introduction

1. The Reality of the World and the Intrigues of Solipsism
2. Acceptance and Non-Acceptance of the World
3. Things in Themselves and Their Cognizability
4. Space and Time
5. Mediated Cognition
6. The Abstract and the Concrete
7. Senses, Ideas, and Concepts
8. Living Nature and Its Treatment in Art
9. Rational Thinking, Dialectical Thinking, and Direct Contemplation
10. Practice in General and Practice in the Theory of Cognition
11. Practical, Theoretical, and Aesthetic Treatment of the World and Their Unity
12. The Original Stands of Materialism and Idealism
13. Hylozoism and Panpsychism
14. Hinduist Mysticism and West European Philosophy
15. The So-called Philosophy of Identity
16. The Sins of Mechanistic Materialism
17. The General Patterns and Links of Being
18. Teleology
19. Freedom and Necessity
20. Organisms
21. Contemporary Natural Science and Dialectical Materialism
22. The Sociology of Thinking: On Work and Thinking as Two General Historical Categories
23. The Sociology of Thinking: On the Method of Production and the Method of Representation
24. So-called Racial Thinking
25. Social Positions, Thinking, and Emotions
26. The Object of Philosophy
27. The Subject of Philosophy
28. The Interaction between Subject and Object
29. Society as an Object and a Subject of Possession
30. Truth: On the Concept of Truth and Its Criterion
31. Truth: On Absolute and Relative Truth
32. Well-Being
33. Hegel’s Dialectical Idealism as a System
34. Hegel’s Dialectics and Marx’s Dialectics
35. Dialectics as Science and Dialectics as Art
36. Science and Philosophy
37. Evolution
38. Theory and History
39. Social Ideals
40. Lenin the Philosopher

Glossary

Index

Nikolai Bukharin was one of the most talented of the leaders of the Bolshevik Party that led the Russian Revolution of 1917, a leader of the Soviet government, and the author of important theoretical works on Marxist theory. He was executed for treason in 1938. Helena Sheehan teaches the history of ideas at Dublin City University and is the author of Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History.