31 MATERIALIST DOCTRINE OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRATES

From the middle of the XIX century. for Russian scientific and social thought was typical materialistic awareness of the nature of mental phenomena. Under the influence of the work of Charles Darwin on the genesis of plant and animal organisms, as well as man, the biological striving of ideas about the nature of human consciousness was organized.

Representatives of the materialistic views at that time were revolutionary democrats: V. G. Belinsky, A. I. Herzen, N. G. Chernyshevsky, D. I. Pisarev, etc. They found in Darwinian theory of the development of nature everything else and evidence of the impermanence of human society. This was the basis for the definition in natural science of the true justification of its central task — the overthrow of the exploitative regime of tsarist Russia and its replacement by a democratic state.

V. G. Belinsky (1811–1848). Critic, publicist and materialist philosopher. Analyzed the psyche only as a result of the functioning of the brain. Being a metaphysician, he believed that the world is in a state of constant natural evolutionary development. Developed the basic principles of revolutionary democratic aesthetics and pedagogy. He determined the importance of education and the role of art in the ontogenetic formation of the personality of each person.

A. And Herzen (1812–1870). He was distant from the adherents of the biological nature of the psyche, noting the social nature of human consciousness. Being also a materialist philosopher, he was a representative of dialectical materialism, but explained it from liberal positions to the social manifestations of human relations.

N. G. Chernyshevsky (1828–1889). The representative of the Russian Social Democracy. He developed the problems of philosophy, sociology, ethics, aesthetics, pedagogy, etc. The antagonist of philosophical idealism (I. Kant, D. Hume, G. Hegel, etc.). The basic provisions of the scientific ideology believed the physical integrity of the world, its infinite knowability.

The materialism of N. G. Chernyshevsky embodied the elements of anthropologism borrowed from the anthropological approach of L. Feuerbach, a philosophical thesis explaining social life by the needs and characteristics of a person as a biological creature. This position is based on the analysis of a person in isolation from social activities, which testified to the idealism of the relationship between social phenomena. A materialist in understanding the nature and theory of knowledge, N. G. Chernyshevsky was an idealist in understanding the history of the social formation of society. He gave a scientific substantiation to the positions of atheristic aesthetics, defended the principles of critical realism, and emphasized the importance of education and training for the development of the ideology and worldview of the individual.