A Philosopher, Who Failed to Learn Wisdom

Abstract

The article is devoted to the state of scientific research of the life, activity and legacy of V.E. Seseman, a Russian, Lithuanian, Soviet philosopher, one of the participants of the Eurasian movement. His fate turned out to be closely connected with one of the main ideologists of Eurasianism, L.P. Karsavin, a Medieval scholar and philosopher. The weak holistic elaboration of Seseman's legacy and life is due to a combination of reasons, primarily the lack of Russian translations of his main works written in German and Lithuanian. Another important reason is the low interest of researchers in archival sources containing important information about the biographies of Seseman and Karsavin. Previously unknown historical documents are actively used in the article. They recreate the dramatic tension of the 1920s–1950s, reveal important circumstances in the tragic fractures of the destinies of two Russian philosophers. Contrary to the established opinion, the author considers that the main real reason for the criminal prosecution of Seseman is not participation in Eurasianism, but a principled philosophical position, including expressed in open objections to the imposition of the supremacy of the principle of partisanship in the teaching of logic and against the reformatting of this science into an ideological discipline. theoretical development. Another reason for the arrests was the extreme carelessness of these university professors in informal relationships with others, many of whom were secret agents. The author of the article points out a striking gap between the high theoretical qualifications of two armchair scientists and their naive short-sightedness in practical behavior. The unreasonable credulity shown in real life by two thinkers translates the topic into the register of ethics and leads to questions about the personal responsibility of each of these theorists for the tragedy of not only their lives, but also the lives of loved ones.