Discussion about Kant during the Great Patriotic War: The look 75 years after the Victory Part II

Abstract

With the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, in the Soviet Union, an old discus­sion about Kant began again under the new conditions. This time, its issue was Kant’s philosophy that was a part of the so-called Classical German Philosophy and the role of this philosophy in the formation of German National Socialism with its aggressive foreign policy. To understand the origin of the dispute, I ini­tially turn to the debates on Kant as the face of German militarism during the First World War. They were initiated with V.F. Ern’s paper “From Kant to Krupp” and almost ignored by Russian Marxists. The Marxist view of Kant is in­vestigated by the reference to the history of Kant’s treatises (“Prolegomena” and pre-critical works) first publications after the October revolution of 1917 till the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. Details of the dispute over Kant during the Great Patriotic War are analyzed through the lens of two significant events, namely the publication of V. F. Asmus’s paper “Fascist Falsification of Classical German Philosophy” (1942) and the cancellation of the Stalin award for the third volume of “The history of philosophy” (1943) in 1944. In conclusion, I evaluate the results of this war-time discussion from the contemporary perspective that considers the modern understanding of both National Socialism and the involve­ment of German Kant Scholars into the Nazi movement. The perspective also takes into account post-war debates on Kant’s philosophy responsibility for un­fortunate events of the Second World War.