From Russian Marburg to the United States: New Wine into Old Wineskins

Abstract

The conceptualization of ideological influences in philosophy is usually unidi­rectional: from tradition-source to tradition-recipient. The history of Russian neo-Kantianism demonstrates other possibilities for conceptualizing philosophi­cal reception: documenting the facts of reverse influence forces us to look for new ways of interpreting this philosophical movement. The uniqueness of the his­torical situation, which cannot be ignored when analyzing the fate of Russian Neo-Kantianism, makes it necessary for the historian of ideas to turn to the study of intellectual biographies, professional connections, and in general the “sphere of conversation” in which the transformation of the ideological horizon took place. The emigration of intellectuals from Russia in the late 1910s and early 1920s, termed the “philosophers’ ships”, not only provoked unprecedented exis­tential shifts in individual personal trajectories, but also gave rise to new intel­lectual phenomena, conceptual networks and cultural-institutional clusters. Re­constructing the intellectual biographies of two Russian thinkers, Simon Kaplan and Jacob Klein, whose philosophical development took place in the symbolic Marburg, we uncover difficult problems of self-identity, intellectual relevance, and creative fulfillment in emigration. Kaplan, fascinated by the philosophy of religion of Hermann Cohen, head of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism, found himself in demand in the United States in the innovative “Great Books” educational program as an expert on Kant and the Bible and as the translator of Cohen’s major work on the philosophy of religion into English. Klein brought to the New World a reputation as an expert in the history of ancient mathematics and Renaissance science, revealed himself as an expert in Plato’s philosophy and an excellent organizer of the educational process, and contemporary research in­terest turns to him as a phenomenologist.