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Herzen the father and Herzen the son: A debate on science and human nature
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Herzen the father and Herzen the son: A debate on science and human nature
Annotation
PII
S0205-96060000622-1-
Publication type
Article
Status
Published
Authors
Irina E. Sirotkina 
ORCID: 0000-0002-6090-7005
Edition
Volume 22 Issue 4
Pages
5-23
Abstract

An illegitimate child of a wealthy Russian aristocrat, who made himself a name as a writer, Alexander Herzen was both admired by the Russian liberals for his ardent defense of freedom and dreaded by the country’s authorities for the same reason. After Lenin had canonized him the first professional revolutionary, Herzen took a prominent position in Russia’s Pantheon.

His elder son, also named Alexander, did not follow into the father’s steps. Tutored as an adolescent by a famous naturalist Karl Vogt, Alexander Herzen junior then studied with the German physiologist Moritz Schiff and subsequently became a professor of physiology in Lausanne. Much to his father’s disappointment, Herzen the son led a life of a bourgeois, and never went back to Russia. In his native country he was hardly known by anyone except a few fellow physiologists.Before perestroika, Russian historians tended to view Alexander Herzen junior as a classic example of the “prodigal son.” Later, however, the accents shifted so that the “revered father” has now lost some of his former glory, while the “unworthy son” has acquired a certain fame of his own. In particular, the elder Herzen has fallen into disgrace with contemporary historians for the same reason for which the Soviet historians once praised him namely, his revolutionary role. During the Soviet period, Russian historians of science proudly listed Herzen the father among scientists and philosophers; in the recent years, they started criticizing him for sacrificing science to revolutionary activity. As they now see it, the elder Herzen had overlooked the advent of a new epoch in which scientific and technological progress replaced political struggles as the principal vehicle of history. In contrast to his father, the younger Herzen supposedly contributed to the new epoch with his devotion to science.In fact of course, neither the elder Herzen was an obscurantist, nor the younger Herzen was totally absorbed in his physiological studies. The father at periods seriously took himself to science and did give a scientific education to his son. And the son did not seem to consider his academic career an ivory tower. He took part in contemporary debates on human evolution vivisection and free will, and even tried to set up a business using his own method of preserving meat. In contrast to his father, who at the end of his life came under attack from the Russian nihilists, Herzen the son might have won their sympathies; he held firm materialistic views and was a member of a radical political party named “Land and Liberty.”Yet, there was a deep difference between the father and the son, which found its expression in their philosophical debate on the freedom of the will. As is shown in the article, this family debate, which revealed contrasting conceptions of the self and the limits of human agency, echoed a larger discussion of the divide that still separates the natural and human sciences.
Date of publication
01.12.2001
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