George Kline


George Louis Kline was a philosopher, translator, and prominent American specialist in Russian and Soviet philosophy, author of more than 300 publications, including two monographs, six edited or co-edited anthologies, at least 165 published articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries, over 55 translations, and 75 reviews. The majority of his works are in English, but translations of some of them have appeared in Russian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Korean and Japanese. He is particularly noted for his authoritative studies on Spinoza, Hegel, and Whitehead. He was President of the Hegel Society of America, and President of the Metaphysical Society of America. He also made notable contributions to the study of Marx and the Marxist tradition. He attended Boston University for three years, but his education was interrupted by service in the U.S. Army Air Corps during WW II, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Career

After the war he completed his undergraduate education with honors at Columbia College, Columbia University, followed by graduate degrees at Columbia University. He taught philosophy at Columbia University 1950–52 and 1953–59 and was Visiting assistant professor at the University of Chicago, 1952–53. He moved to Bryn Mawr College in 1959, initially teaching in both the philosophy and the Russian departments. He was appointed full Professor of Philosophy in 1961, becoming Milton C. Nahm Professor of Philosophy from 1981 until his retirement in 1991. Afterwards, Kline served as a professor of philosophy at Clemson University, South Carolina. He also taught one-semester courses at Rutgers University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College and Swarthmore College.
Beginning in 1952, at the University of Chicago, Kline first taught his famous course on "Russian Ethical and Social Theory"; it was subsequently taught at Columbia University through the 1950s, at Bryn Mawr College from 1960, and at a number of other institutions over the years. He also taught, more or less continuously, courses on the history of Russian philosophy, Russian and Soviet Marxism, and a number of courses on Russian literature.
The entire field of Russian philosophy as an object of study in America has been shaped to a remarkable degree by the efforts of Kline himself over the course of a long career, beginning with his first publications in 1949: "Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor and the Soviet Regime," Occidental, no. 2, and "A Note on Soviet Logic," Journal of Philosophy, v. 46, p. 228. The textual precision, historical learning, and depth of insight found in Kline's own numerous studies of Russian and Soviet philosophy over several decades have served as a model of serious scholarship on these topics for many other researchers. He is also responsible for making available in English some of the most important reference works in the field, including the English translation of Zenkovsky's History of Russian Philosophy, and Russian Philosophy, a 3-vol. anthology of original translations of Russian philosophical texts, continuously in print from 1965 to the present.

Works in Slavic studies

Kline has also supplied a large number of entries on Russian philosophers for a variety of philosophical encyclopedias over many years. He has written approximately 75 reviews of other scholars' works on Russian and Soviet philosophy as well as of new Soviet philosophical works. For example, during the 1950s Kline reviewed approximately thirty recent Soviet publications in the fields of formal logic, philosophy of logic, and philosophy of mathematics, principally for the Journal of Symbolic Logic, as the field of formal logic was opening up in the U.S.S.R. He has also published several authoritative bibliographies of works in Russian, and also in other languages, concerning the history of Russian thought and culture, as well as a bibliography of Brodsky's published writings. Finally, Kline's skills as an editor are legendary. He contributed his services to a great many publishing ventures connected with Russian and Soviet philosophy, including the Sovietica series of monographs and the journal Studies in Soviet Thought. On a personal level, he most generously assisted in the editing of other scholars' drafts of works in philosophy, intellectual history, literature and literary criticism, and has been a constant source of encouragement and support for younger scholars. In all of these ways Kline has placed his own irreplaceable mark upon the entire field.
In 1949-50 Kline was in Paris as a Fulbright Scholar, just as V. V. Zenkovsky's История русской философии was being published there. While in Paris Kline met Zenkovsky and volunteered to translate the History into English, completing it after returning to the U.S. During this process Zenkovsky introduced revisions and corrections for incorporation into the English translation, so that Kline's translation became the authoritative version of the text. This work became the standard history of Russian philosophy for the next half-century, a crucial reference source for all scholars of Russian philosophy. In addition to Kline's translation of Zenkovsky, another exceptionally important resource for English-speaking students of Russian philosophy has been the comprehensive three-volume collection of original translations of Russian philosophers from the 18th century up through early Soviet Marxism.
The appearance of these three volumes in the 1960s made it feasible for the first time for instructors in the U.S. and U.K. to teach university courses based upon a representative sampling of the entire history of Russian philosophy, with excellent translations and scholarly introductions for each general section and each philosopher. Kline contributed ten translations to these three volumes, revised a number of others, and advised the editors on which selections should be included. They commented that "Without his help and inspiration the publication of this historical anthology of Russian philosophy could have been neither successfully planned nor achieved."
Kline's own many studies of Russian and Soviet philosophy can be distributed into five main categories:
  1. Religious thought in Russia and the Soviet Union
  2. Russian and Soviet ethical thought
  3. Studies of individual Russian philosophers
  4. Marx, the Marxist tradition and Marxism–Leninism
  5. Arguments for ethical individualism
The first category is well represented by Religious and Anti-Religious Thought in Russia, based upon the six Weil Institute Lectures that Kline delivered in Cincinnati in 1964, examining a panorama of attitudes toward religion by ten Russian thinkers, treated in five pairs: Bakunin and Tolstoy, Konstantin Leontiev and Vasily Rozanov, Lev Shestov and Nikolai Berdyaev, Maxim Gorky and Anatoly Lunacharsky, V. I. Lenin and Sergei M. Plekhanov.

Attitudes toward religion

Against the background of this extreme range of attitudes toward religion by various Russian thinkers, Kline concluded by examining three dominant attitudes toward religion in the then contemporary Soviet Union. They were:
  1. The collectivist atheism of Marxist–Leninist ideology, which appeared to function as a kind of secular pseudo-religion for some of its most devout believers, an inversion of normal religious belief.
  2. A "scientific-technological Prometheanism," somewhat analogous to Gorky's and Luncharsky's religion of "God-Building," which apparently inspired substantial numbers of the population, especially among the scientific and engineering elite.
  3. A genuinely religious sense of life which was emerging among some poets, writers and artists outside of the church, inspired by earlier writers such as Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova.

    Religious belief in Russia

Kline has published a number of important articles on aspects of religious belief in Russia, including "Religious Ferment Among Soviet Intellectuals," in Religion and the Soviet State: A Dilemma of Power ed. M. Hayward and W. C. Fletcher, and especially "Spor o religioznoi filosofii: L. Shestov protiv Vl. Solov'eva," Russkaia reigiozno-filosofskaia mysl; XX veka, ed. N. P. Poltoratzky and "Russian Religious Thought" in Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, ed. Ninian Smart, et al.. Russian and Soviet ethical theory have not only been at the center of much of Kline's teaching, but also of many of his publications. In "Changing Attitudes Toward the Individual", Kline examined the entire range of Russian ethical/social thought from 1861, pursuing the question of the degree to which the freedom, worth and dignity of the human individual figured as crucial values in that tradition, and found that the weight of nineteenth-century Russian thought was clearly on the side of ethical individualism. Prior to the revolution, only "the collectivist tendencies of Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Soloviev, and such Marxists as Bogdanov and Bazarov" seem to stand out as exceptions.

Nietzschean Marxism during the Soviet Silver Age

Kline was one of the first Western scholars to direct special attention to the episode of "Nietzschean Marxism" found especially in the works of Volsky and Lunacharsky, as well as Bogdanov and Bazarov during the period 1903–12. Three of his studies are especially relevant: "'Nietzschean Marxism' in Russia,", and "The Nietzschean Marxism of Stanislav Volsky" in Western Philosophical Systems in Russian Literature, ed. Anthony Mlikotin. Kline's attention to "Nietzschean Marxism" has inspired work by a number of other researchers on this same theme: see Kline's "Foreword" in Nietzsche in Russia, ed. Bernice G. Rosenthal. Ethics and morality in the Soviet period have also been a continuing interest: "Current Soviet Morality" in Encyclopedia of Morals, ed. Vergilius Ferm, "Economic Crime and Punishment," Survey, no. 57, "Soviet Ethical Theory," in Encyclopedia of Ethics, ed. Lawrence C. Becker, and "The Soviet Recourse to the Death Penalty for Crimes Against Socialist Property," Sofia Philosophical Review, vol. 3, 2009.