Logically consistent methodological thinking was already viewed by Lenin as idealistic, bourgeois, metaphysical, and undialectical.

Dialectical materialism is not organized as a closed system of postulates and inferences from them. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that this caution was implicit in Marxism-Leninism from the beginning. This cautious attitude toward science no doubt reflects the traumatic experience of Soviet philosophy in the Stalinist era, when many scientific methods and even whole scientific fields (including cybernetics, formal logic, structural linguistics, and above all modern genetics) were banned and persecuted due to their supposed incompatibility with dialectical materialism. It is also misguided, according to Alekseev, to regard dialectical materialism as a “meta-science” or scientific methodology, since this interpretation similarly leads to a “dogmatism” vis-à-vis the variety of possible theories of science. This interpretation, Alekseev argues, leads to dogmatism, which prevents other sciences from developing autonomously. Neither, however, can it be a “total science,” so to speak, that unites all other sciences into a total worldview, as was often asserted in Stalinist-era Soviet philosophy. Dialectical materialism, in Alekseev’s view, cannot be one science among others without losing its dominant position.

The author seeks to show that Soviet philosophy’s traditional interpretation of dialectical materialism as a science necessarily leads to a needless and nonsensical rivalry between dialectical materialism and the individual sciences. Alekseev’s book The Object, Structure, and Functions of Dialectical Materialism (1983), which otherwise hews closely to orthodox Marxism. A good example of this new development is P. This new self-understanding of dialectical materialism as “wisdom” primarily emerged in the polemic against two of its earlier interpretations-as a science and as an ideology. Dialectical materialism was itself conceived as a form of “wisdom”: that is, as an insight into the whole of the world which was fundamentally lacking in science and art. It was used to better situate the doctrine of dialectical materialism within the history of philosophy as well as in relation to science, art, religion, and so on. The Turn from Science to Wisdom in Dialectical Materialismīeginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the term “wisdom” appeared very frequently in Soviet philosophy publications. The exhibition linked a selection of works by the Russian avant-garde from the George Costakis collection – curated by Boris Groys – with contemporary contributions: films by Anton Vidokle and an installation by Arseny Zhilyaev that reflected on the philosophical, scientific and artistic concepts of Russian Cosmism. Courtesy of MOMus-Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection. The work was shown in Art without Death, HKW, Berlin, 2017. Solomon Nikritin, Oval Composition (Study for a Self-Portrait), 1920s.

Dialectic marxist