“The Debate” between Fichte and Hegel in the Historical and Philosophical Works of I.A. Ilyin. Article One: The Rational and the Irrational in God

Using the historical and philosophical works of I.A. Ilyin as an example, this article examines an important but still completely undeveloped problem: the degrees of influence of Fichte’s and Hegel’s ideas in Russian philosophy of the 19th–early 20th centuries are compared. An analysis of Ilyin’s work “The Crisis of the Idea of the Subject in Fichte the Elder’s Science of Teaching”, published in 1912, is provided. It shows that the author initially used generally accepted assessments of the systems of German philosophers: criticizing the subjective idealism of the early Fichte, he believed that it was Hegel who created the true concept of the Absolute and its relationship with the world and man. The article traces the evolution of I.A. Ilyin’s views during his work on the first part of the book “Hegel’s Philosophy as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Man” (in 1912–1914), when he was researching the concept of speculative thinking in Hegel’s philosophy. A new original conclusion was obtained regarding Ilyin's philosophical views: already in the first part of his famous book, Ilyin synthesizes the ideas of Hegel and Fichte. Borrowing from Fichte's philosophy the idea of irrationality and unpredictable becoming as qualities of divine being, Ilyin depicts Hegel's speculative thinking as a synthesis of the rational and the irrational.