Saving philosopher Descartes: Valentin Asmus as a guardian of culture

Early in his career, Valentin Asmus gave a polemical lecture on Descartes’s dialectics, and during the “Thaw” he published a book on René Descartes’s life and scientific work. Asmus was the guardian of classical philosophical culture in the worst of times, when it was attacked by ideologically biased and semi-literate “Red professors.” They proclaimed Descartes founder of “modern idealism” and of a “mechanical worldview” hostile to dialectics. Asmus responded by arguing that Descartes had contributed much to the development of the dialectic and materialist view of the world—this was the only possible way to rehabilitate Descartes’s philosophical legacy from ideological accusations. In his 1956 book, Asmus gave an overview of Descartes’s philosophy as a whole. He was fluent in the philosophical techniques of Marxist histmat (short for “historical materialism”); at the same time, the portrait he draws of Descartes clearly shows the Kantian way of thinking, which Asmus learned from the schoolroom in the pre-revolutionary period.