Social utopia of Vyacheslav Ivanov - society as the mystical union of individuals

Russian poet and thinker Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949) was one of the few Russian Symbolists who extended his doctrine of symbolic reality to social theory. Ivanov conceived his social theory on the basis of the philosophy of all-unity by Vladimir Solovyov meaning that a person like all reality as a whole exists in two aspects: empirical and noumenal. A coercive type of society corresponds to an empirical individual while the interaction of the spiritually transformed men involves other people and leads to the creation of a new non-coercive type of society. The creation of a new society is based on the metaphysical transformation of men, and this transformation is possible when people comprehend the truth about reality which is the truth of all-unity. Non-coercive comprehension of the truth is possible for Vyacheslav Ivanov only through its presentation in the art which is aimed at discovering and portraying the higher noumenal reality. Such an art is the symbolism. Thus, the new society is unintentionally but involuntarily created by a symbolist artist. The artist creates symbols and myths that reveal the true reality, and this creative action is sociogenic: seeing the truth in the symbolic and mythical images presented by the artists, people spiritually transform themselves and enter into a new type of interaction in the mode of all-unity, i.e. giving themselves to others and absorbing others into themselves. The result of this mode of interaction is the new type of society characterized by the fact that the maximum unity of all people is combined with the maximum freedom of everyone.