This brief paper is a polemical response to Mikhail Epstein’s review of the Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought, and especially to his claim that the widely acknowledged tendency of Russian philosophy towards holistic thinking is akin to political totalitarianism, not to say its underlying cause. My argument is that philosophical and political or ideological thought are fundamentally different in their nature and purpose, and cannot be usefully identified with one another as Epstein does. Epstein’s claim is, I argue, a manifestation of the modern outlook at large, incapable of grasping the difference and, worse, offering precisely the opposite of a solution to the problems posed by totalitarianism.

这篇简短的论文是对米哈伊尔·爱泼斯坦（Mikhail Epstein）对《帕尔格雷夫俄罗斯思想手册》的评论的争论性回应，特别是他的主张，即俄罗斯哲学普遍承认的整体思维倾向类似于政治极权主义，更不用说其根本原因了。我的观点是，哲学思想和政治思想或意识形态思想在性质和目的上根本不同，不能像爱泼斯坦那样有效地相互等同。我认为，爱泼斯坦的主张是现代世界观的体现，无法把握其中的差异，更糟糕的是，它为极权主义提出的问题提供了完全相反的解决方案。