Abstract
This paper looks at the ways in which Mikhail Bakhtin had appropriated the ideas of Kant and of the Marburg neo-Kantian school. While Bakhtin was greatly indebted to Kantian philosophy, and is known to have referred to himself as a neo-Kantian, he rejects the main tenets of neo-Kantianism. Instead, Bakhtin offers a substantial re-interpretation of Kantian thought. His frequent borrowings from neo-Kantian philosophers (Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and others) also follow a distinctive pattern of appropriation, whereby blocks of interconnected ideas are removed from their original context, and made to serve Bakhtin’s own—substantially different—philosophical purposes in the context of his own thought. Bakhtin’s thought thus remains original even as he is borrowing ideas from others.
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Notes
Another position (e.g., Morson and Emerson 1990, pp. 64–65) views only Bakhtin’s early philosophical work (Bakhtin 1990 [1923/4]; 1993 [1921/2]) as heavily influenced by neo-Kantianism—an influence which Bakhtin then mostly overcomes. As I will argue in what follows, Bakhtin’s rather unorthodox attitude toward neo-Kantianism is already evident in his earliest writings.
A note on dating references to Bakhtin’s works. The date included in square brackets reflects either: a. the publication date of the Russian original for Bakhtin’s few lifetime publications; b. the writing date of texts published posthumously, as estimated in the commentary to the (currently) definitive Russian edition (Bakhtin 1996–2012); or c. the date of recording for interviews with Bakhtin. A similar rule applies to citing works by Matvej Kagan.
But note that Bakhtin’s wording implies a certain distance: “I was such a zealous [zaiadlij] Kantian”, he recalls of himself in the first half of the 1920s (Bakhtin 2002 [1973], p. 161). But zaiadlij is a pejorative term, which implies that at least by 1973, when the quoted interview was recorded, he no longer considered himself to be as zealous a Kantian as he was back then.
Bakhtin’s early philosophical writings are difficult to date with precision. Traditionally, proposed dates have ranged from 1918 to 1924 (e.g., Clark and Holquist 1984, p. 63 ff). One noted scholar (Poole 2001) argued for a somewhat later dating of 1926 to 1928, but see Nikolaev and Liapunov (2003, pp. 495–503) for a refutation and solid arguments in favor of dating “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” (Bakhtin 1990 [1923/4]) to 1923–1924. Gogotišvili (2003, pp. 412–418) argues for roughly 1921–1922 as the date range for Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Be that as it may, it is agreed that Toward a Philosophy of the Act is an early work, which one would have expected to be neo-Kantian in character.
Vadim Liapunov’s English translation (Bakhtin 1993 [1921/2]) uses both “deed” and “act” (as in the title of the work), and often even uses the phrase “act or deed” to render the same Russian word. I will consistently use “deed” as the translation of postupok, because of the everyday ethical connotations this word shares with its Russian counterpart (e.g., in such expressions as “good deeds” and “bad deeds”).
See, for example, its use in the fragment from Natorp’s Sozial Idealismus discussed below. Notably, Kagan’s Russian translation of that book indeed renders Handlung as postupok (Natorp 2004 [1920], pp. 148–149).
Like Bakhtin himself, I am using the first person singular (“my”) in this description to stress the essential difference between this actuality and the potential, hypothetical status of general theoretical claims. Statements about “a subject”, “a person”, “a self”, etc. hold potentially for abstract entities; statements about me hit closer to home. The idea is for readers to adhere, for the purposes of our discussion, to the same linguistic practice, and to examine these points as applying to them, personally.
Or “theoreticism” in the published English translation. The Russian original is teoretizm.
The quote above is from notes Bakhtin wrote (probably) considerably later, in the 1940s, but it deals with topics developed most thoroughly in his earliest works.
To briefly recapitulate this central philosophical move of Bakhtin’s here—he argues for the intersubjective constitution of the subject by problematizing the notion of introspection, central to Western philosophy from Descartes on. As Bakhtin insists (e.g., Bakhtin 1990 [1923/4], pp. 27–36), I cannot form a coherent image of myself as an entity in the world. I can be in another person’s field of vision, but not in my own. And therefore, I need to be able to communicate with others, to receive my exterior image from them, in order to become a full-fledged subject myself.
For some relevant observations in the literature, see Nikolaev’s (2001, pp. 198–200) discussion of how Bakhtin transformed the neo-Kantian notion of responsibility (or answerability), Sandler’s (2012) examination of Bakhtin’s linguistic terminology and numerous discussions in Gogotišvili’s (1996) commentary to several of the texts published in vol. 5 of Bakhtin’s Collected Writings.
It is true that the completion (“consummation”, “finalization”; the Russian word all these terms translate is zaveršenie) of the hero by the author in a literary work is viewed as a positive aesthetic achievement in Bakhtin (1990) [1923/4], while the same completion is denounced on ethical grounds as incompatible with true dialogue in Bakhtin (1984) [1929/1963]. But as Erdinast-Vulcan (2013) convincingly argues, this tension hardly represents a clean break in Bakhtin’s thought: the ethical critique of completion can already be identified in the early works. Besides, even if we do assume a change of heart on Bakhtin’s part, irreducible intersubjectivity is still clearly central to his early thought, and “dialogue” could have been a natural way to refer to it.
A possible additional source could have been Buber (1970) [1923].
Though the translation was completed while Bakhtin and Kagan were no longer living in the same city.
Interestingly, when Kagan translates this word into Russian, he uses the word iz`iasnenie, which means “clarification”, not “debate”. Technically speaking, this is just a badly chosen word. But we should also consider the possibility that Kagan had evidence to support this odd reading from his direct communication with his doctoral thesis advisor—Natorp himself.
The translation is my own, but is designed to follow Kagan’s Russian translation of the text (Natorp 2004 [1920], pp. 148–149) quite closely. I would like to thank Dmitry Bosnak for some useful comments on this text and its interpretation and for locating and making available to me a copy of the book’s first edition (which Kagan, and probably Bakhtin too, used).
As another example for the same pattern from a different period and thematic context—consider that the second volume of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, on myth (Cassirer 1955 [1925]), plays a significant role in shaping Bakhtin’s conception of carnival in the late 1930s and early 1940s (see Bakhtin 2008 [ca. 1938]; and cf. Poole 1998). Cassirer’s third volume (Cassirer 1957 [1929]), dealing with science, which is in many ways the culmination of Cassirer’s system, is absent from Bakhtin’s discussion.
This seems to be, for instance, the assumption in Poole (2001), and it probably explains Brandist’s (2002a, p. 39) statement that Toward a Philosophy of the Act “is of interest chiefly for what it tells us about Bakhtin’s later work” and “represents little more than a (rather too) self-conscious combination of themes from contemporary German and Austrian philosophy”.
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Acknowledgments
My work on this paper was partly funded by a Vidi research program (276.70.019, Principal Investigator: E. Pascual) from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). I would like to thank Craig Brandist and Caryl Emerson for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of the text.
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Sandler, S. A strange kind of Kantian: Bakhtin’s reinterpretation of Kant and the Marburg School. Stud East Eur Thought 67, 165–182 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-015-9237-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-015-9237-2