The following text from the archives of the philosopher, psychologist, and linguist Nikolai Ivanovich Zhinkin (1893–1979) immediately expands our investigative horizon into the intellectual history of the first half of the twentieth century in several respects and therefore deserves careful study. In the first place, this text, which is an article by Nikolai Zhinkin on Ernst Cassirer’s work Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken (“The Form of the Concept in Mythical Thinking”) was published in 1922 in the “Studien der Bibliothek Warburg” (“Studies of the Warburg Library”) based on the report. It is the earliest evidence of a discussion and reception in Russia of Cassirer’s new philosophy of culture. The ideas formulated in Die Begriffsform were expanded upon a few years later in his Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (“Philosophy of Symbolic Forms”), which consists of three volumes, and which was published in Berlin between 1923 and 1929. Secondly, this text is important for understanding the project of a “phenomenology of culture,” which was developed by Gustav G. Shpet and his circle of students and like-minded associates within GAKhN and beyond in the 1920s. And, finally, it sheds light on the main ideas of the philosophy of myth, a discussion of which was actively conducted in GAKhN in connection with the theory of language and art.

The author of the article, Nikolai Zhinkin,Footnote 1 was a graduate of the Department of Philosophy in the History and Philology Faculty of Moscow University (1916), a student of Georgii I. Chelpanov and Gustav G. Shpet, and arguably one of the latter’s closest associates in the 1920s. He participated most actively in Shpet’s development of a phenomenological-hermeneutic theory of culture, the core of which was the structural-hermeneutic approach developed and tested in the investigations of language and art (Plotnikov 2017). Shpet invited Zhinkin, who was a specialist in philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy, to participate in most of his post-revolutionary scientific initiatives. With the assistance and on the recommendation of Shpet, Zhinkin became a member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle (1921–1924), a member of the Cabinet of Ethnic Psychology at Moscow University (1920), a staff member of the Institute of Scientific Philosophy (1921–1922), a research fellow (since 1923) and a full member of the Academy of Arts (from 1926), and scientific secretary of the Department of General Theory of Art and Aesthetics in the academy (1929–1930). After the liquidation of GAKhN in 1929, Zhinkin was forced to retire from scientific activity and worked for a long time at the Moscow Film Studio of Scientific Films. He began the study of film as an art form and also the study of the psychology of moviegoers already during the time of his work at GAKhN. In 1947, he returned to scientific activity, but already as a second specialty, as a psychologist and psycholinguist, having become an employee at the Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. In the 1950–1960s, he published his chief works on the study of speech and the creation of text. These works made him one of the leading specialists in psycholinguistics (Zhinkin 1998). We can note, however, that his participation in the development of educational films, which took into account the psychology of the audience, as well as the psycholinguistic study of the relationship between language and thought were a continuation and development of the key theme of Zhinkin’s phenomenological-hermeneutic conception. Within this framework, he investigated the genesis of meaning in various acts of consciousness and their objective correlates. Already during his investigations of art, while at GAKhN, Zhinkin developed this hermeneutic approach in aesthetics, which allowed the interpretation of various sorts of art and culture in general as forms of language with their specific semantic structures. Zhinkin later continued the analysis of such structures in his works on psycholinguistics and cybernetics, the focus of which, however, was not on a static linguistic code, as with the structuralists, but on the sum total of speech acts that form the process of speech and that are the chief carriers of meaning in language.

From the very beginning of the activities of the GAKhN’s Philosophy Department, Zhinkin held the position of Deputy Chairman of the Commission for the Study of the Problem of Artistic Form. In this position, he actively participated in the preparation of the commission’s works, of which the most famous was the collection “Artistic Form” (Khudozhestvennaja forma; 1927). As part of this activity, Zhinkin prepared a report on the topic “Conceptual Forms in Mythical Thought,” which he delivered at a meeting of the Committee on Artistic Form of GAKhN on 21 October 1923 (see GAKhN 1926, pp. 21, 103). This report formed the basis of the text, which he originally planned to publish in the form of an overview, and then as a review of Cassirer’s work in the first issue of the Proceedings of the Commission (RGALI Fond 941, Op. 14. Ed. Khr. 7. L. 27). This issue was never published, and Zhinkin’s review, consequently, could not be included in it.

In terms of studying Cassirer’s reception in Russia, it is worth noting that this text marks the changed constellation of the philosophical debate about neo-Kantianism. Until the early 1920s and before the appearance of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer was perceived primarily as a proponent and defender of the philosophical concepts of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism (Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp), i.e., above all as an exponent of a philosophical justification of logic and the theory of knowledge of the natural sciences and psychology (Dmitrieva 2007; Nemeth 2022). Because of the philosophical situation of the 1910s, neo-Kantianism was essentially synonymous with “scientific philosophy,” to the extent that the attitude toward it was formed above all along a demarcation line separating science and metaphysics. Representatives of religious metaphysics (cf. Trubeckoj 1917) acted as critics of neo-Kantianism, whereas representatives of Russian neo-Kantianism regarded Cassirer’s works, on the contrary, as an important contribution to the development of the theory of science and scientific philosophy in general (cf. Gessen 1911–1912 and Mnikh 2008–2009).

The situation already changed during the period of war and revolution, when alternative projects of “scientific philosophy” were formed, among them being “phenomenology,” as announced in 1910 by its founder Edmund Husserl, with his call for a “rigorous science.” Following Shpet and his idea of phenomenology as the “fundamental science,” the supporters of the phenomenological project in Russia went further and considered neo-Kantianism to be not a form of scientific philosophy, but a kind of subjectivistic metaphysics (“philosophy of the point of view,” to use Zhinkin’s formulation). In the published text, Zhinkin simply characterizes Cassirer’s philosophical position as “an exhausted idealism,” although he pays tribute to the novelty of the project of a philosophy of culture outlined by Cassirer in his report. In the discussions of the 1920s, therefore, there emerges a competition between various projects for a “scientific philosophy,” each of which in its own way defined the boundary between science and metaphysics, or even eliminated it altogether, including also the sphere of first principles within that of scientific knowledge. Indeed, Cassirer himself developed his new philosophy of culture in the direction of a “metaphysics of symbolic forms” (Cassirer 1995 and Cassirer 1996), without distinguishing philosophy from metaphysics. Zhinkin’s criticism of Cassirer’s constructions is directed to this point. In these constructions, the theory of cognition changes from an explanatory theory for the individual sciences into a universal way of explaining the world, but one which is presented only as an object of cognition. It, thereby, becomes a metaphysics, one that is devoid of “scientific justification.”

Zhinkin contrasts this transformation of epistemological philosophy into metaphysics with the project of a “phenomenology of culture,” which he develops together with Shpet (in the “Aesthetic Fragments”) and with his like-minded associates in GAKhN in the context of philosophical investigations of art. The project focuses on an analysis of the forms of expressing a sense that constitute various spheres of consciousness (scientific, aesthetic, religious, etc.), with their characteristic and specific structure, and in correlation with them, the individual subject areas of culture. For Shpet and his collaborators, the paradigm of such an analysis is language and its semantic structures (“internal forms”), which organize in each of the spheres, each time in its own way, the sequence and “algorithms” of the positing of sense and the expression of sense (logic, poetics), as well as the type of objectivity, to which consciousness is correlated and the type of content grasped by these forms. On the one hand, it seems that the idea of grasping all cultural spheres within the single analytic scope of their forms of consciousness brings the approach of the GAKhN phenomenologists closer to that of Cassirer, whose concept of symbolic forms is also oriented on the model of language (in its Humboldtian understanding as a linguistic activity; Möckel 2014). But on the other hand, phenomenology opposes the identification of consciousness with the forms of “cognizing consciousness” and the reduction of the entire variety of cultural forms to various types of cognitive activity on the part of the subject. In addition, phenomenology also turns its attention to the differentiation of the various ways that the content of consciousness is given, the content (“hyletic data”) being taken not as the indifferent material of subjective syntheses of consciousness, but as specifically organized elements of each act of consciousness. Similar to the “hyletic” element of consciousness, Zhinkin singles out the “mythical,” which is the matter of the collective consciousness of the community.

The difference between the neo-Kantian and phenomenological projects of the philosophy of culture is manifested most distinctly in Zhinkin’s understanding of myth, as formulated in the published text and developed further in his article “Myth” for the Encyclopedia of Artistic Terminology (Zhinkin 2005b (1927)), as well as in the theses for a discussion of this article in the Philosophy Department of GAKhN (Zhinkin 2005a (1927)). With this text, he opens a long discussion of the concept of myth in GAKhN, which took place over several years, especially after the publication in 1925 of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume Two: Mythical Thought. Such works as Losev 1998 (1926); Fokht 1998 (1927), and Sakketti 2017 (1928) are products of that discussion.

For Zhinkin, a myth is a “worldly attitude” (Zhinkin 2005a, p. 458), which, although manifested in the expression, is not a formal structure of consciousness, but a “pure content” (ibid.), or a kind of “anoetic consciousness” (as Zhinkin describes it using the terminology of George Frederick Stout, a psychologist of the Franz Brentano school). It means that a myth characterizes a state of consciousness, in which there is no articulated objectivity, intentionality, or distinct positing of sense. It is a prereflexive consciousness, fused with immediate practical life, which possesses all of its possibilities as a field, without thematizing them and without choosing from them. Therefore, it is wrong to characterize myth as a “form of intuition” or “a form of life,” as Cassirer does, trying to build the logic of mythical thought by analogy with the categories of reason or aesthetic feeling. Myth as a prereflexive attitude toward the world (which can be compared with Heidegger’s “Being-in-the-world” (In-der-Welt-Sein) is transformed with the help of cultural forms (art, religion) and becomes a mythological narrative.

Zhinkin concludes from this that it is also wrong to consider myth as just some historically primitive form of consciousness, which in the course of historical evolution is transformed into religion and science (as Cassirer sees it). A myth is not at all archaic. “Every epoch creates its own myths,” and in each epoch there is a confrontation between the reflective forms of culture and myth.

The discussion of myth within GAKhN demands a separate study. Within the academy, the phenomenological conception (of Shpet and Zhinkin), which saw myth as a sphere of originary experience, clashed with the Cassirer-inspired neo-Kantian interpretation of myth (of Sakketti and Fokht), as a symbolic “form of thought” and “form of life,” as well as with the conception of dialectical metaphysics (of Losev), which followed Schelling, who defined myth as the identity of the rational and the irrational, or as a self-conscious being. Zhinkin’s published text opened this discussion, the consequence of which was A. F. Losev’s famous “Dialectics of Myth” (Dialektika mifa). The reconstruction of the chief arguments and positions advanced in this discussion allows us to understand better not only the intellectual context, but also the conceptual framework of Losev’s work, which was developed taking into account the various interpretations of myth circulating in GAKhN’s philosophical community.