Ilya Lepikhov. 700,000 signs of living philosophy

700,000 signs of living philosophy
G.G. Shpet. Internal form of a word. Sketches and variations on themes by Humboldt. - Ivanovo, 2000

Ilya Lepikhov

Publication date: August 24, 2000

And the name of Gustav Gustavovich Shpet stands apart among the names that made up the glory of Russian discourse at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. He is first of all a scientist and only then a thinker. Russian philosophy of that era consciously distanced itself from the academic tradition in the hope that, having overcome disciplinary dryness, it would gain an additional degree of freedom. Freedom had to be paid at a high price. The mental discipline of N. Berdyaev, S. Bulgakov, V. Zenkovsky and their followers, even at first approximation, cannot be considered impeccable. And at that time they decisively prevailed over the champions of strict knowledge. The latter, who affirmed logical forms over liberalist phantasms, either avoided discussing pressing philosophical problems (Prince S. Trubetskoy), or put them off for later (B. Kistyakovsky) in the hope of masterfully mastering the modern, as a rule, neo-Kantian scientific method.

Even compared to them, Shpet looks quite special. It is strictly academic, but equally stunningly modern. Like all philosophical science of the first half of the twentieth century, he is occupied with the problems of the philosophy of language; he is a dialectician, and not a metaphysician, like most of his scientific colleagues. And is it necessary to say that he is not a Marxist? Moreover.

G. Shpet is not even a neo-Kantian in the traditional sense. His discourse goes beyond Kant, beyond Cohen. Pausing briefly on the early Husserl of the “Logical Investigations” era, Shpet’s thought moves on, developing the legacy of his predecessors in a very original and quite meaningful direction.

The concept of language put forward in his works, which does not bear the imprint of the influence of the Viennese, Oxford and Cambridge schools, is quite comparable in its significance to the works of L. Wittgenstein, B. Russell or G. Frege. Few philosophers of the 20th century can boast of the same.

The originality of Shpet's mental image still leaves a very curious imprint on the perception of his heritage and personality. Thus, the author of the afterword to the publication under review, after a cursory presentation of the features of Gustav Gustavovich’s scientific method, considers it necessary to give an idea of ​​the personality of Shpet himself. According to the recollections of one of the MSU students: “Everyone loved him, the girls were all in love... Shpet drank glasses of vodka, but it was never noticeable . ” To this day, according to the publisher, the frightening perfection of philosophy needs to be colored with some kind of sweet little person. In a word, the non-Russian person is narrow - he would like to expand.

The book under review includes the most famous works, such as “The Internal Form of the Word” and “Language and Meaning.” Not being a professional linguist, I will not take the liberty to judge the degree of today’s persuasiveness of Shpet’s logical constructions in the sphere of the formation of new ideas about language. Let me just remind you that the very concept and principle of the “internal form of the word” as one of the fundamental laws of discursive thinking (and both works are devoted to its affirmation) are now recognized almost everywhere. It would be a serious simplification to attribute all the glory to the works of Shpet: before him, similar problems were developed by Goethe and Condillac, Rousseau and Shaftesbury, after and simultaneously with him - a dozen scientists who were in no way inferior to Shpet in the scale and direction of talent, just remember A. Marty and E. Curtius. Paradoxically, the concept of the internal form of a word is being instilled in Russia independently of “Language and Meaning”: the outstanding Russian linguist A. Reformatsky is obliged to share its glory with E. Husserl, under whose decisive influence most of the now classic works were written. At the same time, justice requires pointing out that it was Shpet who was the first philosopher of language in Russia who began to originally develop the problems of the internal form of the word, when the philosophy of language itself in the modern sense of the word was still just being formed.

The same justice forces us to say that Shpetov’s style can be considered exemplary in terms of the reader’s understanding of philosophical concepts. We, who have managed to get used to ponderous translations of German authors, are justified in marveling at the stylistic perfection of “The Internal Form of the Word.” I’m afraid I’ll be mistaken, but, perhaps, nowhere in Russian has the essence of Kant’s “thing in itself” been presented with such skill, the abolition of subject-object relations, so important for postphenomenological thought, has not been explained, and the limited suitability of psychological approaches in understanding essence of "aesthetic". In general, Shpet’s literary, as well as literary-critical talent is a topic for another discussion. Let us only recall that it is to him that we owe the appearance of the very first cultural commentary to the classical text. The volume of notes to the "Posthumous Notes of the Pickwick Club" published in Academia precedes in time even Nabokov's commentary on "Eugene Onegin", not to mention the later experiments of Yu. Lotman, V. Manuylov, S. Fomichev and other respected authors.

The Word, not so much Discourse as Logos, was the key concept of his work. It mediated a set of instrumental, social and epistemological views. Developing Humboldt's ideas about language as a social subject ("ergon" in the terminology of his predecessor) and a cultural-social act ("energeia"), Shpet comes to the affirmation of poetic language as a special sphere of social activity, which has its own internal form and thereby demonstrates the possibility of a fundamentally different logic of interobject relationships. Long before M. Bakhtin, he drew attention to a very special place, which the newest narrative forms were beginning to claim in his contemporary reality, and discovered the didactic-rigoristic mechanism of influence of the novelistic narrative. And, although the definition of the novel as a type of “moral propaganda” does not receive further development in “The Internal Form of the Word,” it should be recognized that not one of the Russian theorists of this genre, be it B. Griftsov, V. Shklovsky, L. Ginzburg or all of them Bakhtin (with understandable reservations) did not take upon himself the courage to so definitely assert his non-fictional goal-setting.

With due respect for Shpet's texts, such “ideas” and “attitudes” can be found in abundance. It is timely for domestic political scientists to become familiar with the distinction between a social fact and an intermediary object as a particular realization of this social fact (take, for example, a social movement that reveals a tendency towards building a national state, and military operations on the outskirts of the state as one of the manifestations of this tendency), domestic - and not only domestic historians - it’s time to reconsider the role and place of socio-psychological mechanisms of social life after a detailed study of Shpet’s idea of ​​the national language as a subject and instrument of social consciousness. It will be especially difficult for methodologists and methodologists. It is impossible to come to terms with how incompetently, ineptly and without any correlation with the truth the teaching of humanities is carried out almost everywhere today. In a word, no one will find it too little. You just have to read the book carefully.

And, it seems, such books are written in Russian and cannot be re-read.

And not in Russian? And it's scary to think...

P.S. In conclusion - about the terrible. Your humble servant has never seen so many typos and editorial mistakes. The internal form of the word once again capitulates to the external. Isn’t that what Wilhelm von Humboldt lamented about a century and a half ago?