Shpet, a professor of philosophy at the University of Moscow,
introduced Husserlian
transcendental phenomenology into Russia. Additionally, he wrote
extensively on aesthetics,
hermeneutics, the history of Russian philosophy and the philosophy of
language. During the Stalinist years in Russia he was condemned as being
an idealist in philosophy and a counter-revolutionary in politics. The
depth and breadth of his numerous studies stand as a testament to the
philosophic spirit in Russia during the waning years of tsarism.
Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you to those parts of this article)
1. Life
Gustav Gustavovich Shpet was born in Kiev in April
1879.
Late in life during the Stalinist period, he sought to emphasize his
humble origins as the illegitimate son of a seamstress. In fact, his
maternal grandfather appears to have been a member of the Polish
gentry. No information is available on his father. Whether he had any
religious upbringing is unclear. On his university registration form he
gave his religion as Lutheran, although his mother was, based on family
testimony, Catholic.
Upon finishing studies at a gymnasium (secondary school) in Kiev
Shpet enrolled at
the university there in 1898. Also at this time he became involved in a
Marxist circle,
although the degree of his active participation is unclear. In any
case, his involvement resulted in expulsion from the university. After
a relatively short time, however, he was permitted back to attend
classes. From that time onward, Shpet always maintained a respectable
distance from philosophical Marxism, while apparently retaining a
measured sympathy for its socio-economic ideals. After finishing his
studies in 1906 he taught for a time at a Kiev gymnasium but followed
his former teacher Georgij Chelpanov to Moscow in 1907 upon the latter's
succession to the philosophy chair formerly held by Sergej Trubeckoj.
In Moscow Shpet continued his studies at the university and worked
in Chelpanov's
newly established psychology institute. In addition, he taught at a
number of educational institutions in the city. During the summer months
of 1910 and 1911 Shpet went abroad to Paris, Edinburgh and various
locales in Germany in connection with the psychology institute and his
own research for a dissertation. During one of these trips he first
encountered Husserl, but it was not until his stay in Goettingen during
the 1912-13 academic year that he came firmly under Husserl's
influence. Attending Husserl's lectures and seminars at this time,
Shpet became acquainted with the nascent ideas of transcendental
phenomenology and, in particular, with those that would eventually
become known as Ideen II. When Ideen I was published in
1913 Shpet amazingly mastered in short order the change in Husserl's
orientation. The next several years were arguably the most
philosophically productive of his life, producing in rapid succession a
series of works on epistemology, the history of philosophy and the
history of Russian philosophy. In 1915 he wrote a large study of the
19th century Moscow philosophy professor Pamfil Yurkevich, followed the
next year by the defense and the publication of his dissertation
Istorija kak problema logika (History as a Problem of
Logic) and then the writing of Germenevtika i ee problemy
(Hermeneutics and Its Problems), which languished in manuscript
for decades.
His work, however, as the first propagandist, if you will, in Russia
for Husserl's
transcendental phenomenology and philosophy as a rigorous science is
perhaps that for which he is best known, at least in Western
philosophical circles. Although the Husserlian influence waned over the
years, due at least in part to his increasing isolation within Soviet
Russia, Shpet produced within a few short months of its appearance in
1913 the first book-length study of Husserl's Ideen I. In 1917
and 1918 he edited the philosophical yearbook Mysl' i slovo,
which also contained valuable contributions by Shpet himself and
amplified his own position vis-a-vis Husserlian phenomenology. In 1918
he was appointed to a professorship at Moscow University and in the
following year he succeeded to the chair held by Leo Lopatin, who had
recently died.
Despite his varied intellectual activities on many fronts during
the early years of the Bolshevik regime, Shpet, as an openly non-Marxist
intellectual, could not be permitted to retain his teaching position
long. His name appeared on Lenin's August 1922 listing of those to be
exiled from Russia, a list that included numerous prominent
philosophers, such as Berdyaev, Lossky and Lapshin. Shpet, however,
successfully appealed to Lunacharskij, the Soviet cultural minister,
with whom he was acquainted from his student days in Kiev, to have his
name removed.
In 1923 with the creation of the Russian--later State--Academy for
Cultural Studies,
Shpet was tapped to be its vice-president. There he continued his
scholarly work, albeit
slightly redirected or, perhaps more accurately, re-focused away from
pure philosophy. Again despite his prolific output and that of his
colleagues, the Academy, though at least nominally headed by a Marxist,
was closed in 1929. Over the next several years he made his living
chiefly by preparing translations from such authors as Dickens and
Byron, and he also participated in the preparation of a Russian edition
of Shakespeare.
On 14 March 1935 Shpet, along with several other former colleagues
from the State
Academy, was arrested, charged with anti-soviet activities and sentenced
to five years internal exile. Later that year the place of exile was
changed to Tomsk, a university city in Siberia, where Shpet prepared a
new Russian translation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. On 27
October 1937 he was again arrested and charged with belonging to a
monarchist organization. Recently uncovered documents from the former
KGB headquarters in Tomsk indicate that Shpet was executed on 16
November 1937.
2. Philosophy
The nascent secondary literature is still at a
very
early stage.
Nevertheless, already three areas of disagreement exist concerning: a)
the influences on
Shpet's philosophy; b) the number of stages in the development of his
thought; and c) Shpet's lasting contribution to philosophy. With regard
to the first area, some have tended to emphasize the phenomenological
aspect of his thought and, consequently, have stressed the Husserlian
influence. Others have noted the influence of Hegel, while still others
have sought to demonstrate Shpet's indebtedness to the Russian
metaphysical tradition. To a large degree, however, the depiction of
the dominant influence on Shpet has been determined by one's response
to the third area, viz. his contribution to philosophy. During the
Soviet era, Russian scholars saw Shpet almost exclusively as an
historian of Russian philosophy. To the extent that his ideas at that
time received recognition in the West he was viewed as the
Russian disciple of Husserl. Today both inside Russia and in Western
circles Shpet is receiving attention as a phenomenologist of language,
if not the first to study language from within a broadly
phenomenological perspective.
In any case, Shpet's philosophical development can be broken into at
least three periods. Although one contemporary scholar (A. Haardt)
holds the first of these to range from 1898-1905, no writings have
emerged from these very youthful years and certainly Shpet published
nothing at this time. What little information we have comes from an
autobiographical remark in his huge 1916 thesis. Thus, seeing his
Marxist infatuation as a stage in Shpet's thought serves no useful
purpose.
Whatever was the nature of his Marxism, already by 1903 Shpet felt
an affinity toward idealism and, in particular, saw the former as
riddled with what he thought were
epistemological and methodological errors. In his thesis for Kiev
University, published under the title "The Problem of Causality in Hume
and Kant: Did Kant Answer Hume's Doubt?," Shpet writing under the
unmistakable influence of Chelpanov and the "Kiev School of
Kant-Interpretation," fundamentally sided with a phenomenalist reading
of Kant. In addition, referring explicitly to the writings of the Baden
School of neo-Kantianism, Shpet cautiously held that although Kant had
demonstrated the "real necessity" of a priori cognitions, he had not
proved their "logical necessity."
"We must recognize, therefore, that Kant succeeded in
proving
the real necessity of a priori categories. Nevertheless, he did not
prove their logical necessity. " (1, p. 202)
That is, the Kantian a priori categories, including causality, must
be postulated so as to account for objectively valid knowledge. In this
way Shpet accords belief in the categories, and thus practical reason, a
primacy in and over epistemology. Therefore, based simply on the
textual evidence available to the contemporary scholar for analysis, the
first period in Shpet's thought is marked by a neo-Kantian phase
extending from circa 1903-1912 and is the only period conceptually quite
distinct from the others.
The exact evolution of Shpet's ideas immediately after moving to
Moscow is unclear.
What is clear, however, is that he irrevocably distanced himself from
neo-Kantianism and
came under the influence of Lopatin and the works of the recently
deceased S. Trubeckoj.
From them, as well perhaps as through his reading of Vladimir Solovyov,
Shpet began to
employ the unmistakeable terminology and think philosophically in the
categories and
problems of Platonism, particularly that variant then dominant at Moscow
University. In
addition to criticizing psychologism--and, indeed, all "isms"-- for its
failure to grasp the psyche as a "living whole," Shpet began to see
philosophy itself as based on the immediate data of reflection.
"The spirit of our philosophy is that of a living,concrete
and integral philosophy based on the reliable data of inner
experience. " (2, p.264.)
Despite the obvious pedigree of this conception in, on the one hand,
the Moscow
metaphysicians, and, on the other, James, Dilthey, Stumpf and the early
Husserl--as Shpet himself acknowledged--we should not disregard the fact
that Chelpanov also stressed the importance of introspection as a
technique in psychology, albeit bereft of metaphysical interpretation.
The next period in Shpet's philosophy is that for which he is best
known. In
Appearance and Sense, published in mid-1914, Shpet provided, on
the one hand, a
summarization of many points covered in Husserl's Ideen I. Yet,
on the other hand, Shpet sought to invoke Husserl's transcendental turn
for his own purposes, while cautiously noting what he saw as
deficiencies in the latter. Like Husserl, Shpet was willing to
characterize phenomenology as the fundamental science and, again like
Husserl, Shpet made extensive use of eidetic intuition. This reliance
on the Husserlian technique of "ideation" is one that Shpet continued to
value years later even after coming under political attack for his
idealism. Husserl and Shpet differed, however, on the goal of such
procedures and methods. Whereas the former sought to construct a
presuppositionless philosophy, a "science" of consciousness and
cognition, Shpet saw philosophy as ultimately a study of being, of which
cognizing is but one form among many. Modern philosophy's error is
found in its concentration on the forms of cognition, rather than on
cognition as such. In modern parlance we could say philosophy has
failed to distinguish the forest from the trees. The subject-matter of
phenomenology, as Shpet conceived it, is the study of cognition, qua
a mode of being. The major oversight of modern philosophy is not to
have seen the non-empirical and non-actual nature of the cognizing
subject.
Of the several articles Shpet published immediately subsequent to
the appearance of
Appearance and Sense two in particular stand out: "Consciousness
and Its Proprietor" and "Wisdom or Reason." In the first of these,
which appeared in 1916, Shpet already addressed an issue that would
later prove to be a major bone of contention among the next generation
of phenomenologists. Developing ideas enunciated by Solovyov during the
last years of his life, Shpet asked who "owns" or "possesses" the unity
of consciousness. Whereas he is willing, pace Hume, to concede on the
issue of such a unity, it is no one's, i.e., it has no proprietor. We
are led astray in seeking such a proprietor by an inaccurate analogy
drawn from our everyday language.
"Ultimately, it is as impossible to say whose
consciousness as it is to say whose space, whose air, even
though everybody is convinced that the air which he breathes is
his air, and the space which he occupies is his
space. " (4, p. 205)
In direct opposition to Husserl, whom he accuses of betraying the
"principle of all
principles," stated in Ideen I, Shpet finds no "pure Ego." What
unity there is certainly cannot serve as an epistemological guarantee,
and it certainly cannot be called a Self or an Ego.
In "Wisdom or Reason" from 1917 Shpet presents what may well be the
first attempt to
depict the phenomenological idea, or what we today often view as that
idea, as the telos of Western philosophy. Noticeably, however, Shpet
never mentions phenomenology as such;
instead he uses the locution "philosophy as pure knowledge" and even
"philosophy as
knowledge." In a precise manner, Parmenides established the proper
object of philosophy and showed the path along which philosophy is
directed to solve the problem posed by that object. (5, p. 7)
This itself can be seen as a distancing from the Husserlian
influence in that Shpet traces his conception back to the Greeks
and indeed to Parmenides. In any case, Shpet holds that philosophy
proceeds through three stages (and as in Hegel's Phenomenology
whether these are purely logical or chronological as well is arguable):
from wisdom then on to metaphysics before finally arriving at rigorous
science or knowledge. Unlike positivistic "scientific philosophy," which
seeks to copy the methodology of an arbitrarily chosen natural science
or bases itself on results attained in natural science, philosophy as
pure knowledge grounds the specific sciences.
The recent emergence and publication of Shpet's hitherto virtually
inaccessible 1918
work Hermeneutics and Its Problems, in both the original Russian
and a German
translation, has drawn notable international attention. In it Shpet
presents a history of hermeneutics ranging from the Greeks to the early
20th century, seeing the work of Dilthey and Husserl, as represented in
the first "Logical Investigation," as the highest point yet attained.
Throughout this period and later Shpet maintained that his work was
a continuation of that direction in philosophy associated with Brentano
and Husserl. Where they erred was in forgetting the social dimension.
There can and do exist forms of collective or socio-cultural
consciousness. An element of such consciousness is language, more
specifically words. The understanding plays an analogous role in the
grasping of sense, for which words act as the "material bearer," as
sense perception does in the individual's representational
consciousness. Shpet developed these themes at some length in his
Aesthetic Fragments from 1922/23 and his Inner Form of the
Word from 1927.
In addition, Shpet shortly before and after the Bolshevik Revolution
devoted
considerable attention to the history of Russian philosophy, publishing
a number of valuable studies studded with numerous caustic comments on
the poverty of philosophy in his homeland.
3. Bibliography of Major Writings
- "Problema prichinosti u Juma i Kanta. Otvetil li Kant na somnenija
Juma?" ("The Problem of Causality in Hume and Kant. Did Kant Answer
Hume's Doubt?"), Kievskie
universitetskie izvestija, 1907, #5.
- "Odin put' psikhologii i kuda on vedet" ("One Path in Psychology and
Where It Leads"), Filosofskij sbornik L. M. Lopatinu ot Moskovskogo
Psikhologicheskogo Obshchestva, Moscow, 1912, pp. 245-264.
- Javlenie i smysl, Moscow, 1914. [English translation:
Appearance and Sense, trans. by Thomas Nemeth, Kluwer Academic
Publishers: Dordrecht, 1991]
- "Soznanie i ego sobstvennik" ("Consciousness and Its Proprietor"),
Sbornik statej po filosofii, posvjashchennyj G. I. Chelpanovu,
Moscow, 1916, pp. 156-210.
- Istorija kak problema logiki. Kriticheskie i metodologicheskie
issledovanija. Chast' I: Materialy (History as a Problem of
Logic. Critical and Methodological Investigations. Part I:
Materials), Moscow, 1916.
- "Mudrost' ili razum" ("Wisdom or Reason"), Mysl' i slovo,
vyp.
1, 1917, pp. 1-69.
- Ocherk razvitija russkoj filosofii. Chast 1. (An Outline
of
the Development of Russian Philosophy. Part 1.), Petrograd, 1922.
- Esteticheskie fragmenty (Aesthetic Fragments), I.
Petergrad 1922. II, III. Petrograd 1923.
- Vnutrennjaja forma slova. Etjudy i variacii na temy
Humbol'dta
(Inner Form of the Word. Studies and Variations on a Humboldtian
Theme), Moscow, 1927.
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