Gustav Shpet: Russian Philosopher of the Human Level of Being

Abstract

M. Denn [Maryse Dennes], Vladislav Aleksandrovich Lektorskii, Boris Isaevich Pruzhinin, and Tat'iana Gennad'evna Shchedrina, eds., Gustav Shpet i ego filosofskoe nasledie: U istokov semiotiki i strukturalizma (Gustav Shpet and His Philosophical Legacy: At the Sources of Semiotics and Structuralism). 527 pp. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010. ISBN-13 978-5824313673. Galin Tihanov, ed., Gustav Shpet's Contribution to Philosophy and Cultural Theory. 322 pp. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-1557535252. $39.95. Gustav Gustavovich Shpet (1879-1937) has a reputation for being a very demanding but equally rewarding thinker, a philosopher's philosopher if ever there were one. That reputation is confirmed by these two excellent volumes, which are written for specialists well versed in European intellectual history and philosophy. Various contributors explicate the theoretical foundations of Shpet's system, which are in the sometimes esoteric realms of (immanent analysis of pure consciousness through reduction to its essential ideas), hermeneutics (which understands human beings as uniquely cultural beings--that is, as creators and conveyors of meaning through the use of signs, especially words), the philosophy of language (which approaches the word as the distinctive human capacity), and, at the most general level, ontology (the philosophical discipline concerned with the study of being). Yet despite the complex theoretical grounding, the burden of both volumes is to demonstrate Shpet's broad relevance to--and deep power to inform--some of the central problems of philosophy, history, and the humanities. Taken together, these volumes thus mark a new stage in Shpet scholarship, a shift from earlier representations of him as primarily a phenomenologist (indebted especially to Edmund Husserl, the principal founder of phenomenology) to appreciation and assessment of his staggering overall significance for the humanities, or for what Wilhelm Dilthey (whose ideas had a major impact on him (1)) termed the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). As S. S. Khoruzhii (Horujy) writes in Gustav Shpet i ego filosofskoe nasledie, The Shpet phenomenon is one of those great individual projects of the synthesis of human knowledge created in his time, an era that also produced (as Horujy notes) the comparable figure of Ernst Cassirer. (2) Shpet's first major work was Iavlenie i smysl (Appearance and Sense [1914]). It is a masterful exposition of Husserl's Ideen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie und phanomenologischen Philosophie (Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, known as Ideas I [1913]); in it Shpet already outlines a revision of phenomenology. Over the next 14 years, he wrote a series of important books, including Istoriia kak problema logiki (History as a Problem of Logic [1916]), Germenevtika i ee problemy (Hermeneutics and Its Problems [1918]), (3) Esteticheskie fragmenty (Aesthetic Fragments [1922-23]), Vvedenie v etnicheskuiu psikhologiiu (Introduction to Ethnic Psychology [1927]), and Vnutrenniaia forma slova (etiudy i variatsii na temy Gumbol'ta) (The Inner Form of the Word: Studies and Variations on Humboldt's Themes [1927]). (4) These highly theoretical works advance a system that Alexander Haardt calls hermeneutical or a phenomenology of reason (after 1914 it developed more in the direction of hermeneutics than of phenomenology). Its leading idea is the correlation of signs (as combinations of expression and meaning) and sign-interpreting consciousness. (5) His system took shape under the influence not only of Husserl (with whom Shpet studied in Gottingen in 1912-13 and who considered Shpet one of his most remarkable students) but also of Hegel, Humboldt, and Dilthey, among others. For this reason, George L. Kline has called him a Russian neo-Husserlian, a characterization adopted (explicitly or implicitly) by most contributors to the volumes under review. …