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.
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, namely, 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. References and Further Reading
* "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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