Shelling's and Bakhtin's Process Thinking

F. W. J. Schelling's and M. M. Bakhtin's Process Thinking

Miroslav Orel, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria

Abstract— Being influenced by Wilhelm von Schelling's ideas both directly and indirectly (through Feodor Dostoevsky), Mikhail Bakhtin's work can only be properly understood and appreciated when seen as developing Schelling's philosophy. Furthermore, it is argued that Schelling's work itself, attempting to overcome the opposition between idealism and realism, between spiritualism and materialism, should be seen as belonging to the tradition of process philosophy. Examining his work from this perspective, Bakhtin must be seen as far more than a literary theorist; he was a philosopher who succeeded through his defence of dialogism in developing a new 'processual' ethics which challenges traditional, more formalist ethical philosophies. At the same time, appreciating this strand of process thought overcomes the pernicious tendency to identify process philosophy with Alfred North Whitehead and his interpreters only, and reveals process philosophy to be a broader and richer tradition than has generally been acknowledged. Keywords— process philosophy, Schelling, Bakhtin, Dostoevsky, ethics, art, being.

The aim of this paper is, firstly, to argue that Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), the celebrated Russian ‘literary theorist’, can only be properly understood in relation to a tradition of thought that goes back to Wilhelm von Schelling (1775-1854). Secondly, it is to argue that this tradition is essentially a tradition of process philosophy. What is the point of making these arguments? To begin with, there is the obvious point to be made that so far, because these thinkers have not been recognized as process philosophers, existing interpretations of their work are defective. To treat Bakhtin just as a literary theorist is to ignore the range of his work and the deeper significance of his ideas on literary theory. It is to fail to appreciate the contribution of his ideas on literature to his ethics and philosophical anthropology, and the reasons for relating literary theory to ethics and philosophical anthropology. Construing Schelling as an idealist or Romantic has enabled philosophers to ignore his influence and the contemporary relevance of his ideas. However, there is another, and perhaps more important reason for identifying the tradition of thought from Schelling to Bakhtin as a tradition of process philosophy. It overcomes the pernicious tendency to put Alfred North Whitehead (1861- 1947) on a pedestal as the ultimate process philosopher. To overcome the scholasticism engendered by the identification of process philosophy with Whitehead and interpretations of his work, we need to acknowledge a much broader tradition of process philosophy than is commonly assumed at present. The gap between Heraclitus and Whitehead needs to be filled. Only then will process philosophy, enriched by its historical tradition, become, not a minor, but a major alternative to the substance metaphysics, to the mechanistic view of the world, and to the mainstream analytical philosophies.

To achieve this objective, Schelling’s concept of activity and the role he ascribed to art in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) (to which I will refer as the System) will be briefly outlined. Following a short sketch of Schelling’s influences on other thinkers, the inadequacy of interpretations of Bakhtin will be briefly addressed. Then, Bakhtin’s concept of activity, and the role of ethics and art in his Toward a Philosophy of the Act (to which I will refer as the Act) will be examined. The paper will conclude by highlighting the central tenets of Schelling’s and Bakhtin’s process thinking and the need for further research.

I. SCHELLING’S CONCEPT OF ACTIVITY IN HIS EARLY WORKS

‘... everything is either a thing or nothing; which can straightaway be seen to be false, since there is assuredly a higher concept than that of a thing, namely the concept of doing, or activity. This concept must certainly be higher than that of a thing, since things themselves are to be understood as merely modifications of an activity limited in various ways. The being of things …does not consist in mere rest or inactivity. For even all occupancy of space is a degree of activity, and every thing a specific degree of activity with which space is filled’.

As the quote indicates, Schelling conceived reality as a process, and things as mere modifications of process limited in various ways. Nature for him is the objective aspect of process, while the self is the subjective aspect of process. The condition of self-consciousness, as knowledge of ourselves, is to become an object to itself, and so finite and posited. The self is a united process of two opposing activities, the ideal and the real, and self-consciousness is the uniting process, both dependent on and independent of the self. Nature begins as unconscious and ends as conscious. The self is conscious of the process of production and unconscious in regard to the product. To unite the conscious and unconscious processes in the product, as is the case of the organic product, Schelling argued, is possible through the process of artistic production. However, this unity cannot be grasped or communicated through description or concepts. It can only be intuited. In philosophy, this occurs through an intellectual intuition, which is internal and subjective. In art, it is through aesthetic intuition, which is the intellectual intuition become objective, and therefore, accomplishing the condition of self-consciousness to become an object to itself. The artistic production is also a process of two opposing and contradictory activities. It is in a way like the two-faced Janus, (an ancient Italian, regarded by the Romans as presiding over doors and gates, over beginnings and endings, and represented with two faces in opposite directions). This process of two opposing and contradictory activities drives the artist toward “the feeling of an infinite harmony” in order to reconcile this contradiction, which then becomes united in the art-product. The art-product is a description of an infinity, which no finite understanding is capable of developing to the full, “an infinite finitely displayed”. This allows the artist to reconcile the contradiction between the real and the ideal, between the conscious and unconscious processes and allows the artist to feel “an infinite tranquillity”, which is then passed into the art-product itself. Contrary to organic production, artistic production proceeds from consciousness, it proceeds from the infinite contradiction within the artist and ends in infinite unity. Thus, according to Schelling, while philosophy can achieve only a fraction of this unity, art, being granted objectivity, brings the whole individual to a “knowledge of the highest”, and enables a better comprehension of the world-in-process.

Following Spinoza, Schelling was a determinist, assuming the world to have the logical necessity of a system, but following Kant, Schelling upheld the reality of moral freedom. To reconcile these ideas he departed radically from both these thinkers. The originality of his philosophy lies in his view of nature as “productivity” or process and in his elevation of art above philosophy as a means to reveal this process. Schelling attempted to interpret freedom through this conception of the world as process. Despite the Kantian language of Schelling’s System, he did not share the Kantian preoccupation with the formal principles of moral life. Schelling considered the moral law as a personal self-determination, a kind of subjective necessity, in contrast to and above the objective natural inclination, i.e., “the outward-going activity”, of the self. Schelling considered a rule of law not as a branch of morality, but rather as a theoretical man-made construct, ‘which stands to freedom precisely as mechanics does to motion’. He criticized this rule of law as a ‘machine primed in advance for certain possibilities’, and for its ability to take on an existence of its own. However, he was not entirely clear on how to overcome this formalism. Bakhtin’s ‘ethics of answerability’ together with his work on literary theory can be understood as a solution to problems posed by Schelling’s philosophy.

II. SCHELLING’S INFLUENCE

In general, Schelling’s influence on other thinkers and artists has been immense. This has been acknowledged by number of writers. Hegel, and those who reacted against Hegel, were essentially developing Schelling’s ideas. Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Engels and Bakunin went to his lectures. Schelling also directly influenced Coleridge, Peirce, Schopenhauer, Tillich, and the existentialists, and indirectly impacted upon Marx, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and many others. Schelling also had an enormous influence in 19th century Russian thought, propagated by Davydov, Pavlov, Vellansky, Galich, Nadezhdin, Kireyevsky, Soloviev and Berdyaev.

Dostoevsky was profoundly influence by Schelling. According to Frank, Dostoevsky was introduced by Davydov to the whole tradition of German thought on art and aesthetics that dominated Russian culture in the 1830s. Dostoevsky was most affected by Schelling’s view of art as an organ of metaphysical cognition, as the vehicle through which the mysteries of the highest transcendental truths are revealed to mankind. In addition, Dostoevsky was influenced by Schelling’s argument that the highest truths were closed to discursive reason but accessible to apprehension by a superior faculty of “intellectual intuition”, as well as by Schelling’s conception of nature as dynamic and organic rather than static and mechanical. Schelling’s dynamic/organic conception of nature and his view of art as a means of metaphysical cognition were echoed in Bakhtin’s writing. Bakhtin was directly influenced by Schelling and was sympathetic to these ideas. This direct influence was acknowledged only recently in English literature on Bakhtin by Caryl Emerson who indicated that, amongst the sources of Bakhtin’s philosophy (i.e., Kant, Schelling, Buyer, and Cassirer), Bakhtin remained an enthusiast of Schelling, from being the passion of his youth right through until the end of his life. This influence was reinforced by Bakhtin’s intense study of Dostoevsky’s work.

III. BAKHTIN

Bakhtin was already the object of a cult in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, while in the West, he has been favourably received and eagerly studied since the 1980s. Because Bakhtin has influenced and made contributions to literary studies, anthropology, linguistics, psychology and social and cultural theory, this creates a tendency to see him as belonging to one of these areas of thought only. To synthesize Bakhtin’s important contribution to these different areas of thought, to embrace Bakhtin’s intellectual activity in all its variety, Michael Holquist “uneasily” proposed to call it, “Bakhtin’s philosophy”. Such a designation was designed by Holquist to overcome interpretations of Bakhtin as a literary theorist, linguist, anthropologists and so on. Even Bakhtin himself mentioned, when as an old man he sought to bring together the various directions of his life’s work, that: ‘our analysis must be called philosophical mainly because of what it is not: it is not a linguistic, philological, literary or any other particular kind of analysis ... On the other hand, a positive feature of our study is this: [it moves] in spheres that are liminal, i.e., on the borders of all the aforementioned disciplines, at their junctures and points of intersections’.

Nonetheless, even though Holquist “uneasily” nominated Bakhtin as a philosopher, he still failed to grasp the processual nature of “Bakhtin’s philosophy” and perceived it as a pragmatically oriented theory of knowledge that seeks to understand human behaviour through the use of language. Also Brian Poole, despite his revealing analysis of the sources of Bakhtin’s early works, viewed Bakhtin as an idealist and placed him in the tradition of phenomenology. However, like Schelling, Bakhtin was interested in biology and from his critique of vitalism (a perspective of philosophy of biology, concerned with the way life forms are understood), especially Bergson’s vitalism and Driesch’s vitalism, it is evident that he went beyond phenomenology.

Furthermore, Bakhtin himself challenged the shortcomings of rationality. He viewed modern philosophy as being permeated by the prejudice of rationalism, where only the logically rational is clear. He accused rationalism of creating the split between the objective qua rational and the subjective, individual qua irrational. Also, he accused rationalism of detaching the truth from the individual, as being artistic and irresponsible, and raising the truth in the abstract theoretical world of universals, functioning in a fundamentally mechanistic fashion. However, Bakhtin stressed, that his argument does not uphold any kind of relativism or irrationalism; he argued that the truth can participate answerably in and from within Being-as-event.

IV. THE CONCEPT OF ACTIVITY IN BAKHTIN’S EARLY WORKS

And this is how he conceptualised it. In the Act, Bakhtin conceived ‘an act of our activity, of our actual experiencing, ... [as looking] in two opposite directions ... like a two-faced Janus. It looks at the objective unity of a domain of culture and at the never-repeatable uniqueness [subjective unity] of actually lived and experienced life’. To reconcile the division between the subjective and the objective, Bakhtin proposed that only the ‘once-occurrent of Being in the process of actualization’ could comprehend the unity. This Being-in-process must have a ‘single unitary plane to be able to reflect itself in both directions ...; it must acquire the unity of two-sided answerability’. The term “Answerability” instead of “responsibility” was chosen by Averintsev (the translator) in order to foreground the root sense of the term - answering. Hence, as for Schelling, the activity that grounds the self also looks in two opposite directions, the real and the ideal. In addition, Bakhtin relates the self as Being-in-process to every ordinary moment of life permeated with answerability as a means to reconcile the opposition between “the ideal” and “the real”.

According to Bocharov, the Russian editor, Bakhtin entered intellectual life in 1919 with a discourse on “answerability” in a two-page article, Art and Answerability . In this first known publication, Bakhtin touched upon the task of overcoming the division between art and life through their mutual answerability. This answerability was only possible through the unity of personal answerability. In the Act, Bakhtin addressed the same task of overcoming ‘the pernicious non-fusion and non-interpenetration of culture and life’. Toward a Philosophy of Act, the English translation published in 1993, is an unfinished philosophical essay, which was first published in Russian in 1986 by S. G. Bocharov. According to the translator, Vadim Liapunov, Bocharov himself acknowledged the difficulty of publishing Bakhtin’s manuscript. It was in very poor condition, with opening pages missing and a number of words and phrases quite illegible. Even though Bakhtin provided an outline of the whole essay, which was to have four parts, only part one seemed to have been written. To Liapunov, the opening paragraph of the introduction is a conclusion: ‘Aesthetic activity as well is powerless to take possession of that moment of Being which is constituted by the transitiveness and open event-ness of Being’. Liapunov, judging by the immediately following paragraph, assumes that in the preceding pages Bakhtin dealt with aesthetic activity, the activities of intuition and seeing, and also with the activity of discursive theoretical thinking (as natural sciences and philosophy), and the activity of historical description-exposition (as a representation of history).

In what followed, Bakhtin argued that none of these activities have access to Being in process of becoming (Being-in-process), because the natural sciences, philosophy, the representation of history, and aesthetic intuition established a fundamental split between the content of an activity and the actual experiencing of it. This act of Being-in-process can be only truly real “in its entirety”. And for Bakhtin ‘[o]nly this whole act is alive ...’. This whole act, Bakhtin conceived as an actual living participant in the ongoing event of Being. However, as a result of the split, Bakhtin recognized two worlds with no communication: the world of culture (similar to Schelling’s objective world) and the world of life (the world of the self). The world of culture is a world in which we create, cognise, contemplate, live our lives; it is the world in which the acts of our activity are objectified. And the world of life is a world in which these acts actually proceed and are actually accomplished.

Bakhtin’s thought revolved around a moral problem and , as Bocharov indicated, that is why it was so important for Bakhtin to deal with an illusion that was characteristic for the consciousness of the intelligentsia of his time. Initiated by the existential questions of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky’s “underground man”: “you ought, because you ought, because you ought”, absolutized ethics became inadequate for transcending the limits of a logical circle. Instead of being a mode of relating to values, absolute ethics became a source of values. Bakhtin reacted against absolute ethics by arguing that every thought of an individual is an individually answerable act. He did not believe in conceiving the ought as the highest category; he also did not believe in some sort of special theoretical ought. Bakhtin believed in thinking veridically; ‘veridicality or being-true is the ought of thinking... There is no aesthetic, scientific and ethical ought; there is only that which is aesthetically, theoretically, socially valid, and these validities may be joined by the ought, [because] the ought gains its validity within the unity of my once-occurrent answerable life’. For Bakhtin, the ought is a distinctive category of an individual’s activity, a certain attitude of consciousness. Thus, in opposition to absolutized abstract ethics, Bakhtin grounds ethics in the particular, in the actual experiencing of one’s world and relates “the ought” to “the self”, to the core of an individual-in-process. From within the actually performed act, which is integral in its answerability, ‘we can find an approach to unitary and once-occurrent Being in its concrete actuality’.

For Bakhtin, a relation between the individual and the object, is as a relation of the ought to the object. It is an attitude or position the individual ought to take in relation to the object, which presupposes the subject’s answerable participation, and not an abstracting from oneself. ‘It is only from within my participation that Being can be understood as an event’. Thus, Bakhtin indicated that to experience the object or the other, we ought, we must acknowledge its unique singularity, which assumes that we ourselves acknowledge our own unique singularity, which must be interrelated to the other. The acknowledgment of oneself, as a Being-in-process, Bakhtin pointed out, gives unity to an answerable consciousness, which cannot be expressed in theoretical terms, but can only be described and experienced through participation. Also, the acknowledgment of one’s participation in the world, “by my non-alibi in it”, gives the world its unitary uniqueness (non-alibi in Being is Bakhtin’s term for one’s obligatory acknowledgment of one’s unique place in the world).

However, Bakhtin warned that ‘to live from within oneself does not mean to live for oneself, but means to be an answerable participant from within oneself, to affirm one’s compellent, actual non-alibi in Being’. In the actually experienced world, the world of the self-in-process, Bakhtin pointed out, there is a difference between the uniqueness of the self and the uniqueness of any other, both aesthetic and actual. The actual world of the self-in-process is a contraposition of I and the other, with its own unique value-centres. For Bakhtin, ‘[t]his does not disrupt the world’s unity in meaning, but, rather, raises it to the level of a unique event’. It is an event or a process of a responsible dialogue between two different value-centres, because to reflect aesthetically, according to Bakhtin, means to relate ‘an object to the valuative plane of the other’. As for Schelling, also for Bakhtin, the world is an event, the world is in process. This world is given as well as something to be accomplished. It is the “yet-to-be-realized” plane of one’s orientation in Being-as-process, which is actively being accomplished through one’s answerability and being determined as a contraposition of I and the other. With regard to Bakhtin’s argument on ethics - on answerability - his intention was not to construct and provide a logically unified system of values, with the fundamental value confirmed and acknowledged by the participation in Being, or a systematic inventory of values, where absolute concepts would be interconnected on the basis of logical correlativity. Bakhtin intended to provide a system, a concrete and value-governed architectonic of the actual experiencing of the world, which is centred around an individual interconnected with others.

Thus, the possibility of such a concrete, value-governed architectonic, Bakhtin argued, is possible in the world of aesthetic seeing, i.e., in the world of art. The world of art, in its concreteness as well as in its abstractness, is closer than any of the cultural worlds (philosophy, sciences) to the unitary and unique world of the performed act. By understanding the world of art, Bakhtin indicated, it ‘should help us to come closer to an understanding of the architectonic structure [or construction] of the actual world-as-event’. In other words, in a similar way to Schelling, Bakhtin here argues for the superiority of art, over philosophy, to offer a better way of understanding the world-in-process and our-in-process ethically responsible participation in it.

Similar to the unity of the world-in-process, Bakhtin conceived the unity of the world of art as arranged around a centre, and this centre being a hero. Everything is arranged around and correlated with the hero. However, for example as in Dostoevsky’s novels, it does not mean that the hero must have a positive character. On the contrary, Bakhtin argued, that the hero might be pitiful or even defeated and surpassed in every way. He stressed that the specific character of the world of art is its ability to evoke a positive emotion despite its hero being negative. Thus, while the art-product may be presented as “upsetting”, it can still appeal to us, as a number of Dostoevsky’s pitiful characters do, or Picasso’s abstract, war portrayal, “Guernica”.

For Bakhtin the aesthetic architectonic (the art-product) is produced by the aesthetic activity of reflecting, however, the aesthetic activity and the performer of that activity are both located outside this architectonic. ‘This is a world of the affirmed existence of other beings, ... a world of unique others who issue or proceed from within themselves and a world of Being that is valuatively correlated with them’. Like Schelling, Bakhtin conceived aesthetic activity as an objectified engagement, and argued that from within the aesthetic architectonic there is no way out into the world of the performer, who is located outside the field of objectified aesthetic seeing. Thus, once the art-product is completed, as Schelling indicated, the product will appear as a unity of the conscious and unconscious activities, as an “infinite finitely displayed”. Also, because the aesthetic production proceeds from the feeling of an infinite contradiction, the completion of the art-product ends in an infinite tranquillity for the artist, which is passed into the work of art itself.

To summarize, Bakhtin conceived a “human being in process of actualization” as being able to comprehend and reconcile the split between the objective world of culture and the subjective world of life, the ideal and the real,. However, because this being-in-process is also split, like the two-faced Janus looking in two opposite directions of conscious and unconscious activities, it also needs to be united. That is only possible through a unity of personal answerability. Contrary to the absolutized theoretical ethics, Bakhtin placed the Kantian “ought” at the heart of a human being and related this “ought” to “the self”. Even though Bakhtin’s intellectual life seems to show few fabrications, he believed in thinking veridically. Bakhtin argued that every thought of an individual is an individual answerable act/process. However, that did not mean to live for oneself only, because the individual or the self-in-process is a contraposition of I and the other. More so, it is a contraposition of two unique value-centres. It is a contraposition of mutual answerability, which applies equally to the relation of the self-in-process and the world-in-process too. Bakhtin conceived the world-in-process as a concrete and value-governed “architectonic” with a human being, interconnected with others, in its centre. This principle of construction also applies to a world of art, and therefore, Bakhtin argued, the world of art enables a better comprehension of the world-in-process and our-in-process place in it, than philosophy or sciences do. Through a detailed analysis of a poem by Pushkin, toward the end of the Act, Bakhtin showed how this was possible.

V. CONCLUSION

Influenced by the Radical Neoplatonists (such as Boehme and Bruno), Spinoza, Leibniz, Hölderlin, Fichte and Jacobi; developing the ideas of the anti-mechanistic thinkers (such as Herder and Goethe); and responding to Kant’s failure to explain the nature of the subject’s knowledge of itself, Schelling argued that the self-conscious I needs to be explained as the product and the highest potentiality of nature. He conceived nature as a productivity being capable, at its highest level of development, of giving rise to the self-conscious subject that could arrive at the knowledge of nature. Then, from F. Schlegel and Novalis, Schelling adopted the idea that art, more than philosophy, is central to reveal this production, this process. Therefore, by moving away from the materialists’ and idealists’ conceptions of nature, and mediating between the Idealists and the Romantics, it is crucial to view Schelling not as a “materialist or spiritualist, nor realist or idealist”, but as a philosopher upholding a process view of the world. Furthermore, Schelling’s ideas had an immense influence on other thinkers, including Dostoevsky and Bakhtin. Through Bakhtin’s study of Dostoevsky’s novels and by taking up Schelling’s theme and going beyond it, Schelling provides the basis for proper understanding and appreciation of Bakhtin’s achievements. Bakhtin also reacted against the absolutized theoretical ethics, and, unlike Schelling, offered an alternative in his concept of “answerability”. Similar to Schelling, he conceived the world as a process. In Bakhtin’s view, the world was a value-governed architectonic of interrelations. In this world, the self, also as a process, was grounded and related to every ordinary moment of life. The relation, determined by a contraposition of I and the other and permeated with the ethical answerability, provided a means to overcome and reconcile the opposition between the self and the other, the author and the hero, the real and the ideal. To comprehend this world and our-in-process ethically responsible participation in it, like Schelling, Bakhtin turned to art, to literature, as a domain that reveals these processes. It is in his study of Dostoevsky’s novels, in his study of the ethically responsible “dialogue” between the author and the hero, that Bakhtin applied his ideas. However, even though Bakhtin applied his ideas through contributions to literary studies, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and social and cultural theory, his thinking extends beyond these disciplines as Bakhtin was first and foremost, a philosopher. Therefore, seeing him as developing and advancing Schelling’s motif, and also seeing him as a process philosopher, would provide us with a veridical understanding and appreciation of Bakhtin’s achievements. There is much more to Schelling, and there is much more depth in Bakhtin than I have presented here. On a final note, I would like to suggest further lines for reinterpreting Bakhtin. To begin with, I contend that the process of mutually answerable dialogue underlies all of Bakhtin’s work. For example, in his following works on the relationship between the author and hero (Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity ) and in his study of Dostoevsky (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics ), novels are central to Bakhtin’s understanding of art and answerability. For him, art, and especially the long Russian novels, allow for enriching the individual’s responsible understanding of one’s particular situation in the world-in-process. Further, I submit that the processual view resonates throughout Bakhtin’s work on “chronotope”, “heteroglossia”, “carnival” and his later work on literary history, cultural studies and the nature of humanities. However, that is a topic for future research, which should examine the process philosophical foundations inherent in Bakhtin’s later works. Furthermore, in this paper, mainly Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism and his influence on Bakhtin was examined. Another topic for future research would be to analyse the whole of Schelling’s philosophical career as a process philosopher. More so, his numerous influences on other thinkers of his time as well the echoes of his ideas in later philosophies should be systematically examined. Finally, and ultimately, in the light of the latest evidence on Bakhtin, and in anticipation of the completion of his Collected Works, new and refreshed interest in Bakhtin studies should spark comprehensive analyses of his influences, ideas and legacy. However, for now, I believe that there is sufficient evidence to warrant Schelling and Bakhtin rightful place within the tradition of process philosophy. What do you think, process people?

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Presented at The Third Australasian Conference on Process Thought, 29th November 2001. I would like to acknowledge the indispensable guidance and expertise of my supervisor Dr. Arran Gare, without whom this argument would not be possible.

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