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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Gustav G. Shpet (1879-1937) is one of those formidable Russian thinkers who, in the early years of the last century, orchestrated a revolutionary paradigm shift across a broad swath of the humanities and social sciences that is still reverberating today. But we lack a comprehensive view of the manifold heterogeneity of Shpet's intellectual endeavors. This article focuses on one prominent lacuna in our knowledge of Shpet: the theory of history that he advanced in the 1910s. In many respects Shpet's theory anticipated the "linguistic turn" that occurred in western historiography during the last quarter of the twentieth century and that is most often identified with Hayden White's name. But while White analyzes the historian's discourse in terms of tropology and narratology, for Shpet predication is the key logical mechanism that generates production of texts about the past. The divergence of these two approaches can be explained through the hidden Kantian underpinnings of White's thought that contrasts sharply with the explicit Hegelianism of Shpet's theorizing.
An earlier version of this paper was delivered on 1 March 2002 at the conference “Between History and System: Slavic Theory Today,” held at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University. I am indebted to George Kline and Kevin Piatt for their insightful comments. The English translation of the epigraph is “Nothing is in the intellect which has not been in history, and everything that was in history should also be in the intellect.“
1 Pasternak, Boris, Safe Conduct: An Autobiography and Other Writings, trans. Deutsch, Babette(New York, 1958), 35.Google Scholar
2 Here and elsewhere I drew information about Shpet's life primarily from M. K. Polivanov, “O sud'be G. G. Shpeta,” Voprosy filosofii, 1990, no. 6:160-64; and T. D. Martsinkovskaia, ed., Gustav Gustavovich Shpet: Arkhivnye materialy, vospominaniia, stat'i(Moscow, 2000).
3 Zen'kovskii, V. V., htoriia russkoi fdosqfii(Paris, 1950), 2:369-72.Google ScholarZen'kovskii's hostility toward Shpet, one might surmise, dates back thirty-five years to the time when the latter reviewed, in a highly critical manner, Zen'kovskii's work on causality in psychology. “The author,” Shpet put it bluntly, “had an excellent plan but the realization lacks any logic, any method…. I would not raise this issue had I not detected the author's claims to apply … a phenomenological method. The fundamental sin of Zen'kovskii's entire book lies in its disregard for the purport [smysl]of diis method.” And, reducing poor Zen'kovskii to ashes, he concluded, “after a careful scrutiny of his book I state categorically that throughout it the terms phenomenologyand phenomenologicalare not even onceused correctly in the sense of Husserl's phenomenology.” See Shpet, “Kriticheskie zametki k probleme psikhicheskoi prichinnosti: Po povodu knigi V. V. Zen'kovskogo, “Problema psikhicheskoi prichinnosti,” Voprosy filosofii ipsikhologii, 1915, no. 2:290 (emphasis in the original).
4 Jakobson, Roman, “Retrospect,” Selected Writings(The Hague, 1971), 2:713.Google ScholarSee also Jakobson, , “Toward the History of the Moscow Linguistic Circle,” Selected Writings(Berlin, 1985), 7:281.Google Scholar
5 Kline, George, “Meditations of a Russian Neo-Husserlian: Gustav Shpet's ‘The Skeptic and His Soul,'” in Wachterhauser, Brice R., ed., Phenomenology and Skepticism:Essays in Honor of James M. Edie(Evanston, 1996), 144.Google Scholar
6 See, for example, Nemeth, Thomas, “Translator's Introduction,” in Shpet, Gustav, Appearance and Sense: Phenomenology as the Fundamental Science and Its Problems(Dordrecht, 1991), x.Google Scholar
7 Shpet, Gustav, “Filosofiia i istoriia: Rech',” Voprosy filosqfii i psikhologii, 1916, no. 4:437.Google Scholar
8 Gustav Shpet, “Istoriia, kak predmet logiki” (25 February 1917), Nauchnye izvestiia Narkomprosa2 (1922): 1-35.
9 White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe(Baltimore, 1973).Google Scholar
10 For a convenient overview of the contemporary “strife of historians,” see Munslow, Alun, Deconstructing History(London, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 See, for example, Popper, Karl Raimond, The Poverty of Historicism(London, 1957).Google ScholarFor a detailed discussion of Shpet's rejection of the progressivist view of history, see Kline, George L., “Gustav G. Shpet as Interpreter of Hegel,” Archiwum historiifilozofii i mysli spokcznej 44(1999): 181-90.Google Scholar
12 Shpet, Gustav, Istoriia kak problema logiki: Kriticheskie i metodologicheskie issledovaniia. Materialy v dvukh chastiakh(Moscow, 1916), 49.Google ScholarRussian nauka(translated above as “discipline“) is difficult to render into English. Like the German Wissenschaft, it refers to any systematic gathering of knowledge, whether in the humanities or the sciences. Sometimes, however, the context necessitates translating naukaor its adjectival form nauchnyias “science“ or “scientific” despite the much more restrictive meanings of these English words. I will mark all these instances in the body of this article.
13 Bell, David, Husserl(London, 1990), 87.Google Scholar
14 Shpet, Gustav, Esteticheskiefragmenty(Petersburg, 1923), 2:11.Google Scholar
15 For an in-depth discussion of this topic, see Kusch, Martin, Language as Calculus vs. Language as Universal Medium: A Study in Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer(Dordrecht, 1989), 55-76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
16 Shpet, Gustav, “Mudrost'ili razum,“ Filosofskie etiudy(Moscow, 1994), 294-95Google Scholar(emphasis in the original).
17 Shpet, Appearance and Sense, 160 (emphasis in the original).
18 Shpet, Gustav, “Soznanie i ego sobstvennik: Zametki,” Sbornik statei po filosofii, posviashchenykh G. I. Chelpanovu(Moscow, 1916), 205-6;Google ScholarShpet, Fstoriiakakproblemalogiki, 4.
19 Shpet, Appearance and Sense, 160.
20 Shpet, “Filosofiia i istoriia,” 428.
21 Gustav Shpet, “Germenevtika i ee problemy” (manuscript, 1918). I am quoting from the as-yet-unpublished translation by the late Erika Freiberger-Sheihkoleslami, “Hermeneutics and Its Problems” (241), a copy of which was kindly provided by the editor, George L. Kline. In his later works Shpet combined these two terms into a single notion of a “dialectical hermeneutics.” See Vnutrenniaia forma slova: Etiudy i variatsii na temy Gumbol'ta(Moscow, 1927), 116.
22 Shpet, “Istoriia, kak predmet logiki,” 12 (emphasis in the original).
23 [bid., 6 (emphasis in the original).
24 For an extensive discussion of this topic, see Kohak, Erazim V., Idea and Experience: Edmund Husserl's Project of Phenomenology in Ideas I(Chicago, 1978), 105-20.Google Scholar
25 Shpet, “Istoriia, kak predmet logiki,” 17.
26 Ibid., 18 (emphasis in the original).
27 Ibid., 17 (emphasis in the original).
28 Shpet, hloriia kakproblema logiki, 32 (emphasis in the original).
29 Shpet, “Istoriia, kak predmet logiki,” 32-33 (emphasis in the original).
30 According to Vossius, writes Shpet, “historiesshould be distinguished from history with the same care as poetics from poetry … both set forth rules: histories for compiling history, poetics—poetry.” Shpet, Istoriia kakproblema logiki, 34 (emphasis in the original).
31 Ibid., 62.
32 Ibid., 25-26.
33 Shpet, Gustav, Ocherk razvitiia russkoifilosofii(Petersburg, 1922).Google Scholar
34 White, Hayden, “Literary Theory and Historical Writing,” Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect(Baltimore, 1999), 5.Google Scholar
35 As he explained in a footnote appended to this sentence: “The distinctness of such a theory of knowledge becomes clear if it is compared to logic. The logic of a concept qua expression is, in essence, a semiotic discipline. But if in the case of other empirical sciences [nauki]logic can conceptualize its subject-matter [predmet]as the meaning of an expression, in the case of historical concepts the situation is more complicated because their very meaning is already a sign decipherable only by means of a special hermeneutics. It is not very difficult to see,” Shpet concludes, “that by reintroducing the term semioticsI am closer to [John] Locke than the way in which contemporary philosophy understands semiotic knowledge (in [Gustav] Teichmiiller).” Shpet, “Pervyi opyt logiki istoricheskikh nauk: Kistorii ratsionalizma XVIII veka,” Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii, 1915, no. 3:381. This article is an earlier version of the third chapter of Shpet's fstoriia kakproblema logiki, 245-302.
36 Shpet, Vnutreniaia forma slova, 183.
37 One reason why my parallel between Shpet and White is not straightforward is that the latter identifies as the first step of the historian's inquiry the prefigurement of his or her own “preconceptual linguistic protocol” (lexicon, grammar, syntax, semantics). Yet, this “essentially prefigurative”act, White hastens to add, is not only figurative in the sense of being “characterizable in terms of the dominant tropological mode in which it is cast“ but also “poetic, inasmuch as it is precognitive and precritical in the economy of the historian's own consciousness.” White, Metahistory, 30-31 (emphasis in the original). The historian, it seems, cannot but use images.
38 Shpet, “Istoriia, kak predmet logiki,” 20.
39 Ankersmit, F. R., History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor(Berkeley, 1994), 10-13.Google Scholar
40 Shpet, Istoriia kak problema fogiki, 4.
41 Shpet, Vnutreniaia forma slova, 110 (emphasis in the original).
42 Shpet, “Filosofiia i istoriia,” 433-34 (emphasis in the original).
43 Shpet, Vnutreniaia forma slova, 34 (emphasis in the original).
44 Shpet, “Filosofiia i istoriia,” 438 (emphasis in the original).
45 Mitiushin, A. A., “Shpet Gustav Gustavovich,” in Bol'shaia sovelskaia entsiklopediia(Moscow, 1978), 29:469.Google ScholarThe date was derived from a fabricated death certificate mailed to the family in 1956, which listed pneumonia as the cause of Shpet's demise. Until 1990 the true circumstances of his death remained a secret.
46 Haardt, Alexander, Husserl in Rufiland: Phanomenologie der Sprache und Kunst bei Gustav Spel und Aleksej Losev(Munich, 1993).Google Scholar
47 Aleksandr Blok, “Devushka pela v tserkovnom khore,” Raznye stikhotuoreniia: 1904-1908: http://public-library.narod.rU/Blok.Alexander/kniga2.html#raznye(last consulted 26 February 2003).