Existence and Participating Thinking: Mikhail Bakhtin in the History of Thought

Abstract

The article is an attempt to establish and analyze concrete historical interrelation between the “paradigm shift” in the Western philosophy during and after the First World War, on one hand, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s early philosophical project around the 1920s, on the other. This interrelation was constituted not so much by theoretical constructions in themselves, but rather by the radical break in the whole ideological culture of the New Times, during the short decade between 1914 and 1923. Consequently, this cultural upheaval was motivated by pre-scientific, historically “existential” motives and factors, which determined, to a large extent, the subsequent cause of the 20th century philosophy and the humanities. The connection between the so-called “New thinking” in the Western (primarily German) philosophy and Bakhtin’s early philosophical project, is particularly evident in the ontological turn, most closely connected with the general cultural collapse of the epoch, resulting in the both Western and Russian “paradigm shift” in philosophy. Thus, it was that very crisis – not the popular comparisons in the genre of “Bakhtin and…” – may give us an adequate approach to what Bakhtin calls “dialogizing background” that motivates consciousness, thinking and utterance in the “event of being’’. In Bakhtin’s own case, this concept of dialogizing background, it seems, allows us to better understand the interrelation between the existential-ontological turn among some of Bakhtin’s contemporaries to the new kind of the “first philosophy”, and his own turn to the “philosophy of the act” and “participating thinking”. Later on this Russian thinker managed to develop his initial project in different human sciences as a specific system of thinking called “dialogism”.