Toward a Philosophy of the Act

Translator's Preface

VADIM LIAPUNOV TRANSLATORJS PREFACE Toward a Philosophy ofthe Act is a translation of an unfinished philosophical essay by M. M. Bakhtin (1895-1975) that was published in Russian in 1986 by S. G. Bocharov under the title Kfilosofii postupka. According to Bocharov, the manuscript has come down to us in very poor condition: the opening pages are missing (hence we do not know the title Bakhtin himself gave to the essay) and a number ofwords and phrases are barely legible or quite illegible. We do know what Bakhtin planned to accomplish, for on page 54 in the present volume he provides an outline of the whole essay. It was to comprise four parts, ofwhich he seems to have written only part I (we do not know how complete it is). Part I begins on p. 56 in the present volume; the whole preceding text is, therefore, an introduction (with several pages missing at the beginning). The opening paragraph of the introduction (in its present truncated form) is a conclusion: "Aesthetic activity as well is power- ................................ . .xmi less ..." Judging by the immediately following paragraph, we may assume that in the preceding pages Bakhtin dealt not only with aesthetic activity (aesthetic intuition, aesthetic seeing), but also with the activity of discursive theoretical thinking (actualized in the natural sciences and in philosophy) and with the activity of historical description-exposition. All of these activities have no access to the "event-ness" of Being, no access to Being as ongoing event. (In another context Bakhtin explains that "the ongoing event of Being" is a phenomenological concept, "for being presents itself to a living consciousness as an ongoing event, and a living consciousness actively orients itself and lives in it as in an ongoing event.") All of these activities proceed to establish a radical split between the content/sense of a given act (i.e., its noema) and the historical actuality of its being, that is, the actual and once-occurrent performing/experiencing of that act. The given act, however, is an actual reality (that is, it participates in the onceoccurrent event of Being) only as an undivided whole: only this whole act is an actual, living participant in the ongoing event of Being. The ultimate result of splitting off the content of an act from the actual, once-occurrent performing/experiencing ofthat act is that we find ourselves divided between two non-communicating and mutually impervious worlds: the world of culture (in which the acts of our activity are objectified) and the world of life (in which we actually create, cognize, contemplate, live our lives and die-i.e., the world in which the acts of our activity are actually accomplished once and only once). (The reader should note here Bakhtin's anticipation of Husserl's concept of the Lebenswelt.) Concentrating above all on theoretical cognition and on aesthetic intuition, Bakhtin argues that neither ofthem has any way ofgaining access (from within itself) to Being as ongoing event (i.e., to the world of life), for there is no unity and interpenetration in them between the content or product of an act and the actual historical performance of that act, in consequence ofa fundamental and essential abstraction from oneself as participant in establishing any sense and seeing. In aesthetic intuition, just as in theoretical cognition, there exists the same radical non-communication between the object • • • • • • • • • • • • TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY OF THE ACT of the act of aesthetic seeing (the object being a subiectum and his life) and the subiectum who is the bearer/performer of that act of seeing: in the content ofaesthetic seeing we will not find the actually performed act ofthe one who sees. And yet the integral, whole act of our activity, of our actual experiencing , is two-sided: it is directed to both the content and the being (the actual accomplishment) of the act. The unitary and unique plane where both sides ofthe act mutually determine each other (i.e., where they form an undivided whole) is constituted by the ongoing, once-occurrent event ofBeing. To reflect itselfin both directions (in its sense and in its being) the act must, therefore, have the unity of two-sided responsibility or answerability: it must answer both for its content/sense and for its being. The answerability for its being constitutes its moral answerability, into which the answerability for its content must be integrated qua constituent moment. The pernicious disunity and non...