Gustav Shpet's Contribution to Philosophy and Cultural Theory

Gustav Shpet and Phenomenology in an Orthodox Key

98 Gustav Shpet and Phenomenology in an Orthodox Key Steven Cassedy Gustav Shpet was one of a number of Husserl's disciples who took some of phenomenology 's central principles and applied them to language theory and aesthetics. Much of the value of Shpet's contribution to philosophy derives from his introduction of phenomenology into his own country. But even though he knowingly proposed certain significant modifications to Husserl's thought, an examination of some of his major writings on language and aesthetics leads one to suspect that Shpet, apparently without knowing it, gave his own slant to those parts that he thought he was merely interpreting and passing on. Both the witting and the unwitting modifications show a thinker who is thoroughly grounded in Russian religious thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The result is a philosophy that combines Husserl's analysis of the structure of consciousness with the fundamental Platonism of Orthodoxy, the doctrine of incarnation, and the related notion that matter is to be venerated. To the extent that he incorporates the Platonism of Russian Orthodoxy into his philosophy, Shpet sets himself apart not only from Husserl but also from Husserl's other, non-Russian disciples who attempted to found aesthetics on phenomenology. For Shpet, as for other early phenomenological aestheticians, the study of art is a science of essences. But essence has a different meaning for Shpet from what it has for Husserl's other followers, and the direction Shpet takes from his initial assumptions is quite different from what we find in the others. An Earlier Phenomenological Approach to Aesthetics and Language The first significant attempt to apply Husserl's methods to the field of aesthetics was a study by Waldemar Conrad titled "Der ästhetische Gegenstand. Eine phänomenologische Studie" ("The aesthetic object. A phenomenological study"). Conrad (1878-1915), one of Husserl's earliest pupils, published his study in 1908-1909, that is, after the appearance of Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900-1901), but before Gustav Shpet and Phenomenology in an Orthodox Key 99 the appearance of Ideas (first volume, 1913). In his article Conrad sets out the principles that will govern most phenomenological approaches to aesthetics from that time on (see Haardt, Husserl 45-53). If Husserl was not an aesthetician, what can we take from his work that might help us to understand the world of art? The very way Conrad defines the problem shows his indebtedness to his master. The basic material of investigation will be not only artworks, but the human subject's attitude (Verhalten) towards them as compared with the human subject's attitude towards human-made objects that are designed for practical uses (Conrad 71). Like Husserl, Conrad is interested in the moment of contact—and the immediate environment of that moment of contact— between consciousness and what is external to it. Taking one of the most important catchwords from Logical Investigations, Conrad proposes for his approach a method of description that will be "presuppositionless" (voraussetzungslos), by which he means that all natural presuppositions about the existence of the world and its things, all of what Husserl refers to as "transcendent" (that is, lying beyond acts of consciousness and thus transcendent relative to it), will be left to one side (Conrad 75). The consequence of adopting the presuppositionless method is that objects appear no longer as mere things, as mere objects in nature, but now as ideal objects to which essential properties (Wesenseigenschaften) can be attributed (Conrad 76). Phenomenologically oriented aestheticians will thus be committed to seeing essences in the objects of their investigation. Or, to put it more generally, they are going to be committed to employing a kind of vision that penetrates through the object on its concrete level to discover something behind it: an essence, an object of a nonconcrete nature, a quality of some sort. Conrad's title, the reader quickly finds out, is evidence of this vision. "Aesthetic object" is not another phrase for "artwork." It does not mean the poem we are reading, the statue we are admiring, or the symphony we are listening to; it means something essential within the artwork, something that phenomenological analysis can discover. Hence Conrad's otherwise baffling subtitles: "The aesthetic object of music," "The aesthetic object of poetry." The aesthetic object, Conrad concludes, in contrast both to the artwork in particular and to other sorts of objects in general, is a purely ideal object whose fundamental nature is...