Gustav Shpet's Contribution to Philosophy and Cultural Theory

Sign and/vs. Essence in Shpet

181 Sign and/vs. Essence in Shpet Thomas Seifrid What I mean to indicate by my somewhat cryptic title is a certain tension or distance, perhaps introduced by our retrospective gaze but possibly present in Shpet's thought itself, between two different kinds of philosophical projects that unfold within his works: between, on the one hand, Shpet's several insightful theorizations on the nature of semiotic phenomena and their role in human culture; and, on the other, a project that is present throughout but less evident, which I would briefly summarize as an attempt to elaborate a model of selfhood that is grounded in linguistic consciousness and to establish its ontological security against a variety of perceived threats ranging from materialism to Neo-Kantianism, epistemological skepticism, and relativism . Shpet was arguably the most conscientiously "professional" philosopher in the Russia of his day, markedly different in philosophical persona from such wilder, "disheveled," more "Russian" types as Rozanov, Losev, or even Florenskii. But one of the things that makes him such an interesting figure is that the former project, on which his reputation as a forerunner of semiotics deservedly rests, in fact represents the derivative (if careful) surface of his work; while the latter is more innovative and links him up with an array of Russian (rather than European) thinkers of the early twentieth century. The starting point for any consideration of Shpet's thought is, of course, his Husserlian phenomenology. Much of Iavlenie i smysl (Appearance and Sense, 1914; English trans. 1991)—first fruit of the time Shpet spent with Husserl in Göttingen in 1912-13, and the beginning of productive extensions of Husserlian thought in Russia (Haardt, Husserl 68)—is devoted to reiterating Husserl's explication in the first volume of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy of phenomenology as a science of essences knowable via intuition. Following Husserl, Shpet urges philosophy to turn its attention away from the empirical realm of "being in the world" and direct it instead toward the eidetic realm of "being in an idea" (Shpet, Iavlenie 25). Philosophers must develop a "presuppositionless" science of essence by taking the "natural" attitude toward the world out of action, so that what remains is "the entire 'world as eidos'" (41). Skepticism of the kind espoused by the likes of Hume arises out of concentration on the "accidental" fac- 182 Thomas Seifrid tors of the object's appearances to us, while phenomenology proposes to deal with the non-accidental and the necessary components of its essence (nesluchainost', neobkhodimost'; 58-59), which the object retains throughout changing contexts and which enable us to recognize it as the same object "in spite of all the changes of the intentive mental processes and in spite of the fluctuation of the attentional acts of the pure Ego" (122). "Physical things" are given to us only empirically, through "adumbrations in appearances," whereas immanent being is apprehended as an absolute (44). As in Husserl, this absolute is apprehended by the inner eye. Phenomenology attains its aim, Shpet asserts, not through any mechanical process of abstraction but through an "advertence of vision" (26): the philosophical gaze or "regard" refuses to stop with the "experientially given" but penetrates through to essence (28). Eidetic intuition is fulfilled when "the contemplated itself" (usmatrivaemoe samo) stands before us as "ob-ject" ("pred-met," i.e., "placed before us," an etymological play Florenskii was later to dwell on), when it gives itself to us in its originary givenness ("gde ono daetsia nam v svoei pervichnoi dannosti"; 88). One trait already separating this seemingly slavish paraphrase from its Husserlian model, however, is the greater emphasis Shpet places on what might be called ontological security (as Savich points out, Shpet's professed desire in Iavlenie i smysl merely to acquaint the reader with Husserl's thought is disingenuous, as Russian translations of Husserl's works already existed; Shpet's purpose, rather, was subtle revision and redirection; Savich 24). Husserl had been concerned to assert that the eidetic contents of consciousness exist and constitute objects in their own right—he claimed that phenomenology had "opened up a new region of being never before delineated in its peculiarity, that of the world as Eidos" (Ideas 63)—but the need to establish the being of consciousness becomes an even more pressing issue in Shpet, who I think for this reason "ontologizes" and "Platonizes" Husserl (Haardt; Husserl 90, 63, 33; see also Savich 26-27). There is a certain...