The Argument Against Philosophy and the Formation of Modern Russian Poetic Discourse

THE COMPAKATIST THE ARGUMENT AGAINST PHILOSOPHY AND THE FORMATION OF MODERN RUSSIAN POETIC DISCOURSE Edith W. Clowes We love everything—both the heat of cold numbers, And the gift of divine vision, We perceive everything—both Gallic wit And twilit German genius. (Aleksandr Blok, "Scythians," 361) I. Discourse, Speech Genre, Writing Culture, Episteme The historical relationship between literary art and philosophy in Russian writing culture has long been a subject ofcritical interest. The typical approaches to studying this relationship, the old-style influence study and, more recently, reception history, have supported the impression of a symbiotic relationship between "philosophy" and "fiction." We have a picture of a strongly philosophical Russian fiction committed to metaphysical and moral questions, a fiction that itself functions as a form of philosophizing in the absence of a body of "real" philosophical thought. The premise of this essay is that Russian philosophical fiction, instead of subordinating itself to philosophy, tends to resist the mentality , behavior, attitudes, and premises that Russians call "philosophy." Despite dozens offamous and well-documented interactions between fictional and philosophical texts, Russian fiction writers tend to take issue with the very notion of "philosophy," which they understand as a rational , analytical, academic discourse free of ideological engagement, isolated from any particular social behavior, and claiming superior access to a form of "knowledge" and "truth" that inhabits a neutral space apart from social, political, or other interests. Examples of such contentiousness between discourses can be multiplied in the work ofTolstoi, Chekhov, Gorky, Belyi, Pilniak, and Pasternak on the literary side, and Chaadaev, Khomiakov, Solovyov, Rozanov, and Shestov on the philosophical side. Here we will address the following questions: why do these writers draw such attention to the interaction of philosophical and literary discourses, and why does it matter? The hypotheses ofthe present essay are the following: 1) not only are writers appropriating discursive space for their own voices to be heard, but 2) those voices work to legitimize a specific discursive identity, whether "literary," "philosophical," "scientific," or "journalistic," establishing their own authority in contrast to other possible identities. Finally, 3) in contrast to Western cultures, in Russia literary discourse predominates over philosophical and other discourses with the result that Russian phiVoI . 27 (2003): 41 PHILOSOPHYANV KUSSIAN poetic VISCOUKSE losophy, when it does emerge at the end of the nineteenth century, is very close to literature. With the possible exception of Rozanov, who operates equally as editorial publicist and philosopher, each of these writers, whether novelist or philosopher, is deliberately choosing one identity over another, and we need to ask why. Appropriating any of the traditional philosophical areas of esthetics, ethics, or metaphysics, Russian fiction writers tend to emphasize their own separate identity as "artists" and, using this identity, put forth their own unique claim to authenticity. This essay is going to probe the possibilities of a different kind of approach that examines the rhetorical relationships between these two kinds of writing and their two approaches to knowing the world. The long-term goal of a broader project is to examine interactions between these languages in the context of a larger array of language uses, including, especially, natural science and editorial journalism, over the two centuries of Russian modernity. Our chief goal is to describe how these interactions have led to the formation of specific discursive identities and to the unusual prominence and authority of literary fiction in Russian culture. Before exploring them further, four key terms—"writing culture," "discourse," "speech genre," and "episteme"—need clear definition. Discourse here is meant as a pattern of language use or speech employed by a group of people in a given socio-cultural milieu sharing certain kinds ofknowledge. In an attempt to bridge two isolated disciplines, the formal study of stylistics and the socio-political study of ideology, Mikhail Bakhtin in "Discourse in the Novel" (1934-35) develops a concept of "discourse " that would give attention to both language use and the evaluative concerns that are inherent in language use. Here he draws attention to the communicative, dynamic nature of language and its meanings. Language, he writes, lies on the border between oneselfand the other. The word in language is halfsomeone else's. It becomes "one's own...