Toward a Philosophy of the Act

Introduction to the Russian Edition

s. G. BOCHAROV INTRODUCTION TO THE RUSSIAN EDITION Among Bakhtin's works published posthumously in the collection of his essays Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva [The Aesthetics of Verbal Creation] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979) the text of central importance is the treatise "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity." I Bakhtin worked on this treatise at the beginning of the 1920S but did not finish it; it has been published from a manuscript which was preserved (unfortunately, in an incomplete form) among his papers. Bakhtin's papers also included the manuscript ofanother philosophical treatise which is quite similar in its problematics, basic ideas, and language to "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity." This manuscript was also preserved in an incomplete form, which we are publishing here under the title K filosofii postupka [Toward a Philosophy ofthe Act).2 The text published here represents only the initial part of a more extensive philosophical project. The text consists of two large frag- ments. The first fragment is apparently the introduction to a treatise on moral philosophy that was to consist of several parts, according to the plan outlined at the end of the introduction. The first pages ofthis introduction are missing in the surviving manuscript: the first eight out of fifty-two, according to the author's pagination. The introduction is followed immediately by "part I" (that is how the author entitled it in the manuscript); only the beginning of this part has been preserved (sixteen pages, according to the author's pagination) . Both the content of the text published here and the outlined plan of the whole treatise show that the distinctive philosophical aesthetics presented in "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity" was only a part of a larger philosophical project which went well beyond the bounds of aesthetics. This project is concerned with more general questions which lie on the boundary ofaesthetics and moral philosophy ; it is concerned with what Bakhtin calls the world of human action-"the world of event" [mir sobytiia], "the world of the performed act" [mir postupka]. The leading category in this projected treatise is "answerability" [otvetstvennost)], and the distinctive concretization ofit is an image-concept that Bakhtin introduces here-a "non-alibi in Being" [ne-alibi v bytii]: a human being has no right to an alibi-to an evasion of that unique answerability which is constituted by his actualization ofhis own unique, never-repeatable "place" in Being; he has no right to an evasion of that once-occurrent "answerable act or deed" which his whole life must constitute (cf. the ancient parable ofthe buried talent as a parable ofmoral transgression).3 It is with a discourse on "answerability" that Bakhtin entered the intellectual life of his time in the immediate postrevolutionary years: his earliest known publication (1919) was an article entitled "Art and Answerability."4 It spoke in a impassioned tone about surmounting the ancient divorce between art and life through their mutual answerability for each other; and this answerability was to be actualized in the individual person, "who must become answerable through and through": "I have to answer with my own life for what I have experienced and understood in art ..."5 Bakhtin probably began working on the treatise "Toward a Philosophy ofthe Act" soon after ••• TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY OF THE ACT .nvi that programmatic article and it is inspired by the same passion of surmounting "the pernicious non-fusion and non-interpenetration of culture and life" (p. 3 m the present volume). One can feel that passion behind the somewhat difficult technical language ofthe treatise that reflects, ofcourse, the philosophical trends ofthe time ofits writing. The critical dimension is very pronounced in the text published here: Bakhtin develops a critique of"fatal theoreticism" in the philosophy ofthat time (in epistemology, in ethics, and in aesthetics) and opposes to it, as a task to be accomplished, the "answerable unity" ofthinking and performed action; he also introduces such categories as "action-performing thinking" [postupaiushchee myshlenie] and "participative (unindifferent) thinking" [uchastnoe myshlenie]. A human being who "thinks participatively" does not "detach [his] performed act from its product" (footnote on p. 19)-that is the main thesis of this distinctive "philosophy of the answerable act or deed" [filosofiia postupka], as the author himself defines the content of his treatise in the text published here (p. 28). Based on this definition , we have entitled this text "Toward a Philosophy of the Act" [K filosofii postupka], since we do not...