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28 The Hermeneutic Triangle: Gustav Shpet's Aesthetics in Context Robert Bird From 1921 to 1930, numerous Russian thinkers found refuge in a Moscow institution called the State Academy of the Artistic Sciences (GAKhN: Gosudarstvennaia akademiia khudozhestvennykh nauk). GAKhN was an island of relatively independent scholarship and open intellectual debate, and it served as a locus of cultural continuity in the tumultuous period between the Civil War and the first Five Year Plan (see Misler). A large share of the credit for GAKhN is owed to Gustav Shpet, a member from its inception in 1921 (when it was still known as the Russian [Rossiiskaia ] Academy of Artistic Sciences), head of the philosophical section from 1922, and Vice President of the institution from 1924. In these years Shpet maintained a prolific rate of scholarship in the most varied fields; in addition to numerous essays and papers, he published Esteticheskie fragmenty (Aesthetic Fragments; 1922-23), Vnutrenniaia forma slova. Etiudy i variatsii na temy Gumbol'ta (The Inner Form of the Word: Etudes and Variations on Themes from Humboldt; 1927), and Vvedenie v etnicheskuiu psikhologiiu (An Introduction to Ethnic Psychology; 1927). Like many of his colleagues, he paid a high price for his intellectual independence. When GAKhN was purged in 1930, he was hounded from his post and forbidden to teach or publish on philosophy. Five years after GAKhN was closed, Shpet was arrested and charged with leading a counter-revolutionary group centered at the Academy, and on 16 November 1937 he was executed for his crimes of thought. The image of GAKhN as a kind of Noah's Ark for the remnants of Russia's intelligentsia fits the fragile, dialogical nature of Shpet's philosophy (see Shchedrina 217-20). All of his ideas were developed in intense dialogue with others, and his works typically took the form of commentaries on the works of previous, sometimes relatively obscure thinkers. Fittingly, he was the first Russian thinker to appropriate the term hermeneutics for the type of philosophy which views knowledge primarily as understanding, and which theorizes culture as an interpretive continuum. Although the historical deluge delayed its publication by seventy years, his 1918 book The Hermeneutic Triangle: Gustav Shpet's Aesthetics in Context 29 "Germenevtika i ee problemy" ("Hermeneutics and Its Problems") still managed to be the first of its kind in Russia. It is ironic that one of the major philosophical documents to have suffered the fate of near oblivion is a vast and impassioned defense of culture as a continuous community of interpretation. GAKhN, whose members included many of Shpet's close intellectual interlocutors, was the institutional image of this community which informed the immediate sources and contexts of Shpet's philosophical hermeneutics. In this essay I investigate Shpet's hermeneutics with special reference to two of his colleagues at GAKhN, the symbolist poet and theorist Viacheslav Ivanov (18661949 ) and the philosopher Aleksei Losev (1893-1988). I argue that Shpet's links to these two thinkers call particular attention to his key concept of detachment, which in turn helps illuminate an original tradition of hermeneutics and narrative theory. Shpet's Phenomenological Hermeneutics Shpet's "Germenevtika i ee problemy" consists largely of a critical overview of approaches to historical understanding by numerous (mainly German) historians and philosophers. In its major lineaments and characters Shpet's history of hermeneutics matches closely the standard story told in Western scholarship (see, e.g., Palmer; Grondin). However, Shpet was writing decades before his closest competitors; his account of the history of hermeneutic thought is independent and distinctive. Alexander Haardt's authoritative statement will guide my own investigation of the matter : "The most significant innovation in Shpet's history of hermeneutics was that he placed the task of a philosophical grounding for the hermeneutic canon squarely within a fundamental analysis of understanding," and that he pursued this by a "combination of semiotics and hermeneutics within the horizon of a 'phenomenology of understanding reason'" (127, 136). In short, Shpet was the first thinker for whom the field of hermeneutics united phenomenology, history, and art within a single, manifold problematic. In the Europe of 1918 the hermeneutic problem was ripe. The atomism of modern society, exemplified by the mechanical slaughter of World War I, demanded new explanations of how inner experience becomes perceptible and communicable to others. Idealistic tendencies in philosophy were under a particular obligation to confront historical failures of communication and present alternatives. In German philosophy, various schools of thought (Neo-Kantianism, Philosophy of Life...

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