An Interview with Anatolii Akhutin and Vladimir Bibler
conducted by Daniel Alexandrov and Anton Struchkov1
Daniel Alexandrov: Let me begin with the following introductory remark. You, Vladimir Solomonovich [Bibler], have been schooled as a historian. However, it is philosophy, not history, that has turned out to be your vocation and creative destiny. You, Anatolii Valerianovich [AkhutinJ, were educated in chemistry. Then you devoted much time to the history of science, especially to its philosophical aspect. Thus, your professional interests also concentrate, first and foremost, upon philosophy in the classical sense. Neither of you specializes in the history of science per se, still less in Bakhtinian scholarship. Your own cultural and historico-scientific studies proceed from the logic of your philosophy and belong to the latter's context. Accordingly, the work of Bakhtin is significant for you not as a neutral "object of research," but as an occurrence of philosophically congenial thought.
For a long time such "philosophical congeniality" has been — and it continues to be — the "adhesive" that binds together the members of your group specializing in diverse fields: historians, culturologists, philologists, psychologists, teachers. The logical foundations of that philosophy, which you name "the logic of the dialogue of logics" or "the dialogic ontology of culture," are explicated in detail mainly in your own works, Vladimir Solomonovich.
But one may also conceive of all the group's work over many years, including highly specialized studies, as the detailing and thematic trial of its common conception. Therefore, before we turn to the main topic of our conversation, I would like to ask you, Anatolii Valerianovich, for a brief account of the history of your circle.
Anatolii Akhutin: We do indeed shoulder a rather long history — nearly thirty years. Notwithstanding that our present-day (official) status — that of an independent creative group entitled "Dialogue of Cultures" — has been conferred on us quite recently, the history of our circle actually begins with seminars that go back (as a noticeable social phenomenon) to the so-called thaw in the days of Khrushchev. In this respect, we share the common destiny of a number of trends formed in those days that maintained the vitality of philosophical thought under the conditions of its methodical suppression. After the Czechoslovakian events of 1968, all these seminars dispersed and retreated into . . . private kitchens, or smoking-rooms of certain institutions (such as, for example, the State Lenin Library), or even into back-streets.2 The seminar conducted by V. S. Bibler also shifted to conditions of domestic, almost underground, existence. At that time, its membership was somewhat different than now. Thus, Lina B. Tumanova was among us, a remarkable philosopher whose works still remain unpublished. (An active member of the movement for the defence of human rights, she was arrested by the Committee for State Security |KGB] in 1984; afterwards, however, when it became known that she was incurably ill, they set her free several months before her death.) The distinguished culturologist Leonid M. Batkin (well-known today as a political scientist) has actively participated in our seminar for many years. A student of Descartes's philosophy, Yakov A. Lyatker (now in the USA), has also been the seminar's longtime member (and its "chronicler"). Two disciples of Mikhail B. Turovskii, Vladimir V. Silvestrov (died in 1990) and Leonid S. Chernyak (now in the USA), have been in close collaboration with us. In other words, as usual in Russian history, "already some are not, and others are far off"
Parenthetically, this history of "back-street circles" and "kitchen seminars," i.e., the real history of philosophical thought in the post-Stalin USSR — a rich and by no means insipid story that harbors many surprising discoveries — has not been written as yet and is not likely to be written in the foreseeable future. We "insiders" are unlikely to do this, for our time is devoted to other commitments or simply devoured by the humdrum of life here. On the other hand, the perverted logic of Soviet life is too cunning for an objective view from without. The point is not so much the lack of relevant documents (these are quite sufficient) as their inscrutable semiotics. How, indeed, is a scrupulous, unbiased, objective historian to discern the philosophically meaningful text (such as that written by a Marxist, Eval'd V. Il'enkov, for one) amid the dense mass of those texts which, similar to it though they look, have purely ritual meaning? — Or to see behind the scenes of pseudo-philosophical debates; to read the subtexts underlying particular textual signals, denunciations, allegories, etc.? — The failure is guaranteed.
Moreover, the failure is sometimes so striking that historians may well be advised to learn a valuable lesson from it. Such was the case with J. P. Scalan's Marxism in the USSR: A Critical Survey of Current Soviet Thought (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), the book that prompted L. S. Chernyak to write a review entitled "The Objective Approach as the Basis of Mis-under- standing."3
In the 1960s the recovery of philosophical consciousness — concerning at least those trends that attained some level of publicity — mainly followed a path back to the primary sources of Marxism. If this path led to Das Kapital, it was not so much to its political-economic as to its logical aspect, the latter viewed in explicit juxtaposition to Hegel's logic. Or, this path could lead to the early Marx, and — through him — to Hegel again. This return pushed into the foreground the concepts of "productive subject" (related to Marx's definition of humans as essentially the beings who create themselves, society, and nature through their "productive activity", whether they be engaged in producing their means of subsistence or in their artistic, scientific, political, and social activities), "alienation," and "dialectics" as the form of development of a theoretical notion, the creative basis of human personality. Different philosophical trends (represented by such figures as E. V. Il'enkov, Grigorii S. Batishchev, M.B. Turovskii, Merab K. Mamardashvili, and others) were initially unified by their common consent to the conception of philosophy as "the theory of productive activity" (the latter understood in the same broad sense mentioned above).
V. S. Bibler was one of those working in this context, this philosophical community (his first book, O sisteme kategorii dialekticheskoi logiki (Stalinabad: Tadzhikskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 1958) [On the system of categories of the dialectical logic], was published in Dyushambe as early as 1958). When I entered Bibler's seminar in 1966, his version of this philosophy of "productive activity," essentially different from other accounts of it, seemed the most attractive of all. The first thing that attracted me was the logical culture of philosophical thought. Bibler's way of "doing philosophy" probed into contemporaneity with all the vigor of logical radicalism peculiar to that classical European philosophy which, from Aristotle on, was termed "first." It was in the primeval self-determination of that philosophy as the thought of the first principles of thinking and being that Bibler discerned the source of the newest contemporary discoveries. At the same time, he claimed no abstract metaphysics whatever, nor any sort of Hegelian Aufheben culminating in some ultimate universal logic. According to Bibler, logical universality is to be sought, not in the abstract generalization of various historical phenomena of thought (cf. Hegel's movement from Phänomenologie des Geistes to Wissenschaft der Logik), but in each of these particular phenomena. Instead of generalization, then, this approach aims at the utmost concretization and individuation. This or that particular conception, philosophical system, or integral culture of thinking is revealed in its absolute uniqueness. Hence, the rapt attention he pays to that historical "matter" in which thought is embodied: the word, the text, the (artistic) creation. If the point under discussion was a certain scientific notion, Bibler considered it in the fullness of its concrete experimental and mathematical expression(s), in all the details of its real, "material" history.4 If the question at issue was a term (e.g., "motion") as it was manifested in different cultural epochs, he paid attention first of all to deep semantic and logical differences (for example, the "theological" context in the Middle Ages, the context of "aesthetic cosmology" in antiquity — each distinct from the other, as both are from the context of "epistemology" characteristic of modernity).
What especially pleased me was that Bibler did not construct all- embracing schemes, but returned to philosophy its proper historical and cultural individuality, its live polyphony. Hence, particular attention was given to the culture of reading classical philosophical works. Many of our seminars were simply "exercises in reading": utterly absorbed in a certain work of Plato, Aristotle, Proclus, Nicolaus Cusanus, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, or what-have-you, we read and reread it; made comments upon it; and continually discussed and interpreted obscure passages in the text. Then we switched over to another topic; after a long time, however, we returned to that work again, disclosing its unknown layers of meaning, its trends of thought unnoticed at the first reading. In this way, each creation of philosophical thought revealed itself to us in its living inexhaustibility. We were beginning to hear the voice of its author, as though this latter continued to speak with us, responding to our unexpected questions with answers unexpected by himself. Plato was becoming our real life interlocutor, our contemporary in the second half of the twentieth century. At all events, such was the goal of our reading.
Initially Bibler treated his philosophy as the elaboration of classical Wissenschaftslehre — i.e., as the philosophical grounding of scientific reason in the capacity of reason as such. But the very logic of the chosen approach prompted him to proceed further. A basis, by definition, exceeds the limits of the based. Scientific reason cannot be based scientifically. Its philosophical foundations are fraught with the possibility of a radically different way of defining reason. Hence, the possibility of a different logic, a different culture of reasoning. For instance, the mode of reasoning peculiar to ancient culture may well be logically solid, while being utterly different from the scientifically-cognizing reason characteristic of the epoch we are familiar with. Therefore, philosophy can and must comprehend itself as other than Wissenschaftslehre.5
From the mid-1970s, our seminar became engaged in earnest culturological studies. As distinct from comparative studies, ours consisted in elucidating the character of internal relationship between cultural worlds that must exclude one another, that cannot be located (together) in some overall "scheme of things," some all-embracing Universe. Their community can only be the community of communication; their relationship, dialogue. Thereby the philosophy of culture — understood as the logic of the dialogue of logics, or even as the dialogic ontology of culture — has proved to be, not a particular branch of philosophy, but the very root of its definition — the definition touching the essence of its philosophical undertaking.
Having accomplished such culturological overturning, if one recurs to classical Wissenschaftslehre it will not be hard then to discern the distinctive dialogism inherent in its own foundations as well. Such dialogism can be discerned in the fundamental controversy (concerning the philosophical-logical principles) that has taken place between classical philosophical systems of the seventeenth century (those of Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Pascal, Leibniz . . . ); in Kant's covert debate with Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; in Husserl's argument against Descartes . . . Our seminar has long been engaged in detailed reconstruction of "the seventeenth-century controversy of logical principles." By the expedient of imaginary correspondence — exercised in the form of La République des Lettres similar to that of the seventeenth century — we have been at pains to render the infinite possibilities of new questions and new answers, new turnings, meanings and logical trends inherent in Descartes's "method," Spinoza's "metaphysics," Leibniz's "monadology," Pascal's "christology," Hobbes's "sociology," etc.6
Now, I guess, that's enough for a brief review of our seminar's ideational history.
DA: If I may use this simple graphic analogy, I would like to picture our further discussion, not in a "linear" fashion, but as a "circular affair." That is to say, I would like you to turn round several major interconnected points. First, you might want to say something about Bakhtin — especially in connection with your own standpoint, according to which rational thinking is to be understood as broader than science. Perhaps this broad standpoint may lead you to venture some comment upon what might be called "humanistic knowledge" and its future — that is, to comment upon "the logic of humanistic knowledge and twenty-first-century culture." To bring this discussion into closer contact with the audience of Configurations, you could touch upon such subjects as:
1) "Bakhtin and the history of science" — in other words, what does the history of science mean as a humanistic discipline; and
2) whether it might be possible for a historian of science to turn your philosophy of the dialogue of cultures, if not into a method, then into certain landmarks, as it were, which could be set up when studying texts or coming to grips with the differences between epochs and cultures.
The second major point at issue may be science itself, as it can be seen in the light of Bakhtin's views. According to his statement from the "Notes of 1970-71,"7 science is a monologue. Do you think this is true? The point is an important one: If humanistic studies should not be monologic (in accordance with Bakhtin's and your own views), then his statement brings us to confront the question, where is the distinction between the humanistic and the "nonhumanistic" to be drawn? What makes me emphasize this point is the discussion I once had with one of you [= Anatolii Akhutin]. If you remember, we were discussing the dialogues between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg (cited in the latter's The Part and the Whole),8 and your own words were that "in science it's just the same": Heisenberg recognizes that it is only in dialogue that truth — or rather, understanding — emerges in science. That conversation left me feeling that maybe — if scientists are not merely engaged in "solving puzzles" (Thomas Kuhn), but wrestle with the problems of reconstructing physical reality — in science, as well, genuine understanding is possible only in this way, "germinating" in their dialogue. If this is so, then maybe it is conventional "laws of genre" that later force them, bluntly speaking, to erase this "dialogic dimension," to make their novel vision of reality "flat" by writing objectivist papers and books?
This question may be linked with the third major point that could be dealt with in our discussion — namely, the theme of speech genres, very fashionable today. It is becoming a commonplace among those writing on the subject of "genres in science" to read Bakhtin and refer to the notion of speech genres. As far as I know, these present-day scholars usually conceive of a speech genre as a certain socio-psychological category that is necessary in order for us to establish and maintain communication — to recognize, so to say, scientific speech. However, such a "functional" — if that is the word — conception is a far cry from Bakhtin's typological definition. This difference may bring us back to the consideration of Bakhtin's views, to the problems of reading (and misreading) him, and perhaps to the ways in which his legacy is being addressed, and elaborated, in your own work.
Vladimir Bibler: Let me start by trying to sum up our basic presuppositions. I would note the following points.
First: In my view, it is now very important to understand and emphasize that the works of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin and the very cast of his thinking are essentially significant on a far larger scale than the fields of philology or literary criticism. First of all, his works constitute points of radical change in addressing the question, "What is knowledge, what is the understanding of reality?" His intention may be outlined as follows: to grasp the problem of, say, the novelistic word as a key, not only to the idea of speech genres, but also to the idea of the intercourse between epochs in the "great time" of culture,9 and even to the fundamental changes in the types of human comprehension of reality as a whole. And "reality" here means not only those aspects thereof which are important for a literary critic (qua literary critic), but being itself — "being" in the broadest and the deepest, in the true philosophical, sense of the word.
At the same time, it seems to me equally important to stress that Bakhtin's intention includes the reverse trend as well (a point that usually escapes those who study his work). What distinguishes Bakhtin among a good many thinkers — even the proponents of "dialogic philosophy" — of the beginning and the middle of this century (such as, e.g., Martin Buber or Franz Rosenzweig) is that his meditations on the fundamental significance of dialogue, on its existential, ontological meaning, do not take the shape of general philosophizing. Bakhtin has considerably narrowed and concentrated (!) the field of his studies. It is not enough even to say that all his works are bound up with literary criticism or with the study of dialogue (as it is revealed by means of literary criticism). The essence of the matter is that all his works are concentrated upon the novelistic word [romannoe slovo], the word of Rabelais's and Dostoevsky's novels or of his last notes' heroes. And it is precisely this concretization, this concentration, this almost technical focusing on what one would think to be a very narrow issue that allowed Bakhtin, as if by means of some "turntable," to radically transform the very conception of knowledge, understanding, being. If he were proceeding from those philosophical problems which had already become ripe and explicit by the time he embarked on his scholarly path, he would have involuntarily made use of that conceptual apparatus, those phraseological concrescences which had emerged long before. If such had been the case, Bakhtin's thinking, for all its revolutionary character, would have nevertheless been but the working-out of "a new variant of philosophy" within the old channel. He would have been responding to Kantians and neo-Kantians, objecting to Hegel and Hegelians, discussing Husserl's train of thought, and so forth. Actually, however, Bakhtin begins his philosophy from a clear place, as it were — from the very beginning: the human word in its concrete, comprehensible, textual expression.
To sum up our first point. It has been my intention to emphasize these two sides of Bakhtin's thinking: he arrives at extremely broad historico-cultural, epistemological, philosophical problems; and he does so by means of a highly concrete, tangible, and extremely specialized way of setting forth the issue in question (viz., the novelistic word and its inner structure). Bakhtin explores the possibilities of making different types of cultures go through the needle's eye of the novelistic word.
Second: What, then, are the ways out of the channel of philological, literary-critical, even humanistic (in the narrow sense of the word) knowledge, that were outlined owing to such concentration? — It is to one of them that we shall now turn.
In the case of historians of science, historians of literature, historians of culture, or — generally speaking — students of human understanding in its history, the prime material they have at their disposal is this or that particular text. It is first and foremost in corresponding texts that the mentally weighed life of past generations exists for us. Now Bakhtin has shown that not all sorts of texts are substantial (in the above sense) — for example, neither the text in the capacity of a fragment cited in these or those sources, nor the text inasmuch as it is compiled of other texts or split into parts. Bakhtin has shown the significance of the phenomenon of literary creation.10 While it is undoubtedly more usual for us to speak of "creation" with regard to the realm of the so-called fine arts,11 it is essential indeed — and we shall further elaborate this point in our discussion — that a scientific text (e.g., Galileo's Dialogues, Newton's Principia, or Darwin's Origin of Species) or a philosophical treatise be understood as a (literary) creation as well. By bringing the phenomenon of literary creation into the center of exploratory attention, Bakhtin argues in advance, as it were, against the theorists of what we might call the "disjointed [razomknutyi] text." The point is that the text's cultural significance is not assigned to it by the fact that it may be torn asunder, quoted, supplemented, covertly or overtly disputed, parodied, and so forth. No; for the text to become culturally significant, it is necessary to focus attention on the whole — to comprehend the speech genre, the peculiarity of this literary creation as integral utterance. What does this mean? (1) This means that the model for analysis (and synthesis) of texts in all spheres of culture is that which has long since become the principal topic of attention and understanding of literary critics: namely, the phenomenon of literary creation, with its main features of composition, peripeteia, inner completedness from the beginning to the end — in other words, whatever makes it a single indivisible whole.
(2) On the other hand, this means that it is necessary to take into consideration the particular type of communication between the author and the reader. And this is to be done, not in a somewhat perfunctory way (that is, by considering the general "audience" this book or paper is meant for), but on a deeper level — namely, by raising questions such as "What is the measure of the reader's coauthorship, collaboration, participation in the specific speech genre of this particular literary creation?" These issues are significant even if our studies are concerned with, say, a "normal" treatise on theoretical physics. It is one thing if this treatise is intended for a fellow-physicist; another thing, if it is intended for an engineer drawing on physical theories; and yet another thing, if the treatise is intended for a mathematician working with its formal, linguistico-mathematical structures. In any event, the reader is always included in the order, in the organic wholeness of the literary creation in question. From this point of view, any text is always, figuratively speaking, "half-text": it is always but some incomplete moment of that mysterious integral intercourse which must be complemented and fulfilled by the reader.
Concluding our second point: Literary creation is — by its definition and conception — always a "half-text" that takes on its wholeness and completedness (without ceasing to be open-ended?!) in the "author-reader" intercourse. Unfortunately, this essential aspect of Bakhtin's approach is paid no heed in so-called science studies, in the history of science.
Third: The above discussion of the phenomenon of literary creation allows us to consider what may prove to be the decisive impact of Bakhtin's thought upon the discipline of the history of science and upon the understanding per se of humans' "productive activity" (theoretical, in particular) — namely, that he has called attention to the special significance of the idea of beginning [nachalo]. (I am speaking here, of course, of the way in which we understand and interpret him.) First of all, the idea of beginning is bound up with the understanding of literary creation qua creation — a novel of course, or a "circular novella." Any creation must cling to the "beginning" thereof.
Contemporary textual criticism of the structuralist school, of the Yuri M. Lotman school of semiotics (Tartu, Estonia), and especially of poststructuralists, is oriented the other way round — moving, as it were, from integral literary creation to text. Which means: the integral literary creation is to be disassembled into separate texts, and the latter can be "twisted round one's finger" as much as one wants to suit one's own various ends. This is analysis, dissolution of a literary creation into textual pieces or quotations. Eradicated from the coherency of a certain literary creation, isolated texts can be treated more freely. Thereby we are liberated.
But isn't this sort of freedom, the freedom of arbitrariness, a cheap one? How different from it is the freedom that each time unfolds this particular creation in the reader's imagination — awakens it, as it were, expands its horizon, interprets it — but enfolds it again and again into itself, as something immutable and equal-to-itself. It is the reader (the spectator, the listener) who may be called the main hero of any artistic creation, whether literary, pictorial, musical, philosophical, or scientific. This is the hero that is being projected outward by the artistic creation in the course of its being read, perused, hearkened to.
Thus it is essential to pay heed to the way the artistic creation (in this broad sense) refers to its beginning — especially insofar as it concerns the history of science. If a certain scientific treatise displays the re-course of theoretical thought to its beginning, to the very grounding of the first principles guiding the development of thought, then this treatise is a genuine instance of (artistic) creation in its broad, epochal sense. Twentieth-century theoretical thought abounds with such epochal creations, for its essence is found precisely in fundamental theoretical criticism of the first principles: i.e., the notions of space and time, continuity, elementariness, multitude, number, text, word. ... It appears that the pattern of contemporary scientific thought is not unlike the pattern of the "circular novella": each displays recourse to its own beginnings. The criticism and rethinking of principles turns out to be theoretically more essential than the merely deductive, seemingly infinite, unfolding of initial principles. The attention is focused mainly on beginnings, not consequences. These consequences are of course extremely important, make no mistake about it. They must be meticulously and accurately deduced in order that the ending may recur to the beginning, so that one may set about the problem of grounding the principles of one's own thinking; and — inasmuch as this is the question of "one's whence" — not just the principles of one's own thinking, but those of the epochal and eventually of historical thinking on the whole. This last may happen only in one's dialogue with oneself, verging on "the last questions of being."12
Before we move on to larger issues infolded in the idea of beginning, let me sum up the above account in a single sentence: What Bakhtin's approach enables is the perception of the pattern of (artistic) creation even in the scientific text, its comprehension as an integral creation of theoretical thought.
Now, this approach opens the path to the deeper dimension of the latter — namely, the issue of intercourse between the present generation and past ones, which are no less real and "ever-present" in their creations than we are in ours. It is emphatically not the case that we take notice of them only in order, so to speak, to satisfy ourselves that we have indeed "made great progress," nor that our attitude toward the works of past generations is simply: "Very interesting from the historical point of view though it may be to know what they — past and gone — had been doing, but all this has surely become 'a thing of the past' and is of no real importance for the science of our own day." Not at all! The former knowledge does enter into the very substance of present-day scientific (not just historico-scientific!) theories, and in such a way that the theoretical constructions of Galileo or Newton turn out not simply to represent the preceding stage of present-day theoretical idealizations, but — on the assumption of one or another type of extremal idealizations — to enter into the relationship of "correspondence" or "complementarity" with them. Thereby the character of the discipline of the history of science changes. From "times long since vanished," which it could describe in a somewhat detached manner, it suddenly issues forth into the present — inasmuch as it enters the very structure, the core of theoretical knowledge proper. One can see this "at work" in the writings of Niels Bohr, for example, or in Werner Heisenberg's The Part and the Whole, wherein what might
seem to be but long-bygone stages are again brought into discussion — and discussed in the theoretical-scientific, rather than historical, context. Moreover, it is not only the nearest-in-time concepts of Galileo or Newton that are discussed there, but also such "obsolete" ones as Plato's "ideas" or Aristotle's "cosmos." And these concepts of great antiquity appear to be theoretically significant today. Thus — through the recourse of theoretical-scientific thought to its very beginnings — does real dialogue set up in that sphere which Bakhtin himself regarded as definitely monologic.
There is yet another essential issue involved in, and illuminated through, the recourse of theoretical-scientific thought to its beginnings. I have been maintaining that, owing to the latter, the history of scientific knowledge enters into the very substance of contemporary scientific knowledge. Accordingly, it ceases to be of much sense to conceive of theoretical science and scientific history as merely "living next door" to one another. The central concepts of contemporary physics are connected with the restoration of those historical potentials which do not vanish, but — on the contrary — are being more deeply thought over in the context of contemporary scientific knowledge. Such concepts as the idea of extremal transition, the principle of correspondence, and the uncertainty principle reveal the necessity of conjoining the utterly differing logical intentions in the framework of contemporary knowledge. Thus, to take things beyond our above account, the discipline of the history of science not only loses the character of detached description of "things long since vanished," but becomes thoroughly dialogic.
This, then, is the point where the path outlined by Bakhtin's insights into the idea of beginning has led us finally: The history of science tarns out to be the keynote, defining component of the theoretical concept itself revealing the latter's own inherent dialogism (logical, theoretical, constructive dialogism involved, e.g., in the virtual "composition" of elementary particles . . .). Reality itself proves to be inherently dialogic.
Fourth: Another essential point to be borne in mind — inasmuch as we are concerned with comprehending the ways in which Bakhtin's thought tends toward the presently emerging novel mode of thinking and being — is his comparison of exactness [tochnost'] with depth [glubina], and further, of signification [znachenie] with meaning [smysl].13
At the core of the Cartesian reasoning prevalent in modern science is its founder's endeavor to attain certain knowledge. The famous path of doubt had finally led Descartes to arrive at something of which he could be certain — namely, the fact that he was doubting. And if he was doubting, if he was thinking, then certainly he must exist. Herein lies the Cartesian starting point for all knowledge: once arrived at the certainty of its own existence, the conscious Ego would then extend this initial certainty over "the objects of external world" by testing them through systematic doubting — that is, by reducing "external things" to what is measurable, numerable, and calculable. It is thus that it guarantees the certainty and exactness of its own thought (which is the criterion of all knowledge). To put it in scientific terminology, our knowledge would proceed through a series of tested hypotheses. In this process, the previous stages of knowledge are significant only inasmuch as by testing them we edge closer and closer to certainty. Accordingly, the Cartesian approach invites us to deal with them very easily — i.e., to generalize and condense them, and to proceed further on in the direction of increasing exactness (The standardized version might go something like this: "Galileo could only determine inertia very inexactly; Newton was able to do this more exactly; Lagrange — still more exactly; etc.").
Against this approach built upon the idea of "precisation" of knowledge, Bakhtin sets off the idea of depth and mutual understanding. (He regards it as essential for humanitarian knowledge; from our point of view, it is essential for the contemporary mode of thinking as a whole.) When we come to the deepest points of comprehension, what is required of us is not so much the mathematically expressed exactness (this task is for machines) as the possibility of mutual understanding with another theoretical conception. If you remember, I have maintained earlier that the structuralist approach provides one the freedom to disjoint texts, to cut them in this or that way, to draw one text into another by hook or by crook, and so forth. However, once it has been "uprooted" from the integral literary creation, the text is doomed to become voiceless. That is to say, it loses its own voice: from now on, it will hardly be able to answer our questions, and in no way to ask any questions of us.
The idea of depth and mutual understanding (resting on our reciprocal — as opposed to one-way — relationship with any literary creation) enables us to uncover the essential contrast between "signification" and "meaning."14 The signification (e.g., of a word) has to do with its formal definition, which may be found in the corresponding dictionary entry. But its meaning is revealed only in the light of a unique verbal event. By no accident, we contend, the notion of "event" proves to be essential for present-day physics as well: it is not "atom," but "event" that is the elementary unit. The meaning of a word (situation, event) is determined by its unique con-text. In this way, the definition of a submicroscopic particle takes into account its possible transmutations — i.e., its meaning-properties (which are actualized in the course of submicroscopic events). Future and past are here "copresent in the present."15 "This looks very much like Bakhtin's understanding of Rabelais's or Dostoevsky's novels," we shall say — immediately adding: "And this looks very much like the prime intention of contemporary physics, contemporary mathematics." Indeed, such is the prime intention of the present-day mode of understanding in general.
Fifth: The next important point to be discussed is the notion of speech genres, which (it is true) permeates into the field of contemporary science studies more and more. As a rule, however, speech genres in science are being analyzed in the spirit of ordinary literary studies. That is, the established principles of stylistic, rhetorical, sociolinguistic studies are simply being applied to scientific texts. For Bakhtin, on the other hand, the whole notion of speech genres turns upon something quite different from these established principles: what concerns him is the radical change of the very idea of the elementary word, the unit of speech. From his point of view, the latter is formed not so much in accordance with the principles of phrase or sentence construction, as in accordance with the concept of utterance [vyskazyvanie]. His conviction is that from the very beginning, before the possible listener, reader, or coauthor will have begun to speak, the word uttered (by the author) has already been constructed — from within — in response to the possible question on the part of the former. Herein is the essence of utterance as the elementary unit of any sort of speech — scientific, belletristic, etc. Once we thus understand Bakhtin's concept of utterance, various "speech genres of utterances" will obtain a quite different meaning.
More than that: if we proceed along the path blazed by Bakhtin (maybe somewhat further than Bakhtin himself explored it), we shall notice the following essential point. "Bakhtinian speech genres" emerge and undergo changes in connection with the changes in the character of those basic, culturally significant units which we may call small clusters of communication [malye gruppy obshcheniia]. The thing is that within different types of communication, in the presence of different heroes and characters of this communication, such matters as what may be passed over in silence, what must be supposed in advance, what has to be spoken of in more detail, what nuances are to be shaded, etc., are understood quite differently. The changes in types of communication do affect changes in the content of scientific thought.
In this connection, let us dwell for a moment on what was known under the name of "the republic of scientists" (or La République des Lettres) in the seventeenth century. The main features of scientists' work in those days were determined by the logic of letter — yes, of scientific and philosophical letter. Such figures as Abbé Marin Mersenne in France or Henry Oldenburg in England were acting, in their way, as organizers of this communication by letters: they sent letters to Descartes, conveying to him the questions raised by Arnauld, Gassendi, or Hobbes; tried to "play off" Leibniz against Spinoza — in order that these two start thinking "toward each other," so to speak; and so on. (Perhaps it is no mere chance that Spinoza's best literary creation is his correspondence. . . . ) It was becoming common for scientists — (a feature that goes back to Galileo) to report in their letters on those experiments they had actually performed themselves. Thereby they were beginning — unwittingly at first, and then intentionally — to orient themselves to the possibility that this or that experiment might be reproduced by someone who had not performed it yet. Accordingly, actual experimental events had to be represented on paper, rendered by means of words and drawings, and the content of these drawings had to be released from any "material" details whatsoever. This naturally led to the transformation of a real, "material" experiment into an idealized, mental experiment. What eventually sprang up was not only the cast of scientific treatise typical of modernity (i.e., designed in the form of an address to a possible correspondent from La République des Lettres), but the basic methodological principles of cognition as well. The ideas of objectivity, conclusiveness, instrumentality were shaped, or rather embodied, in this epistolary intercourse, in this "communication-without-seeing-one-another. "
A very different "pattern" may be discerned, say, in antiquity, where even theoretical discourse was based on forms set by ancient tragedy: i.e., the hero's conversation with himself and with the chorus, the covert communication of the chorus with the audience, etc. This pattern is executed both in Parmenides' poem and in Plato's dialogue, and even in the well-known letter of Archimedes to Eratosthenes (the epistolary intercourse, however, is not original here, but derivative from the tragedian mode of communication).
Until we arrive at these issues, we shall not find that which both draws us nearest to Bakhtin and . . . most removes us from him. For Bakhtin, the phenomenon of speech genre is of course essential as the point of emergence of the new type of thinking. At the same time, however, he has chosen the novelistic word as the sole culturally significant speech genre. It is into the novelistic type of dialogue that he draws all other forms of dialogue, all other forms of communication. But where, then, is the creating dialogue\tvoriashchii dialog, the newly emerging type of utterance? Close indeed though Bakhtin comes to this issue, what prevents him from considering it in real earnest is the lack of transition from consciousness to thinking in his conception, the absence of switchover to communication between different modes of reason (which is not the same as the communication between one's and another's consciousness).
In connection with this, I shall briefly explain how we see the difference between consciousness [soznanie] and thinking [myshlenie].
Consciousness, in its initial definition ("knowing-with-others"), is the reproduction in our perception, in our mind, of things' coexistence. Here is one object, there is another object, each of them is identical-with-itself, and both are regarded as perpetually coexistent. Thus, in a child's consciousness, mother is self-same — irrespective of whether she is beside, or has left and then returned in a minute (in an hour, in two weeks . . . ). Mother is in my consciousness not only when she is satisfying my immediate needs. And I exist not only in the moments of my immediate needy relation to her. In our consciousness we overstep the range of immediate satisfaction (of our needs or aspirations, such as hunger, thirst, etc.) and exist as some (ideally) perpetually coexisting figures. Mother — whether she has left and returned, or left again and even disappeared — is the same. I am conscious of her in our coexistence.
As distinct from consciousness, thinking is engaged with the possibility — not the actuality — of being: "All the same, mother has left me; all the same, I disappeared after I had left the room. . . . How indeed is this being possible at all?" In contrast to consciousness, which takes this being as actual, thinking takes it as possible — takes it at the point of its non-existence, as it were. In thinking, in other words, one is in the grip of a strange question. "Whether the thing is when it is not?" is emphatically not a vulgar question born of some sort of naive "struggle of materialism against idealism." Is there the thing when it is not? Yes, there is — prior to me, to my consciousness. But how is it possible? Thus, in my thinking I relate it to the point, so to speak, where the case would be as if it had not yet come into being. . . . Therefore, the thing in question, as it were, springs up — in my thinking — from nonbeing. Thinking always puts a thing, an event, another human being in the point of their possible nonbeing, and therefore thinks of them as occurring anew. Now, Bakhtin conceives of dialogue within the spectrum of consciousness, but he does not arrive at the idea of thinking. He does not place things — nor such "things" as this or that culture — at the point where they are thought of as emerging; at the point of the supposed absolute beginning. . . .
AA: Now is this mumbo jumbo, one may wonder, to ask of the possibility of being — i.e., of that which, by the very definition, is not "possible," but "is"? But precisely at this point the question arises: By what definition? What does it mean "to be" and not "not to be"? What is that for which "not to be" is impossible? How is it that this "that" is? And these questions are coterminous with the following one: How is thinking itself possible? This is so, because we, when attaining to the primal roots of being, are likewise arriving at the primal roots of thinking. Arriving, that is, at the point where philosophy — "first philosophy" — has dwelt since its very beginning. Strange is this abode in which there seems to be neither any definite logic of thinking nor any definite mode of being. Our thinking is here governed by a kind of nonlogic of nonbeing. . . .
VB: By nonlogic of nonbeing. This is the point. The very question of the possibility of being is already the realm of thinking. Being is here being-thought-of. But it is also here that thinking begins. Let me dwell on this essential point, because what crops up here is a certain dissension between us and Bakhtin. ... Or maybe it is not so much a dissension as the disclosure of the "points of growth" of Bakhtin's approach.
It is characteristic of Bakhtin that there are the following two limits to his understanding of dialogue. On the one hand, dialogue is eliminated from lyric poetry as entirely realizing the sole voice of this or that particular author (I easily recognize: this is Pushkin, that is Tyutchev, and another one is Rilke; but where is dialogue here?). On the other hand, dialogue (according to Bakhtin) is eliminated from philosophical discourse. However dialectical it may be, philosophy always strives for systematic, logical monism.16 And logic, by its very essence, may be but the only one. How can it be otherwise?
Thus, dialogue in Bakhtin's approach is eliminated from those very points where it emerges.
It is true that in poetry — and, most obviously, in lyric poetry — one exists in one's solitary being. The voice of verse is my voice par excellence. But it is precisely here that dialogue, however paradoxical it may seem, is most intense. It is of course easy to say: "Dialogue is where two persons are present. But what if there is only one person, quite private? Why dialogize then, and with whom? In this case, there is no need for dialogue. The poet is absolutely monological, so it seems." Actually, however, the matter is quite the reverse! It is precisely where and when one is alone, in one's inner speech, that one is genuinely dialogic — and no escape is possible from this kind of dialogue. It is here that one does not coincide with oneself, is not "self-same" but "exterior" [vnenakhodim] to oneself.17 Dialogue in this case cannot be dispensed with. I have walked away and have taken my dialogism with me. To put it another way: nowise can I escape from the "dialogic inhesion" of my consciousness, thinking, comprehension simply because my opponent has moved into another room or left for good.
The case is the same with philosophy. We hold that it is reason per se that is initially dialogic.
AA: Let me mention here Plato's well-known utterances. Thinking, he says (Timet. 190A), is "the talk which the soul has with itself about any subject which it considers"; thus (Soph. 263E), "thought and speech are the same; only the former, which is a silent inner conversation of the soul with itself, has been given the special name of thought."18 We may also recall Kant's words, which are cited by Bibler in the epigraph to his book Myshlenie kak tvorchestvo [Thinking as creating]: "To think means to speak with oneself. . ., to be able — by the agency of reproductive imagination — to inwardly hear oneself."
VB: This has to do with the elementary act of thought and inner speech. But this same applies equally to, and is even more true of, reason as a whole. An individual soul may think — that is, talk with itself — as much as it wants, but reason (thus sought for) seems to be, by its very idea, the one and only reason, so to speak. However, it is characteristic of reason per se that it — by enfolding into itself, by recurring to its beginnings — does launch into the already indomitable dialogue with itself on the ultimate questions of being. What is being elaborated most earnestly in our conception, and what is understood least easily in it, is the assertion that each culture maintains its peculiar dominant mode of comprehension, its distinctive reason; that different reasons — and not just different stages of reasoning — are possible and even logically indispensable.
Thus, for ancient reason, to comprehend a human being, a thing, or the world meant to comprehend it as something formed, beautiful, rounded — to convert chaos into cosmos and . . . again to set cosmos on the verge of chaos. This we call "the eidetical reason" (from Greek eidos, "form"). For the Middle Ages, to comprehend something certainly does not mean to "cognize" it — i.e., to have cognition of it as "it-is-in-itself." A "something" — whether this be a thing, a human being, or the world — cannot exist by itself. It only exists as an extension of a creating hand and intelligence — whether this be by the agency of a craftsman lifting a stone as a tool, or of the divine Creator creating the creation. Thus, to comprehend something is here to comprehend it in the light of the notion that it partakes of another — the higher — intelligence. To spread the idea of cognizing the essence of things by themselves to this type of comprehension would mean the distortion and restriction of the medieval "things." It is only in modernity, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on, that comprehension becomes equivalent to cognition: what the principle of inertia (or any other principle of physics, biology, sociology) aims at is precisely to reveal "the essence of the things themselves," to answer the question, "What are things in themselves, as the objects external to me — as the extended matter (res externa) apart from and irrespective of me, the thinking subject (res cogitans)?" Next, the cognition of "things' essence" proceeds to the question concerning the effect that one thing has upon another — these things, once again, viewed as thoroughly external each to each. From this follows the whole series of corollaries, of which I shall not speak here.
In connection with the above-said, it seems to me very important that, by virtue of appropriating Bakhtin's approach to the phenomenon of theoretical-scientific creation, the very notion of truth [istina] appears to be radically transformed. It is emphatically not the case that only an advance in the direction of truth is brought about by means of dialogue, while truth itself is only one, monistic, "univocal." Instead, the very entities we seek to know the truth about are dialogic with respect to themselves. Their very beginning is dialogic. An entity is initially not identical with itself, not "selfsame." And it is not only that different forms of understanding come into collision here, but also that an entity itself, in its existence, is disposed to a certain self-activity, self-change, self-determination. If Bakhtin's dialogism is understood merely heuristically — i.e., if it is considered that we only dialogize while in quest of truth which, once reached, proves to be unambiguous and indisputable — then the whole point of his thinking altogether vanishes. Because the point is not a matter of debates about truth; this is not nearly so important as the dialogic essence of the very ultimate, "atomic," indivisible truth, of the "truth-monad."19
AA: "How is that?", it is often said against us. "Don't you see that it is necessary to have some common ground, to find some common language, so to speak, in order that conversation and mutual understanding might be possible at all, lest all conversation turn into a sort of 'conversation between the deaf'?" — Surely. But a conversation becomes dialogic in Bakhtin's sense precisely when this "common ground," this basis is called into question, when it appears to be the point at issue. And it turns out then that this — allegedly self-evident — basis is precisely that which I myself have hitherto understood worst of all. At this point, the issue becomes a matter of my searching for a "common language" with myself. Thus it comes to me that "myself" is not only that of which I conceive as follows: "Is there anything that might be more close to me, more concordant with me than myself?", but also that which makes me wonder: "Is there anything more incomprehensible to me than myself?". It is only such profound puzzlement; such a state of being baffled by the nonsuperficial incomprehensibility of oneself of other entities, of being that may be the common ground of the dialogic mutual understanding.
VB: To round off all the aforesaid in the manner of "creation," let me return to the beginning. The trouble with contemporary Bakhtinian scholarship, as I see it, is that it disjoints the entirety of his thought, reducing it to the following two pieces. On the one hand, it is a commonplace to conceive of Bakhtin as the methodologist of literary or cultural studies, who has enriched these long-established fields by introducing into them new devices of analysis. In other words, he is understood in the spirit of modern scietitific thought — that is, in the spirit of the Cartesian approach to knowledge. On the other hand, Bakhtin is taken as a "normal" philosopher: "a philosophy of the act" [filosofiia postupka], ethics, religion, existentialism. ... In this vein, he is typically considered in connection with Buber — that is, as a philosopher elaborating the ideas of Buber or engaged in a sort of friendly debate with Buber. It is as though such matters as "speech," "consciousness," and so forth were merely a sort of "springboard" giving Bakhtin an impetus in leaping into the domain of the ordinary, traditionally understood, typical philosophy of the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Actually, however, Bakhtin altered not only the subject matter of philosophy, but the very mode of philosophizing as well — the very understanding of what it means to reason. Bakhtin has outlined the transition from cognizing reason to dialogic reason whose mode is mutual understanding. ... It is at this point that I wish to conclude the account of our basic presuppositions.
AA: Let me proceed by making some remarks about the above account. Vladimir Solomonovich calls our attention to the fact of Bakhtin's concentration on the novelistic word, arguing that this concentration has enabled Bakhtin to envisage the phenomenon of dialogue in its rich variety. All the same, we now see that this steadfast focusing has resulted in a certain universalizing model. Bakhtin has come to contemplate all dialogism after the model of the novelistic word, while there may be strikingly different "dialogical patterns" with regard to the assemblage of personages and their disposition (as, e.g., in ancient tragedy).
Next, Bibler indicates that Bakhtin owed his distinction among many "dialogists" to the fact that he was not "doing philosophy" in the conventional way (like Buber, for instance), but rather focusing on a very concrete subject: i.e., the phenomenon of literary creation, especially in the form of the novel — or, even more specifically, the novelistic word. This tactic, however, has somewhat limited his understanding of the phenomenon of dialogue, which serves Bakhtin badly nowadays. Why? Because it appears very easy to confine him, so to speak, within the field of literary studies. That is, to think of him as a gifted, interesting, original — but still quite traditional — literary critic; or (more imaginatively) to conceive of him as a structuralist, a semiotician. . . . Yes, Bakhtin has certainly made a name for himself in these fields by taking notice of such things as the significance of the dialogic structure of texts, the necessity of taking into account all those components of a text which determine its specific genre, etc. But his philosophical intention — and the fact that his intention was first and foremost philosophical — this remains altogether unnoticed by the great majority of his Western commentators. (And though it is noticed by Bakhtin's "fans" in Russia, the consequences are such that the less we speak of them, the better.) Yet it is only on this level that the essence of the concept of dialogue may be revealed.
VB: On this level only; and (as I have mentioned earlier) by taking into account that in the case of Bakhtin's philosophical intention we encounter, not conventional philosophizing, but a change in the type of philosophizing. . . .
AA: This is what Bakhtin's "philosophical fans" in Russia apparently fail to recognize, in their frantic endeavor to reduce him to a philosophy of the act. It is the point of their interest, which they consider as representing the philosophical aspect of his legacy.
VB: And whatever he has to say concerning speech, they take as somewhat accidental — maybe otherwise important, but philosophically of little interest.
AA: They try to explain Bakhtin's alleged "turn to the field of literary studies" by the circumstances of his life in the Soviet Union: it is because these circumstances [VB: "censorship" . . . ] had simply made it impossible for Bakhtin to devote himself to philosophy, they say, that he became engaged in literary criticism. However, to "explain" Bakhtin in this way is actually to explain him away. For, really, his engrossment in so-called literary studies is quite naturally determined by the genre of his thought, not the "circumstances of his life." His philosophical intention was not something Bakhtin once "had" and later "had not"; no, he maintained it — and it was by the necessity of his own peculiar philosophical intention that he turned his attention to matters of aesthetics, literature, speech. . . . But the fact that the fundamental meaning of his dialogism lies in the rethinking of philosophy and reasoning per se, is something that Bakhtin himself has not voiced, as it were (with the exception of some fragmentary utterances in his notes). And his followers have simply let it vanish altogether — this very horizon at which the concept of dialogue for the first time acquires its own principal meaning. Why? It seems to me that the very first theses of Bibler's account illustrate why this happens. Because what Vladimir Solomonovich shows there is this: it is only when we come to see a text as a literary creation that we may be able to speak of, or indeed enter the realm of, dialogue (in Bakhtin's sense). But the trend that prevails now is quite the reverse. It is customary today to treat of any literary creation as but a certain composition of texts. Accordingly (as may be seen, e.g., in the writings of Roland Barthes), the phenomenon of literary creation is treated as a mere epi-phenomenon: something that is to be overcome, disassembled, cut into many and many a text — generally speaking, into an infinite multitude of texts. As a matter of fact, there is no special text; in any literary creation there is only the composition, the re-com-position of different texts — overt and covert texts, and even some whose presence the author himself could never suspect. ... So let us elucidate them, "fish 'em out of the muddy waters" of a literary creation, and show this latter as their composition, why not? This is precisely the way to remove the phenomenon of dialogue in Bakhtin's sense of the word.
VB: In the opinion of those who follow this way, however, it means "to become emancipated from the tyranny of literary creation," which is "too closed unto itself."
AA: In other words, considered as monological, mono-lithic. . . . However, it is only when com-pressed within the "boiler" of a literary creation that texts may enter into dialogue, texts otherwise indifferent to each other. ... It is just as in chemistry, where those substances which, in the case of their mutual occurrence under "normal conditions” do not react with each other, must be shut together in a vessel and properly warmed up — and then they will start affecting and being affected by one another. Such is, really, the "chemistry" of literary creation . . .
In other words, it is the "vessel" of literary creation that prevents texts from breaking loose, that does not permit the unraveling of the fabric of dialogue into a mere mutual occurrence of different texts, and therefore does not let the dialogically knitted voices vanish, transformed into the objects of intertextual analysis. "Well, certainly the text is dialogic," it is often said, "because here is an allusion in it, and there is a covert quotation. Okay? Next, here is a hidden phraseological combination, and there is a parody in it. Right again?" — Begging your pardon, not at all. What the above words point to is no dialogue. What they indicate is a number of texts, but no utterances. In a certain way, these texts are interrelated, of course. But their relation to one another is a peculiar one: they are interrelated in our "roll-call." Why they come and go in relation to each other makes no difference. In other words: "Piecemeal formalization and depersonalization: all relations have logical (in the broad sense) character." — This is how Bakhtin characterizes structuralist analysis. What is the difference in him? It is this: for Bakhtin, as he tells us, it is ever the matter of "voices I hear everywhere, and the dialogical relationships between them."20 True, he too does not disregard those ways in which texts act upon each other within a literary creation, but this is not his primary concern. His primary concern is not the interaction of texts, but the controversy of voices-subjects (in that form, of course, in which this controversy is embodied in a text).
VB: The difference you speak of will be more strikingly clear if we repeat: the important point is not just the scholar's freedom regarding texts, but also the text's freedom with respect to its readers — its freedom to contain, reveal, and thrust forth new meanings. Not that the author's words have just been pronounced once and for all; in the reader, really, the author continues to speak, even to ask — so that, at certain points, it may already be we who must answer. In textual analysis, on the contrary, dialogue fades away and a one-way relationship between the researcher (experimentalist, theoretician) and the object of research sets in. The subject, the author vanishes from literary creation that has been disassembled into texts...
AA: This is a familiar viewpoint, indeed: " There are no authors, only innumerable texts that are being shuffled in innumerable ways — like an immense pack of cards." It may be right, but Bakhtin and dialogue have nothing to do with this "game." When playing it, we keep within the bounds of Modern European scientific cognizing, investigatory reason, where the dialogic nature of truth remains utterly concealed in the standpoint of a scientist-investigator before the face of a single silent nature, the object of analysis. However intertextually the text may be treated, whatever innumerable contexts we may plunge it into, it still remains the object of investigation — the "textual nature," so to speak.
What happens with this Modern European reason in the twentieth century is that it constantly runs up against its own bounds. On the one hand, these bounds are perceived as the limits of reason in general, and the whole situation, therefore, as its "rack and ruin." Rarely is it realized that the discovery of the limits of reason is, at the same time, the discovery of its intrinsic definiteness [opredelionnost'] — that is, a thoroughly reasonable discovery — that reason is not abolished at these limits, but is more deeply understood and transformed. But let me leave it at that and turn to the other side of the contemporary situation.
Here, on the other hand, the picture looks quite different. Never before, it seems, has scientific rationalism celebrated such triumphs as it does in the twentieth century. Systems analysis, structuralism, semiotics . . . There is no antiquity, no culture, no mystical sphere that these disciplines would not undertake to investigate scientifically, fully armed with the most rationalistic, well-nigh laboratorial, expertise. The borderline between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften, which the neo-Kantians had been cudgeling their brains over, now seems to be altogether effaced. All this has become possible at the price of giving up the "unjustifiable pretensions" of reason plus striving for the total methodologization of thinking.
Reason cannot — and should not — embrace being. This we have already understood. (That was no more than a romantic dream of "fuzzy-headed idealists.") Now, what is rational? — Well, science is rational — because it always limits the conditions of veracity of its knowledge, because science is only method. It may not interest me how the scientific method corresponds with the "thing-in-itself," whether this be the research subject or the reasoning and comprehending subject itself. We dwell in the world of signs, codes, language games. . . .
Accordingly, the opinion of Bakhtin prevalent in the quarters of contemporary humanistic science is that he is one more methodologist. Dialogue is an element of literary construction, that's all. What has it to do with philosophy, and even more, with ontology? And such a view is actually in accord with the fact that Bakhtin confined his understanding of "dialogism" within the realm of novel, the novelistic word, having sharply separated this sphere from lyrics and philosophy. Vladimir Solomonovich maintains that it is Bakhtin's focusing upon the word that uncovers the possibility of radical — that is, philosophical — reconsideration of the very notion of thinking. But as for Bakhtin himself, it is precisely philosophy proper that he chose to take out of the sphere of dialogical being.
Be that as it may, for all the lack of unfolding of philosophical thinking proper in Bakhtin's case, there has been no trace of a "methodological attitude" in him. The foci of his thinking are genuinely philosophical: personality, meaning, culture, world, being. It is precisely these notions that make up the perspective, the horizon, the regulative principles of his philological and literary studies. Insofar as we neglect them, it is not possible to comprehend Bakhtinian "utterance"; and it is not possible to arrive at them, bypassing "utterance." .. .
The methodological attitude has nothing in common with this. Its emancipation, its boundless breadth, its indifference to the sphere of application are bought at the price of deliberately renouncing any sort of perplexity with the subject in question. . . .
VB: Incidentally, this is just what is being almost grotesquely, albeit most consistently, elaborated in the circle of G.P. Shchedrovitskii (another hero in the history of our "back-street philosophy"). He straightforwardly contends that contemporary methodology suffers from its being too much tied to (1) the subject of research, and (2) the subject pursuing this research. Method must be set free from both. A graduate of the "methodological school" must be able — with equal ease — to work in the field of linguistics, or psychology, or physics, or engineering, or administration. Method is essentially the same. . ..
Now, your account of "methodologization" also allows us to turn to the following issue. When it is argued that dialogue is important in order that we may eventually arrive at truth, that it is even impossible to arrive at truth without dialogue, but that, once we have come to know that truth, dialogue ends — then, once again, we hear the same "voice of methodologism." The case is that truth itself, in its uttermost, indivisible, "atomic" kernel, is dialogue . . .
AA: . . . This is, really, the most important thing — "the last thing," indeed. . . .
VB: Let me repeat: truth is dialogic with respect to itself. The notion of dialogism bears on entities, being, ontology — not only on heuristics and the methodology of our quest for the raottological truth. Should we say that, without having made this completion, one will not really have discovered Bakhtin? Because Bakhtin was not fighting his foremost action just against the monological method of analysis. To think so is to reduce his intention to a commonplace: "It is of course necessary that the researcher's thinking become excited in all its dialogic polyphony; thus, for example, had there been no debate between Bohr and Einstein, we would not have arrived at the truth." — "But, you see," Bohr himself might have replied to this, "it is the complementarity principle that appears to be intrinsically dialogic; truth itself is intrinsically dialogic." Yes, it is — in the essence of the matter, not in virtue of the method of our quest for it. In this connection, we may imagine Bakhtin's words (which Akhutin recited here) continued as follows: " . . . voices I hear everywhere, and the dialogical relationships between them. The complementarity principle I also perceive dialogically."
AA: In the "Notes of 1970-71," Bakhtin takes heed of the standpoint of "the experimenter and the observer in quantum theory."21 He finds here a corroboration of his favorite idea that reality itself changes when being comprehended or when answering our questions; that the real observer is involved in the reality observed — by no means the passive spectator, the real observer is a participant in the "event of being" [sobytie bytiia].22 There is no meta-standpoint, no meta-language: "meta" is being revealed only as the "actual meaning" [aktual'nyi smysl] — that is, as the open-ended theme in the onto-logical dialogue of reason with itself.
After we have made this discovery, even in Kant shall we hear: reason, striving to complete the a priori framework of experience, problematically extends it and enters into contention with itself. But it is only here, focusing on the problem of the unconditional, on the ideas of reason, that reason becomes itself for the first time. It is here that "methodology" and "epistemology" end and philosophy begins. The Critique of Pure Reason is a philosophical creation — not "teaching," or "doctrine," or "system," or anything else "according to Kant" — because to comprehend it means to plunge into this contention of reason with itself, to continue it, to include new "plaintiffs" and "defendants" in it. This would be the Bakhtinian reading of The Critique — in other words, the reading of it as a philosophical creation.
The point is that any creation contains the creating principle. It is not so much created by the author as it creates the author — and, accordingly, the coauthor. To conceive it is not to extract information (knowledge, conception) from it, but to become shaped (= conceived) in one's own capacity as author. It is by this trait that we may distinguish a creation from other texts.
Does this apply to science? — Surely. Thus, Galileo's Dialogues do not so much narrate experimental physics and mechanics as they create, produce — in the fully Socratic manner — the experimenter and the theoretician, the new scientist. This same trait distinguishes Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Heisenberg's Physical Principles of Quantum Theory, and even Einstein's short article, "Toward the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies." Notwithstanding that the subsequent development of theoretical thought is supposed to have erased all their traces (from the present-day picture), these creations still remain in the capacity of indispensable sources of understanding. For some reason or other, they cannot be abridged, rewritten, done anew, or formalized. Each of them is meaningful only in that integral form into which it was originally moulded. That which has found its expression in them, can be expressed only thuswise. When we say that in such works thought betakes itself to its beginning, it means that this beginning is actually contained within them. It is by reading such texts that we may first begin understanding. Their order makes us think, transforms our intellectual imagination, enables us to see anew the world, the subject, the problem. The successful reader does not acquire knowledge, but becomes — comes-into-being as — a "Copernican," a "Newtonian," a "relativity theorist," or a "quantum physicist''
DA: Could you please elaborate on this a bit? — I mean, what distinguishes these treatises-creations from ordinary scientific works?
AA: Well, let me begin, then, with a little anecdotal story. It goes back to the days when I was studying in the upper grades of the
Chemical Faculty at Moscow State University, to 1961 perhaps. The "dose" of physics we were given at the Chemical Faculty was rather reduced. And rather oddly reduced, too: thus, quantum mechanics was considered as necessary for chemists-to-be; relativity theory, on the other hand, was excluded from our courses in physics as unnecessary. This being so, I decided to study it by myself. Having heard plenty of horror stories about the abstruseness of relativity theory, I felt awe-struck and unprepared for the "face-to-face encounter" with it. So I began by reading "introductory stuff" of every sort and kind, popular or specialized, all of which had been produced by other authors. Well, I could not understand anything at all! While on the point of concluding that, as chemist, I was simply doomed to fall short of comprehending this kind of wisdom, I came upon the collection of classical articles by Minkowski, Lorentz, Poincare, and Einstein, entitled The Principle of Relativity. And that was it: everything became clear to me from the very first words! The definitive point was Einstein's article (published elsewhere) "Toward the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" (1905), with which relativity theory, in fact, had begun. What Einstein suggested there was not just another physical theory; properly speaking, he was conveying to the reader the very "organ" whereby to comprehend it, the "pattern of relativity thinking." This quality is peculiar to Einstein's writings in particular, but it is also characteristic of primary sources (= beginnings) in general. In other words: It is the account of a theory coupled with the means of understanding it, together with the mode of thinking that allows such understanding, that characterizes a theoretical-scientific creation. Popularizers actually move in the opposite direction, trying to "explain" the problem by having so "chewed it over" that it might become "swallowable" for allegedly conventional thinking.
At this point we may see what makes relativity theory "unswallowable," as it were, for the would-be conventional frame of mind. It is first and foremost this: the beginning of relativity theory, the source from which it springs, is not the constancy of the speed of light at all, nor those amusing experiments with trains, nor even the classical Michelson-Morley experiments. Its beginning lies in grasping the fundamental violation of the universal principle, Galileo's principle of relativity, in electrodynamics. The fundamental principle had to be transformed; and this was the same as transforming the whole picture of the world, the whole system of theoretical imagination, the very schematism of thinking, and even (albeit this point, perhaps, has more to do with quantum mechanics) the very conception of theoretical knowledge.
What do I want to say? "Toward the Electrodynamics ..." is a normal, ordinary article, published in Antialen der Physik among other scientific articles. At the same time, it is a singular, unique creation, inexhaustible in its capacity as source. The statement of the problem is here coupled with the "stating" of thinking, viz. "relativity thinking." And this is characteristic of other principal works of Einstein as well. Despite the risk of provoking caustic objections, let me say: relativity theory is exclusively Einstein's theory. Yes, while being "general," this theory is at the same time exclusively Einstein's, because it is in the deepest way bound up with the peculiar cast of Einstein's mind. By saying so I do not want to claim that relativity theory is Einstein's subjective viewpoint. What I do want to claim is that even the objective content of theoretical thinking has its beginning and finds its completion in the mind, in the subject (of course in the logical, not psychological, subject). Further, this means that I can only understand a theory by having adopted this "subject-bound" (not subjective!) character of thinking, by having started with the fundamental principle, with the beginning. Now, other "minds," other "ways of thinking" are also co-present in this beginning. This is not to say that different theories meet here; this is to say that here different minds encounter one another: the "Newton-minded thinking," the "Lorentz-minded," the "Einstein-minded," the "Bohr-minded," etc. That is why we encounter here, not the usual sort of scientific polemics over current issues, but a profound logical dialogue on principles. One example of such dialogue is the famous debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein, where the real issues were not certain facts and problems, but the principles of theoretical knowledge, the ideal of this knowledge. This — philosophical — turn of thought was typical of the founders of contemporary theoretical physics. It was typical, for example, of Einstein, through the whole of whose writings vibrates this concentration of thought upon fundamental questions. Having published another dozen articles in an "offhand manner," he would return again and again to the first, initial, primary question: What do motion, space, time mean? What does spatiality per se mean? (Not "how is space?" — whether it be curved or not — but "what is space, space-time, the world?") What does it mean to "know" what the "completeness of theoretical description" stands for?
The second example: Heisenberg's Physical Principles of Quantum Theory. This volume is constructed neither as the statement of Heisenberg's theory nor as a textbook. The authorial character of this creation is less pronounced than in our first example, but other features distinguishing the phenomenon of creation are quite manifest. It is a remarkable introduction (in the literal sense) into quantum physics, acting most of all so as to introduce — almost to draw — the reader into the quantum-mechanical frame of thinking. The book is constructed as a kind of trap — designed, as it were, to baffle the reader by its very structure. And nothing is left for the reader but to become fundamentally baffled, because to understand it is precisely to become so baffled and thereby to see all the strangeness of quantum reality through this "magic crystal." The structure of the book is as follows: its first part is exclusively experimental; the second part, purely mathematical. Such a curious complementarity: here you have the experiments in which the phenomena under discussion are actually disclosed, and there you have the mathematical technique that correctly describes these phenomena. The two parts are strictly separated from each other; though it would seem natural to have rendered the result of a certain experiment together with its mathematical description, they do not intermingle. What Heisenberg presents is sheer laboratory on the one hand, and pure abstract theory on the other. What is so provocatively lacking in this scheme? What, in other words, is that whose very absence provokes the reader to a synthesizing participation? — It is this: interpretation, understanding. The mathematical formalism, sealed off from the laboratory realm, does not appear as interpretation. Indeed: this formalism itself requires interpretation, as well as the experimental results. The almost Bohrian complementarity between the two, in its appropriate way, sets a certain "arrow of understanding" — namely, the question: in what way do these parts correlate with each other; to what sort of understanding do they induce thinking? It is precisely this induction that initiates and engenders quantum-mechanical thinking proper. These two "apparatus" — experimental and mathematical — only induce one's thought, baffle it by the fundamental question, concentrate it upon the very notion of understanding as well as the subject of understanding: what is reality; what does "elementariness" stand for?
Thus, by virtue of its very composition, a theoretical-scientific creation constructs the new way of understanding — it does not take some sort of understanding for granted, as ready-at-hand. It betakes thought to the point where both thinking and understanding have perpetually to start. No wonder, therefore, that at this point Heisenberg meets with Plato and Aristotle, neither of whom, as it turns out, has passed away or disappeared. Rather, they even now take part on equal terms with present-day thinkers in solving the fundamental, perennial questions: what the deuce is being, reality, space-time. . .?
Thus we have discerned the presence of philosophy in theoretical-scientific creations. Let us now turn to another element whose presence can be discerned in them, viz., the element of poetry. No wonder again, since we treat the phenomenon of literary creation as the focus of culture, whatever special field it may pertain to. To develop this theme, Werner Heisenberg once more appears to be our useful guide: after all, it was he who, when speaking of genuine thinkers, used to call them the poets. In his view, Plato, of course, and even Kant were poets; and — however strange this may sound — Wittgenstein was, too. Also, we may recall here a conversation between Heisenberg and Paul Dirac, who told him that Bohr should have been a poet: "He [Bohr] takes too much care of the language," explained Dirac, "always cultivates it. . . . "23 What, in fact, is meant here? Of course, the point is not that Bohr, like any scientist, cultivated his language in order to express himself clearly; for a physicist and mathematician this is not the task to rack one's brains over. Something else, then, is meant. Probably this: what distinguishes Bohr's language is an uncommon, not immediately noticeable, complicatedness. Bohr seeks to construct a sentence in such a way that it may not lose the enigma of "complementarity," in order that it may be filled with the initial complementarity — even when he does not speak of this principle in particular. It is unbearable for Bohr to utter a "flat," "one-dimensional," unambiguous assertion — reporting, describing, informing. By every word he strives to re-create the enigma of understanding, to disclose its innate, specifically theoretical (not novelistic!) dialogism.24 It is here that Bohr's poetics, his poesy, lies. And it is precisely in this sense that Heisenberg refers to the poetical element in theoretical thinking. This understanding is best conveyed by the following lines of Schiller's poem "The Saying of Confucius," which Bohr was so fond of: "Only the fullness leads to clarity, / and in the abyss truth abides."25
DA: It may be well to recall here that Bohr was reputed to have been tongue-tied. This is precisely the "poetical tongue-tie" that occurs when one cannot speak smoothly because one's ear is of just such a kind to be filled with consonances, diverse meanings that call to one another, and ringing images. Nothing else is left, but to talk in verse. Bohr's tongue-tie was of that nature. He was not able to express himself with the clarity, smoothness, and unambiguity peculiar to positivistic scientists — he was not able to traffic in platitudes. His thought was filled with multiple meanings, uncommon insights . . .; in a word, it was multi-voiced.
AA: Well, maybe what we mean by the phenomenon of (literary) creation has now become more tangible, and it is now easier to see how such creations are possible in science, even in theoretical physics. If I am correct, there are at least three traits that may be indicated as distinguishing a theoretical-scientific creation. First: it is constructed in such a way that it does not so much inform of results as form thinking — and it does so by creating the corresponding organ of thought, the organ whereby thought may respond to a novel reality. It is this organic construction that does not allow the dissection of such a creation into separate pieces, textual fragments, quotations, etc. Second: it is marked by the identity of what it says and how it says this — in other words, by its "subject-bound," authorial character. (Once again: to understand relativity theory means to learn to think like Einstein.) Third: as the Greeks would have put it, such a creation is constructed "epistrophically" (strophe = "turning"), which means that it betakes, or refers thought to the beginning, to the source. Everything that is deduced in such a creation serves the purpose of inducing thought to that from which it is deduced. Such a creation is the unfolded speech about the beginning of speech. Results — experimental, theorematic — interest the author inasmuch as they compel one to question the very conditionality of the experimental conditions and the grounds of conclusions. In such creation, there are no results that would be of significance out of context. Viewed out of context, the results obtained by Lorentz were taken at first to be identical with Einstein's, although they belonged to a different theoretical world from the very beginning.
VB: Returning to Bakhtin at this point, we may note, however, that if he had started by studying these — scientific — creations, he would not have arrived at those very views which we now find so important for understanding them. This is so because the features indicated here as distinguishing them qua creations — particularly their inner dialogism — are most strongly pronounced in belletristic creations and there reveal themselves to the philologist's eye in the first place.
AA: Yes; and it is of course very important to emphasize that we can now discern all these traits in theoretical-scientific creations (especially if what I have outlined here is at least partly sound) only because Bakhtin has already accomplished the basic work. Yes, only because Bakhtin's creations have attuned our thought appropriately...
VB: Thus, that Bakhtin was a philologist proved to be the impulse for change in the type of thinking.
AA: Allow me to note, however, that Bibler — who was and continues to be a philosopher — somehow managed to detect the "dialogical core" of thinking without becoming a philologist and even before having come to know Bakhtin's writings. I remember discussing even the phenomenon of artistic creation at our seminars before we read Bakhtin. . . .
VB: Well, if you have touched this theme, let me indicate two points that 1 consider as essential for having riveted my attention to such phenomena as artistic creation. First, there was a certain breaking away from that classical tradition of philosophical thought which still determined the character of Russian "silver age" philosophy, despite all its novelties. In my case, it occurred through the immanent criticism and overstepping the limits of Hegel's logic (incidentally, this was not a path that Bakhtin — never tempted to the latter — could have taken). Second, in my own development this breaking away was also bound up with the passion I had in my youth for the writings of the Formalist school in literary criticism (in particular, those of Yuri Tynyanov and Victor Shklovsky). Of course, these authors were Bakhtin's opponents; the important thing, however, is that in my own philosophical journey as well, the encounter with the realm of the artistic word proved to be profoundly significant. . ..
DA: Now, if I have rightly understood you, the fact that Bakhtin concentrated his attention upon creations of a purely literary kind, especially upon the novel — the fact that he was a philologist of the novel, so to say, turned out both to help him in reorienting thought to dialogue and at the same time to hinder him from doing so. After all, wasn't it this concentration that led Bakhtin to remove philosophy together with lyrics, and science all the more, from the dialogic sphere?
AA: It was not only in this respect that it hindered him: in a way, the novel set its seal on all his culturological studies. For example, when addressing himself to historical poetics, whatever genres he takes as dialogical (e.g., Socratic dialogue or Menippean satire, or the carnival folklore), Bakhtin considers to be the roots of the novelistic genre.26 However, both in antiquity and in the Middle Ages we encounter dialogism of quite a different type — not the novelistic, but, say, the "tragedian" or the "disputational," respectively.
DA: But how does it happen that Bakhtin, otherwise so perceptive in his understanding of dialogism, does not hear these specific voices, does not attend to these specific forms, these different cultural genres of dialogue? Why, indeed, does he have to do violence, so to speak, to these diverse manifestations by hunting out certain "germs" of what is close to him in them? Wherefore this narrowness?
VB: For two reasons at least, I think. First: As I have already said, dialogue in his view is — in a strictly conceptual way — confined to that part of the "spectrum of verbal art" which does not stretch to lyrics on the one hand, and to philosophical-logical discourse on the other. That is, dialogue does not stretch precisely to those spheres where the very source of dialogism is most manifest. Bakhtin assumes — in accordance with the classical, traditional standpoint — that logic is single. In his view, there is, of course, many a consciousness; their plurality is even indispensable; logic, however, is only one — it is mono-logic "once and for all." By virtue of this conception, Bakhtin's dialogue may not arrive at the level of the dialogue of logics, the dialogue of reasons. Bakhtin's dialogue is, indeed, limited — inasmuch as he does not drive it to the idea of philosophical recurrence to the beginning of thought, to the point of the poetical birth of thinking from consciousness. . . .
AA: . . . His dialogue is not primal, not focalized at the beginning of speech, thought, being . . .
VB:... It is not primal. That is why he is not able to see the radical peculiarity of ancient dialogue, to hear its specific voices. Because this latter is simply subordinate to another logic. For Bakhtin, however, it is no more than another consciousness, engaged a priori in the regime of the novelistic word. One consciousness is Raskolnikov's; another is Svidrigailov's; and the next one is . . . Socrates' or Parmenides', viz., Socrates and Parmenides qua participants in the novelistic, Modern European dialogue. This is the first reason why Bakhtin cannot treat ancient thinking and ancient culture (understood as a form of being) as an altogether different realm of being and thinking, in which there is not and cannot be the novelistic word in Bakhtin's sense.
The second aspect of the matter, which I think is essential with regard to your question, is the rather peculiar character of Bakhtin's own development. It is as if it had once broken off, and by this I do not mean the natural end of any development. What I mean is as follows. In "Author and Hero," which dates back to the 1920s, it is first and foremost eyesight [zrenie] that Bakhtin regards as the theoretical basis of consciousness; hence, the visible hero [vidimyi geroi]. It is in this capacity that the latter is thought of as exterior [vne-nakhodimyi], existing outside me. And this, in fact, means that dialogue qua inner dialogue is impossible to comprehend. However, "seeing oneself" is emphatically not the fundamental determination of consciousness. By eyesight I see the outer; and dialogue with the visage reflected in a mirror would be a peculiar sort of narcissism, i.e., an extremely degenerated dialogue. Now, it is only in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1963) that Bakhtin comes to decide in favor of hearing [slukh] and, accordingly, speech [rech']. Here is the root of both consciousness and thinking. For it is speech, viz., speech hearing and listening to itself, wherein — as the philosopher whom Akhutin is so fond of [= Heidegger] would have put it — a human being occurs in its "Being towards this Being."27 I always hear myself. It is not that I can only speak when addressing someone. Inasmuch as I always hear myself (by the "inner" or the ''outer ear"), I am engaged in this inner dialogue once and for all. Here the very meaning of dialogue shifts into a different focus. However, it is only in Bakhtin's last writings that all this was made manifest. This dialectic of relationships between macro- and micro-dialogue he always broke off on the threshold of turning to inner dialogue qua the dialogue poetical (i.e., inner dialogue revealed in outer speech). And since Bakhtin rejected this — poetical — dialogue, the relationships between inner and outer dialogue were not cleared up. This is why, in particular, he was never able to take the ancient dialogue — subordinate to an utterly different type of inner speech — in earnest.
Of course, what I have said here is to be taken cum grano salis, "with a grain of salt": may other scholars have a feeling for, and an acquaintance with, antiquity as good as Bakhtin's! Nevertheless, in order to comprehend antiquity — and not just to feel it — it was always necessary for Bakhtin to take it, so to speak, through the "needle's eye" of the novelistic word. But the novel and the novelistic word are bound up with a certain type of human personality, with a certain type of social gathering. In the novel, according to Bakhtin, different "dialects," "discourses," speech characteristics — already present, socially determined, psychologically typified — are gathered together into the indissoluble fabric of literary creation. In the novel they are brought together into dialogue whereby this social and psychological predeterminateness is overcome. In the novel there occurs the "alchemical transformation" of types into persons, of ideologies into ideas, etc. Nonetheless, these dialects are first in a certain social reality, in the reality of this civilization, in this historical situation; and only then are they, artistically transfigured, brought into the laboratory of the novel. It is plain that nothing of this holds for antiquity: the civilization is different, the societal mode of life is different, and its artistic transfiguring is different too . ..
AA: . . . and the ideas are different; even that which is given the name of "idea," is different. If Bakhtin, when speaking of persons-ideologists (Dostoevsky's heroes) and of ideas, had taken into account that (1) the subject considered is philosophy after all, and (2) that, in Plato's case, for example, "ideas" stand for something quite different from (if not opposite to) what, Kant or Hegel say, understand them to be, then, perhaps, he would have made discoveries of his own in the realm of poetics as well.
DA: Now I would like you to discuss at greater length a topic that you have touched on various occasions here and that finally seems to shift into the foreground. Let me call it the notion (or maybe the image) of the "dialogic micro-community." In present-day history of science, as you know, sociological analysis is hardly the most widespread approach. Yet, the relationships between traditional macrosociology, the sociology of scientific communities, the sociology of small groups, and, finally, the sociology of knowledge (or "internal sociology," so to speak) are far from being clarified. Inasmuch as dialogue represents, as it were, the "micro-particle of sociality," perhaps your approach, or maybe Bakhtin's own vision, could contribute to the clarification of these complex issues. In particular, I think it very important to clarify the differences in the very structure of group — and dialogic — relationships between one culture and another, in diverse historical situations.
AA: What we consider to be most important here — contrary to traditional sociologism, as well as to the vulgar sociologism of our "old fellow Marxism" — is that transfiguration of the societal reality (viz. social functions, roles, institutions, etc.) which occurs when we shift from abstract sociology to the concrete sociology of communities and groups; further, to the inner community [vnutrennii sotsium] of creative work; and eventually, to the dialogical community of an individual mind (even if this be the mind of an "asocial" lyricist). It is precisely the "multi-stage-ness," the heterogeneity of these communities, as though enclosed in one another, this inner stratification that creates the world of living civilization, wherein the direct social determinatives are being variously deflected and transformed, and may even collapse altogether, ousted by the "determination from within" (i.e., from a person's inner community, so to speak).
The phenomenon of the inner community is given detailed consideration in the fourth chapter of Bibler's book Ot naukoucheniia k logike kultury [From Wissenschaftslehre to the logic of culture], exemplified there by the shaping of the seventeenth-century scientist type — in particular, by the way in which the inner dialogue of the latter's mind is organized. In the above discussion, we have briefly mentioned the community of "the republic of scientists" (or La République des Lettres) in the seventeenth century. Let me now make some additional comments. First, this "republic" was not merely inserted, in a certain way, into the "given" network of social relations at that time. Its community was, as it were, the live project of the new society: the one deeply, albeit covertly, opposed, say, to the community of university scholarship — and, therefore, to the overall societal structure to which the university structure, rooted in the Middle Ages, entirely corresponded. In fact, this "republic" involved not only the new attitude toward such matters as scholarship and knowledge, but also the new type of relationships with colleagues, as well as with engineers, merchants, financiers, etc.
Another, perhaps even more surprising, aspect can be discerned if we turn to the mind's inner community, to that wise-dom, or "house of wit" [palata uma] which is given particular attention in the aforementioned chapter of Bibler's book. If you remember, in his above account of the seventeenth-century "republic of scientists" Bibler underscored the role of epistolary intercourse between those earlier scholars in shaping the principal idealizations, experimental schemes, and ideas such as those of objectivity, conclusiveness, instrumentality, etc. A letter in that case was a means of "objectifying," of pushing one's thought away from oneself. On the other hand, in the pages of his Ot naukoucheniia . . ., Bibler, attending to Galileo's Dialogues, inquires into the intellectual characters of their personages: Simplicio, an empiric and an authoritarian-minded peripatetic; Sagredo, disposed for reckoning and at the same time endowed with quick mathematical intuition; Salviati, the synthetic-philosophical mind, playing the role of Socratic intermediary. Further, he shows how these personages come into the interior of the scientific mind and become its faculties: authoritarian empiricism, reckoning, intuition, reason . . . Significantly, these different faculties are not simply collaborating with one another. The controversy of Galileo's Dialogues continues — no longer between personages, but already between these "faculties" — a controversy in which one of them easily prevails, however. Thus diverse types of the classical science practitioners emerge, such as "mathematician," "experimentalist," "visionary-intuitivist," "philosopher." Epistolary intercourse is drawn into dialogue; dialogue is interiorized into one's mind, into the laboratory of one's mind; and this laboratory finds its embodiment in a real scientific laboratory, in an institute's department, in a series of articles, and so forth. One can trace these successive formations and transformations through the history of the Royal Society of London or the French Académie des Sciences. . ..
VB: Let me emphasize once again the importance of taking heed of the fact that an individual, solitary mind of a theoretician has this dialogic — and, in this sense, social — interior. I can illustrate this by permitting myself the following pun: a theoretician's family living is living "five-me-ly." ...28
AA: If we lose this "family/five-me-ly" amid scientific institutions; if we forget that the structure of scientific knowledge includes a certain mode of communication, the projection of a certain addressee; if we neglect the complicated relationships between the "community" of a scientific mind and the scientific community, we will be doomed to wander between the mysterious "psychology of scientific creativity," the formal "logic of scientific language," and the external "sociology of science." The vexations that this sort of mishmash may cause were revealed in full measure in the commotion over Thomas Kuhn's "paradigm."
The study of Galileo's Dialogues or the correspondence between seventeenth-century scholars makes it possible to notice the combination of these two types of dialogue (epistolary and inner) even in those cases where no evidence of "letters," or of "dialogues," seems to have remained. Thus, what is taken to be the final text, viz., a scientific treatise or an article — the form, it might seem, from which the dialogic origin of scientific knowledge should be erased altogether — actually maintains, albeit in the extreme, the claims of that "age-old" scholarly correspondence: i.e., that the knowledge communicated should be separated from the author's subjectivity; that it should be rendered conveyable to a perfect stranger, as it were; and that it should be imparted to the latter not on the author's behalf, but as if on behalf of nature itself. Experiments should be reproducible irrespective of their author; assertions should be proved. It is no mere coincidence that, by the nineteenth century, formal logic already awakens from its agelong somnolence and begins developing together with mathematics. What this points to is not just the logical shaping of knowledge, but inquiry into the shape itself. Modern mathematical logic continues investigative thought proper, methodically pursuing all sorts of "illegal" intuitions, insinuations, psychological cogencies, and evidences. While "proving" continues to be a matter of speech, it is now speech directed toward a perfect stranger, an absolute other. And the discipline of logic is precisely the inquiry into this absoluteness. "One of the chief merits of proving," remarked Bertrand Russell, "is that it suggests a certain skepticism with respect to the proved result."29 Thus, it is the author, the author's innermost subjectivity, that is above all pursued in the course of this logical investigation.
Such is one tendency — the tendency leading from the seventeenth to the twentieth century toward the formation of what is called classical science. However, present-day science — with the paradoxes of mathematics and theoretical physics — manifestly bends backward to the beginnings. Beneath the plane of "objective significations," there occurs the sphere of ontological meanings. The "house of wit" becomes the main personage once again. It appears that such things as correspondence, archives, and so forth — in other words, what is generally considered as the "rough state" of scientists' work — are far from being of only historical significance. All such things prove extremely important for understanding the very essence of the matter, allegedly expressed "in full" in scientific publications. Moreover: such things as protocols of laboratory studies and even records of seemingly idle talks at table d'hote gatherings may also prove to be essential.
In the foreword to his book Der Teil und das Ganze [The part and the whole], supplied with the positively Galilean subtitle Gesprache im Umkreis der Atomphysik [Conversations around atomic physics], Werner Heisenberg writes: "The natural sciences rely upon experiments, they arrive at their results through the conversations of people engaged in these experiments and taking counsel with one another about interpreting them. It is such conversations that make up the main contents of the book. By their example, it should be made clear that science originates in dialogue." It is precisely the dialogue, the conversation that is regarded here as the location of the whole of reflected knowledge. As a result, the scientific article is only one part of the overall form of knowledge. In other words, what the classical scientist had regarded as interior, laboratory, conversations, no trace of which should remain in the final text, now lays its claim to be expressed as the final, the whole. The whole knowledge is, not the law of the uniform acceleration of falling bodies on the earth's surface, elicited from the flow of Galileo's periscientific chatter, but — strange though it may seem — this very "chatter" itself, because it is the latter that reveals the logical, philosophical, aesthetic, even ethical (remember Spinoza's "Ethics") — in a word, the whole — meaning of this "meager" knowledge.
However, when we enter the contemporary theoretician's "family," "house of wit," or, simply speaking, creative community, we notice that, in comparison with the seventeenth century, the roles, types, "wits" there have essentially changed. If you remember, I have earlier referred to Bibler's account of the seventeenth-century "house of wit," with its reckoning, intuitive, empirical-authoritarian "wits" or frames of mind. Now let us turn, say, to the famous Copenhagen "family." We find there, for example, the formal, mathematical frame of mind, deliberately eschewing from intuitions into physics. Having passed through the school of such thinking under Max Born's guidance in Gottingen, Heisenberg managed to produce the mathematical apparatus of his "matrix mechanics," initially ignorant of what, in fact, he was describing. Next, we see a mind capable of very precise and subtle criticism of whatever ideas are suggested — the mind-critic, as if paralyzing itself. This is Paul Ehrenfest. And who knows what role this critical faculty played in his tragic fate? Another one is Wolfgang Pauli, Heisenberg's closest friend and the nagging critic of his theoretical constructions. But his is a different kind of criticism than Ehrenfest's. In Pauli's view, mere mathematical constructivism was far from being sufficient for the understanding of what it nominally referred to; hence, his judgment of Heisenberg's frame of mind (as expressed in the first fundamental works of the latter) as un-philosophiseh, "unphilosophical." As for Heisenberg himself, at one time (viz., before he began to work in close collaboration with Bohr in 1924) he held to the positivistic rule: "Everything is OK, if the theory is mathematically beautiful and allows one to calculate the results of experiments." On the other hand, since his first encounter with Plato's Timaeus in his school years, he had been thrilled with the paradoxical mystery of the very idea of the atom, the indivisible: if the "material," by definition, is divisible, then the indivisible must be, in a sense, "immaterial." How is it possible? What are Plato's atom-forms? This is, in fact, the keynote logico-philosophical question of all his theoretical physics. In the theory of fundamental generating symmetries Heisenberg saw but the modern, mathematically accurate and physically thought-out solution of the ancient problem of atomism (in particular, of Plato's conception of the atom-form). Getting to know Niels Bohr, which Heisenberg regarded as the "gift from heaven," induced him to think "philosophically." Not for nothing was Bohr referred to as "the philosopher" among the members of the Copenhagen circle. . . .
VB: ... At this point, venturing to draw a parallel between Bohr and Salviati from Galileo's Dialogues, it may be said that Bohr is precisely the Salviati of contemporary physics. While his colleagues were all striving to solve the next problem in turn, to develop mathematical apparatus, etc., Bohr always stopped at the "point of comprehension" per se. The question, "What does it mean 'to comprehend'?" — as a matter of fact, a forbidden, if not absurd, question for a physicist — may be considered Bohr's main contribution to the Copenhagen circle. Whenever it seemed that everything was clear and it was possible to proceed onwards, Bohr would stop: "It is not °nly incomprehensible; it may not even be understood what, in fact, you call 'comprehension,' what you mean by this."
AA: All of them recurred to this question from time to time. . . .
VB:. . . But it was Bohr who did it first and foremost. . . .
AA:... It was precisely the special significance of their circle — by the way, an aspect well-nigh forgotten nowadays — that, among other things, they were good at profound noncomprehending, capable of Socratic understanding that there is, in fact, nothing of which they could earnestly claim to have arrived at complete understanding. This being so, it should be noted that, for the different members of the circle, the word "incomprehensible" meant different things. Thus, one of them would say: "Incomprehensible is that which is mathematically negligent and uncomely. It is all well and good with your experiments, partners, but the mathematical monsters you've invented are indicative of the fact that you don't understand your own experiments." As for the others, some would seek comprehension in "observability" and some would seek it in experimental modeling. ...
VB: Bohr, however, would recur to "incomprehension" per se: "If you claim to have understood everything," he would say, "it means that you understand nothing at all."
AA: Hence, his fondness for the aforementioned Schiller lines, ". . . in the abyss truth abides."
Returning to the Copenhagen "family," we see Bohr, in his debate with Einstein, calling into question the very ideal of classical science — that very ideal which had been shaped and philosophically grounded in the seventeenth century, by Descartes first of all. I put it this way, because it was precisely the Cartesian ideal that guided Einstein, in his critique of Newton, in his endeavor to replace dynamics by pure geometry (i.e., science dealing with mere "extended stuff"). To illustrate how deep are the philosophical layers touched in the course of such debates, we may refer to one of the most profound of Bohr's utterances: we have to learn to think in such a way as to understand that we are, not just spectators at the world theater, but the real participants in the events of the world. . . Further, we see Heisenberg taking up the actual meaning of Plato's idea (which he takes, not in the neo-Kantian — methodological — sense, but in the fully ontological one) and finding in Aristotle the appropriate formulation for the definition of quantum "matter": potential reality.30 We see Pauli turning to Carl Jung's concept of archetypes in order to comprehend the possibility of the non-Cartesian structure of thinking. We see Herman Weyl turning to Fichte's philosophy, adopting for theoretical physics Husserl's notion of Wesenserschauung ["the perception of essence"], and even perusing Meister Eckhart. Thus widens and deepens the contemporary theoretician's "house of wit." By such examples we may catch a glimpse of the true range of the contemporary theoretician's real "community."
To emphasize the essential difference between the classical "republic of scientists" and the Copenhagen "republic," let me now mention that the latter's course of development was not from conversations to epistolary intercourse and then to journal articles and monographs (as the case had been with the classical "republic"), but the other way round. The most important breakthroughs happened at the informal evening gatherings (after conference sessions), within the precincts of "domestic universities" (e.g., at Bohr's home in Copenhagen), in conversations held on mountain paths (which occurs in Heisenberg passim). The laborious endeavor to handle, to comprehend, to ponder over problems of traditionally philosophical character, is the kind of thinking that necessarily presupposes personal contacts — not so much the communication of professional scientists as the intercourse between personal intellectual cultures. Communication by letters will not do here. The cardinal, the most difficult, the most needful problems require personal intercourse, because they belong to dimensions of meaning that are not only bypassed outright in the classical theoretic article, but are also largely concealed by the expedient of epistolary discourse. As it has turned out, mathematical exactness and unambiguity do not account for comprehension; the depth and multiformity of meaning cannot be dispensed with. With each of us being professionally competent in equal measure, I have understood the theory in one sense, you — through the agency of your own mind — have understood it in another sense; and this other form of understanding turns out to be utterly important for me. That this is essential is made manifest only in the event of personal intercourse, because it is only through the latter that what Bakhtin called the "actual meaning" — the basis of understanding — is revealed. (The debates between Heisenberg and Schrodinger and between Schrodinger and Bohr are of this sort. . . . )
It may be added that such things as an almost casually uttered word, a thought suddenly broken out, a certain illumination — all possible in a free and easy personal conversation — take on a special importance. One example is the very first such conversation between Bohr and Heisenberg. In response to Heisenberg's question, "If the inner structure of atoms baffles palpable description as much as you say, and if we are, strictly speaking, devoid of a language that would enable us to converse about this odd structure of theirs, then shall we ever be able to comprehend atoms at all?", Bohr uttered the following words: "We shall be able, perhaps. But we shall first have to find out what the word 'comprehension' stands for." (See the third chapter of Heisenberg's Der Teil und das Ganze.) Unexpectedly as this extremely important theme cropped up in that conversation (having emerged perhaps to Bohr's own surprise), it would nevertheless eventually become the key issue (as we have seen).
VB: To exaggerate somewhat, it may even be said that, from now on, such casual circumstances as "this point occurred to us upon that mountain path," "this issue was dealt with when we had ascended to the summit," and "this notion surfaced while we were seated at that campfire" take part in the meaning of physical concepts. The procedure of understanding involves muscular efforts, the rhythm of movement, surrounding sounds and sights, landscapes, seasons, and so forth. All of this is present in the act of understanding, though of course it is in no way included in theories.
AA: This is, indeed, a wonderful thought, albeit a bit extravagant. But what oddities do not enter into the event of conversation, when the interlocutors leave their study rooms, side-stepping their inner professional images. A mathematician then appears, not in the role of a specialist in proving theorems, but as a person living in the world. Nonetheless, even in an informal interlocution, a mathematician or a logician exemplifies a characteristic type of personality: think of, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, George Moore, Willard Quine, or John Austin — sharp-witted, exhibiting subtle skepticism and a strange combination of the enthusiasm for sober-mindedness and the fondness for paradoxes . . .
Or consider the panorama of views that opens in the course of discussing the question of God (as recorded in the seventh chapter of Heisenberg's Der Teil und das Ganze). We see the perplexity of a "logical" Dirac ("What, indeed, are you talking of?! Properly speaking, there is nothing to say, except obviously false statements"); the Spinozist intellectual love of God-the-universe-as-a-whole, professed by Einstein; an essentially different attitude taken up by Pauli and Heisenberg, who are aware of the limitations of classical objectivism and consider as untenable the factoring of experience
into either exclusively subjective or objective components. ... In this case, the problem in question is, not physical, but already metaphysical; hence, it is, properly speaking, the meaning-problem. Moreover, it is, in a certain way, specifically personal and therefore demanding of an exclusively personal utterance. Yet we see here our heroes revealing themselves, not just as subjective or psychological persons, but as persons each corresponding to a particular cast of mind31 By the same token, in the course of discussing the problems of physical reality — namely, in cases that require comprehension of meaning, not the ascertainment of precise significations — a scientist's particular cast of mind would reveal its personal aspect.
Let me emphasize again that what I am speaking of is not "person" in the psychological sense of the word. A specialist in mathematics or physics, as well as a poet or a musician, will be capable of serious achievements in a particular sphere to the extent that the subject chosen engulfs each of them totally, in the whole structure of their personality. Intuition, fantasy, the immense range of imagination are not a bit less necessary for a mathematician than are analytical methodicalness and perspicacity. (Consider Max Born's remark about a student who abandoned mathematics for the sake of poetry: "He has so weak an imagination.") And is there but a mere metaphor in the statement that music is mathematics in sound? Scientists-thinkers are professionals personally involved in their research subjects; their professions take on the quality of matters of their personal, we may even say intimate, concern. That is why it is precisely the personal intercourse that emerges on the occasion of wrestling with a problem. The very essence of the matter requires it.
It is clear that, throughout such a personal interlocution, its course, its particular theme, and even its general subject may be changed at any moment — provided that these themes and subjects maintain the quality of personal matters. Thus, in a debate about arts or religion, we may discern the peculiar turns of our scientists' personal minds. Whereas in the development of classical science we see a certain cast of mind enfolding, say, into the mathematical faculty, which then gets embodied in a specialist in mathematics, in the recent trend we can observe, on the contrary, how mathematics shapes a certain cast of personality as a whole — the cast affecting the whole range of one's faculties, even one's pliancy of body and facial expression. There is a personal world before us, but this world is engendered by our engagement in mathematics. In this world some things simply may not exist (hence the severe judgment, "This is not possible!"; or, in more reasonable words, "In my logical world objects of this kind may not exist").32 Next to it, however, there is another "world," the world of another intellect, in which objects of this kind do exist in quite a rational way. The dialogue of principle, therefore, is held, not about "objects," but about worlds — i.e., about the principles of logical world-forming. It is being held at those very boundaries where the worlds end, and beyond which, in Wittgenstein's belief, all is mystery that we literally cannot speak of. . . .
Although communication between the scientists of the seventeenth-century "republic" was also deeply immersed in the realm of meaning, it was directed at the ascertainment of precise objective significations. In due course, their correspondence was transformed more and more into the means of conveying scientific news, exchanging theoretical ideas and outlines of proofs and experiments, debating concrete results, solving "puzzles", etc. Questions of meaning were ceasing to be the points in question. . . .
VB: Strangely enough, in the second half of the twentieth century, the same dissolving of questions of meaning into problems of signification happened. As it turned out, comprehension and practical realization (the talent for bringing discoveries into use, for rendering theories "practicable") are utterly different from one another. In the course of titanic striving for the "great unification," almost everything that the theoretical physicists of the 1920s and 1930s took pains over, is sinking into the background and is being forgotten. Accordingly, we see vanishing from the scheme of theoretical works all those traits we have been trying to indicate here (the recourse to beginnings, the inclusion into a theory of its history, etc.). The "refining cognition" [utochniaiushchee poznanie] once again is gaining a victory over the "comprehending cognition" [os-mysliaiushchee poznanie]. As illustrating this recent trend, let me mention Heisenberg's Der Teil und das Ganze once more — namely, his excellent account of his visit to the USA (1929), and Bohr's comment upon his address (Copenhagen, 1952) to the audience of philosophers, most of whom were of the positivistic persuasion (chapters 8 and 17, respectively). The audience simply refused to be interested in Bohr's problems; truth, for those philosophers, did not abide in the abyss. The same attitude was discerned by Heisenberg in the "pragmatic" USA. Such an attitude toward scientific knowledge, remarks Bohr, "goes back to the pathos characteristic of the initial epoch of natural science."33 However, for scientists of our own day it again appears more important to know "how does this work; how may this help us to calculate or predict?" than to know "how are we to understand this?" . . . And this is but additional evidence that Bakhtin's "actual meaning" — and, even more, the notion of dialogic reason — are extremely complicated matters. . . .
AA: Obviously, this recent trend leads to the narrowing of present-day theoretical physicists' "circle of communication" (or mi- crocommunity). With the exclusion of speculations about the "Big Bang," physics has again parted with philosophy. Who among nonprofessionals, indeed, will be able to comprehend the mathematical language of, say, the theory of "super-strings"? On the other hand, to ponder over such questions as "what does it mean to 'comprehend'?" is no business of mathematicians, logicians, or experimentalists. Such questions require quite other personages, a different "microcommunity" — one in which figures such as Plato, Saint Augustine, Galileo, Kant, Heidegger, Bohr, and Wittgenstein may appear on equal terms. The microcommunity of the "republic of scientists" of the beginning of the twentieth century was of this type.
VB: Returning to Bakhtin at this point, it may be indicated that all we have just said is very closely associated with his main culturological insight. The issue is, in fact, the interplay between macro- and micro-dialogue. What we have been describing — all this picture of the "republic of letters" transforming into the inner "five-me-ly" of a theoretician, and the subsequent unfolding of this "me" into the real family of wits-persons (e.g., of the Copenhagen school) — is precisely that which is expressed in Bakhtin's terms as the reciprocal transformation of micro- and macro-dialogue.
AA: There is yet another point I would like to consider here, which seems to me very important for understanding the essence of the matter under discussion in general, and its sociological aspects in particular. It is not hard to notice that, the more deeply the part-takers of the dialogue are drawn into it, the broader does the circle of the interlocutors become. Only their composition changes. In order to catch their many and various voices, one needs the silence of a reading-room, of a study. The desire arises to become a lighthouse keeper or a country schoolteacher, a recluse or an anchorite. The interlocutors of the creative dialogue are the far-away ones, the unfamiliar. They come to the light of our night-lamp, irrespective of their remoteness in space and time. They appear from that very abyss where truth abides, from the depths of the realm of meaning. Forgive me this involuntarily romantic language!
The more strictly my social coordinates and functions are determined, the more obscure and amorphous is the impulse of my cultural undertaking. And contrariwise, it is necessary, in a certain way, to sidestep one's "own time," in order that one may enter, as Bakhtin says, the great time of culture [bolshoe vremia kultury]. In this great time, all times are up-to-date. Informal communities, small unstable groups, even complete solitude — all of these are, nonetheless, specific social forms, forms of the community of culture, the necessary conditions of the possibility of entering this community. The community of culture has its own laws, its own determinative forces, its own needs, which are different from the laws, forces, and needs of that society in which we happen to be living.
In this connection, Bibler, making use of Marx's notions, speaks of the contraposition between the communities of "common" and "universal" labor. Common labor is the functionally divided direct collaboration in the operations of an enterprise, an office, a political or scientific institution, a laboratory. Universal labor is the labor that belongs in culture, the labor that produces creations, of which we have been speaking so much here. In the case of universal labor, the collaborators are one's "colleagues" throughout the whole world and all of history. For a poet — e.g., James Joyce — it is Homer and Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare and Freud, who are the real interlocutors and collaborators, rather than some "next-door neighbor" in the literary corporation. For Einstein, it may well be that Newton and Spinoza are more contemporaneous than some "nearby" colleagues. It is precisely the membership in this community — or, to put it differently, the inner dialogism of a profound, that is to say cultural, thought — that produces the apparant "asociality" of a serious thinker or artist. It is not a matter of romanticism, but a matter of one's instinctive obedience to the laws of the cultural community, which may be at sharp variance with the laws of the society wherein one occupies a certain social position.
Thus, what I am speaking of is far from being romantic aloofness. There must be books, libraries, and study-rooms; there must be leisure hours and free places for getting together, for conversations, for walks; there must, after all, be lighthouses, country schools, forest huts. I shall even put it this way: it is by the significance of the place assigned to the community of culture within the framework of a certain society, by the measure in which the community of culture is institutionally stipulated and maintained, that we may determine the degree to which this society is civilized. I am thinking here, for example, of what was Bohr's Institute in Copenhagen, or what was Cambridge and — who knows? — maybe even that poor Austrian village, Trattenbach, for Wittgenstein, the Cavendish laboratory for Piotr Kapitsa, Princeton for Einstein, the Duino castle for Rilke, or the Iasnaia Poliana estate for Lev Tolstoy.
We do know, however, that even the most severe material need, the most severe constraints and repressions cannot overpower the need of the "community of culture" and its constraint.
Between the two extremes — the "community of culture" for which, in all its universal-historical range, room can be found in the head of a single person, on the one hand, and the social framework in which this single person lives, on the other — there may occur an immense spectrum of the most diverse social formations. Strange anchorites, epistolary intercourse, a creative group, a scientific society, research institutions, universities, academies — with their conferences and symposia, firms, administrative bodies, forms of public life, political organizations — all these are, not aspects of a homogeneous community, but the results of the complex (far more than just linear) process of interaction of heterogeneous social microcosms. This interaction may be effective and fruitful or meager and destructive, encouraging or tragically collisional, but it may in no way be reduced to the flat scheme of external influence of a society upon "its" culture, nor to the simple social determination of the individual's behavior. Schemes of that kind belong to the political discourse of State power. The extent to which they have spread in the field of sociology is not only indicative of one-sided thinking in these quarters, but also testifies to the deeply unfavorable situation within the society per se.
VB: I would like to supplement your considerations with the following remarks. Each epoch of culture shapes its own image of the "community of culture/' peculiar exclusively to itself — i.e., its own form of human intercourse, within the context of the dominant type of creation characteristic of this epoch. It shapes the specific typology of persons communicating in culture. Thus in antiquity, the distribution of roles in tragedy (the hero, the mask, the chorus, the spectator) set the entire architectonics of integral communication in culture. Thus in the Middle Ages, the architectonic whole of the community of culture was the way of living that drew breath in the ambience of the temple. Thus in modern times, humans' communication in culture is enacted, as it were, in the field of tension of the novelistic word, the novelistic plot. And it is only from within the peculiar forms of the "community of culture" of each epoch that communication between cultures, or the dialogue in that great time which Bakhtin spoke of, turns out to be possible.
AA: Of course, both the structure of the social spectrum, which I have mentioned, and the concrete forms it is being shaped into, undergo radical changes from one epoch to another. The ancient polis/theater/Plato's Academy are subordinate to one type of architectonics; the Alexandrian court/library/court school, to another; the medieval university/cloister/Church, to still another; the town of the Renaissance epoch/the Florentine Academy/the "humanists'" circles, to still another type; the "Accademia dei Lincei"/man- ufactories and arsenals/the epistolary intercourse of the seventeenth-century scholars, to its own type of architectonics, etc. . . .
VB: Which means that the field of further studies, meditations, reconsiderations is, in fact, only barely outlined. . . .
_____________________
1 Daniel Alexandrov conducted this interview in Moscow during November 1992. Anton Struchkov revised and translated the interview in consultation with Anatolii Akhutin. All footnotes marked A.S. were provided by Anton Struchkov.
2 For additional commentary, the reader is referred to a recently published book by Alexandr Pyatigorskii, Filosofiia odnogo pereulka (Moscow: Progress, 1992) [The philosophy of one back-street).
3 I.S. Chernyak, "Ob'ektivnyi podkhod kak osnova ne-ponimaniia," in Mitiuvshee. Istoricheskii al'manakh 6 (Moscow, 1992): 451-470.
4 See especially V. S. Bibler, Kant. — Galilei. — Kant (Moscow: Mysl', 1991), and his chapter on ancient mechanics "Genezis poniatiia dvizheniia" [The origin of the notion of movement] in Anatolii Arseniev, Vladimir Bibler, and Bonifatii Kodrov, Analiz razvivaiushchegosya poniatiia [Analysis of the unfolding notion| (Moscow: Nauka, 1967), 100-197.
5 This is precisely the subject matter of Bibler's book, Ot naukoucheniia k logike kul'tury [From Wissenschaftslehre to the logic of culture] (Moscow: Mysl, 1992).
6 Fragments of this work were published in 1991, as an occasional edition of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, entitled XVII vek ili spor logicheskikh nachal [ The seventeenth century, or the controversy of logical principles).
7 M.M. Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva [The aesthetics of verbal art) (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979).
8 The book by Werner Heisenberg referred to throughout the interview is the Russian edition, entitled Fizika i filosofiia; Chast' i tseloe [Physics and Philosophy; The Part and the Whole] (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), combining his Physic und Philosophic (Frankfurt am Main, 1959) and Der Teil und das Gauze: Gesprache im Umkreis der Atomphysik (Munich, 1969).
9 On the concept of "great time" [bol'shoe vremia], see M. M. Bakhtin, "Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff," in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 1-9. [A.S.]
10 The Russian word Bibler uses here is proizvedenie, formed from the verb proizvesti (its components — pro, iz, vesti — correspond to the English words "forth," "from," "lead"). Thus, proizvedenie implies "that-which-is-brought-forth-into-existence-as-a-re- sult-of-one's-guiding-action." As a matter of fact, it is possible to render proizvedenie as "production" (from Latin productio; duct- corresponds to English "lead"). However, the fact that the latter's contemporary connotations savor somewhat of "industrial process" prompted me to decide in favor of "creation," which seems to me much more conformable to the spirit of this interview. [A. S.]
11 Even here, in the case of English-speakers at least, it is much more common to use the expression "work of art." [A.S.]
12 See, for example, Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (above, n. 7), p. 311. [A.S.]
13 See, e.g., ibid., p. 344.
14 A number of alternative translations of these key terms, znachenie and smysl, may be found in "Glossary," in Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, ed. Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 194. [A.S.]
In a similar vein, Henry Pierce Stapp (one of the contemporary physicists who elaborate this "event" perspective), maintaining that the universe is a creative process consisting of individual creative acts called "events," writes that "each event embodies within itself all prior creation and establishes a new set of relationships among the previously existing parts"; "each new event embraces all creation and endows it with a new unity" (Stapp, "Quantum Mechanics, Local Causality, and Process Philosophy," ed. William B. Jones, Process Studies 7 (1977): 175. [A.S.]
See M.M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo [Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics] (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1979), pp. 31, 92-94.
17 Bakhtin's term, vnenakhodimost', is usually translated as "outside(d)ness"; some authors, however, prefer to render it as "extralocality" or "exotopy" (see, e.g., the essays by Paul de Man and Mathew Roberts in Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, ed. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson [Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1989|. If I were to explain my own choice, I would certainly refer to Emmanuel Levinas — namely, to his treatment of "sameness" vs. "exteriority" (e.g., in Totality and Infinity). But I could also point to the following passage in Paul de Man's "Dialogue and Dialogism": "[DJialogism also functions, throughout the work [of Bakhtin] .. ., as a principle of radical otherness or, to use again Bakhtin's own termi- nology, as a principle of exotopy: far from aspiring to the telos of a synthesis or a resolution, as could be said to be the case in dialectical systems, the function of dialogism is to sustain and think through the radical exteriority [italics mine — A. S.| or heterogeneity of one voice with regard to any other, including that of the novelist himself" (Rethinking Bakhtin, p. 109). [A.S.]
18 Plato's words are given as translated by H. N. Fowler.
19 Bakhtin himself explicitly points to "the dialogic nature of truth" in Socratic dialogue — see Problemy poctiki Dostoevskogo (above, n. 16), p. 126. [A.S.]
20 Bakhtin, (above, n. 7), p. 372.
21 Ibid., p. 340.
22 Using the term sobytie bytiia, Bakhtin probably wants to evoke the etymology of so-bytie as "co-being," thus stressing the "co-existential" character of the "event of being" ("the co-being of being"). [A.S.]
23 As cited in Anatolii Akhutin, "Verner Heisenberg Filosofia" in V. Heisenberg, Fizika i filosofiya, Chast' i tseloe [Physics and philosophy. The Part and the Whole] (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), p. 381.
24 See Bohr's comment that, in our description of nature, the main purpose is not to reveal the real essence of phenomena once and for all, but "to track down as far as possible relations between multiple aspects of our experience" (quoted in Henry Pierce Stapp, "The Copenhagen Interpretation," American fournal of Physics 40 [1972|: 1105-1107). [A.S.]
25 See chap. 17, "Positivism, Metaphysics, and Religion," in Heisenberg, Der Teil und das Ganze (above, n. 8).
26 See Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, (above, n. 16), p. 125.
27 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 32, esp. n. 2.
28 Actually, Bibler puns on the Russian word sem'ia (English "family"), rendering it as sem'-ia (English "seven"-"I"). [A. S.]
29 See Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (London, 1903), p. 306.
30 Cf. the following comment from W. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper and Row, 1962): "we can say that the matter of Aristotle, which is mere 'potentia,' should be compared to our concept of energy, which gets into 'actuality' by means of the form, when the elementary particle is created" (p. 160). [A.S.]
31 In Heisenberg's account, it is made most manifest in the case of Paul Dirac. While Dirac's philippic zeroed in mainly on the ethical aspect of religion, his steadfast striving for logical consistency resulted in his appearing (according to Heisenberg) as "a certain fanatic of rationalism." [A.S.]
32 Cf. the following anecdote told by Niels Bohr (as quoted in chap. 7 of Heisenberg's Der Teil und das Ganze (above, n. 8): "Not long ago Dirac and 1 visited together a small art gallery, in which there was exhibited painting by Manet of an Italian scene — a view of the sea in magnificent grey and blue tones. In the foreground there could be seen a boat; and in the water nearby, a dark-grey blot whose meaning it was difficult to understand. Dirac then said: 'This blot is inadmissible.'" [A. S.]
33 As cited in V. Heisenberg, Fizika i filosofiya, chast' i tseloe (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), p. 319.
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