Free To Do the Right Thing
Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject
Stanford University Press, 260pp, £21.50, ISBN 9780804785839
reviewed by Andre van Loon
What kind of people would we like to be? And, perhaps more importantly, how should other people, in an ideal world, behave? Such questions can sustain idle gossip as much as high philosophy, both perhaps driven by a feeling that what happens between us is not quite right. There is always a next time, a chance to do better; the other can be more loving, less disappointing. We – and they – can become more virtuous, more understanding. And we do not need a transcendental God, long dead or enwrapped in silence, to improve ourselves. Descartes and Kant solved things the wrong way by seeking universal rules and postmodernism, at its worst, simply sniffs at a workable ethics. Faced by the sublime and the ridiculous, we can instead turn to a down-to-earth, thoroughly modern way to act. We can work at a democratic ethics in which freedom and responsibility are equally important. This can be a world in which we tolerate another’s freedom, but in which the best of us use it to do the right thing.
This is the better world as envisioned by Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Professor of English at the University of Haifa, Israel, as informed by her reading of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975). The latter studied classics and philology at the University of Petrograd (1913-1918), attended a study circle (now known as the ‘Bakhtin circle’) during the 1920s to discuss philosophy, religion and politics, became a schoolteacher in Nevel and later worked as a Professor of Russian and world literature at the University of Saransk. He wrote and sometimes published a series of notes, essays and book length studies on aesthetics, ethics, literature and discourse throughout a life lived in relative obscurity. He gained widespread Soviet recognition only in the last decades of his life and became a posthumous academic celebrity during the 1980s-90s.
With a charming precision, Erdinast-Vulcan dates the genesis of her Bakhtin study to the summer of 1992, when she first read Art and Answerability. This work struck her as deeply at odds with Bakhtin’s more famous Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics and Rabelais and His World, widely praised for their emphasis on dialogue, polyphony and the carnivalesque. While not rejecting the view of Bakhtin as an early proponent of literary relativity and open-endedness (which stems from a selective reading of his Dostoevsky and Rabelais works), Erdinast-Vulcan also recognised him as a profound ethicist, one who would be aghast at the contemporary ‘radical chic of dispensing with the notion of agency and responsibility’. Her study, then, attempts to marry Bakhtin to himself; free spirit as much as sober realist, he is shown to examine the ways in which some semantic structures disperse and fade while others converge and strengthen.
At the outset, Erdinast-Vulcan briefly notes that her argument took twenty years to mature; she describes herself as a latecomer to the field. This may be understandable on a personal level, but it is nonetheless a slightly odd comment. Bakhtin studies did not begin or end in the 1980s-90s and Erdinast-Vulcan’s contribution is certainly valid now. What she probably means is that she was not one of the first to write about Bakhtin, but this is an out-of-place, even self-indulgent point to make in the context of advocating a Bakhtinian ethics for the present day. The reader is best advised to focus simply on the here-and-now.
Philosophy is Erdinast-Vulcan’s main concern throughout her study. She begins by briefly summarising the philosophical tradition which Bakhtin was situated in and partly rebelled against. She draws a fundamental distinction between the autobiographical works of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) and René Descartes (1596-1650):
Whereas Montaigne offers an account of himself as an embodied, concrete, singular, and inherently heterogeneous being, firmly positioned in his time and place, Descartes offers a version of subjectivity where the autobiographical subject is conflated with the philosophical construct, setting itself up as pure thought, absolute knowledge, overriding the contingencies of the living, historically situated person called René Descartes...[This is] blatantly strategic...allowing Descartes’s decontextualised, disembodied, abstracted, and capitalized Subject to become a transcendental stand-in for humankind in general.
Erdinast-Vulcan goes on to structure her argument around conceptions of the historically positioned and universal subject. Montaigne, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) are among her doubters; Descartes and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) are her universalist thinkers, for whom a slippery subjectivity is deeply suspect.
Bakhtin’s drive to understand meaningful truths in a world of change is thus positively boosted, in Erdinast-Vulcan’s view, by his early polemics against Kant (e.g. Towards a Philosophy of the Act) and by his exploration of fictional worlds in which characters seem to resist or know more than their authors (e.g. Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity). To really drive this point home, he is compared at length, in a series of ‘philosophical encounters’, with three of his fellow ‘dissenters’: Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) and Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995). Although these chapters provide a good view of Erdinast-Vulcan’s subject, it is disappointing that a similar encounter between Bakhtin and a philosophical opponent is not staged. It feels too easy to examine actual and potential allies only.
In several passages, Erdinast-Vulcan shows an awareness of where her study might fail. In her discussion of Bergson, for example, she contrasts a Cartesian ‘specular epistemology’ in which ‘knowledge, truth and reality’ are interpreted spatially with a modern ‘de-Cartesianisation of Western thinking’, driven by an ‘auditory-temporal sensibility’. Bergson, in this account, shows the human subject moving out of the other’s absolute gaze. The I is not finished but always in a state of becoming; differences over time are more constitutive of the self than any innate characteristics. This is a rich thought and one open in many ways to productive study. Yet Erdinast-Vulcan rightly states that ‘one [can feel] a little uncomfortable with the sweeping breadth of this cultural diagnosis’. Other than a fondness for wordiness, the main problem, here as elsewhere, is Erdinast-Vulcan’s excessive ease in describing the works of those she disagrees with. We do not learn much about Descartes and Kant, for example, who are swiftly disposed of in a way their serious students are likely to find objectionable. Bakhtin himself, though by no means an impartial thinker, spent much more time on setting up and tackling his opponents.
Surprisingly, Erdinast-Vulcan leaves literature largely to one side. She rightly notes Bakhtin’s love of novels (a love focussed more on their aesthetic and ethical formations than on their immediate plots and characters), especially those written by Dostoevsky. Bakhtin saw the latter as a profound example of an author ethically unwilling to have the final word; his characters argue and will themselves into and out of situations with a minimum of authorial guidance. Erdinast-Vulcan writes:
Dostoevsky’s abdication of authorial jurisdiction anticipates the awakening of the modernist consciousness, the consciousness of an essentially secular world, where neither the fictional nor the historical subject can refer to an authorial Being – outside and above itself – for comfort and confirmation.
This ties in with the broader thrust of the study: to show the human subject in a modern, secular, often painfully free context. Yet there are no interpretative passages of individual novels to bolster this argument, nor readings of Dostoevsky to show where Bakhtin overstated his case: although Dostoevsky’s novels feature many apparently chaotic scenes, virtue and vice are often clear enough, if understated. Erdinast-Vulcan is not particularly interested, at least in this study, to show how literature informs or contrasts with philosophy. Detailed literary analyses would have made this a stronger study, both by showing theory in action and by bringing its philosophy into greater relief.
Despite some major flaws, Between Philosophy and Literature is profoundly interesting. Even though it comes too easily to its view of a Bakhtinian ethics, its vision of a better way to live is genuinely persuasive. One might not agree that Descartes and Kant are to blame for the worst of abstract thought (or be frustrated that this is not shown by a careful interpretation of their work), or rebel against the wholly positive view of Bakhtin (his weaknesses, such as prolixity and an overly benign view of Dostoevsky, are either ignored or glossed over) and still find much to underline enthusiastically in this study. The chapters in which Bakhtin is compared to Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Lévinas are particularly well-achieved and show how the examination of a concrete, historically situated and creative self became a sustained philosophical concern in the 20th century. Although it is strange that a book on a 21st-century ethics does not seriously engage with any living philosopher or writer, the view that great freedom comes with great responsibility is highly pertinent in today’s world. Addressing the right question is Erdinast-Vulcan’s saving grace.
This is the better world as envisioned by Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Professor of English at the University of Haifa, Israel, as informed by her reading of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975). The latter studied classics and philology at the University of Petrograd (1913-1918), attended a study circle (now known as the ‘Bakhtin circle’) during the 1920s to discuss philosophy, religion and politics, became a schoolteacher in Nevel and later worked as a Professor of Russian and world literature at the University of Saransk. He wrote and sometimes published a series of notes, essays and book length studies on aesthetics, ethics, literature and discourse throughout a life lived in relative obscurity. He gained widespread Soviet recognition only in the last decades of his life and became a posthumous academic celebrity during the 1980s-90s.
With a charming precision, Erdinast-Vulcan dates the genesis of her Bakhtin study to the summer of 1992, when she first read Art and Answerability. This work struck her as deeply at odds with Bakhtin’s more famous Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics and Rabelais and His World, widely praised for their emphasis on dialogue, polyphony and the carnivalesque. While not rejecting the view of Bakhtin as an early proponent of literary relativity and open-endedness (which stems from a selective reading of his Dostoevsky and Rabelais works), Erdinast-Vulcan also recognised him as a profound ethicist, one who would be aghast at the contemporary ‘radical chic of dispensing with the notion of agency and responsibility’. Her study, then, attempts to marry Bakhtin to himself; free spirit as much as sober realist, he is shown to examine the ways in which some semantic structures disperse and fade while others converge and strengthen.
At the outset, Erdinast-Vulcan briefly notes that her argument took twenty years to mature; she describes herself as a latecomer to the field. This may be understandable on a personal level, but it is nonetheless a slightly odd comment. Bakhtin studies did not begin or end in the 1980s-90s and Erdinast-Vulcan’s contribution is certainly valid now. What she probably means is that she was not one of the first to write about Bakhtin, but this is an out-of-place, even self-indulgent point to make in the context of advocating a Bakhtinian ethics for the present day. The reader is best advised to focus simply on the here-and-now.
Philosophy is Erdinast-Vulcan’s main concern throughout her study. She begins by briefly summarising the philosophical tradition which Bakhtin was situated in and partly rebelled against. She draws a fundamental distinction between the autobiographical works of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) and René Descartes (1596-1650):
Whereas Montaigne offers an account of himself as an embodied, concrete, singular, and inherently heterogeneous being, firmly positioned in his time and place, Descartes offers a version of subjectivity where the autobiographical subject is conflated with the philosophical construct, setting itself up as pure thought, absolute knowledge, overriding the contingencies of the living, historically situated person called René Descartes...[This is] blatantly strategic...allowing Descartes’s decontextualised, disembodied, abstracted, and capitalized Subject to become a transcendental stand-in for humankind in general.
Erdinast-Vulcan goes on to structure her argument around conceptions of the historically positioned and universal subject. Montaigne, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) are among her doubters; Descartes and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) are her universalist thinkers, for whom a slippery subjectivity is deeply suspect.
Bakhtin’s drive to understand meaningful truths in a world of change is thus positively boosted, in Erdinast-Vulcan’s view, by his early polemics against Kant (e.g. Towards a Philosophy of the Act) and by his exploration of fictional worlds in which characters seem to resist or know more than their authors (e.g. Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity). To really drive this point home, he is compared at length, in a series of ‘philosophical encounters’, with three of his fellow ‘dissenters’: Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) and Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995). Although these chapters provide a good view of Erdinast-Vulcan’s subject, it is disappointing that a similar encounter between Bakhtin and a philosophical opponent is not staged. It feels too easy to examine actual and potential allies only.
In several passages, Erdinast-Vulcan shows an awareness of where her study might fail. In her discussion of Bergson, for example, she contrasts a Cartesian ‘specular epistemology’ in which ‘knowledge, truth and reality’ are interpreted spatially with a modern ‘de-Cartesianisation of Western thinking’, driven by an ‘auditory-temporal sensibility’. Bergson, in this account, shows the human subject moving out of the other’s absolute gaze. The I is not finished but always in a state of becoming; differences over time are more constitutive of the self than any innate characteristics. This is a rich thought and one open in many ways to productive study. Yet Erdinast-Vulcan rightly states that ‘one [can feel] a little uncomfortable with the sweeping breadth of this cultural diagnosis’. Other than a fondness for wordiness, the main problem, here as elsewhere, is Erdinast-Vulcan’s excessive ease in describing the works of those she disagrees with. We do not learn much about Descartes and Kant, for example, who are swiftly disposed of in a way their serious students are likely to find objectionable. Bakhtin himself, though by no means an impartial thinker, spent much more time on setting up and tackling his opponents.
Surprisingly, Erdinast-Vulcan leaves literature largely to one side. She rightly notes Bakhtin’s love of novels (a love focussed more on their aesthetic and ethical formations than on their immediate plots and characters), especially those written by Dostoevsky. Bakhtin saw the latter as a profound example of an author ethically unwilling to have the final word; his characters argue and will themselves into and out of situations with a minimum of authorial guidance. Erdinast-Vulcan writes:
Dostoevsky’s abdication of authorial jurisdiction anticipates the awakening of the modernist consciousness, the consciousness of an essentially secular world, where neither the fictional nor the historical subject can refer to an authorial Being – outside and above itself – for comfort and confirmation.
This ties in with the broader thrust of the study: to show the human subject in a modern, secular, often painfully free context. Yet there are no interpretative passages of individual novels to bolster this argument, nor readings of Dostoevsky to show where Bakhtin overstated his case: although Dostoevsky’s novels feature many apparently chaotic scenes, virtue and vice are often clear enough, if understated. Erdinast-Vulcan is not particularly interested, at least in this study, to show how literature informs or contrasts with philosophy. Detailed literary analyses would have made this a stronger study, both by showing theory in action and by bringing its philosophy into greater relief.
Despite some major flaws, Between Philosophy and Literature is profoundly interesting. Even though it comes too easily to its view of a Bakhtinian ethics, its vision of a better way to live is genuinely persuasive. One might not agree that Descartes and Kant are to blame for the worst of abstract thought (or be frustrated that this is not shown by a careful interpretation of their work), or rebel against the wholly positive view of Bakhtin (his weaknesses, such as prolixity and an overly benign view of Dostoevsky, are either ignored or glossed over) and still find much to underline enthusiastically in this study. The chapters in which Bakhtin is compared to Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Lévinas are particularly well-achieved and show how the examination of a concrete, historically situated and creative self became a sustained philosophical concern in the 20th century. Although it is strange that a book on a 21st-century ethics does not seriously engage with any living philosopher or writer, the view that great freedom comes with great responsibility is highly pertinent in today’s world. Addressing the right question is Erdinast-Vulcan’s saving grace.