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Solov'ev, the Late Tolstoi, and the Early Bakhtin on the Problem of Shame and Love Author(S): Caryl Emerson Source: Slavic Review, Vol

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Solov'ev, the Late Tolstoi, and the Early Bakhtin on the Problem of Shame and Love Author(S): Caryl Emerson Source: Slavic Review, Vol Solov'ev, the Late Tolstoi, and the Early Bakhtin on the Problem of Shame and Love Author(s): Caryl Emerson Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 663-671 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2499862 Accessed: 04-02-2019 23:03 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Slavic Review This content downloaded from 136.142.143.34 on Mon, 04 Feb 2019 23:03:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms CARYL EMERSON Solov'ev, the Late Tolstoi, and the Early Bakhtin on the Problem of Shame and Love This paper is part of a larger project, an attempt to understand Mikhail Bakhtin's early writings on ethics and aesthetics in their native, rather than their west European, context. The task is a complex one. Bakhtin's polemic with (and debt to) Immanuel Kant, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and other European philosophers is directly expressed in his texts and well documented; his Russian sources of inspiration are much more muted and elusive.' But Bakhtin's early writ- ings surely qualify him as an heir to those great and maverick nineteenth century Russian think- ers who, while concurrently literary critics and moral philosophers, brought about a spiritual revival in the Russian creative intelligentsia between 1880 and World War I. In any such list of Russian mavericks, Vladimir Solov'ev and Lev Tolstoi must figure prominently. Indeed, these two thinkers share with Bakhtin a number of common themes. Each in his own way, Solov'ev, Tolstoi, and Bakhtin rejected the characteristic polarization of nine- teenth century criticism: its polemic between "art for life's sake" (the civic critics) and "art for art's sake" (the symbolist and later the formalist persuasion). Instead they sought a third inter- mediary position, one that insisted on formal criteria and categories for art but that was neverthe- less suspicious of all demands for artistic autonomy, vigorously resisting the separation of art from life and art from ethics. All three were philosophers of religion (albeit highly irregular and hard to classify), who considered both the established churches and the established philosophical schools of their time seriously deficient-a situation with disastrous consequences, in their view, since a member of the "thinking intelligentsia" could no longer be a person of faith. And finally, in varying degrees of explicitness, all three thinkers connected a theory of aesthetic creativity with a theory of love. These theories of love, it turns out, incorporate not only aesthetic creativity but also a pecu- liar understanding of shame. In linking love and shame, each of the three avoids logical, general, universal postulates; they approach the problem of love as an instance of individual case ethics rather than as a matter of ideals and abstractions. This might seem strange to those who know Solov'ev as an idealist and advocate of cosmic vseedinstvo, and to those who recall Tolstoi's controversial-not to say hysterical-views on carnal love in "The Kreutzer Sonata," and to those who know Bakhtin but cannot remember anything there on love at all. This paper will explore the logic that links these three thinkers along the lines of shame and love, and will sug- gest how this particular lens provides insight into their theories of creativity. We will begin, then, with Bakhtin. His writings from the early 1920s are largely concerned with ethical questions, and the major moral category he develops is otvetstvennost'-by which he means each person's obligation to answer for his or her own acts, both toward another person 1. For a pioneering Soviet statement, see Lu. N. Davidov, "U ustokov sotsial'noi filosofii M. M. Bakhtina," Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 2 (1986): 170- 181, where Bakhtin is seen as a Russian response to Nietzscheanism and an alternative to the "aesthetic fatalism of (Oswald) Spengler," the "idealistic the- oreticism of the neo-Kantians," and the depersonalization of Husserl, in English, see Nina Perlina, "Funny Things are Happening on the Way to the Bakhtin Forum," Kennan Institute Occasional Paper no. 231 (1989). Alexandar Mihailovic is currently at work on a study of Bakhtin's intellectual roots in Russian theol- ogy and bogoiskatel'stvo. A good example of a Russian source is Bakhtin's relationship with Russian Orthodox Christianity. Some students of his thought have declared Orthodox theology and "encoded Christology" to be central to his writings of the 1920s (although concrete evidence of Bakhtin's religious convictions and activity is slim); others claim that Bakhtin was not engaged in a naive or proselytizing "believer's theology" but contributing to the perfectly conventional German academic discipline of Religionsphilosophie. Slavic Review 50, no. 3 (Fall 199 1) This content downloaded from 136.142.143.34 on Mon, 04 Feb 2019 23:03:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 664 Slavic Review and toward the world. What is peculiar about Bakhtinian otvetstvennost', however, is its indif- ference to the ideas of guilt or shame. In Bakhtin one can find blame (0'ina and vinovnost') but no crippling stvd in the strong sense of the word. One explanation, perhaps, is that Bakhtin-with his magisterial disinterest in grim fictions like the Freudian unconscious and with his optimism about dialogue, the future, and the potential of communication to transfigure events-is a phi- losopher in whom there is very little rage and almost no concept of alienation. Naturally he would avoid such inward, backward-looking, psychologically isolated categories as shame, guilt, and sin. Two curious mentions of sin and shame appear, however, in Bakhtin's early manuscripts. One occurs in the text published as "Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel'nosti," its single lone reference to grekhopadenie.2 We sin, Bakhtin says, when our inner self "falls into deep contra- diction with itself, into self-rejection." What does this entail? In the scenario Bakhtin develops in this essay, our inner self (what he calls the ia-dlia- sebia) is always in flux, since it is constituted not by accomplishments but by potential. Only our external self, the ia-dlia-drugikh, can be a pile of finished achievements, because that self is viewed from the vantage point of others. So an inner self that "falls into sin"-which is to say, an inner self that begins to "'contradict and reject itself"-is one that, in Bakhtin's words, suc- cumbs to "the tendency of being to self-sufficiency" (p. 109). Bakhtin hastens to add that such self-sufficiency is profoundly counterintuitive; it is "an absurd and puzzling completedness, en- during the shame of its form." "Shameful form," in other words, is a sense of completedness where there should be a sense of potential. In Bakhtin, this state of affairs is always connected with thinking that one can do without others. Early in the "Avtor i geroi" essay, Bakhtin remarks on the impossibility of such autonomy, which he equates with a vain striving to love one's own self. "I in relation to my own self is deeply cold, even in self-preservation," he writes. "'The body is not something self- sufficient, it needs an other, it needs the other's acknowledgment and form-shaping activity. Only the inner body-heavy flesh-is given to the person himself, the external body of the other is posited: it must be actively created" ("Avtor i geroi," p. 47). For Bakhtin, clearly, shame has nothing at all to do with "sinful acts," and nothing to do with any indiscretions of the body. "Falling into sin" is, rather, doing without other bodies- which is to say it is the sin of solipsism. A second and related reference to shame occurs in that chronologically prior portion of the early manuscripts published as "K filosofii postupka." Bakhtin is reinterpreting the Christian teaching of love. One cannot love one's neighbor as oneself, Bakhtin intimates, nor should we strive to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Any such formula will always suggest identity. And what is needed is precisely difference, loving the other as an other, loving the neighbor as a neighbor. Or, as Bakhtin puts it, "I love another but I cannot love myself, another loves me but cannot love himself, each is right in his own place . another occupies his place in my . consciousness [only] to the extent that I love him as another, and not as myself" ("K filosofii postupka," p. 116). Underneath this argument is a larger implication: that there is something shameful about a single isolated consciousness, and that the only way to get out of that sin or shame situation is by the proper sort of love. But what precisely is that love, and what is its link with shame? Further on in the essay ("K filosofii postupka," pp. 128- 130), Bakhtin again returns to shame, this time in its social sense as pozor, disgrace or embarrassment over ethical error. He explicitly unites it with love in a moral paradox. How will I react, Bakhtin asks, "esli ia sozertsaiu kartinu gibeli i sovershenno opravdan- nogo pozora edinstvenno liubimogo mnoi cheloveka?" The shame is wholly deserved.
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