—Mikhail Bakhtin
I felt relaxed and well prepared since I had my vital visual aid unfurled and ready. On an easel, next to our speakers’ table, Vitaly and I had mounted a three-by-four-foot diagram, one that displayed most of the subjects on what I call “the complete Cross of Reality.” To those I’d added some of Bakhtin’s terms for his version of the cross, his chronotope.
Strada would be speaking in Russian, while Vitaly would be translating for me. Caryl Emerson and many other key workers in the Bakhtin industry were sitting in front of me. I wondered if I’d sound believable to this august academic assembly.
When Strada finished, Vitaly introduced me, and I started out.
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Toward a Philosophy for the Third Millennium
First I noted how, in 1977, John Kemeny, the President of Dartmouth, a distinguished mathematician and inventor of the computer language BASIC, gave a speech in which he said that the great need of our time was for a breakthrough in the social sciences so that they could make progress in the same rapid and effective way as the natural sciences. Then I stated my thesis: that the vital spark needed for that breakthrough is first ignited when we bring together the astonishingly similar work of Bakhtin and Eugen.
Next I recalled something Eugen said at the end of Out. As earlier times had asked, “What is the revealed character of the true God?” and then “What is the true character of nature?” our time should ask, “What must we do to insure the survival of a truly human society?” Today’s social sciences, after years of imitating the objective method of the natural sciences, still fail to answer that third question of truth. If we really are concerned with our global society’s survival, we need a new discipline, a higher and more flexible sociology. I noted that Bakhtin had proposed the name “metalinguistics” for such a unifying discipline, while Eugen had proposed “metanomics.”
After those introductory remarks, I reviewed some of the astonishing similarities between the two men, from their basic model of the chronotope or Cross of Reality to their perception that this model provides a societal method, one which is based on the four grammatical persons we become in any significant experience.
Specifically, Eugen says that we are addressed by another as thou, respond as I (discovering our subjective inner space), go on to form a we, and finally are recognized by others as he or she. Bakhtin says that we are addressed by “the other for me,” respond as “I for myself” (discovering our “subjectum”), then become an “I for others,” (a we relation), and finally are seen objectively in the world around us. I emphasized that both men say that this fundamental pattern of speech reveals itself as a social process. Speech doesn’t simply describe the human reality; it creates it.
To illustrate the many coincidences between their discoveries, I turned to my cross diagram, noting how its horizontal axis represents times, while its vertical axis represents spaces. On those two axes I pointed to the four types of speech which Bakhtin and Eugen say create and orient us to these times and spaces; the four moods of speech which dominate each time and space; then, finally, the different persons that Bakhtin and Eugen say we become as these different types of speech form and remake us.
After reviewing these similarities between Bakhtin’s and Eugen’s thought, I went on to explain how the Cross of Reality provides a new image showing how all the sciences and humanities are connected. There is no pyramid with hard science at its base, as is so widely imagined today. The Cartesian scientific vision of a world revealed to us by mathematics and physics turns out to deal with only one quarter of our reality. Any holistic approach to a problem must start from the center of the cross. For example, politics or economics must always take into account history and psychology. And so must law listen to religion.
I conceded that many academics will be put off by this unifying picture. It challenges today’s postmodern consciousness, that contemporary affliction of academe which is characterized by the fragmentation of knowledge, the absence of moral parameters and the rejection of any unitary truth. I maintained that the Cross of Reality allows us to find unitary truth without a system, without any metaphysics. It is an open-ended model of the human reality, and its dialogical method is similarly open-ended.
In the middle of my paper, I provided two examples of that method’s application. My first example related to the contemporary crisis in
My point was that the Russian mafia’s considerable take-over of the Russian economy could have been avoided by a carefully phased change in which legal, parliamentary, and other social foundations were laid in conjunction with each economic step. What happened in Yeltsin’s
My second example concerned
In both my
Toward the end, I described a key difference between Eugen’s higher sociology and sociology as it is practiced today. That would be the admission that the new science had a purpose: to establish peace. Of course, I pointed to my cross diagram to describe the four constant threats to peace in society: revolution, anarchy, decadence, and war. If we give priority to establishing a truly human society, we’ll always have to address these threats.
I concluded that the bringing together of Bakhtin’s dialogical thought with Eugen’s does, indeed, ignite the spark needed for Kemeny’s breakthrough in the social sciences. Eugen’s applications of the dialogical method in the fields of history and society complement Bakhtin’s applications in the fields of literature and linguistics.
The fact that two men independently arrived at such similar discoveries suggests the birth of a new science. It enlarges the field and overcomes the tendency to build a cult around one innovator.
I ended by offering some visions of how we might come to see the world in the light of the new discipline which I‘d been describing:
—We might get rid of the notion that we live one-dimensional lives in a simply mechanical world. We might discover that each of us lives at the center of creation, and that times and spaces are being constantly renewed and remade as we accept the responsibilities of living within reality’s cross.
—We might grasp that what all religions describe as spirit is not something otherworldly. Instead, it is simply the higher form of the speech spoken by the whole human race and made audible in the words of every good man or woman.
—We might replace our ancient story of a divine being who called the world into existence—and our more recent story of meaningless atoms competing in space—with a new story. This third story would tell us of the great body of humankind, united through all time by the sweeping web of speech. We would come to recognize the living word as the spark, the electricity, which flashes throughout this web, animating each of us and uniting us with the whole.
—We might realize that, just as the atom was imagined by the Greeks but remained hidden until it was turned into electrical fields and atomic power by Faraday and Bohr, so the Logos, the word, was described by Heraclitus but really was not seen as the field in which we become human until Bakhtin’s and Rosenstock-Huessy’s discoveries.
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When Vitaly completed translating that last sentence, he stood to announce that lunch would be served in the cafeteria.
After lunch, instead of going to one of the afternoon panels as I’d planned, I headed for the front door. I needed a long walk to get my bearings again after all the energy I’d put into this morning’s talk. There was only one place in this city where I could find the space and peace I wanted, and fortunately there was a metro near it.
Half an hour later I was walking in the dappled sunlight of tree-lined paths on the great expanse of
I sat on the grass in the shade of the sixteenth-century church, older than St. Basil’s, reached into my briefcase and took out the notebook with my text for Beyond Belief, still only completed through Chapter 10.. That heart attack last year left me more than a little fatigued, but now I was feeling fine, and this sunny Moscow afternoon in 1995 seemed a good time and place to reflect on how Russia had become the proving ground for all the ideas I’d been nourishing since the fall of 1940.
Testing the Dialogical Method
From the moment I arrived in
All my other dialogues—with Yuri Zamoshkin, Konstantin Ivanov, Father Benjamin, Vitaly Makhlin, Sasha Pigalev, and Sergei Averintsev—helped to establish ever-expanding projects: Bridges for Peace, the Transnational Institute, and the Vladimir Solovyov Society. They also gave Eugen’s work a firm toehold in
Of course, refounding Bulgakov’s and Berdyaev’s Solovyov Society, though a small project, had a huge significance for all of us involved—so intimately was it related to the narrative of Russia’s past, her inner spirit, and her future aspirations. The dream I’d shared with Igor in
Like the Solovyov Society, “Bridges” and the Institute succeeded because we thought and acted within the parameters of the Cross of Reality. We and our Russian partners wanted to build a bridge to a common future, one beyond our mutual nuclear suicide. We both responded, quite vigorously, to that future imperative, the imperative of peace. As we citizen diplomats engaged in dialogue, within the privacy of our homes, we learned about each other’s inner spirit and saw each other as individual persons, as I’s; we learned about each other’s histories and language, and saw where the other was coming from, as we’s; and, finally, we organized ourselves to make our exchanges happen in the real world, and had them publicized through press and television in each country. We became visible on the outer front of life, as they’s. Any complete and successful human experience touches all those four bases.
Our efforts within Bridges were multiplied many times over. There were only three organizations dedicated to US-USSR exchanges when we started in 1983. And those three served primarily their own members. By 1990, our example of an open network had helped, directly or indirectly, with the formation of at least fifty similar organizations. The resulting national movement eventually sent over a hundred thousand Americans to the
What else was tested in
When Problems of Philosophy, through Sasha Pigalev’s initiative, printed the last two chapters of Out of Revolution, with their presentation of Eugen’s motto respondeo etsi mutabor and his call for establishing metanomics, it provided evidence that Eugen’s ideas are not beyond the imagination of some leaders in a nation’s academic establishment. Such publication had not really occurred before.
Then my little book, Between East and West: Rediscovering the Gifts of the Russian Spirit, matured from a samizdat to publication by the
When I finished writing out those reflections, I raised my eyes from my notebook and let them follow the
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In August 2000, as planned, the Solovyov Society and the
In 2001 Out of Revolution, translated by Vitaly, Sasha, and some others, finally was published in
The Solovyov Society’s current main activity is a Web discussion group, which has over 300 members. You can join us by sending an e-mail to: Solovyov-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
Finally, I’ll add, as Appendix B, an e-mail from
Now Part III will return from