2 - Neo-Kantianism and Bakhtin's phenomenology

Summary

Bakhtin's interest in phenomenology – or, more specifically, the way in which the human mind comes to consciousness in a relationship with objects or other human subjects – stems from his immersion at the beginning of the twentieth century in neo-Kantianism, the dominant school of philosophy at the time. In the 1910s and 1920s, neo-Kantianism was largely imported from Germany, in particular from Marburg; at one time or another at the turn of the century almost all the chairs of departments of philosophy, both in Germany and in Russia, were occupied by neo-Kantians. Of the philosophers from the Marburg school, the most influential for Bakhtin was Hermann Cohen. In general, what interested Bakhtin and his colleagues during their gatherings in the years immediately following the Revolution was Kant's concern for founding a relationship between a theory of knowledge and a theory of ethics based in The critique of pure reason and The critique of practical reason. In the first of these works, Kant shows that human understanding cannot go beyond the phenomena of sensory experience, and thus questions about transcendent objects – God, for example – will necessarily be unanswerable. If one takes this transcendent knowledge as ultimate reality, then reality is unknowable, and as a result there can be no rational metaphysics. In the second book, Kant's aim was to remedy the problem established in the first.