“Participative thinking”. Bakhtin’s philosophical project in a context of the ontological turn of 20th century

Abstract

In this essay the young Bakhtin’s philosophical project from the early 1920s, is analyzed in two interrelated directions: first, within the “inner” context of his “first philosophy”, secondly, against the “outer” background of the West European (mostly German) turn to the “New Thinking”, that is, to the so-called existential ontology, or the “social ontology” (Husserl, Scheler. Buber, G. Marcel, Sartre et al.). Methodologically, in order to answer the question “Where did Bakhtin come from?”, the author of the essay, in contrast to the trend of research in the comparative genre of ‘Bakhtin and…’, works both historically and systematically using the ontological category of the “in-between”: his subject is just the “event of being” and the “concrete historicity” as mediation between Bakhtin’s project and the projects of his Western contemporaries. Thus, it becomes clear why and under what circumstances the Russian thinker’s concept of the “participative thinking” in fact participated in the European turn to the modern, or existential, ontology. Besides, some motives or elements in Bakhtin’s early project are taken into consideration, which he later developed in his well-known works written since the mid-1920s and up to the mid-1970s.