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Toward a Philosophy of the Act
Rescued in 1972 from a storeroom in which rats and seeping water had severely damaged the fifty-year-old manuscript, this text is the earliest major work (1919-1921) of the great Russian philosopher M. M. Bakhtin. Toward a Philosophy of the Act contains the first occurrences of themes that occupied Bakhtin throughout his long career. The topics of authoring, responsibility, self and other, the moral significance of "outsideness," participatory thinking, the implications for the individual subject of having "no-alibi in existence," the difference between the world as experienced in actions and the world as represented in discourse—all are broached here in the heat of discovery. This is the "heart of the heart" of Bakhtin, the center of the dialogue between being and language, the world and mind, "the given" and "the created" that forms the core of Bakhtin's distinctive dialogism. A special feature of this work is Bakhtin's struggle with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Put very simply, this text is an attempt to go beyond Kant's formulation of the ethical imperative. mci will be important for scholars across the humanities as they grapple with the increasingly vexed relationship between aesthetics and ethics.
132 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1924
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About the author
Mikhail Bakhtin
103 books322 followersVery influential writings of Russian linguist and literary critic Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin in 20th-century poststructuralism and the social theory of the novel included
Problems of Dostoyevsky's Works
(1929, see Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky) and
The Dialogic Imagination
(1975).
This philosopher, semiotician, and scholar on ethics and the philosophy of language. He on a variety of subjects inspired scholars in a number of different traditions of Marxism, semiotics, and religionand in disciplines as diverse as history, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology. Although Bakhtin acted in the debates on aesthetics that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, scholars rediscovered his not well known distinctive position in the 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail...
This philosopher, semiotician, and scholar on ethics and the philosophy of language. He on a variety of subjects inspired scholars in a number of different traditions of Marxism, semiotics, and religionand in disciplines as diverse as history, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology. Although Bakhtin acted in the debates on aesthetics that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, scholars rediscovered his not well known distinctive position in the 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail...
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
June 4, 2018
This is my favorite of all of Bakhtin's books.
In it, he makes the case for why we are wholly dignified beings who must live with one another, listening to each other as equals.
What is more important than that?
In it, he makes the case for why we are wholly dignified beings who must live with one another, listening to each other as equals.
What is more important than that?
November 26, 2024
A jargon-laden prolegomena on the need to tie Kantianism to a phenomenology of action. Don’t miss the rejection of determinate/autonomous ethical norms.
February 7, 2026
I know that this is formally a response to neokantian ethics, but I read it more in reaction against a sort of vulgar nietzcheanism that I've been grappling with.
it attacks both from opposite ends. there's a synthesis of thought and being here which is deeply morally empowering for me, this attempts to integrate thought as process into being in a way that i think is opaque in the nietzsche I've read, where overcoming only exists as a sort of horizon.
Obviously incomplete and dense in an unedited kind of way, but imo still immensely valuable.
it attacks both from opposite ends. there's a synthesis of thought and being here which is deeply morally empowering for me, this attempts to integrate thought as process into being in a way that i think is opaque in the nietzsche I've read, where overcoming only exists as a sort of horizon.
Obviously incomplete and dense in an unedited kind of way, but imo still immensely valuable.
August 31, 2017
Reimagining, revolution, and resistance in name of and for the sake of humanity and love. My kind of shit.
September 25, 2012
(4.5 stars, rounded down)
This dense little fragment has revitalized my interest in Bakhtin after reading The Dialogic Imagination with great interest almost twenty years ago, and then having that enthusiasm blunted through my exposure to its appropriation within the domain of cultural studies. What a happy discovery to learn then, through this early work, the extent to which Bakhtin had been working through the German philosophic tradition while consciously positioning himself in relation to contemporaneous orientations such as Neo-Kantiansim and phenomenology.
In attempting to "go beyond Kant's formulation of the ethical imperative," Bakhtin criticizes in certain ways that are reminiscent of Heidegger the sterility of theoretical generalities over the unique, lived experience of the individual, which is always informed by a participation within a social context. The development of Bakhtin's ontology is characteristic of the originality of his particular genius, but its orientation is actively engaged in the seed bed of philosophical crosscurrents of early 20th Century Germany, an intellectual ferment that produced modern existentialism, philosophical hermeneutics, and phenomenology, and that adds an entirely new and exciting aspect to his portfolio, from this reader's perspective.
This dense little fragment has revitalized my interest in Bakhtin after reading The Dialogic Imagination with great interest almost twenty years ago, and then having that enthusiasm blunted through my exposure to its appropriation within the domain of cultural studies. What a happy discovery to learn then, through this early work, the extent to which Bakhtin had been working through the German philosophic tradition while consciously positioning himself in relation to contemporaneous orientations such as Neo-Kantiansim and phenomenology.
In attempting to "go beyond Kant's formulation of the ethical imperative," Bakhtin criticizes in certain ways that are reminiscent of Heidegger the sterility of theoretical generalities over the unique, lived experience of the individual, which is always informed by a participation within a social context. The development of Bakhtin's ontology is characteristic of the originality of his particular genius, but its orientation is actively engaged in the seed bed of philosophical crosscurrents of early 20th Century Germany, an intellectual ferment that produced modern existentialism, philosophical hermeneutics, and phenomenology, and that adds an entirely new and exciting aspect to his portfolio, from this reader's perspective.
January 2, 2019
A Philosophy of the Act is not well written, but the manuscript was never intended to be published by Bakhtin to begin with. There are thoroughly engaging ideas in this text though. I am most drawn towards Bakhtin’s critiques of philosophical theory, especially of Kant, as well as his explorations of space, time, and action in this manuscript.
March 3, 2015
unfinished and probably unfinishable, but not in a good nezavershennost way. could've been some cool neo-Kantian rumination here on the key problem of vnenakhodimost, had dude not smoked this manuscript up in the Kazakh wilderness (or was that the other text?).
October 13, 2020
This shows you the inner workings of a lot of his later thought. It’s incredibly dense and steeped in impossible kantian terminology, and it’s really not helped by being an incomplete fragment of a water-damaged manuscript (several moments where you think you’re finally understanding something and he hits you with a “[32 illegible words]”) but there’s some really interesting stuff in here for the Bakhtin stans out there
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February 12, 2026review text for 320
January 11, 2026
Three stars is generous. Toward a Philosophy of the Act is Bakhtin's very worst. That makes sense, because it's a super early career manuscript which was discovered in a severely damaged state. Still, there are awesome conceptual resources to be mined from this dumpster fire. I recommend it only to academics who are after that kind of thing. To spare you from a migraine, here's a summary of the parts I found most interesting:
Bakhtin’s philosophy situates human identity in the act of becoming: a perpetual process shaped through dialogic relations with others and the surrounding world. In this miserable book, he explains that each person’s existence is a once-occurrent event existing in a unique, once-occurent context. People are answerable for their actions because no one else can act from the same vantage point. To live ethically, we must answer for how we choose to architect the world with and from our own “surplus of seeing”. The surplus which others provide completes aspects of ourselves we cannot perceive directly, while our perspective completes theirs. In this way, the self and the other are enmeshed in a dance of continual co-authorship. Importantly, this dynamic makes identity fundamentally relational and unfinalized.
The carnivalesque offers somewhat of a cultural enactment of this principle of becoming. Carnival suspends and subverts standing hierarchies and fixed meanings. It creates a temporary social order in which transformation is not only possible, but celebrated. The grotesque body--emphasizing openings, excrescences, and cycles of degradation and renewal--unapologetically symbolizes the unconfined, ever-evolving nature of life. Masks, parody, and inversion liberate participants from the constraints of singular identity, much as dialogic relations in everyday life liberate the self from solipsism. Carnival’s linguistic play, in particular (blending sacred and “profane”, official and “marketplace” speech) creates a liminal, playful, imaginative space in which meanings and identities can be collectively and nonjudgementally reworked and explored.
For Bakhtin, both the ethical sphere of the answerable act and the cultural sphere of carnival reject isolation, closure, and abstract universals detached from unique lived experience. They affirm that identity emerges through situated, embodied participation in the ongoing event of life, where meaning is continually negotiated in contact with others--a moving target never meant to be pinned down. Becoming depends on the carnivalesque spirit--on rawness, openness, relationality, play, extrication from temporality, and the creative renewal of self and world.
Bakhtin’s philosophy situates human identity in the act of becoming: a perpetual process shaped through dialogic relations with others and the surrounding world. In this miserable book, he explains that each person’s existence is a once-occurrent event existing in a unique, once-occurent context. People are answerable for their actions because no one else can act from the same vantage point. To live ethically, we must answer for how we choose to architect the world with and from our own “surplus of seeing”. The surplus which others provide completes aspects of ourselves we cannot perceive directly, while our perspective completes theirs. In this way, the self and the other are enmeshed in a dance of continual co-authorship. Importantly, this dynamic makes identity fundamentally relational and unfinalized.
The carnivalesque offers somewhat of a cultural enactment of this principle of becoming. Carnival suspends and subverts standing hierarchies and fixed meanings. It creates a temporary social order in which transformation is not only possible, but celebrated. The grotesque body--emphasizing openings, excrescences, and cycles of degradation and renewal--unapologetically symbolizes the unconfined, ever-evolving nature of life. Masks, parody, and inversion liberate participants from the constraints of singular identity, much as dialogic relations in everyday life liberate the self from solipsism. Carnival’s linguistic play, in particular (blending sacred and “profane”, official and “marketplace” speech) creates a liminal, playful, imaginative space in which meanings and identities can be collectively and nonjudgementally reworked and explored.
For Bakhtin, both the ethical sphere of the answerable act and the cultural sphere of carnival reject isolation, closure, and abstract universals detached from unique lived experience. They affirm that identity emerges through situated, embodied participation in the ongoing event of life, where meaning is continually negotiated in contact with others--a moving target never meant to be pinned down. Becoming depends on the carnivalesque spirit--on rawness, openness, relationality, play, extrication from temporality, and the creative renewal of self and world.
March 4, 2025
Finished Mikhail Bakhtin’s TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY OF THE ACT, an unpublished text written between 1919 and 1921 and rediscovered, rat and water-damaged, by his students in 1972. The foreword begins, “In his long life under Soviet rule, Bakhtin experienced the whole range of effects an author can produce, from censorship, imprisonment, and banishment to fame and adulation.” I found out about this short but difficult book from Russian literary scholar, Gary Morson, in his discussion of Bakhtin’s concept, “non-alibi,” which means “One is…always responsible for what one does or fails to do in an unrepeatable moment of time” (WONDER CONFRONTS CERTAINTY, p. 259). Bakhtin alludes to this lack of political accountability in a brief statement on technology, that “when divorced from the once-occurrent unity of life…it may from time to time irrupt…as an irresponsibly destructive and terrifying force” (p. 7). The book as a whole is a complex discussion of the centrality of one’s human existence and living experience from and through which we derive all thoughts and actions. This may seem obvious. But Bakhtin objects to abstract ideas or “Theory” divorced from human responsibility. In historical terms, for example, it is communist “theory” as an “alibi” that allows starvation and murder of millions of people. For Bakhtin scholars, TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY is essential reading. I’m not one of them. But since he is one of the more important literary philosophers of the 20th century, I will eventually get to his THE DIALOGIC IMAGINATION (1941) and SPEECH GENRES (1971). The latter pages of PHILOSOPHY OF THE ACT explicate the aesthetic perspectives in Pushkin’s poem, “Parting” (1830), precursing Bakhtin's later works.
May 18, 2013
Revolutionary for both its time, as well as our own. Discusses how we implement the artistic/theoretical tastes of our lives into the practical. Kind of heady and difficult to follow... but that's expected, given he wrote it around the age of 20. A fine work for Christian epistemology and aesthetics.
December 11, 2010
Volitional and architectonic.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews