I-for-Myself and Its Spiritual “Form” in Mikhail Bakhtin’s Moral Philosophy (Based on His Text “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”)

In his manuscript “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”, Bakhtin creates an image of I (I-for-myself) as a moral agent who performs a moral act that has aesthetic content. However, research of his early aesthetics has more often than not been focused on the unit of aesthetic interaction, the relation “author – hero” (“I – the other”), while the results of the analysis of I as a moral agent (in Bakhtin’s work “Toward a Philosophy of the Act”) have yet to be compared with the treatment of I in the “Author and Hero…” This article for the first time offers an attempt to analyze the discourse on I in Bakhtin’s early aesthetics as a presumed part of his plan to study the world and act (“moral philosophy”) he had begun implementing with his text on the “philosophy of the act” but never completed. From a technical standpoint, I argue that the discourse on I in­cludes three separate but complementary themes of the aesthetic treatise: the soul (the temporal form of the hero / the other), self-account-confession and “Christ of the Gospels”. I isolate the con­cept of I/I-for-myself from particular aesthetic relations and recreate it on its internal grounds. I maintain the con­sonance of the concepts of disunity and value-based unity of I as its unity with God (and the spiritual form of I) and the concept of aesthetic form (whole, unity): it introduces the Creator into Bakhtin’s early aesthetics and determines its value-ontological and deontological character. Content-wise, I show that I-for-myself in early aesthetics is a moral agent in full mea­sure as a Christian: I as a moral agent is born with the recognition of its meaning in God, and the goals, meaning and form of its inner life are located in the horizon of the Fall and my own sin­fulness – and the desire for salvation, transfiguration, and redemption. I undermine the noticeable syncretism of Bakhtin’s narrative about I (and its own spiritual experience) to concentrate on such concepts as self-reflection, I as a given and I as an assigned, fragmented and bad subjectivity, the future unity of I and responsibility, the object and meaning of my experiences, memory, the ex­perience of time and myself in it, confessional self-accounting, the spiritual form of I as repentance (in its non-coinciding with itself) and trustworthy dialog with God, spirit and value category of the other. I try to examine these concepts that form the concept of I-for-myself in its entirety, in their interrelationships, but in a linear order if possible. A selective comparison of the concepts of I and the world in two early manuscripts of Bakhtin points to their distinctly Christian character and substantive continuity. The article lays the foundation for the study of the aesthetic content of Bakhtin’s treatise “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”.