Introduction Konstantin Megrelidze and His Fundamental Problems of the Sociology of Thinking
Konstantin Romanovich Megrelidze’s book The Fundamental Problems of the Sociology of Thinking is a remarkable and rare type of work: a comprehensive and subtle work of Marxist philosophical thought which engages extensively with contemporary European philosophy, psychology and social science, dating from the height of the Stalin period. The book is far from a dogmatic rebuttal of various schools of thought, which predominated at the time, but a much more creative and critical engagement from the perspective of someone trying to develop a holistic form of Marxism that could account for the many dimensions of the human activity of thinking. In this project the erudition and judiciousness of the author remains clear to the reader, and it is notable that this survives in a text that was subject to many changes, first adopted by the author under duress, and then compounded by excisions some decades after his death. The text we present here in English translation was therefore not that which could be regarded as the author’s own version, but is translated from the edition that was published in the USSR in 1965 and reissued in 1973 and, most recently, in 2007. A putative second volume of the work was allegedly written while Megrelidze was held in one of the camps of Stalin’s GULAG system, but seems to have been lost.1 In common with the work of many thinkers of the time, therefore, the text remains problematic in a number of ways, but the contents are significant enough to make its appearance in English for the first time worthwhile and timely. In what follows we shall present information about the biography of the author and the complicated history of the work before moving on to a discussion of how the work relates to the debates of the time and finally, the relevance of the work today.
A Biographical Sketch2
Konstantin (Kita) Romanovich Megrelidze was born the son of a village priest in Khrialeti, Georgia, on 30 December 1900. He attended the village school from 1906 before enrolling in the boy’s grammar school in the Georgian port city of Poti. On graduation he for a time worked as a teacher of German, and of mathematics, at the Supsa-Ozurgeti College of Higher Education. In 1919 he enrolled at the newly formed (1918) Tiflis (from 1936 Tblisi) State University (now the Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University), graduating in philosophy and psychology in 1923. He stayed on at the University to work towards the title of Professor of Philosophy, simultaneously teaching political economy and the history of materialism at the Central Party School, the pedagogical section of which he headed, and teaching courses of general and child psychology at the Higher Pedagogical Institute.
In 1924 the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Commissariat of Enlightenment sent Megrelidze to Germany to continue his education. He spent two semesters at Baden Albert Ludwigs University in Freiberg (1924–25) and then shifted to the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin, where he spent a further four semesters. While in Germany he attended lectures by some of the leading German intellectuals of the time, including phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, Gestalt psychologists Wolfgang Köhler and Max Wertheimer, and the neo-Kantian philosopher Arthur Liebert (1878–1946). While resident in Berlin, Megrelidze joined the German Communist Party (KPD) under the name of Hans Schlosser, where he was a member of the Bureau of Communist Students of the Central Committee. When a German Union of Soviet Students was formed, Megrelidze was selected as Chair of its Central Executive Committee, in which capacity he attended the Second All-Union Conference of Proletarian Students in Moscow. He also proved to be a talented linguist, developing a command of German, French, English and Turkish in addition to his native Georgian and Russian. Meanwhile Megrelidze worked as a correspondent for the Tblisi newspapers The Communist and Dawn of the East, where he published surveys of the political situation in Germany.
On returning to Tiflis in June 1927 Megrelidze served as Deputy Head of the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Georgian Party for two years, followed by a term as Head of the Scientific Department of the Georgian Commissariat of Enlightenment (1929–31) and, from 1931, as Deputy Head of the section of Language and the History of Material Culture at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Throughout this period, he lectured on philosophy, dialectical and historical materialism at various higher education institutes in Tiflis (the Transcaucasian Communist University, the Chemistry Institute and the Institute of Communication) first as a docent and, from 1930, as a professor. He was also Chair of the Georgian State Film Industry and Rektor of the Academy of Art.
In 1933 Megrelidze visited the Institute of Language and Thinking (Institut iazyka i myshleniia, IIaM), of the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad, where from 1 February 1934 he was confirmed as a permanent ‘Scientific Specialist’ and, from January 1935, he was the institute’s Party Organiser.3 In February of the same year he was appointed the head of the Department of Nationalities at the Leningrad State Public Library. The Institute of Language and Thinking granted him a Kandidat (roughly equivalent to a PhD) degree without the need to defend a dissertation, and in 1935 he submitted his doctoral dissertation (akin to a D. Litt) Social Phenomenology to the Academy’s Institute of Philosophy, where it was to be examined by Abram Moiseyevich Deborin (1881–1963) and Grigorii Samuilovich Tymianskii (1893–1941). The defence did not take place, however, because Megrelidze unexpectedly was expelled from the Communist Party for allegedly concealing the fact that he had been arrested in 1923 for participating in his wife’s Menshevik organisation (he had actually only met his future wife, the economist Aleksandra Fedorovna Kartsivadze [1905–1960] in 1929). The publication of the monograph scheduled for 1937 was halted when the responsible editor, Leon Georgievich Basindzhagian (1893–1938), was arrested by the NKVD. Even though Head of the Institute, academician Ivan Ivanovich Meshchaninov (1883–1967) cleared the book for release the following year, the entire edition was confiscated when Megrelidze was arrested and charged with having connections to a counter-revolutionary Dashnak (Armenian Revolutionary Federation) group, a Trotskyist-Zinovievite terrorist group and with foreign intelligence agencies.
After a lengthy trial, a seriously ill Megrelidze was released, returned to Tblisi in December 1939 and took up a position as Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Language, History and Material Culture of the Georgian branch of the Academy of Sciences. A number of academicians again recommended the publication of the book, but this was again thwarted when, in December 1940, Megrelidze was arrested once more on visiting Leningrad to support his wife who had herself been arrested when she tried to change apartments. Charged with anti-Soviet propaganda, Megrelidze was sentenced to ten years of correctional labour in a camp in the Kirov region, where he died in 1943. His wife was only released from a prison camp following Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ in 1956, at which point she joined their daughter Manana Konstantinova Megrelidze to petition for the posthumous rehabilitation of Konstantin Romanovich. This was granted in September 1958 on the grounds that there was no evidence of guilt.
The Published Text
Megrelidze’s cousin, the philologist Iosif Varfolomeevich Megrelidze (1909–1996), managed to extract a copy of Megrelidze’s monograph from his already sealed office at the Institute of Language and Thinking, and this became the basis of the text published in 1965. A special commission was established at the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR to consider publication in 1956, eventually leading to publication in 1965. There seems little doubt that Megrelidze adjusted the text before his initial attempts to publish the book, not least changing the title from Social Phenomenology to Fundamental Problems of the Sociology of Thinking so that it no longer foregrounded phenomenology.4 Giga Zedania, professor and rector of Ilia State University, Tbilisi, claims the 1965 edition involved a number of excisions of references to Stalin and abridgements of considerations of the work of the prominent and controversial philologist and archaeologist Nikolai Iaklovlevich Marr. Unfortunately such editorial incursions are not uncommon: references to Marr, whose ideas had been denounced by Stalin in his comments on Marxism and linguistics in June 1950, were missing from the publication of Mikhail Bakhtin’s now famous essays on the novel of the 1930s when they were published posthumously in 1975, while references to these same comments by Stalin were removed from the publication of Bakhtin’s 1953 essay ‘Problems of Speech Genres’ when it was published in 1978, 1979 and 1996.5
Such interventions obscure both the political and intellectual contexts in which the works in question were written. It is hard to imagine how a work on Marxist theory written for publication in in the USSR in 1937 could not have included references to Stalin, however much they may have represented instances of obligatory genuflection. It is even less likely given that Megrelidze was the Party organiser in the Institute of Language and Thinking. Considerations of the work of Nikolai Marr were also to be expected since Marr was the founding director of the institute, the leading figure in the field, especially from 1932, and that there were numerous commemorative publications about Marr appearing at the very time the book was being prepared for publication following his death in 1934. The extremely and disproportionately short Chapter 5 of the published book introduces the question of early forms of social consciousness before moving on and it is here discussion of Marr was most likely located. Fortunately, we can glean a sense of the contents from Megrelidze’s article ‘N. Ia. Marr and the Philosophy of Marxism’, which was originally delivered as a lecture in memory of Marr at the Academy of Sciences in February 1935 and published in a special issue of The Problems of the History of Pre-Capitalist Societies, the journal of Marr’s State Academy for the History of Material Culture (GAIMK) to mark Marr’s death. It was republished, with a few minor changes, in the Party journal Under the Banner of Marxism the same year. The article considered the importance of Marr’s work for the philosophy of Marxism and a translation of this article is appended to the translation of the current book. The article helps us to reconstruct where Marr’s ideas were significant to Megrelidze’s approach, and it gives a flavour of the publishing conventions of the time, not least in the invocation of Stalin in the final sentence.
While not wishing to exaggerate the ethnic dimension, there was undoubtedly a close community of Georgian and other Caucasian scholars at IIaM, including the Georgians Marr, Konstantin and Iosif Megrelidze, Basindzhagian, Karpez Darispanovich Dondua (1891–1951) and the Armenian Iosif Abgarovich Orbeli (1887–1961). Study of the languages and cultures of the Caucasus region was central to the activity of the institute, which began as the ‘Japhetic Institute’, based on Marr’s earlier theory that the languages and cultures of the Caucasus constituted a Japhetic group, which were related to Semitic languages and cultures by virtue of them having a common ‘Noetic’ ancestor.6 Georgians Marr and Stalin had an interesting correlation of ideas and interests, and even some correspondence in 1932, while it was under the influence of another Georgian linguist, Arnold Stepanovich Chikobava (1898–1985), that Stalin composed his work attacking the legacy of Marr in linguistics in 1950.7 Marr’s ideas proved controversial among Georgian scholars for a number of reasons, both scholarly and ideological.8 Megrelidze clearly believed, however, that at least one aspect of Marr’s thought was an important contribution to the development of the philosophy of Marxism.
Megrelidze’s Social Phenomenology
The title of Megrelidze’s book Fundamental Problems of the Sociology of Thinking may appear a little unusual in English since the ‘sociology of thought’ seems a little more natural. There is, however, an important reason for the translation. Megrelidze specifically uses the term myshlenie (thinking) rather than thought (mysl′) to foreground activity and process. The book presents a comprehensive consideration of the social nature of human thinking, arguing that the Marxist approach to the question is sharply distinguished from all previous approaches and that characteristic of modern bourgeois philosophy. Marxist philosophy requires a socio-historical approach to thinking and knowledge, based on the understanding of the active, social, and practical essence of humanity. Marxism anticipated methodological innovations that came to the fore in various areas of scientific thinking later: a holistic approach to thinking, as well as to other objects of study; the need to consider the structural connections between thinking and other aspects of human activity; the need for complex study of phenomena, which, in turn, implies the denial of rigid boundaries between branches of science. He concluded that ‘in the history of the formation and development of human society, labour, tools, material culture, language and thinking are components of the whole as inextricably linked and mutually conditioning each other; and if we want to study thinking, we need to take this complex whole in its totality and unity with the general historical process of human development’.
The two closely related tendencies in bourgeois philosophy that Megrelidze considered in need of being completely eradicated from Marxism were naturalistic reductionism and empiricism. The first could be viewed in attempts to take studies of animal behaviour as given and then to extrapolate their findings to human behaviour. While recognising the importance of developments in physiology, Megrelidze held that an excessive focus on the nervous system and the physiology of the brain obscures such fundamental problems as why social conditions make one and the same nervous-neurological apparatus work in a certain way in one era and in a different way in another. Reducing man to a natural being fails to study what is specifically human in human beings, in its place substituting the animal. Physiology and psychology need therefore to be restructured in fundamental ways in order to study what is specifically human. The essence, composition and structure of human consciousness, the forms and ways of thinking, are formed and developed primarily under the influence of social forces, which operate according to social and historical laws.
The fundamental innovations of Marxism had, Megrelidze held, still not adequately restructured the study of human consciousness. The irreducible nature of sociality was still too often interpreted as a relatively minor feature of thinking; the qualitative uniqueness of human consciousness often overlooked. While the early Soviet period saw a rise in studies of the relationship between machines and humans, the social nature of consciousness was too often ignored. The creative nature of human labour, on which Marx placed particular emphasis as manifesting essential human powers, was too often considered narrowly as an external relationship to utility. Megrelidze aimed to give them full consideration as manifestations of the essence of the human.
This failure fully to account for the social essence of the human leads to naturalism, and when this social nature and the specificity of human activity is removed from the theory of knowledge the result is empiricism. Sensations are now regarded as natural data and from them the empiricist tries to explain the essence of human knowledge. Megrelidze claims the connection of this position with naturalism was rarely realised, since the main features of the philosophy of empiricism became embedded in scientific dogmas and prejudices. The persistence of these dogmas constitutes a great danger for Marxist philosophy. In opposition to these narrow perspectives, Megrelidze argues that it is not only the highest functions of the psyche that are products of the history of society, but even its most elementary functions such as sensations and feelings. Sensations, feelings and the data derived therefrom are not a direct source of knowledge for Marxism, which recognises that a person learns certain ways of perceiving by means of the senses.
The naturalistic and empiricist point of view identifies objectivity with the material, and the latter with the natural. As a result, the specific objectivity of social formations, their necessity and regularity, is distorted. Objective value is identified with the natural and material existence of the objects to which value is attributed. Similarly, by regarding the aesthetic aspects of perception as dependent on social factors and so not having a natural character leads many thinkers to regard aesthetic factors as merely subjective. All this suggests that both empiricist and naturalistic interpretations of Marxist philosophy have not yet been completely overcome.
Recognition of the social aspects of the person and of human thinking is crucial in overcoming empiricism and naturalism. However, mere recognition of the social determination of human consciousness without an explanation of human activity essentially reproduces empiricism and naturalism in a new, collectivist form. Society becomes merely an external determinant of human activity. This approach Megrelidze calls ‘sociologism’: the direct derivation of human consciousness from the organisational forms of a given society.9 Durkheim and others (Megrelidze ascribes Saussure to this company, as was common at the time) are the chief representatives of this approach which, Megrelidze complains, turns consciousness into a dead apparatus, meaninglessly reproducing alien forms. Thinkers such as Durkheim, Saussure and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl do not understand that the individual is not only forced to think as others think, in traditionally established forms, but may also compel others to think in his/her own way. The individual not only perceives the traditionally developed forms, but also participates in the creation and re-creation of these forms. Here Megrelidze anticipates, by several decades, an argument advanced by Roy Bhaskar in arguably his most significant work, The Possibility of Naturalism (1979).10
For thinking to be necessary, and for it to be determined socially, it must have a certain function, it must be inherent in social activity; to conceive of thinking as a passive reflection of social reality means to consider it useless, merely accidental for the social process. Consistent determinism is compatible only with the recognition of the potency of human activity. ‘Thinking does not just reproduce a particular social system – it would be useless, but acts each time according to the meaning of these objects and makes mental constructions that solve these problems’.
This activity manifests itself already at the stage of sensory cognition: sensory representations are not recognised as ‘simple mirror images of objects’. Here, in particular, we can see the influence of Megrelidze’s study under Husserl and the Gestalt psychologists, and we can begin to understand why his study was initially entitled social phenomenology. According to Husserl’s doctrine of intentionality, consciousness is not only consciousness of something, but an act of seeing, hearing and so on directed towards something. Objects of perception are therefore presented to consciousness according to these acts; we perceive things in a particular way. What are presented to consciousness in these acts are not atomic sensations, but structured wholes that are objects (or states of affairs, Sachverhalten) which can only be broken down into their constituent parts through analytical processes. This is because, as Husserl outlines in his second and third Logical Investigations, perception always involves some level of interpretation of sensations. Interpretation is here not in the Kantian sense of imposing concepts on a formless ‘manifold’, for reality is already structured and interpretation is not always conceptual. Thus, when we recognise x as a part of whole a rather than whole b, there is no progression via concepts, but an act of perception involving sensory interpretation. Only later, in his 1913 book Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, does Husserl seek to distinguish fundamentally between perception of putative objects and separate noema, that is correlated elements of the structure of any intentional act, which lead him to embrace idealism.11
While by the time Megrelidze studied under Husserl the latter had made his decisive transition to transcendental idealism, a generation of thinkers inspired by the same tradition of Austrian philosophy were working to retain and develop the earlier ontological realism.12 Megrelidze encountered these ideas directly when he moved to Berlin and worked with Köhler, Wertheimer and others.13 The Berlin School argued that the structured wholes or Gestalten, that were the primary objects of the perceiving consciousness, were not ideal entities but could be established experimentally and were repeatedly observable. Perception is a matter of direct relations to reality rather than a detour via ideal entities. Perhaps the most famous example of their experimental work was the so-called ‘phi-phenomenon’ discovered by Wertheimer when he noted that under certain conditions two subjects (in actual fact his two colleagues Köhler and Kurt Koffka) were exposed to two alternately flashing lights a short distance apart, they perceived movement back and forth between them. The movement perceived was not the product of any intellectual production but sensory interpretation. Some of the theoretical implications of this were developed by both Koffka and Wertheimer, of which particularly significant was the idea that perception is a result of the state of readiness or ‘mental set’ (Einstellung) of the perceiver towards the stimulus.14 Successive presentations are integrated according to this ‘mental set’, psychologically grounded states which reflect ‘materially determinate knowledge and habits of mind acquired through time by the organism in question and which may be further dependent on social factors, institutions, authorities, language and so on’.15 Perceived structures, Gestalten, are therefore correlations between objective and subjective factors, which include bodily phenomena such as feelings.16
Particularly important for Megrelidze’s development of these ideas was Husserl’s contention that perceptual states form parts of wider ‘psychological and behavioural wholes, and only an analysis of the role of perceptual acts within such contexts will allow us to make sense of the perceptions of a subject in motion, of perceptions of dynamic objects and of the connection between perceptual states and the sets appropriate to different types of activity’.17 These innovative perspectives about dynamic perception were not fully to be developed in experimental psychology until the 1950s, when Koffka’s student James Jerome Gibson developed what would come to be known as ‘ecological psychology’ according to which an animal’s sensory apparatus constituted a perceptual system with which the dynamic and mobile organism discerned the structures of the physical world through interaction with it.18 For Gibson, the animal seeks ‘affordances’ or the opportunities for action that the environment affords the animal, and humans similarly perceive the object’s affordances rather than its particular qualities.
As we have already seen, Megrelidze’s sociological development of the ideas of Husserl and the Gestalt psychologists did not, like Gibson, work on the basis of continuity between the animal and human, but the qualitative difference between them. This is clear from Megrelidze’s scepticism towards the conclusions about alleged human-like intellectual behaviour in apes that Köhler draws from his experiments (see especially Chapter 2). Instead, Megrelidze insists on the fundamental distinction between apes and man, following the then recently published texts that became known as Marx’s German Ideology and Engels’s unfinished essay ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’, published as part of The Dialectics of Nature. Conscious human labour is the socially coordinated activity that enables and embodies the perceptual states that lead to fundamentally different forms of consciousness: thinking. While Engels had raised the general idea that collective human labour is the means through which language and reason arise and develop, Megrelidze’s development of this idea drew upon some rather more specific arguments which he derived from the work of Ludwig Noiré and Marr.
Noiré took as his point of departure ‘Spinoza’s monism, Kant’s criticism and Schopenhauer’s theory of will’ and proceeded to combine reason, language and will on the basis of human activity.19 It is the ‘percepts [obscure ideas – CB] connected with the will’ that are ‘the most natural and primitive of all’, and it is in ‘practical thinking … thinking guided by interest and founded on the subjective basis of will’ that one needs to search for the origins of human reason.20 It is worth citing the following passage at length:
The emancipation of our thought from our desires and wants constitutes every advance towards theoretical knowledge, and it certainly follows thence, that originally thought was wholly coalesced with will; that percepts, accordingly, in the consciousness of primitive men, were not arranged in any causal, genetic, or intellectual connection, but simply in the order in which through instinctive impulses and emotion they had entered their various incidental or natural connections. The will for a long time remained absolute autocrat; all speech aimed at practical effects, sympathetic agreement, and incitation to common action. From the earliest, instinctive utterances of will, which, in the shape of sounds simultaneously uttered, encouraged men to perform the primitive acts of digging, plaiting, etc. up to the kindling eloquence of the popular orator who fired the souls of his audience with martial enthusiasm … – throughout the same law unceasingly operates, the action of will upon will through the sympathetic frame of mind and its attendant percepts. Everywhere we find imitation, everywhere will, everywhere activity.21
The emancipation of thought from the tyranny of will first begins when the ‘active causality of our will’ produces effects, that are perceived and ‘converted into percepts’. Will is made conscious when made visible in some object of the outside world. The collective nature of such activities leads to the next stage, when percepts are combined freely and regularly, ‘guided and irradiated by the light of cognition, in a word, the Logos’.22
Causality gained freedom solely through the rise of concepts and words. The oldest words, dig, plait, bind, separate, have no other content than that of causal relation – the connection of two sensually perceptual percepts that constitute their causal members, the Logos.23
This ‘union of percepts with percepts, of concepts with concepts, of judgements with judgements constitutes … the essential character of thought’.24
Megrelidze combines Noiré’s ‘percepts’ with Husserl’s ‘presentations’ and the Gestalt theorists’ Einstellungen into the Russian term predstavlenie, which simultaneously means presentation (of something), representation (in the psychological sense) and notion (see especially § 49).25 However, for Megrelidze, will loses its metaphysical character as something impelling humans, and becomes simultaneously a product and component of human development. Here he draws upon Marx’s now famous distinction between human and animal labour in chapter seven of Capital volume one:
A bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.26
Even the most primitive acts of will in the proper sense, Megrelidze tells us in § 21, are peculiarly human in being an ‘aspiration towards a conscious goal’ and so ‘liberated from direct dependence of the sensory field’. In § 19 we learn a ‘rupture of the natural bonds uniting the organism with nature and with other organisms’ is necessary for such acts and this ensues ‘when the objective mediator of relations … between the subject and nature, and between the subject and other subjects’ becomes firmly established. That mediator is the product of labour: material culture. The dialectic of will and activity in labour establishes a spiral of development through which herd-like behaviour ascends to human thinking. It is the concept (poniatie) that manifests the full, active nature of human consciousness, the understanding, comprehension of things and their relations. The concept conveys the semantic expressions of an object, its role, its meaning, the structure and internal law of objects.
Semantic Palaeontology
Megrelidze’s exploration of this development ranges widely through psychology, the history of science, mathematics, anthropology and philology, and draws upon thinkers writing in a wide range of languages. While one finds important engagements with some of these areas in the work of Lev Vygotskii and his associates (Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, Alexei Nikolaevich Leont′ev), and in the works of the thinkers now known as members of the Bakhtin Circle (inter alia Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev and Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov), Megrelidze is probably the most wide-ranging, and the most thoroughly versed in the ideas of Marx. An introduction could not hope adequately to prepare the reader for the range of material adduced in the book and so a glossary of proper names has been appended to allow the reader to explore these figures as appropriate. However, more needs to be said regarding the specific contexts of composition and the material likely to have been expunged from the Russian publication of 1965, and that brings us to the vexed question of the legacy of Nikolai Marr.
While very little of Marr’s voluminous work has appeared in English translation, there is a significant amount of reliable secondary material that describes his fundamental ideas in linguistics and their sources.27 Discussion of the various ways in which many thinkers engaged with Marr’s ideas, deriving significant principles of analysis while avoiding some of their mentor’s more eccentric and extravagant formulations, has gradually been appearing in recent years, but this is still far from exhaustive.28
Megrelidze’s 1935 essay on Marr focuses entirely on the significance of semantic palaeontology for Marxism, and steers clear of Marr’s disputed ideas about the kinship of Kartvelian and Semitic languages, and from the notorious and often derided contention that all words in all languages derived from the four primordial syllables sal, ber, ion and rosh. Indeed, Marr’s linguistic speculations take a back seat to the palaeontology of fundamental philosophical concepts that are traced back to pre-Socratic, Vedic and folkloric motifs. Methodologically, Marr is celebrated for those features he had adopted from Noiré: the rise of language in the process of collective human labour, and its development according to shifts in technology and social relations. Noiré had followed Lazar Geiger to argue that the first specifically linguistic phenomena were verbal roots, and that things marked out by the human action performed on them received their names from the action of which they were made object.29 This Marr developed into the principle of functional semantics, according to which the function something plays in social life determines the way that object is perceived, interpreted and designated. Thus, at early stages of social history, if the camel came to serve the function previously played by the horse then the word that previously designated horse came to designate camel since the social significance of the animal overrides the zoological distinction. This was to undergird Marr’s archaeological approach to language which, he insisted, must be studied along with the history of material culture.
Tracing the history of words according to these principles provides evidence of previous modes of thinking, with the result that as the earliest modes of consciousness are approached then items that served the same function were treated identically even if they shared nothing else in common. As the researcher moves deeper into prehistory, we see ‘one appellation signified a whole series of concepts and objects, and consequently, was distinguished by multiple meanings (polysemanticism)’.30 This is not for any rational or analytical reasons, but because the relevant objects were encountered together. This earlier stage survives in the semantic clusters or nests (puchki) that form the bases of poetic metaphors and plot formations as things previously perceived as identical are rethought as analogous or similar. The specifically poetic dimensions were explored at depth by Megrelidze’s colleagues Izrail′ Frank-Kamenetskii and Ol′ga Freidenberg, while Megrelidze concentrated on the emergence of abstract and philosophical terms from cultic identity. Poetic metaphor and the concept are phenomena that develop in unison from the common world of myth. Focusing on early philosophical terms, Megrelidze traces the emergence of semantic series – the connection between ideas such as fire, soul, mind and spirit are given as examples. Meshchaninov explains this idea as follows:
In the process of the continuing development of human speech a series of words were connected to each other according to their meanings as semantic derivatives, as they emerged from previous appellations of a range of concepts and objects. Later they also emerged from such separate appellations, forming a series of words with their distinct meanings (semantic series), united by successive changes of meaning (semantic links) and ascend to one common basis for the whole semantic series (the beginning or the first link of the semantic series).31
These series, for Megrelidze, are also evidence of the social basis of perception, of social phenomenology, through which the Marxist contention about the humanisation of the senses are provided with historical evidence.
The progressive liberation of human thinking from the common engagement in natural processes through the mediation of cultural phenomena is a thread that runs throughout Megrelidze’s work and one can only speculate how this may have been developed in the putative second volume of his book. Some clues may be found in two further articles written while he was working at the Institute of Language and Thinking, only one of which has been published. Megrelidze develops his work on semantic palaeontology further, dealing with the nature of human superstitions (a critical response to Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of prelogical thinking) and a discussion of the wider significance of Marr’s linguistic ideas.32 It appears Megrelidze was continuing to explore these ideas in his work after completion of the first volume of his book, as is evidenced by the theses of a paper delivered orally at the Institute of Language and Thinking in January 1938 on ‘The Problem of the origin of numbers and numerals’, focused on Marr’s ideas about the origin of grammatical categories.33 Here he further explores Marr’s idea that at the earliest stage of the evolution of human speech the name of the totem incorporated all grammatical persons within a single third person, thus rendering any distinction between subject and object impossible. Subject, object and grammatical persons become differentiated with the development of tribal society, and transformation from matriarchy to patriarchy.34
There seems little doubt that Megrelidze overstates the extent to which Marr’s ideas developed in connection with Marxism. In the wake of Stalin’s debunking of Marr’s ideas in 1950 a range of scholars had little difficulty showing that Marr’s central ideas were formed under the influence of romanticism and positivism of the nineteenth century, and that he and his collaborators rather opportunistically connected them to Marxist terminology only subsequently.35 Indeed, the sources of Marr’s ideas have proven fairly easy to trace, and the extent to which they were compatible with Marxism is a matter of some debate, but what is certain is that many early Soviet Marxists were engaging with the same ideas, and seeking in various ways to combine them with Marxism and adapt them to their own agendas.
Moreover, it should be remembered that it was at this very time that some of the most significant texts of Marx and Engels that ventured into questions of language, culture and science were appearing in published form. Thus, it was in 1932 that three fragments were combined and published as The German Ideology, while Engels’s various fragments on natural science were combined and published as the Dialectics of Nature in 1927 and then in a fuller version in 1935. Scholars of Megrelidze’s generation were therefore some of the first to engage with these aspects of the work of Marx and Engels, and they did so with editions of texts that we now know were products of extensive editorial incursion. Where the first generation of Russian Marxists, exemplified by Plekhanov, had sought to fill in the gaps in what was then known as Marxism by drawing upon philosophical materialism, physiology and positivism in order to develop what they regarded as compatible ideas about anthropology, literature and science, this generation had more texts by Marx and Engels to draw upon. They were therefore seeking to make sense of these ideas in a specific intellectual and political environment, and in order to advance the fields in which they worked they were seeking correspondences with ideas in circulation as best they could. Continuities with the previous generation continued – Noiré had been a significant influence on Plekhanov, Bogdanov and Bukharin,36 for instance, but new perspectives were now added, and Megrelidze’s text is a particularly good example of this change. The specificities of the Stalinist environment are particularly important in this regard, not least since positive reference to Bogdanov was risky and Plekhanov’s rather mechanical materialism was achieving canonical status. In this perspective it is all the more regrettable that the published text of Megrelidze’s book was separated from some of the important intellectual and ideological coordinates of the time. It makes it more difficult to judge the extent of the obligatory genuflection of the time from more substantial engagement.
Megrelidze shows extensive familiarity with the works of Marx and Engels published at the time, and with Lenin’s recently published Philosophical Notebooks, which significantly complicated the somewhat psychologistic reflection theory of knowledge of his earlier anti-Bogdanov tract Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1909). This allowed Megrelidze creatively to employ lessons from phenomenology and Gestalt theory in recasting the Marxist theory of knowledge as an active and intersubjective process. There are areas, however, where Megrelidze appears less sure-footed in employing Marxist terminology, such as in his discussion of economics in § 91, where he uses the term ‘labour power’ (rabochaia sila) to mean labour as a general force in the productive process, coupled with the ‘means of production’, and then employs the same term to signify labour specifically as a commodity. This tendency to treat labour as an essence, independent of the specific form it takes in various modes of production, was a common feature of the time (one may find variants in Bogdanov, Marr and elsewhere) and it facilitated the treatment of labour as the manifestation of will in the Schopenhauer sense. Like Foucault’s employment of ‘power’ as a category separate from its historically determinate forms and structures, it is in danger of becoming a metaphysical category, albeit one that facilitates some interesting analyses. On the other hand, the clarity of Megrelidze’s discussion, in § 98, of class as an objective relationship, dependent on a person’s place within the relations of production, is perhaps unrivalled in its time and runs quite contrary to then official Soviet definitions of class.37
As we become more familiar with the various fragments and notebooks on ethnography and natural science among others in the still incomplete second Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2, 1975–) we will certainly be in a more advantageous position to judge the extent to which the attempts of early Soviet thinkers to develop an overall social phenomenology of thinking converge with those of Marx and Engels. Whatever the results of this, however, we can see already that much in Megrelidze’s work can help us think through a range of problems that have concerned Marxists for many decades. It also helps us to understand that the received and long-ingrained idea that Soviet Marxism by the 1930s was devoid of any creative impulses and that these were pursued only within the realms of what became known as Western Marxism needs serious revision. The complexities of early Soviet engagements with Marxism and other perspectives are still being explored, but the fate of Megrelidze’s text reminds us of the obstacles that are still encountered.
A Note on Some Translation Issues
A number of specific translation issues have been discussed above. Here we mention certain generic issues.
There are a number of instances where the gendered nature of Russian grammar causes specific issues for the translator. Where the author speaks of the ‘individual’ [individ] person [chelovek] or the ‘subject’ [sub′ekt] these terms are grammatically masculine and would normally result in subsequent employment of the pronoun ‘he’. Unfortunately, this would give the reader today the wrong impression of the authorial position, rather like the translations of Marx’s use of ‘Mensch’ as ‘man’ and consequent use of ‘he’. One alternative would be to replace such instances with the third person plural, ‘they’, but this results in grammatical distortion. In order to avoid imposing any gendered or binary distinctions not present in the Russian text I have chosen to impose the somewhat cumbersome ‘s/he’ and ‘his/her’ where necessary.
Megrelidze draws extensively on German-language material and leaves some quotations in the original language in the Russian edition without translation. This reflects the assumption of the time that the readers engaging with these areas of scholarship would be familiar with the German language, an assumption that cannot be made among an anglophone audience today. I have therefore provided basic English-language renderings of the most significant of these in addition to reproducing the German originals.
Like German, Russian is a language that allows the writer to build words that would not normally be combinable in English. Where this proves significant, or where specific terms may be rendered differently in different contexts but carry important connotations, the original Russian term has been appended in square brackets. In cases where the transliterated Russian has been provided, we have followed the convention of the Library of Congress system (without diacritics).
Vitzthum 1993, p. 210.
Information for this section was derived from the following sources: Megrelidze 1989; Dzioev 1989; Vitzthum 1993; Friedrich 1993; Shilov 1995.
Kazanskii (ed.) 2013, pp. 362, 397.
Dzhioev 1989, p. 88.
Bakhtin 1996, p. 536.
This was Marr’s subversive variation on the ‘Mosaic ethnology’ that dominated Indo-European philology. See Trautmann 1997, pp. 28–61.
See Ilizarov 2012 for an interesting consideration of the question.
On the Georgian reception see Cherchi and Manning 2002 and Tuite 2011.
A similar argument is advanced by Medvedev 1983 [1926]. Comparison of Megrelidze’s position with that of members of the Bakhtin Circle such as Voloshinov and Medvedev would be worthwhile.
Bhaskar 1998 [1979], pp. 25–44.
For a discussion see Dummett 1983, pp. 61–83; Philipse 1995.
On this intellectual trend see, inter alia, Schuhmann and Smith 1985; Mulligan (ed.) 1987; Rollinger (ed.) 1999.
It is questionable whether Megrelidze imbibed Husserl’s idealism to the extent suggested by Zedania (2014), not least given the absence of ideas or terms specifically derived from his later works, and the presence of significant ideas from Gestalt theorists fundamentally hostile to Husserl’s idealist turn. On Gestalt psychology in Germany see especially Ash 1998. For a survey of the wider theories of Gestalt at the root of these perspectives see Smith 1988.
This principle was outlined in a number of articles from around 1915, but most clearly stated in Koffka 1935. The notion of Einstellung, rendered in Russian as ustanovka, was commonly invoked in a range of disciplines including philosophy, psychology and literary theory by the early 1920s.
Smith 1994, p. 264.
See, particularly, Wertheimer 1961.
Mulligan 1995, p. 169.
The most developed argument is in Gibson 1979.
Noiré 1917, p. 94.
Noiré 1917, p. 43.
Noiré 1917, pp. 43–4.
Noiré 1917, pp. 44–5.
Noiré 1917, p. 45.
Noiré 1917, p. 46.
The term literally denotes standing (something) before oneself (pered – before; stavit′ – to stand). Bukharin 2005 [1937], pp. 214–23 appears to attempt a similar recasting of the notion of presentation in his prison writings.
Marx 1996 [1887], p. 188.
In English see Matthews 1950; Thomas 1957; Cherchi and Manning 2002; Brandist 2015, pp. 193–220. There is a much wider scholarship in Russian, such as Vasil′kov 2001; Alpatov 2004; Iliazarov 2012. It is worth noting that Marr has recently begun to be recognised as a thinker among whose ideas were those that anticipated perspectives later developed under the rubric of Orientalism and postcolonial studies.
In English see, for instance, Moss 1984; Perlina 2002; Brandist 2011; Tihanov 2012. Little specifically relating Megrelidze’s work to that of Marr has been published, with the exception of Nikonova 2003 and Friedrich 2005.
Noiré 1917, p. 149.
Meshchaninov 2010 [1929], p. 177.
Meshchaninov 2010 [1929], pp. 177–8.
Megrelidze 1935. The second is an undated 119-page typescript entitled ‘Novye dostizheniia iazykoznaniia’ (New Achievements of Linguistics) which is held in Marr’s archive PFA RAN 800/6/E349. The authorship of this typescript is not certain, but seems likely to have been by Megrelidze.
‘K voprosu o proiskhozhdenii chisla i chislitel′nykh’. PFA RAN 77/1/18/5–6.
See also Frank-Kamenetskii 1932, p. 274.
Brandist 2015, pp. 215–20.
Plekhanov 1969 [1908], pp. 57–8 refers to Noiré in his influential Fundamental Problems of Marxism and adopts most of his argument. Noiré appears throughout Bogdanov’s work, but most insistently in Bogdanov 2010 [1910]. Bukharin 1926 [1922] adopts Noiré’s argument in his textbook on historical materialism, which was required reading at most institutes of higher education in the late 1920s, and he appears again, along with Marr in his final prison writings 2005 [1937], pp. 207–8. For a discussion see Brandist 2015, pp. 43–9.
It would perhaps not be until Geoffrey de Ste Croix’s work of the 1980s that a similar analysis was developed, though as part of a study of ancient history. See Ste Croix 1981, p. 43.