“We Both Learned from Gustav, Edmund’s Prophet in Ruthenia”. Alexander Reformatsky and Roman Jakobson on Living Language and Inner Speech

Abstract

The article reflects on the philosophical origins of semiotic and structuralist ideas that developed in linguistics in the 1960s. and have not lost their signifi­cance for the development of modern humanitarian knowledge. Appeal to them is not just of historical and scientific significance. They bring us back to the sub­jects that are important for the actualization of Russian philosophical thought of the 20th century. A.A. Reformatsky and R.O. Jakobson were Shpet’s students and communicated with him in various philosophical and scientific communi­ties. The author traces how Shpet’s phenomenological and hermeneutical con­structions influenced Reformatsky’s phonological research and R. Jacobson’s communicative linguistic concept. Shpet’s influence on Jakobson has already been studied in the historical and philosophical literature, but this comparison is not enough to reveal the scientific potential of Shpet’s ideas in their entirety, since it does not allow us to evaluate the transformations that these ideas experi­enced after they migrate to the humanities in 1960 in USSR. An appeal to the conceptual constructions of Reformatsky opens up an opportunity for us to rein­terpret the role of Shpet’s ideas in the development of the science of language and trace their further return to philosophy. But the phrase “We both learned from Gustav…”, expressed by Reformatsky in a letter to Jakobson in 1975, to­day can be attributed not only to philologists and linguists but also to philo­sophers. The purpose of this article is to show the methodological potential of Shpet’s ideas, transferred by Jakobson and Reformatsky to linguistic grounds, for modern philosophical approaches to the phenomenon of language.