Bakhtin Circle and the German Idealism: relations between thought and language

Abstract

In this article, the relations between language and thought among the Russian Marxist and the German idealist schools were investigated. Our basis was Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, in which Karl Vossler’s German school Idealistische Neuphilologie (Modern Idealist Philology) presented in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sprachphilosophie (Gathered Writings for a Philosophy of Language) and Wilhelm von Humboldt’s philosophy are mentioned as the thesis that, compared to the antithesis, results in the synthesis represented by the Marxist philosophy. The great idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel was also discussed to bring the German idealist philosophy of language into context. When analyzing the German school influence on Bakhtin/Volochinov’s aforementioned work, it is possible to note an inversion on the idealist dialectic. Instead of the consciousness printing its laws onto the world, social ideology shapes the subject’s consciousness through the ideological sign.