Gustave Shpet: Ontology, Phenomenology, and Philosophy of Language in the Context of Russian and European Intellectual History

This study offers a critical re-examination of Gustav Shpet’s phenomenological philosophy of language, situating his seminal Vnutrenniaia forma slova (1927) within the broader constellation of Russian intellectual history, in dialogue and confrontation with both the theological radicalism of the Name-worshippers (imiaslavtsy) and the methodological scientism of the Russian Formalists. Against the theological sacralization of the Name, which posits language as theophanic presence and ontological energy, and against the psychologism of Potebnia, which reduces meaning to image-association, Shpet elaborates a rigorously secular yet ontologically inflected hermeneutics of the word. His conception of the “inner form” appears as a semiotic crystal: neither mystical hypostasis nor subjective intuition, but a phenomenological structure wherein consciousness crystallizes into communicable meaning. The study argues that Shpet’s orientation represents a “structuralism without structuralism”, anticipating later semiotic paradigms while retaining an energetic, dynamic conception of language as energeia. In this paradoxical position – secular, phenomenological, yet resonant with Orthodox categories such as Gregory Palamas’ doctrine of divine energies – Shpet exemplifies the liminality of Russian philosophical modernity. His work, positioned between theology, phenomenology, and formalist poetics, discloses the profound ambiguity of the word as phenomenon, structure, and ontological force.