The Philosophy of the Act as the First Philosophy. (An Interpretation of Bakhtin's Moral Philosophy). The Second Article. The First Philosophy as Moral Philosophy

The article shows that moral philosophy is oriented toward the being of the act but not its content and sees it from the first-person perspective. In this it fundamentally differs from the traditional ethical systems in their material and formal variants. Since the acts are always one and-the-only and the oughtness is the category of the individual acts, they do not contain general moments, concepts, laws, otherwise they would not be one-and-the-only. Only the architectonics of the act is general, steady, permanently reproducible and making the very act possible. Its data points are "I" and "The Other", the relations between which are irreversible. The architectonics of the act includes three-fold relations: "I-for-myself", "the-other-for-me" and "I-for-the-Other" The relation "I-for-myself", expressing the fact that personality proceeds from oneself, is the organizing centre of the act. The article gives special consideration to the difference between the concepts "to live from within oneself" and "to live for oneself". It is shown that some value systems are possible only in relation to the other (love) and some are possible only in relation to oneself (self-denial). To understand the inner pathos of Bakhtin's philosophy it is important to see the difference between the moral responsibility immanent to the act and the consciousness of moral responsibility taking the form of'a specific act. One-and-the-onliness of the acting person finds its adequate expression in the value system specified by Bakhtin as an absolute-self-exclusion. The article leads to a conclusion that according to Bakhtin within the conflict between life and culture philosophy should take the side of life and see the being in culture as an extension of the individually responsible moral position of the personality.