Vasily Sesemann: Experience, Formalism, and the Question of Being (On the Boundary of Two Worlds. Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics, Vol. 7)

Born in Vyborg in 1884 by parents of German descent, Vasily (Wilhelm) Sesemann grew up and studied in St. Petersburg. A close friend of Viktor Zhirmunsky and Lev P. Karsavin, Sesemann taught from the early 1920 until his death in 1963 at the universities of Kaunas and Vilnius in Lithuania (interrupted only by his internment in a Siberian labour camp from 1950 to 1956). Botz-Bornstein's study takes up Sesemann's idea of "experience" as a dynamic, constantly self-reflective, "ungraspable" phenomenon that cannot be objectified. Through various studies, the author shows how Sesemann develops an outstanding idea of experience by reflecting it against empathy, Erkenntnistheorie (theory of knowledge), Formalism, Neo-Kantianism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Bergson's philosophy. Sesemann's thought establishes a link between Formalist thoughts about "dynamics" and a concept of Being reminiscent of Heidegger. The book contains also translations of two essays by Sesemann as well as of an essay by Karsavin