Merab Mamardashvili - A Spy For An Unknown Country - Essays and Lectures by Merab Mamardashvili-Ibidem Press (2020)

Soviet-era philosopher Merab Mamardashvili developed an original
and subtle philosophical system distinct from both his orthodox and
dissident colleagues. This volume provides English-speaking audi-
A Spy for
an Unknown Country
Merab Mamardashvili
ences with a range of his lectures and writings on French and German
philosophy, civil society, the European project, and literature. After
many decades hiding in plain sight, he emerges as a Soviet thinker who
writes in the double-voiced manner of an ideologically surveilled aca-
demic and a potent literary and theoretical innovator independent of
his context. Essays and Lectures
“Mamardashvili was admired as a ‘modern-day Socrates’ whose life- by Merab Mamardashvili
style was characterized by the practice of sustained self-reflection. The
theme of his reflection was philosophy itself, which he regarded as a
moral imperative to question all values and to contribute the value of
non-understanding to the world of total and conventional understand-
ing. In this sense he was a spy for an unknown country, and this beautiful
collection presents a short guide to its mysteries.”
Mikhail Epstein, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory
and Russian Literature at Emory University
Edited by
“This welcome volume allows us to savor the sweep of Mamardash- Julia Sushytska and Alisa Slaughter
A Spy for an Unknown Country

vili’s wide-ranging mind, swinging between philosophy and literature
boldly and brilliantly. Whether he is discussing Proust or Tolstoy, Kant
or Marx, the reader of the scintillating texts here assembled is treated
to the unique insights of someone who moves with agility and in depth
between Eastern and Western European sensibilities. The translation is
sparkling in its lucidity, and the selection of texts is at once representa-
tive and irresistible.”
Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, SUNY at Stony Brook
The editors and translators:

Julia Sushytska (PhD in Philosophy, SUNY Stony Brook) is an Assistant
Professor in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at Occiden-
tal College and teaches philosophy courses at Whittier College. Her
research focuses on metics: those who find or place themselves in-be-
tween major cultures, languages, or ethnicities.
Alisa Slaughter (MA in Comparative Literature, University of Arizona;
MFA in Creative Writing, Warren Wilson College) is a Professor of Cre-
ative Writing at the University of Redlands.
ISBN: 978-3-8382-1459-7
ibidem ibidem
Alisa Slaughter and Julia Sushytska (eds.)
A Spy for an Unknown Country:

Essays and Lectures by Merab Mamardashvili
Alisa Slaughter and Julia Sushytska (eds.)
A SPY FOR AN UNKNOWN COUNTRY:

ESSAYS AND LECTURES BY
MERAB MAMARDASHVILI
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Cover image: Merab Mamardashvili. © copyright 2020 by Elena Mamardashvili.

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ISBN-13: 978-3-8382-1459-7
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Table of Contents
Preface by Caryl Emerson .................................................................... 7

Introduction ......................................................................................... 17
Texts included in this volume .......................................................... 53
European Responsibility ............................................................... 57
Topology of a Path: Lectures on Proust ...................................... 63
Lecture 1 ............................................................................... 65
Lecture 6 ............................................................................... 86
Lecture 11 ........................................................................... 108
What Belongs to the Author ....................................................... 134
Авторское—Original Facsimile of “What Belongs to the

Author” ......................................................................................... 139
Consciousness and Civilization ................................................. 146

The “Third” State ......................................................................... 167
On Civil Society............................................................................ 179
The Illegal Joy of Merab Mamardashvili by Annie Epelboin ...... 211
Verwandlung, or the Human Crucible by Miglena Nikolchina ...... 219
A Note on Primary and Secondary Literature ............................. 239
Selected Bibliography...................................................................... 243
Acknowledgments............................................................................ 247
Contributors ...................................................................................... 249
Preface
Caryl Emerson
For a long time, the Cold-War West clung to a simple binary: in the
Soviet twentieth century, Russian creators were either dissidents or
collaborators. It was hard for outsiders to process the fact that awful
regimes also contain a rich spectrum of courageous, morally astute
survivors. Often this was survival at a very high creative level—in
and out of official institutions, with and without an audience, con-
stantly pushing the limits of what was permissible and then
standing back to see what the regime would do. In literature and
the staged arts, scandals made world news. Works and performers
were banned, ballet dancers defected, writers were expelled or died
in obscurity as their novels and poems circulated clandestinely or
were hidden away in clothes closets. All this danger and humilia-
tion enormously increased the prestige of art, for no one inside or
outside Russia doubted that genuine operas, movies, plays, sym-
phonies and novels were being created, even if not approved for
public life.
In philosophy, the situation was different and more complexly
debilitating. The Russian Academician Vladislav Lektorsky, who
co-edited with Marina Bykova a recent (2019) anthology dedicated
to post-Stalinist Soviet philosophy, readily admits that many West-
ern sovietologists presumed there was no Soviet philosophy at all.
How could there be, since philosophy presumes “a critical exami-
nation of whatever is taken for granted,” and such critique was
forbidden by the Party and Soviet state?1 What is more, the great
Russian novelists and poets had long flourished as carriers of phil-
osophical thought. With their high moral stature and eloquent
manifestos, from Leo Tolstoy to Andrei Bely, Alexander Solzheni-
1 Vladislav A. Lektorsky, Chapter 1. “The Russian Philosophy of the Second

Half of the Twentieth Century as a Sociocultural Phenomenon,” Philosophical
Thought in Russia in the Second Half of the 20th Century. A Contemporary View from
Russia and Abroad, ed. Vladislav A. Lektorsky and Marina F. Bykova (New
York: Bloomsbury Academic: 2019): 19-34, here 19.
7
8 A SPY FOR AN UNKNOWN COUNTRY
tsyn and Anna Akhmatova, literary creators satisfied the world far
better than could any dry academic efforts. Lektorsky asks us to
correct this view. Although the Soviet-era classroom and university
lecture hall had its informers and stool pigeons like every other of-
ficial institution, these venues also enjoyed the advantage of young
minds united by a reading list and charged not with entertaining
themselves but with disciplining their mental life. Lektorsky fo-
cuses on those academic philosopher-teachers who made possible
the “Russian philosophical Renaissance of the 1960s-80s.” It began
as a relatively safe, non-ideological “cognitive turn” in the fields of
symbolic logic, systems theory and epistemology, but soon spread
to the softer humanities. Merab Mamardashvili, who defended a
dissertation at Moscow State University in 1961, belongs to this un-
easy but liberating generation.
In a follow-up essay for the same volume, Mikhail Epstein fills
in the uncharted, risk-taking realm that opened up with the Thaw.2
At mid-century, Soviet philosophy was both crippled and explo-
sively fertile. In Epstein’s view, Russian thinkers have always
tended to be Platonists, drawn to “ideocracy”—that is, to a model
of the State, or a state of mind, where abstract idealist thought fa-
voring wholeness, integrity, and all-unity takes precedence over
fragmented empirical experience. Such passion for oneness has
helped Russian thinkers avoid the stubborn binaries that persist in
the West (reason versus faith, body versus mind or spirit), but at
considerable cost in the political and social sphere. The Soviet vari-
ant of this totalizing national tendency was “Marxist Platonism,” a
paradoxical mix of dialectical materialism and idealism. Precisely
because the doctrine was so internally contradictory did it become
so ferocious and inflexible. If for Plato “the world of ideas exists in
and of itself, without necessarily demanding historical embodi-
ment,” then for Marxists, as inconsistent Platonists, “ideas are
2 Mikhail N. Epstein, Chapter 2. “Main Configurations of Russian Thought in

the Post-Stalin Epoch,” Philosophical Thought in Russia in the Second Half of the
20th Century, 35-52. Epstein identifies eight trends: humanized Marxism, Neo-
Rationalism, Philosophy of the National Spirit, Personalism and Liberalism,
Orthodox Christian thought, Cosmism and other esoterica, Culturology, and
Conceptualism (42-48). Further page references in text.
PREFACE 9
inseparable from the material process and are greedy for realization
and implementation” (38-39). In the literary imagination, the prose
writer Andrei Platonov became the most accurate chronicler of this
traumatized, hyper-idealistic, wholly unrealizable Russian Marx-
ism. (Mamardashvili’s 1989 lecture on “Civil Society,” included in
this volume, cites Platonov’s forlorn slogan-bearing heroes as ex-
emplary of thought developing “according to the mechanical laws
of ideological illusion.”) But literature has freedoms that philoso-
phy does not. The responsible philosopher of a failing society must
seek first principles on a more objective plane. On a spectrum
stretching from humanized Marxism through religiously-inflected
personalism to experiments in Conceptualist art, Epstein places
Mamardashvili among the “neo-Rationalists.” The philosopher’s
specific recuperative task was to restore to individual ownership
the very process of thinking, which had been co-opted by the State.
His method would be a phenomenological analysis of conscious-
ness.
This was not the theory-laden academic phenomenology of
German philosophers in the interwar period, however.3 As we
learn from his brief, impressionistic autobiographical statement in
this volume, “What Belongs to the Author,” Mamardashvili was
early captivated by French culture—its literature, philosophical pri-
orities, modes of expression. This French tradition, with its secular
metaphysics, respect for solitude, autonomy for rational being and
at the same time license for a personal absurd, became the core of
his most precious constellation of values, which he identified as En-
lightenment Europe. Mamardashvili’s former student Mikhail
Ryklin recalls that this idealization of European culture was some-
thing that progressive Europeans had long since cast off (replacing
it, more often than not, with an idealized Marxism); it “presup-
posed a prolonged separation” from the culture it idealized and
3 On this see A. V. Akhutin, “In Mamardashvili’s Country,” published in Rus-

sian 2009, translated by Stephen D. Shenfield for Russian Studies in Philosophy,
vol. 49, no. 1 (Summer 2010): 20-52, here 26: “M.M. may be considered a phe-
nomenologist, if only it be understood that for him phenomenology is not a
discipline or doctrine in whose development he participates, but a sort of or-
gan of understanding that—like any organ of understanding—starts working
only when it is wholly personalized, even privatized.”
owed much to “a forced stay in a closed repressive society.”4 Nev-

ertheless this cleansed, radiant ideal of Europe allowed
Mamardashvili to construct a productive and pedagogically char-
ismatic zone for himself as survivor during the darkest years of the
Brezhnev Stagnation. Marx, a stimulant to the young Mamardash-
vili, had increasingly little to do with this zone. Indeed, as Epstein
wrote of this connection: “The entire project of Marxism was based
on two assumptions antithetical to Mamardashvili’s theory: that
consciousness is determined by being, and that it can transform be-
ing. . . . Philosophers cannot explain the world, but neither can they
change it.”5 With intense effort, perhaps philosophers might suc-
ceed in observing their own thought processes. That was enough.
Some of Mamardashvili’s academic colleagues, such as the im-
mensely popular Evald Ilyenkov, took a more Marx-and-Hegel-
friendly route out of destalinization. For them, intellectual heroes
of the Thaw, objective reality was still cognized as reasonable; but
(so argues one historian of this period, Vadim Mezhuev) that faith
collapsed after 1968. “Those loyal to Ilyenkov probably did not no-
tice the collapse,” Mezhuev writes. “But those who had lost that
faith found solace in the philosophy of Mamardashvili.”6
What is the nature of this solace, this renewed quest for mental
self-respect? How is it compatible with civic responsibility, and
why is art so often an essential component of it? The texts in this
volume offer various clues. Common to them all is one overarching
methodological concern, with roots in Kierkegaard, which has led
some commentators to classify Mamardashvili as a “post-secular”
philosopher.7 Mamardashvili’s own term for this concern is “post-
4 Mikhail K. Ryklin, “Consciousness as a Domain of Freedom. The Metaphysical

Theme in Merab Mamardashvili,” written in 2004, published in Russian in
2009, translated by Steven Shabad for Russian Studies in Philosophy, vol. 49, no.
2 (Fall 2010): 28-50, here 29.
5 Mikhail Epstein, The Phoenix of Philosophy: Russian Thought of the Late Soviet Pe-
riod (1953-1991) (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), especially Part II, 7,
pp. 103-11 on Mamardashvili, here 107.
6 Vadim M. Mezhuev, “Philosophy From the Period of ‘Thaw’ to the Period of
‘Stagnation’: A Philosophical Reflection,” Chapter Six in Philosophical Thought
in Russia in the Second Half of the 20th Century, 103-14, here 107.
7 See Dmitry Ryndin, “Merab Mamardashvili: the concept of the event and the
post-secular situation of the twentieth century,” Studies in East European
PREFACE 11
(or non-) classical rationality,” when an act of thinking can no

longer be considered transparent to itself. Mikhail Epstein summa-
rized the revolution in thinking that Mamardashvili saw in
Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche (one that did not
distinguish between believers and atheists, idealists and material-
ists) in the following way: the “abandonment of traditional
rationalism in favor of complicity with hidden engines of motiva-
tion.” Due to existential uniqueness, or primordial will, or material
forces of production, or vital instinct, “thinking [now] finds its
ground in something unthinkable.”8
This state of affairs would seem to put philosophy professors
out of business. It is incompatible with classroom procedures. One
cannot read about it, conceptualize it, take notes on it, assign it to
others or recall it later. The fact that you are reading this Preface is
already a corruption. But happily, Mamardashvili was of a temper-
ament that could confront the problem head on, and in the lecture
hall. The urgent nature of “unthinkability,” and our human need to
live through it (to experience it to the end, with no guaranteed res-
idue) before any understanding is possible, links Mamardashvili
with two of his predecessors in the history of Russian thought, also
non-conforming personalists who were shaped by the European
philosophical tradition into citizens of an unknown country: Leo
Tolstoy and Mikhail Bakhtin. For Tolstoy, the unthinkable is death.
For Bakhtin, it is the live event. For Mamardashvili, it is thinking
itself. As different as these thinkers are from one another, each came
to believe that the most difficult task faced by consciousness is to
learn to live in the present. For each, art held the key. Art was not a
disinterested realm, however, as it ideally was for Kant. An artistic
creation was a model for coming-to-know that possessed an unal-
ienable ethical dimension, since “consciousness is involved in the
Thought 71 (2019): 259-276. The post-secular approach does not place itself in
opposition to secularity, Ryndin insists, but rather “reveals the historical, con-
tingent and relative nature of the secular position, exposes certain theological
implications in secular thought and questions the traditional dichotomies of
classical rationality, for example, the natural/supernatural, rational/irra-
tional, faith/reason, sacred/profane dualisms” (260).
8 Epstein, The Phoenix of Philosophy, 107.
realm of values and not facts.”9 The remainder of this Preface will
speculate on the potential of Mamardashvili’s method for intellec-
tual solace in a feral time.
Presence, infinity, event

The essays translated here all belong to the end of Mamardashvili’s
life, its final half-decade. The crumbling Soviet ideocracy was again
allowing him to travel abroad, although internally he had been ex-
iled from Moscow to his native Tbilisi in 1980. As with Yuri Lotman
(1922-93), that other great Soviet-era thinker from the imperial pe-
riphery who passed from the scene on the cusp of a (previously
unthinkable) regime change, Mamardashvili’s untimely death in
1990 deprived us of a synthesis from a person singularly well pre-
pared to provide it. His thought was becoming more openly
political, angrier. “Consciousness and Civilization” (1988) opens on
the “anthropological catastrophe.” “The Third State” (1989) speaks
of a “monstrous trash heap of thought and language.” But given his
oral mode of philosophizing (without a prepared text, in the lan-
guage of his audience whether Russian, Georgian, or French), this
anger and politics was of a peculiar texture. It was not directly
translatable into civic action or even into civic speech, but focused
on the cultivation of consciousness itself, a prerequisite for the civic
act. For one thing must be kept in mind. Although Mamardashvili
referred to himself as an internal émigré, in no sense did this mean
he escaped nostalgically to some earlier well-furnished place. When
his mind plied its trade in the presence of his students, there were
no furnishings anywhere: not only no written text or pretext, but
also no finalized argument. What interested Mamardashvili was
the experience of thinking—not the contours or content of a given
thought. If thoughts could be “had” and then stored away, this was
not the case with thinking. In a programmatic interview from 1989,
published as “How I Understand Philosophy,” Mamardashvili
stated categorically that philosophy was not a “system of
9 Diana Gasparyan, “The Transcendental dimension of consciousness in Merab

Mamardashvili’s philosophy,” Studies in East European Thought 71 (2019): 241-
258, here 253.
PREFACE 13
knowledge” but the cultivation and “development of internal states

. . . on the basis of personal experience.”10 Perhaps on analogy with
Tolstoy’s infection theory of art, one could “catch” philosophy from
a person who is practicing it; Mamardashvili remarks in this inter-
view that “being in the individual presence of a thinker . . . and
listening to him will possibly set you too in motion, induce some
sort of spiritual experience.” Because philosophizing is an experi-
ence, it cannot be transmitted by a profession, a textbook, or a
totality of ideas. For Mamardashvili, philosophy could only be a
practice, or as Marina Bykova put it, “a virtue, and to exist it must
be accomplished over and over again.”11 This is concentration train-
ing, a type of mindfulness.
But in fact, the challenge is even greater than it sounds. Con-
scious thinking is so difficult that we do it only intermittently. Not
only must we constantly goad ourselves to make the effort to think,
an act that is neither easy nor natural; in addition, we cannot stock-
pile the things we think up since a thought “exists only at the
moment of its ‘realization,’ which requires a specific personal effort
and particular responsibility.”12 This radical present-tenseness of
philosophical thinking, its transitoriness and continual falling-into-
arrears combined with the absolute ordinariness of what triggers it,
is part of what dazzles Mamardashvili about Marcel Proust. The
three lectures translated in this volume (#1, #6, and #11, taken from
a course on Proust offered first in 1982 and then again in 1984) uti-
lize this French writer much as Bakhtin utilized Dostoevsky and
Rabelais: as vehicles for the philosopher-critic’s own worldview
and deepest emerging matrix of moral values. But Bakhtin’s read-
ers at least knew the novels. Few of us have designed, or sat
through, literature courses like Mamardashvili’s, where the profes-
10 “How I Understand Philosophy. A Conversation with Merab Mamardashvili

(An Interview Conducted by O. Dolzhenko.)” Transl. by Stephen D. Shenfield
for Russian Studies in Philosophy, vol. 49, no. 1 (Summer 2010): 7-19, here 8. Sub-
sequent quote on same page.
11 Marina F. Bykova, “Editor’s Introduction. Philosophizing Out Loud.” Russian
Studies in Philosophy, vol. 49, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 3-7, here 4.
12 A. L. Dobrokhotov, “The Tradition of Immortality. Mamardashvili as a Philos-
opher of Culture,” publ. in Russian 2009, English transl. by Steven Shabad for
Russian Studies in Philosophy, vol. 49, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 51-76, here 71.
sor admits that most likely the students have not had access to the
assigned texts, either in the original or in translation. A professor
need not be limited by that unhappy fact, however. One can even
be liberated by it. In Lesson 11 we learn that Mamardashvili does
not distinguish between ethics and aesthetics, or between philoso-
phy and aesthetics. In Lesson 6 we read that to be an artist (as
Proust and Flaubert were) was not to be a performer, a life-fash-
ioner like the Russian Symbolists or an exhibitionist like the
Russian Futurist poets, but to blend modestly in, the better to spy
on life. In both literature and philosophy, a spy must be willing to
risk improvisations and ragged drafts—and to ask, at every mo-
ment: what is possible, and how is it possible?
Staying focused on the present, a mantra for the late Tolstoy,
entails a radical revisioning of lived time. Tolstoyan characters like
Ivan Ilyich or Prince Andrei Bolkonsky grasp bodily death only
during their experience of dying; maddeningly, that’s why they
cannot teach the living anything about it, and why so little wisdom
about death accumulates on this side of the boundary. For Tolstoy,
the answer to death is not to ask the question, which will resolve
itself. At the right time, an “organ of understanding” (Mamardash-
vili’s term) will appear. In her recent provocative book on
Mamardashvili and Russian film, Alyssa DeBlasio devotes an entire
chapter to Tolstoy and the psychologist-turned-film-director Alex-
ander Zeldovich, one of Mamardashvili’s students in the 1980s,
whose 2011 film Target interrogates precisely our neglect of the in-
finite (always available to us immediately and at any depth) in our
vain pursuit of the immortal.13 Infinite present-tenseness is also a
vital enabling condition for Bakhtin. His dialogism is fully experi-
ential, unfinalizable by definition, a texture made up of one
person’s unique, individuated and answerable responses to events
(ideas, utterances) from the outside.
Such literary artists and philosophers demand a great deal of
their audiences. Little wonder that the prominent St. Petersburg
13 Alyssa DeBlasio, The Filmmaker’s Philosopher. Merab Mamadashvili and Russian

Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), ch. 5, “Alexander
Zeldovich’s Target (2011): Tolstoy and Mamardashvili on the Infinite and the
Earthly,” 124-46.
PREFACE 15
historian of philosophy, Igor Evlampiev, wrote the following exas-

perated, but wholly correct, assessment of Mamardashvili’s
thought in his 2017 survey Russkaia filosofiia v evropeiskom kontekste
[Russian Philosophy in European Context]: “Unfortunately,
Mamardashvili did not leave a precisely elaborated system of ideas;
to the extent that he was oriented toward conversational and not
written speech, it is not always possible to uncover in his composi-
tions a straightforward and obvious logic in the development of his
thought, while at the same time his compositions are burdened
with many digressions from the basic theme and with unnecessary
repetitions.”14
The best answer to that riposte is Mamardashvili’s closing
words to his 1988 statement, “The Problem of Consciousness and
the Philosopher’s Calling.” “The philosopher deals with something
that cannot in principle be known in advance, that cannot be con-
jectured, imagined as possible, or introduced by a definition. But it
is something that can happen as the path is traveled.”15
The present volume is offered to the reader in that spirit.
14 I. I. Evlampiev, Russkaia filosofiia v evropeiskom kontekste, ch. 4.4 “M. Mamar-

dashvili i traditsii russkoi filosofii (na material “Lektsii o Pruste”)” (2017:
Sankt-Peterburg. Izdatel’stvo RKhGA), 419.
15 Merab Mamardashvili, “The Problem of Consciousness and the Philosopher’s
Calling,” translated by Steve Shabad for Russian Studies in Philosophy, vol. 49,
no. 2 (Fall 2010): 8-27, here 26.
Introduction
Julia Sushytska and Alisa Slaughter
Merab Mamardashvili was born in 1930, developed his philosoph-

ical and literary thinking during the post-Stalin thaw-freeze era,
and died in 1990, just as the former Soviet world was ending for
good. At the time of his death and in the subsequent thirty years,
his work was well known and respected in Eastern and Central Eu-
rope, referenced by twenty first-century intelligentsia figures such
as Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, but very little of it was
translated into English.
By the time he delivered his final set of lectures, on the work
of Marcel Proust, Mamardashvili was able to point out that the Sta-
linist terror and the atrocities of the Afghan war failed to transform
Soviet culture. Western civilization—what Mamardashvili some-
times calls “Europe”—depends on transformation: a constant effort
of re-creation and re-embodiment of such values as freedom, the
rule of law, and self-determination. “Europe does not exist if we
ourselves do not begin by existing in Europe by our cultural, polit-
ical, or economic presence.”1 He does not define “Europe” or “the
West” purely as a geographic location or a historical event; his
thought exists both within and apart from a complicated post-colo-
nial reality that includes not only Western imperialism, but Russian
and various Eastern systems of dominance and conquest. He iden-
tifies “the West” specifically as the work that has been performed
in certain places at certain points in time—in the eighteenth century
by Immanuel Kant and Johann Sebastian Bach, in the nineteenth
century by Henry David Thoreau, or in the twentieth century by
Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. Mamardashvili emphasizes that
integrity, truthfulness, unity, and courage are “unnatural;” human
beings need to make considerable effort to become honest or cou-
1 The original of the quote is as follows: “l’Europe n’existe pas si nous ne com-
mençons pas à exister par nous-mȇmes en Europe, par notre présence
culturelle, politique ou économique” (“Tout le monde a peur,” Entretien con-
duit par Jean-François Bouthors, Esprit 179 (1992), 80).
17
rageous, and are more likely to succeed in making such effort if they
attach to an artificial structure designed to facilitate acts of courage
or generosity. Mamardashvili calls these structures “artificial or-
gans,” or “dynamic forms.” Art, philosophy, science, morality (as a
social structure, not a psychological state), and the rule of law are
some of these organs, but also the wheel, the bow, the cupola,
Cezanne’s still life paintings, and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
Mamardashvili’s notion of artificial organs is purposefully broad:
literature in general, but also a specific literary style, and even a
particular book, are artificial organs. These organs augment one’s
sensibility and sensitivity, one’s understanding and endurance—
they expand what it means to be a human being. Yet all past efforts
that a lazy shorthand may categorize as Western culture must be
continuously renewed, and only the places and the moments of
their reinstatement can be properly called “Europe,” or “Western
civilization.” The West, as a socio-political or geopolitical entity,
has a responsibility to constantly become the West—it has to prac-
tice complexity, and make a continual effort to think.
Mamardashvili defined Europe as the process of complexity and
diversity, and argued that there is no Europe without such a pro-
cess. Which is to say, if in a certain community this process is not
taking place—if, for instance, a state refuses to be hospitable to ref-
ugees, and so fails to engage with strangers—then it is not Europe.
If, on the other hand, a community that is not a part of geopolitical
Europe is practicing complexity and diversity, then it is Europe.
Mamardashvili’s ideas resonate with current discussions of
nation, culture, and freedom. His emphasis on personal and collec-
tive effort to maintain advanced democracies serves as a gentle
reminder to monitor the health of the civic sphere. Mamardashvili
visited the United States only at the end of his life, in 1989, when
the Soviet system was collapsing throughout Eastern Europe. From
the vantage point of somebody who lived in a totalitarian state, he
emphasized the need for a vibrant civil society and the role of the
humanities in maintaining it. Constantly remaking democracy is a
difficult and risky undertaking, and Mamardashvili was fully
aware that “one may become fatigued or forget the origins of this
effort, and become unable to sustain it, and here a danger lies in
INTRODUCTION 19
wait for Europe: exhaustion after long historical labor, the incapa-
bility to sustain or remember the effort upon which history
depends, to bring it to life at each moment, to cross the abyss with-
out guarantee and without hierarchies.”2 Mamardashvili’s
conception of Western culture is particularly striking at the present
historical moment: a time when nationalistic and even supremacist
ideas are at work and the project of democracy faces competing im-
peratives and cynical manipulation; an era when a nuanced
exploration of its political and theoretical underpinnings feels most
urgent indeed. He argued that a thinker has to be in a certain sense
without a country—without a nation, or an address—for that is the
only point from which thinking begins. Throughout his writing,
Mamardashvili made sly use of Soviet patriotism and paranoia,
claiming his status as a “spy” for his notional and borderless com-
monwealth of free thinkers.
Mamardashvili was born in the small town of Gori, in what

was at the time the Soviet Republic of Georgia. Gori was also the
birthplace of Joseph Stalin, and, as Mamardashvili once jokingly
noted, his birth was perhaps a ransoming or an instance of divine
symmetry—the cosmos compensated for the totalitarianism of one
Georgian from Gori with the freedom that another taught and
lived.3 Mamardashvili studied philosophy at Moscow Lomonosov
State University (MGU), the most prestigious university in the So-
viet Union, completing his undergraduate and graduate degrees
there, and defending his dissertation in 1961. He was sent to Prague
as an editor of an international journal of philosophy, Problemy mira
i sotsializma (also known outside the USSR as World Marxist Review).
While in Prague, Mamardashvili worked in five Western European
languages and further acquainted himself with Western philoso-
phy and literature, and began a life-long correspondence with
Louis Althusser. In 1967 Mamardashvili made an unauthorized de-
tour to Paris after he attended a conference in Italy. This happened
during the thaw prior to the Prague Spring, and connects Mamar-
2 Merab Mamardashvili, “European Responsibility,” included in this volume.

3 Merab Mamardachvili, La pensée empêchée: Entretiens avec Annie Epelboin (La
Tour d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, 1991), 10.
dashvili with a 200-year tradition of flight to Western capitals that

included such pre-revolutionary thinkers as Alexander Herzen and
Ivan Turgenev. To a great extent it was a leap in the dark, with pre-
dictable results. After Mamardashvili returned to the Soviet Union,
he could not leave again until the late 1980s.
Mamardashvili worked in several academic research insti-
tutes and lectured at universities in Moscow, Riga, Vilnius, and
Rostov-on-Don, but because of his refusal to compromise with the
Soviet authorities, he could not rely on a permanent academic post
at a university, and frequently taught introductory level courses in
philosophy. In 1970, he defended his habilitation (a second disserta-
tion that qualifies a scholar for a professorship in some European
university systems), and in 1980 he returned to Tbilisi, where he
worked at the Philosophical Institute of the Georgian Academy of
Sciences. It was in this final phase of his career that he delivered his
Lectures on Proust, gave interviews, and resumed his international
scholarly work. Even while confined to the Soviet Union, Mamar-
dashvili considered himself a citizen of the world and kept up with
all the new developments of European—and especially French—
thought. He was well acquainted with prominent European intel-
lectuals of the time, such as Sarah Kofmann and Jean-Pierre
Vernant. Mamardashvili died on November 25, 1990, at a Moscow
airport while returning from a lecture trip abroad.
Signposts
One of the first surviving philosophical texts from ancient Greece,
written by Parmenides of Elea, speaks of a journey along a path,
and provides sēmata—signs or signposts—to help one along this
journey.4 Mamardashvili also conceives of his theory as an account
4 “This alone yet, the account of the path,/remains, how it is. And along this
path signposts further (you), many indeed, (indicating) how, being ungener-
ated and unperishing, (it) is/whole, monogeneric as well as untrembling, and
not without finish;/ and never once was, never will be, since now (it) is at once
total:/ One coherent” (B8, Peter Manchester’s translation, adjusted by us; see
Peter Manchester, The Syntax of Time: The Phenomenology of Time in Greek Physics
and Speculative Logic (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 171-173). The unnamed goddess, who
is speaking to Parmenides (or the narrator of the Poem), says μῦθος ὁδοῖο—the
mythos of the path. At the time Parmenides wrote the Poem the Greek notions
INTRODUCTION 21
(logos) of a path, and although the two accounts and the two paths
are rather different (although not without intersections, or conver-
gences), it might help to introduce Mamardashvili’s ideas by
reference to several signposts, rather than trying to categorize or
circumscribe Mamardashvili’s philosophical position in a more tra-
ditional way. Somebody who consistently refused labels
throughout his life may not deserve to be defined by them after-
ward. Moreover, as is the case with any product of human
creativity, Mamardashvili’s thought (thought that is in the process
of becoming, and can take on new forms in conversation with his
readers) cannot be tamed or successfully confined by a label. In
light of this, we will confine ourselves to identifying a few signposts
that might orient the English-speaking reader on Mamardashvili’s
philosophical path.
Mamardashvili’s work naturally lends itself to a “spatial
turn,”5 signaled by his title for a major work, Topology of a Path: Lec-
tures on Proust. What does topology mean? Etymologically,
topology is a logos of topos, an account of a place.6 Psychological to-
pology is topology of the soul (or mind), but Mamardashvili’s work
must be distinguished from psychologizing. Mamardashvili urges
his readers to arrest our tendency to reduce ourselves and the world
to simple explanations (I am bad because my environment is bad,
or eliminating the rich will cure the problem of poverty), but to look
instead for the underlying laws or logos of why, for a thousandth
time, I am doing something that I do not wish to do.
In his preparatory notes for the Proust lectures,
Mamardashvili writes, “Topology is a set or configuration of points
along which the current of life and communication passes (or not)
(the relative positions of these points are changed by effort or its
lack, and because life is effort in time… heterogeneous fragments
of mythos and logos were not as clearly set apart, as they became with Aristotle.
See Roman Dilcher, Studies in Heraclitus (Hildeshein: Georg Olms AG, 1995).
5 Theoretical approach with origins in the work of Henri Lefebvre, La production
de l’espace, Paris: Anthropos, 1974, and Michel Foucault, “Des espaces autres.
Hétérotopies,” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, 5 (1984): 46-49.
6 The meaning of logos, as it is used here, includes order, account, laws, and
word.
of space are time ‘turned into space’).”7 I can change the constella-
tion of my life—my path and my destiny. This will require
considerable effort, the kind that at the level of the state supports
complexity and diversity.
Mamardashvili defines life as “effort in time,” and this defini-
tion reveals an important connection to Marx and Hegel, to the idea
that a human being must work in order to become human. Mamar-
dashvili adds an important insight: this work cannot be put off, for
the opportunity to do it might vanish forever—for instance, I might
never again cross paths with this person who is “meant for me,” or
have this particular impression that could lead me to understand
something about who I am. Mamardashvili’s lifelong task is to dis-
cern the laws according to which I can recognize such moments or
situations, and how I should apply myself then. He tries to discern
the logos, or the laws according to which I could use these moments
to gather myself, scattered around space and time, imprisoned in
various past events and places.
Philosophy claims to be both wisdom and the art of living. What is the su-
preme art of living? It’s about living in a way that is suited to the moment8….
We really live in this time, suspended over the currents of normal, daily life.
This suspension is necessarily supplemented by a topology of a path. For ex-
ample, there may be someone who, by nature, is destined for you. It can be
a woman, created for you. You can pass close to her at a moment that is not
opportune, that is not à propos. So you pass by without recognizing each
other…. What, I wonder, are the laws determining that, in a given, oppor-
tune time, I occupy the point of the space from which I can see and
recognize, and what are the laws determining that I am always at a point
from which I can look but not see?9
To live well is to learn how to look and see, or to discern the

laws according to which my path through life is structured, and
7 Merab Mamardashvili, (Psikhologicheskaia topologiia puti. (M. Prust. “V poiskakh

utrachennogo vremeni") [The Psychological Topology of a Path (M. Proust, In
Search of Lost Time). Vol. 2] (Moscow: Merab Mamardashvili Foundation, 2014),
947.
8 Mamardashvili gave the interview, from which this passage is excerpted, in
French, and he uses the French vivre à propos—to live opportunely. Because
“opportune” is somewhat obscure in English, we have chosen “suited to the
moment.”
9 Mamardachvili, La Pensée empêchée, 25-26.
INTRODUCTION 23
learn how to change this structure. Proust was able to do this—to

gather himself anew—through the writing of the novel. In the pro-
cess of writing, Proust recognized and liberated various “parts” of
himself, or freed himself from the vicious circle of endless repeti-
tions (for instance, from looking for his mother’s kiss in his adult
relationships). For Mamardashvili, Proust’s novel is an example of
writing as a liberatory practice, and in this sense Mamardashvili
anticipates contemporary thinkers who point us toward critical ap-
proaches he could not have anticipated.10
Topology is the study of time-space of the self and of society.
It aims at knowing the points of intensity that organize my personal
life or the life of a society—what makes me sad, or what moves peo-
ple to wage a revolution. The Russian word точка, or point, is a
technical term for Mamardashvili. Occasionally, he uses it inter-
changeably with the term место, or place.11 Writing to a friend he
met in Prague and with whom he discussed Proust’s novel years
before the lectures were delivered, Mamardashvili explains: “You
know, I wrote a doorstop about Proust (with whom I managed to
fall in love despite our conversation in Prague), a kind of topology
of ‘thinking points’ along the traveling apprenticeship through real
life—to the extent that one dares.”12 The book on Proust allowed
Mamardashvili to gather his own self, and also the lifetime of phil-
osophical work. This is why Lectures on Proust is, in a sense, a
culmination of Mamardashvili’s ideas, but also a reconfiguration of
them.
Mamardashvili superimposes the idea of topology with an-
other complicated image to reveal a mechanism at work in human
beings: when two heterogeneous phenomena become interlinked
in a self or society, they create inescapable patterns of behavior or
thinking. For instance, some of Saint-Loup’s noblest ideals became
interlinked with Rachel when he see her for the first time on a the-
10 For instance, the work of Gloria Anzaldúa.

11 See Lecture 4 (page 93 of the Russian edition) of the Lectures on Proust.
12 “Tu sais, j’ai écrit un énorme pavé sur Proust (qui je me suis mis à aimer con-
trairement d’une conversation qu’on a eu une fois à Prague...), une espèce de
topologie des ‘lieux intelligents’ dans l’apprentissage voyageur de la vie réelle
tant quand on s’y aventure….” Letter to Pierre Bellefroid (Summer, 1980, Ba-
tumi). See the Russian edition of Lectures on Proust, 1120.
ater stage. Similarly, in the life of the mind, or soul, certain funda-
mental connections have already been made or “fell into gear,” and
now it would take tremendous effort and work on our part to un-
link these heterogeneous phenomena. The same can be witnessed
at the level of society when, for instance, time and again a people
choose a tyrant to rule over them.
Mamardashvili uses the noun сцепление, and the verb
сцепиться or the phrase впасть в сцепление to talk about such link-
ages. The Russian сцепление ordinarily means “clutch” (as in an
automobile’s transmission) or “linkage,” and the verb or the verbal
phrase literally means to fall into gear, to couple, interlink, or inter-
lock, as in two train cars or two moving parts of a machine. All
human beings are subject to these mechanisms, but we could learn
how to work them—how to unlink something that is destroying us
and those around us, and how to form a new connection, or create
a new point of intensity.
Pure forms, as Mamardashvili calls them, allow us to “fall out
of gear”—they “extract” a part of us that has been imprisoned in a
mechanism.13 For instance, the pure form of time is the time of non-
action—amechania in Greek—when I take time to work on an experi-
ence instead of reacting to a situation that made me angry or elated.
I do not gobble up a madeleine, but linger with the feelings and
memories that the smell of the cookie arouses. I use the momentum
of a passion to unlink some of my customary reactions and patterns
of thinking, and form a new one. In the eleventh lecture on Proust,
included in this volume, Mamardashvili writes:
It is necessary to have a certain separation or estrangement from ourselves

in time, which, in fact, is time (that is, estrangement from ourselves is time
in pure form), or the time of amechania, the time of non-action, the time of
aporia, or of an impassible place, and so Proust writes in a letter that es-
trangement from oneself is the only path to know something in ourselves
and in others, and it creates a certain interval—the in-between: between the
past and the present there is a certain cavernous in-between created, opened,
or cleared by dislocation.
Becoming a stranger to myself as a Georgian, a Russian, a Eu-

ropean, a phenomenologist, a philosopher, a communist, a parent,
13 Lecture 19, Lectures on Proust (page 489 of the Russian edition).

INTRODUCTION 25
a child, etc. places me in the in-between where I can actually learn

from an experience, which is, as Mamardashvili emphasizes, ex-
ceedingly rare. This estrangement explains why Mamardashvili—
like any human being whose goal is to recreate themself—is most
accurately described as a “citizen of an unknown homeland.”
Proust writes:
Each artist thus seems like the citizen of an unknown homeland, which has
been forgotten, different from that from which will come, setting sail for the
earth, another great artist….
The musicians do not recall this lost homeland, but each of them always re-
mains unconsciously in tune, in a kind of unison with it; whoever sings in
harmony with the homeland is delirious with joy….14
A Nest of Spies
Mamardashvili gave an interview, provocatively entitled “Life of a
Spy,” only a few months before his death. When the interviewer
asked whether he is still a member of the Communist Party, he re-
sponded that membership had never meant anything significant to
him, and had never felt oppressive because he knew (and George
Orwell understood this too) that there were two parties: the “outer”
social structure of a party and the “inner” political organization, to
which Mamardashvili never belonged. For him, party membership
served rather as a form of social insurance required, for instance, of
an academic journal editor of Mamardashvili’s generation. Contin-
uing this idea, Mamardashvili notes:
I am a Georgian and a philosopher; since my youth, I have been in internal

emigration. I understand very well what is it to be a spy. A necessary condi-
tion for successful espionage, and often creativity, is blending in with one’s
surroundings. Flaubert said that in private life he is a bourgeois, which gives
him absolute freedom in literature. It takes too much energy to wear the hat
of an independent, free person. You can, for example, become a hippie, but
this hides such primitive thinking. How long does a person have to spend
in front of a mirror to look so disheveled? You must remain invisible without
losing freedom: it is such a difficult task that you need to devote all your
14 III (Pr.), 257: “Chaque artiste semble ainsi comme le citoyen d’une patrie in-
connue, oubliée de lui-même, différente de celle d’où viendra, appareillant
pour la terre, un autre grand artiste…. Cette patrie perdue, les musiciens ne se
la rappellent pas, mais chacun d’eux reste toujours inconsciemment accordé en
un certain unisson avec elle; il délire de joie quand il chante selon sa patrie….”
strength to it; there’s no energy left to put on a show. Personally, I am not

inclined to theatricality.15
As a philosopher of the in-between, or an Eastern European

philosopher insofar as he does not fully belong to any major cul-
tural (including Western European, Soviet, Russian, or Georgian)
or philosophical traditions (phenomenology, existentialism, herme-
neutics, Marxism, structuralism, or postmodernism),
Mamardashvili may claim all of these traditions, but his philosoph-
ical position and style owe allegiance to an unknown country. This
is why Mamardashvili’s philosophy may successfully break
through the debilitating or stupefying hold that philosophical jar-
gon and extreme specialization had (and has) on the discipline.
Sharing several key genealogical lines and engaging in conversa-
tions with past philosophers, Mamardashvili approached them
from the in-between, as a minor thinker (we rely here on Gilles
Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s distinction between minor and major
authors, and the idea that “there is nothing… revolutionary except
the minor”).16 As a result, Mamardashvili deterritorialized such ca-
nonical figures as René Descartes and Immanuel Kant, but also
Marx, and especially the ways in which Marx came to be inter-
preted in the Soviet Union. Mamardashvili often converges with
Hannah Arendt and Petr Chaadaev, although at some decisive mo-
ments these thinkers, and especially Mamardashvili and Chaadaev,
part ways.
Mamardashvili’s position in between traditions, methods, and
languages made him both a creator and creation of a borderlands
that could be called Eastern Europe, a “place” that cannot be re-
duced to a geographical location. He made this perilous
borderlands a point of strength, a source of his creativity and a
more complex—more objective—understanding of the major cul-
tures around it. Simultaneously belonging and not belonging to
several major cultures allowed him to do what is extremely difficult
or impossible, such as discuss Proust’s novel in a context—both
15 Merab Mamardashvili, “Zhyzn’ shpiona” [“Life of a Spy”], Soznanie i tsivili-

zatsiia [Consciousness and Civilization] (Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2019), 322.
16 Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press), 1986.
INTRODUCTION 27
Russian and Soviet—where for political, but also cultural reasons

“a great writer like Marcel Proust would find no readymade
place.”17 It also allowed Mamardashvili to define Europe in a way
that sidesteps the postmodern critique. An Eastern European van-
tage point allowed him an understanding of totalitarianism that, as
in the case of Arendt, is deeply rooted in Kant’s political philoso-
phy. Mamardashvili’s life in the borderlands allowed him to see
that he need not choose between being modern or postmodern, con-
formist or dissident, specialist or generalist.
For a philosopher, life on the borderlands is the life of a spy,
Mamardashvili explains: “What if the philosopher is always a spy?
‘The citizen of an unknown country’ and its spy, a witness in this
country.”18 A good spy looks like an ordinary person—a good spy
does not wear ostentatious clothes, or set themself apart from oth-
ers by elaborate terminology. Mamardashvili’s texts are
unassuming, and there is a reason for it—he does not try to look or
speak like a philosopher—he is one, but it might take another spy
to notice this.
Mamardashvili never simply opposed the Soviet regime, alt-
hough he was very critical of it when this could have cost him a
great deal. He did not sacrifice his ideas—so much so that when he
was “invited for a chat” at the famous Lubyanka KGB
headquarters, a KGB officer called him (sarcastically) “the freest
man in the country.” He knew that he did not belong, and he be-
longed more fully because he knew that he did not belong. Having
studied the inescapable Marxist-Leninist “philosophy”
Mamardashvili did not become anti-Marxist:
Perhaps, unlike others, I was the only Marxist in the sense that Marx in some
ways influenced me in philosophy, while many others had no idea about
Marx. But I was not a Marxist in the sense of socio-political theory, in the
sense of the concept of socialism and the movement of history as a move-
ment toward communism. In this sense, I have never been a Marxist. But I
was not an anti-Marxist either. I simply always acutely rejected the entire
17 Caryl Emerson, The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2008), 13.
18 See “What Belongs to the Author,” included in this volume.
surrounding structure of life, and had no inner dependence on an ideology,

or on ideals, that could envelop this structure.19
He recognized his indebtedness to Marx’s critical method—

the procedure that Marx developed to remove the “poison” of al-
ienated, illusory consciousness. Marx “began in his youth with the
critique of consciousness at the level of the critique of ideology.
That is to say, he tried to design a process that would drive out so-
cial phantoms in thought, in the analysis of society, but that ended
badly.”20 Mamardashvili’s indebtedness to Marx is also discernible
in his claim that “Thought is an activity, or an active state, not a
theory.”21
Taking up a similar approach to the postmodern critique of
modernity, Mamardashvili traced out lines of flight, or found es-
cape routes, to use Deleuze and Guatarri’s terminology, rather than
aligning himself with one or the other side. Instead of having to
adopt the critique of ideology as a new ideology,22 and denounce
such thinkers as Descartes or Kant, Mamardashvili transforms
them into minor thinkers. He clearly saw the blindspots of post-
modernism at the time when it was fashionable, and pointed out
that this critical approach was “a form of ‘cultural stupidity’ be-
cause its celebration of the failure of reason ‘gave up the
philosophical battle’ and denied the right to think.”23
Mamardashvili’s seemingly dismissive attitude to postmod-
ernism had to do with his firsthand, extensive knowledge of
authoritarian mechanisms and structures, where thinking was sys-
tematically suppressed, required heroic effort, and was punishable
by death, confinement, or loss of even the most basic human privi-
leges. Having spent his life in a totalitarian system, he recognized
the danger of discarding the Enlightenment—as did Hannah Ar-
19 Mamardashvili, “Moi opyt netipichen” [“My experience is atypical”] in Soz-

nanie i tsivilizatsiia, 114.
20 Mamardachvili, La Pensée empêchée, 39-40.
21 “On Civil Society,” included in this volume.
22 See Slavoj Žižek’s The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2019), 15-16.
23 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in
East and West (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002), 234.
INTRODUCTION 29
endt,24 who, taking as her starting point Kant’s political philosophy,

spent the final years of her life working on what was meant to be
the third part of The Life of the Mind. In Lectures on Kant’s Political
Philosophy, Arendt maintains that “critical thought is in principle
antiauthoritarian,” and for her the term “critical” was rooted in
Kant’s critical philosophy.25 Both Mamardashvili and Arendt found
rich theoretical resources in Kant’s political writings (with Arendt
taking a step further than Mamardashvili to argue that Kant’s Cri-
tique of Judgement contains the roots of his political philosophy).
Mamardashvili and Arendt recognized the importance of institu-
tions, such as the agora, that support public thinking. I enlarge my
thinking when I come together with those who are different from
me, who are strangers, because with them I cannot assume that I
know or understand. Arendt underscores that I enlarge my thought
not through empathy that obscures the fact that I do not know or
understand the other, while Mamardashvili warns about the dan-
gers of psychologizing.26
A third voice can be added to this conversation on the im-
portance of public thinking—that of Mikhail Bakhtin. In his book
on Dostoyevsky, Bakhtin develops the concept of polyphony that
echoes key features of public thinking. For instance, Bakhtin em-
phasizes that in his novels Dostoyevsky gathers in one room and
makes converse the most heterogeneous characters who would not
ordinarily talk with each other precisely because they do not have
anything in common. Ideas, or thinking, can develop only in the
back and fourth between such unlikely interlocutors: “The idea be-
gins to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renew its
verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters
into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the ideas
of others.”27
24 To our knowledge, neither of the two philosophers discuss the other’s work.
25 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), 38.
26 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 43.
27 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984), 88.
I stand a chance of expanding, improving, or correcting my

thinking only when I can engage in conversations in public places,
like the agora—only when I can reason publicly. Mamardashvili re-
minds me that I cannot think in my kitchen, referring to the Soviet
practice of confining political conversation to the safety of the
home. These “kitchen conversations,” “unofficial though not an-
tiofficial”28; developed in the 1960s and retreated further into the
private sphere after the Prague Spring. Mamardashvili’s insistence
on a public airing would place him, once again, outside official So-
viet structures and dissident culture.
Kant’s claim that “Nothing is required for this enlightenment,
however, except freedom; … the freedom to use reason publicly in
all matters”29 resonates as profoundly through the work of Arendt
as it does through Mamardashvili’s. Both thinkers give powerful
arguments that to abandon the Enlightenment project is to lay
down a successful weapon against authoritarian regimes, ideology,
and serfdom. As Arendt points out: “To think critically, to blaze the
trail of thought through prejudices, through unexamined opinions
and beliefs, is an old concern of philosophy, which we may date,
insofar as it is a conscious enterprise, to the Socratic midwifery in
Athens.”30 Mamardashvili doubtlessly belongs to this tradition—
another reason why the nomme de guerre “the Georgian Socrates,”
given to him by Jean-Pierre Vernant,31 appears in so many short-
hand descriptions of his life and work.
Another way of situating Mamardashvili is by tracing out a
connection with Petr Chaadaev (1794-1856), a Russian philosopher
who also found an important interlocutor in Kant, and became fa-
mous by criticizing Russia’s “semi-volontary semi-slavery” that
precluded it from cultivating memory and having a history, and
28 Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cam-

bridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994), 147-148.
29 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in Per-
petual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1983).
30 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 36.
31 Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Le Socrate géorgien,” Entre mythe et politique (Paris: Édi-
tions du Seuil, 1996).
INTRODUCTION 31
therefore a culture.32 The first of Chaadaev’s Philosophical Letters

written between 1821-1831 was published in 1836, following a lapse
in censorship (the editor of the journal was consequently sent to Si-
beria, the censor dismissed, and Chaadaev was declared insane and
placed under house arrest). In the words of Alexander Herzen, this
letter was “a shot that rang out in the dark night,” setting off the
debate between the Slavophiles and the Westernizers about Rus-
sia’s place and destiny—a debate that still shapes the country’s
sociopolitical discourse. Chaadaev points out an important connec-
tion between memory, history, and culture that Mamardashvili will
develop a century and a half later. Speaking of the Russian people,
Chaadaev observes: “We live only in the most limited present with-
out a past and without a future, in the midst of flat stagnation.”33
As Mamardashvili will point out, all of the peoples who were con-
quered or subdued by the Russian empire, and later became a part
of the USSR came to suffer from the same illness. Mamardashvili
will also emphasize the role of memory that Chaadaev singles out
as crucial:
What is a human being’s life, says Cicero, if the memory of past times does
not connect the present with the past?… Our memories do not extend be-
yond yesterday; we are as if strangers to ourselves. We stride so amazingly
through time that, as we move forward, our experience disappears for us
irrevocably. This is a natural consequence of a culture entirely borrowed and
imitative. We do not have any internal development, natural progress; old
ideas are swept out by new ones, because the latter do not follow from the
former, but appear from an unknown source. We recognize only altogether
ready-made ideas, therefore those indelible traces that are deposited in
minds by the successive development of thought and create mental power
do not mark our consciousness. We grow, but do not ripen, we move for-
ward along a curved line that does not lead to the goal. We are like those
children who were not forced to reason themselves, so when they grow up,
32 This term was used by E. IU. Solov’ev in his 1995 essay “Экзистенциальная
сотериология Мераба Мамардашвили” (accessed May 30, 2020 https://www.
mamardashvili.com/ru/merab-mamardashvili/opyty-chteniya/erih-solovev
/ekzistencialnaya-soteriologiya-meraba-mamardashvili). The essay appeared
in English as “The Existential Soteriology of Merab Mamardashvili,” Russian
Studies in Philosophy, vol. 49, no. 1 (Summer 2010): 53-73.
33 “Мы живем лишь в самом ограниченном настоящем без прошедшего и
без будущего, среди плоского застоя.” P. IA. Chaadaev, Polnoe sobranie so-
chinenii i izbrannye pis’ma [Complete Works and Selected Correspondence].
Vol. 1 (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), 325.
there is nothing of their own in them; all their knowledge is superficial, their
entire soul is outside of them.34
Speaking of Europe, Chaadaev praises it for something that,

as Mamardashvili will notice, contains a seed of “mortal danger,”
that Europeans might take it for granted that they are European.
Chaadaev notes that all Europeans (or, we might say, Western Eu-
ropeans, for Chaadaev belongs to the time period when Western
Europe set out to distinguish itself from its own ambiguous spaces
to the East in an effort to establish its own unambiguously superior
identity)35—anyone who belongs to Western Europe has a
share of the common inheritance, without labor, without tension, selects the
knowledge scattered in society and uses it….Note that this is not about
learnedness, not about reading, not about something literary or scientific,
but simply about the meeting of minds, about thoughts that embrace a child
in the cradle, surround him in the midst of the games that his mother whis-
pers, caressing him, those that in the form of various feelings, penetrate to
the marrow of his bones together with the air that he breathes, and which
form his moral nature before he enters the world and society. Do you want
to know what these thoughts are? These are thoughts of duty, justice, law,
and order. They come from the very events that created society, they are the
constituent elements of the social world of those countries. This is the atmos-
phere of the West, it is more than history or psychology, it is the physiology
of a European.36
One of Mamardashvili’s key terms is artificial organ, or some-

thing in-between the natural and the artificial, something that
connects directly to the human being, an artificial construction to
which I can connect with my body and with its help attain some-
thing that would otherwise require a heroic effort, or an entire
lifetime. Chaadaev also points out that certain thoughts or elements
of social structures became parts of bodies, or that human beings
embody ideas that were developed.
Unlike Chaadaev, Mamardashvili is more circumspect in his
praise of Europe. First of all, he frees the idea of Europe from its
34 Chaadaev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i izbrannye pis’ma [Complete Works and

Selected Correspondence], 326.
35 See Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1994).
36 Chaadaev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i izbrannye pis’ma [Complete Works and
Selected Correspondence], 326-327.
INTRODUCTION 33
geopolitical meaning (that could be easily dismissed for being ide-

alistic, overlooking Europe’s colonial history, its sexism, classism,
etc.) by emphasizing that Europe is a process—or something that
happens (or does not) through work, sustained effort, and might
(or might not) happen in any place of the globe. Mamardashvili also
points out that if any individual or society simply assumes that jus-
tice or dignity has seeped into them through the mother’s whispers
and caresses, and that they need not do anything to activate these
qualities, then they are opening themselves to the danger of author-
itarianism.
Chaadaev’s first letter abounds in sweeping generalizations,
and a less-than-nuanced outlook on Western Europe and the Rus-
sian Empire, yet he is correct to emphasize the importance of
memory and the idea that without it a people cannot have a culture.
Mamardashvili takes up and elaborates this idea, arguing that if
memory is systematically destroyed or erased, entire societies will
not escape the vicious circle of endless repetition. In the essay “On
Civil Society,” included in this volume, Mamardashvili gives an ex-
ample from the war in Afghanistan when Soviet soldiers were
called “international freedom fighters.” Readers in the U.S. may
hear echoes of the mid-1980s, when anti-Sandinista militias in Nic-
aragua became “freedom fighters,” or the early 2000s, when
soldiers and sailors became “our troops.” Such perverse euphe-
misms disguise reality, preventing memory formation, precluding
the possibility of being properly mourned and so remembered.
Mamardashvili talks about mourning, and, in particular profes-
sional mourners—people hired to mourn for the dead; he witnessed
it in Georgia as a young man, and thought of it as ritualized hypoc-
risy,37 but later recognized that this was a powerful mechanism
through which memory and history are created. If instead of being
reinforced by structures like this one, memory is intentionally
weakened, distorted, or even obliterated, individual experiences
and social events cannot be properly worked through. For instance,
if soldiers are sent into battle without identification so that there
37 Merab Mamardashvili, Lektsii po antichnoi filosofii [Lectures on Ancient Greek

Philosophy] (Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2009), 16.
cannot be an official record of what they did, and of their death,

then they cannot be remembered, and the trauma of a war cannot
not be resolved. This strategy is still being used by Russia as re-
cently as the occupation of Crimea in 2014 when Russian soldiers
did not wear insignia, Russia’s official statement was that “there are
no Russian soldiers in Ukraine,” and the dead Russian soldiers
were shipped back and buried in unidentified caskets. The families
were not able to publicly mourn their dead, and these undead
joined the ranks of their like, and will haunt the country and its
people until (if ever) remembered and reckoned with.
Memory plays a singularly important role in Mamardashvili’s
philosophy. It is not accidental that Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
accompanies Mamardashvili from the beginning of his philosophi-
cal career, and in the final decade becomes a prism through which
his lifelong work refracts. Working through or with memory, hu-
man beings are able to enter the interval of aporia or amechania
(non-action) that allows them to unlink certain mechanisms and lib-
erate themselves from involuntary repetition.
Socrates and the Human Voice

Given the extent to which our societies today depend on writing,
there can be no oral philosophers, not even in the sense that Socra-
tes was one. Yet Mamardashvili comes close, and makes it one of
the key elements of his philosophical method. Few of Mamardash-
vili’s texts have written origins; among them is Forms and Content of
Thinking (1969) that served as his habilitation thesis.38 He probably
refers to this text in an interview with Annie Epelboin he gave in
1989 for France Culture. Although he was thoroughly fluent in both
written and spoken Russian, he comments self-deprecatingly on
why he chose speaking over writing:
Only a few of my books have been published, very abstract and “hands-off”:
books on epistemology, an area where nobody understands anything. And,
through my rather heavy and bad style, I compounded the misunderstand-
ing, which was favorable to publication (he laughs...) because the censor got
38 Merab Mamardashvili, Formy i soderzhenie myshleniia [Forms and Content of

Thinking], (Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2011).
INTRODUCTION 35
lost. I don’t mean to, but I write poorly, that’s all. I speak better, it’s a kind
of artistry in relation to the listener, I know how to reach them, because
when I give a lesson, when I give a conference, I am there myself, openly, I
gamble my life during the conference. I’m there with my problems, I run a
personal risk, obvious to those who listen to me; so they walk with me, rec-
ognizing their own experience in the philosophical apparatus which I use,
because I use it myself, and in exclusive relation with what is essential to my
own life.39
Behind this claim of ineptitude is an aversion to the watery

and impersonal constructions necessary to publish through official
channels. The element of risk Mamardashvili assumes when speak-
ing out loud is essential to thinking, and especially to public or
critical thinking. When I speak aloud I risk not being able to sustain
the tension of thinking. If I do not take this risk, however, I foreclose
the possibility of thinking altogether.
Mamardashvili’s philosophical style approximates the writ-
ing of Proust and Faulkner that he discusses in the first of his
Lectures on Proust, pointing out that the “echoing, resonating struc-
ture” of nonlinear writing “might be better suited for the task of
gathering together the scattered pieces of the self.”40 Specialized
thinking is different in kind from the thinking that could help us
liberate ourselves from repetitive, mechanical motions, and this is
one of the reasons that Mamardashvili evades specialized dis-
course. Mamardashvili’s lectures are neither scientific—especially
in the sense in which analytic philosophy aspires to be scientific—
nor poetic in the way that some texts of the so-called Continental
39 Mamardachvili, La Pensée empêchée, 19: “Seulement quelques-uns de mes livres

ont été publiés, ceux qui ne “touchaient à rien” et qui étaient très abstraits: les
livres d’épistémologie, domaine où personne ne comprend rien. Et, par mon
style plutôt lourd et mauvais, j’ajoutais aussi à l’incompréhension, ce qui était
favorable a la publication (il rit…) parce que la censure s’y perdait. Ce style
n’est pas volontaire, mais j’écris mal, c’est tout. Je parle mieux, j’ai une espèce
d’artistisme”, si l’on peut dire, dans mes relations avec l’auditoire, je sais com-
ment le toucher, parce que quand je fais un cours, quand je donne une
conférence, je suis présent moi-même, ouvertement, je joue ma vie pendant la
conférence. Je suis là avec mes problèmes, je cours un risque personnel, évident
pour ceux qui m’écoutent; alors ils marchent avec moi, reconnaissant leur pro-
pre expérience dans l’appareil philosophique que j’emploie, parce que c’est
moi-même qui l’emploie, et en rapport exclusif avec l’existentiel de ma propre
vie.”
40 See Lecture 1, included in this volume.
philosophers like Heidegger, Derrida, or Deleuze approximate po-

etry. Mamardashvili discusses some of the most foundational
philosophical problems—for instance, he provides a definition of
consciousness—and his conversational style gives these problems
lightness without taking away from their complexity. Complex
problems need not be clothed in complex language, or, better, a
complex problem can only be expressed in simple terms; if you can-
not state a problem in simple terms, then it is not complex enough.
In one of his frequent asides, Mamardashvili tells his audience: “To
avoid making you think too seriously about certain terms (I have in
mind only terminology, not problems, because problems are in-
deed worth serious thought; my terms, however, are not
obligatory), I will speak of my experience of existing ‘behind the
looking glass’ in the following way…”41
In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades likens Socrates to a statue of
“Silenus sitting, his flute or his pipes in his hands, and it’s hollow.
It’s split right down the middle, and inside it’s full of tiny statues of
the gods.”42 The only difference, Alcibiades claims, between a satyr
or a Silenus and Socrates is that Socrates has no need for instru-
ments, such as a flute; he does it “with words alone.”43 In a similar
way, the lightness of Mamardashvili texts leads or opens up the
complexity of philosophical problems, and he does it “with words
alone”.
In relinquishing specialized thinking Mamardashvili tried to
avoid what he called, following Kierkegaard, mortal danger:
a person who does not know that he is baptized, that he is a Christian, has a
better chance to be Christian, because preexisting knowledge is most fre-
quently already a stereotype; it lacks a living thought or feeling. We take for
granted that because we were baptized, and at the age of thirteen confirmed,
we are indeed Christians. This is dangerous. This is the sickness Kierkegaard
called mortal danger.44
41 “Consciousness and Civilization,” included in this volume.

42 Plato, Symposium 215b. Translation by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989), 65.
43 Symposium 215d.
44 Lecture 6, Lectures on Proust.
INTRODUCTION 37
Mamardashvili put himself on the line while philosophizing

also because he hoped that this will be contagious—his audience
too will begin experimenting with thinking:
Do I express myself clearly? Not really? I use simple words, although of

course I understand that this is difficult to grasp. To this I can only reply:
you can understand what I am saying only under the condition—I already
introduced it—that you yourself would experience this; that is, it is possible
to understand what is thought, only if you yourself are thinking. Nobody
can save us from this...45
Even the human voice “cannot save us”—even speaking ex-

temporaneously in front of a receptive audience does not guarantee
that “an arrow of thought will fly.” We can only approximate, and
hope that the event of thinking or understanding will happen—on
a les mots qu’on a or we have the words we have, as Mamardashvili
points out.46
Our greatest desire is to be alive while we are alive, and
Mamardashvili pursues this desire. He does not separate between
wisdom and the art of living, while striving to separate between
living thought and what looks exactly the same, but is not. In this
too, he is not unlike Socrates who mastered the art of krinein—of
differentiating, or separating. Mamardashvili wields the sword that
he sees himself as having received from Descartes, the sword that
separates the living from the undead.
Russian Literary Humanism

Despite his consistent focus on Ancient and Western European
thought, Mamardashvili’s work owes a significant debt to Russian
literature, as his references to writers such as Bulgakov, Pushkin,
and, especially, Platonov and Chekhov make clear. His emphasis
on work, inner work, and clear-sighted cultural labor echoes Che-
khov’s entire body of work—the stories, plays, and letters reflect a
45 Lecture 11, Lectures on Proust.

46 Mamardashvili is paraphrasing on a les amours qu’on a, or “one has the loves
one has” that he misattributes to François Villon, and that came from a song
by Georges Brassens based on Villon’s poem. See Lecture 3 (p. 67 of the Russian
edition) of Lectures on Proust.
light-hearted moral seriousness central to Mamardashvili. In a let-

ter to his publisher, Alexei Suvorin,47 Chekhov describes his own
boyhood as an uncultured shopkeeper’s son, exposed to the casual
cruelty (torturing animals) and mindless piety (kissing the priest’s
hands) of aimless provincial life. He asks Suvorin to imagine this
life, and then the moral effort necessary to become a real human
being, one of Mamardashvili’s consistent ideas. In another letter, to
one of his brothers, he chastises a tendency to self-abnegation—feel
worthless before God, perhaps, but not in front of other, equally
fallible humans, Chekhov admonishes his brother. Mamardash-
vili’s close attention to moral development is less about precepts, as
Oblonsky’s brother-in-law Lvov refers to “moral training” in Tol-
stoy’s Anna Karenina, and more to do with Egorushka’s dawning
consciousness of the wide world, the glories of nature, and the va-
riety of human character, as Chekhov depicts it in “The Steppe,” or
Chekhov’s own self-effacing description of his work during a chol-
era epidemic, which is exhausting and perhaps not altogether
effectual, but nonetheless necessary. Coming to know the self and
the world requires “effort in time,” as Mamardashvili describes it
in “On Civil Society,” but there are no guarantees other than effort
and time. Chekhov returns to effort in time repeatedly—“In the
Horse Cart,” depicts a comparatively refined teacher’s spirit
crushed by hardship and corruption, and Olga and Irina in Three
Sisters struggle to maintain their status and standards (“I can’t re-
member the Italian for ‘window’!”) while teaching in provincial
schools. At the end of Uncle Vanya, Sonya speaks of work as though
she is trying to re-humanize her own family circle, which has been
shivered by the pleasure-seeking, cynically pragmatic, and gener-
ally unserious behavior of everyone in the play. For
Mamardashvili, as for Chekhov, serfdom and slavery were not met-
aphorical, and work as a free person was more than an economic
transaction or a moral test. Anton Chekhov’s family were serfs, and
long after the 1861 emancipation, he refers to the moral effort de-
scribed in the letter to Suvorin as “squeezing the slave out of oneself
47 A. Chekhov, Letter to A. S. Suvorin, 7 January 1889, in A. Yarmolinsky, Letters

of Anton Chekhov (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), 107.
INTRODUCTION 39
drop by drop.” During Soviet times—because of Stalinism and Hit-

lerism—the term “slavery” acquired a new layer of meaning, as
Mamardashvili would certainly have been aware.
Russian literature could be characterized as several centuries
of writers talking with each other;48 in the absence of representative
government and a robust public sphere for much of its history,
many of the country’s political and cultural battles played out in
the pages of literature. Types, such as Oblomov or Onegin, and cat-
egories, such as the refined rural schoolteacher beloved of Chekhov
and admired by Mamardashvili in her Georgian form, or
raznochintsy, whom he deplored, walked out from the pages of
books and transcended their fictional role, becoming participants in
the cultural, spiritual, and political conversations of their creators.
Raznochintsy did not belong to the nobility, but because they re-
ceived education, no longer fully belonged to their class of origin—
they were educated people of “miscellaneous rank.” In common
terms, this category includes angry young men, aimless revolution-
aries, irresponsible intellectuals with nihilist tendencies.
Mamardashvili is suspicious of their simplistic attachment to social
engineering and material determinism. It is harder to avoid than to
spot them in Russian literature: Dostoevsky’s Roskolnikov, Turge-
nev’s Bazarov, Chernyshevsky’s Lopukhov. Chekhov’s work in
particular is full of raznochintsy, and he often portrays them as sym-
pathetic, if flawed: the aimless Treplev and Trofimov in Seagull and
Cherry Orchard, a senior version in Uncle Vanya (“I could have been
another Schopenhauer! I could have been another Dostoevsky!”).
For Chekhov, most men and many women had a bit of raznochintsy
latent in them; recognizing and handling such tendencies was part
of the work of being human.
Mamardashvili notes that Soviet writers such as Mikhail
Zoshchenko, Nikolay Zabolotsky, and Andrei Platonov
were the first ones to begin describing strange people who speak ‘the lan-
guage of the neighborhood warden’, the language of the humanoid being
spawned by Bulgakov in his novel Heart of a Dog.
48 For a useful general discussion of this phenomenon, see Kathleen F. Parthé’s

“Literature and Politics in Russia” in Russia’s Dangerous Texts: Politics Between
the Lines (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2004), 1-50.
This language consists of otherworldly immobile blocks resembling cancer-

ous growths. How can we think with phrases such as “the vegetable
conveyor of the country”? Monstrous muscular model workers out of a
propaganda poster emerge from behind this language, but to see or to think
about what happens to the vegetables at that moment is decisively impossi-
ble. It is as though you immediately fall into a magnetic field and cannot
escape its force.49
Rather than separating the lives of an individual and a society,

one of Mamardashvili’s main tasks was to identify and understand
how their interlocking mechanisms function. In Lecture 17 Mamar-
dashvili uses a different “muscular metaphor” referring to the year
1937—the term for the great purges:
What is taking shape as reality in which we live, as something where things

can happen independently of us, is determined to a great extent by what we
did not do in 1937 or in relation to the year 1937, what we did not learn; it is
determined by what we did not derive from experience.
It is clear, of course, why: because we did not have a public space for learn-
ing from experience. Experience is extracted only on the agora, only in a
public space, where the ball of experience should roll around and accumu-
late meat and flesh, because our thought needs muscles; and this ball should
grow with them, having rolled in resonant reflections. I ask the same ques-
tion again: at the moment when it happened and we supposedly
remembered it, what inscription did we incise in our own body, in our
honor, dignity or cowardice? Where was what is remembered, or is a possi-
bility that can be actualized, inscribed?50
Mamardashvili maintains that the Soviet citizens who lived

through the terror of 1937 have not learned from it in the sense that
the same terror is still possible; the same situation could occur, and
I would react in the same way. I experienced but I did not work
with the experience, and, more specifically, I did not work with it
in the agora—enlarging my thinking, testing out the ideas, develop-
ing the tools—habits, books, institutions—to help me react
differently the next time around, or preclude there ever being “the
next time.” Only in the agora can certain social mechanisms that
have been in motion for decades or centuries be decoupled and new
connections forged. Only in the agora—the places where public
thinking could happen—can memory be created—bodily memory
49 “The ‘Third’ State,” included in this volume.

50 See Lecture 17 (pages 417-418 of the Russian edition) of Lectures on Proust.
INTRODUCTION 41
(upon which I rely when swimming or riding a bicycle) that kicks

in when I cannot think rationally, when I do not have time to think,
or when I am too frightened or confused to think and act on what
is right.
There is memory in two senses: as derived memory, in the sense of being

able to say “I remember,” and what is denoted by the same word, but is not
actually derived, and therefore determines a different reality. I gave an ex-
ample: what do we mean when we say “the event happened in 1937”? If
there are certain linkages of our realized movements of the soul (not just
half-movements, half-feelings, half-understandings, but realized) that are
not repeated ad nauseam51, then we have one reality; and if this is not the
case, we have another reality. We,52 for instance, have this other reality, we
cannot say that the year 1937 happened, it would be lovely if this were a
possibility. It didn’t happen, because in terms of our soul, according to the
level of our capabilities and our unrealized acts of understanding, unreal-
ized acts of valor, unrealized acts of honor and so on, we are stuck in the
same gear with regard to events and movements that generated and con-
tinue to generate 1937: 1937 could be 1985.53
Mamardashvili used literature to explore and confirm his met-

aphysical concerns. With one of Chekhov’s stories he illustrates the
idea that one cannot simply destroy—as if with a hammer—a mech-
anism behind an individual’s or a society’s actions that was set in
motion by an interlocking of two phenomena (recall Saint Loup’s
noble ideals that became interlinked with his vision of Rachel). In
this sense, Mamardashvili would concur with Kant that revolutions
are undesirable: they break the old, maleficent, patterns of behav-
ior, but rarely help individuals or a people to form new ones. As a
result, humanity is set back to an atavistic and feral state, and space
is opened up for pathological processes. In this respect Mamardash-
vili sides with Hobbes and Kant, rather than Rousseau, on the
question of “human nature”—without art and the artificial organs
such as agora, we and our lives would be “nasty and brutish.”
51 Mamardashvili refers to дурные повторения—bad or stupid repetitions; “bad

infinity.”
52 In this case, Mamardashvili refers to the actual “we” of his audience: Soviet
citizens.
53 The lecture was delivered in 1985. Lecture 17, page 476 of the Russian edition
of Lectures on Proust.
Chekhov has a story called “The Black Monk,” which describes a mentally
ill person, who himself wanted to recover, of course, and who was treated.
He had an interesting, intense inner life. He was cured, but he died as a per-
son. Before that, he wove a fabric in which his spiritual possibilities were
canalized in the only way possible for him: through a symbol, through a
painful habit, say, with his right hand touching his left ear. It is not about
the ear, but through the ear something else is being actualized in me, which,
for instance, can be detected by psychoanalysis, taking this gesture as a
symptom. I want to emphasize that this gesture, or the interlinking of this
action, constitutes an empirical individual, and only an empirical individ-
ual. The path is already occupied by him, and everything else will be
realized through him. If this is directly destroyed, as the patient’s sympto-
matic channelling of his spiritual abilities was destroyed (the channelling
linked to what turned out to be a symptom of the disease), then the psychic
individual regresses several orders of magnitude.54
When I unlink parts of one interlocking mechanism, I must

have time and space to form another that could take its place—I
must linger in non-action, or amechania, I must establish residence
in a borderlands that is ambiguous by design, like that of Eastern
Europe.
People, Places, and Faces

Mamardashvili “wrote” through speaking, and most of his philo-
sophical writings are actually transcriptions of lectures. Some of the
audiotapes were transcribed right away and reused the next day.
The oral interpretation of his ideas sometimes requires special at-
tention on its way to a useable English text. In this translation, some
repetitions and “you had to be there” constructions are trimmed
away or managed through context. Mamardashvili was fluent in
Georgian, Russian, and French, and his professional language was
Russian; in any language, he would sometimes prod an expression
into a new and strange shape in order to call attention to its possi-
bilities or undermine an easy interpretation. Managing the idioms
while preserving the eccentricity is often a challenge, as is capturing
the sometimes untranslatable Russian vocabulary.
Mamardashvili’s style of speaking acknowledges that it is not
worth the trouble to convey ideas in a systematic logical sequence.
54 Merab Mamardashvili, Vil’niusskie lekcii po sotsial’noi filosofii [Vilnius Lectures

on Social Philosophy] (Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2012), 239.
INTRODUCTION 43
He rejects terminology—more often than not he was not speaking

to specialists, but to diverse groups of students and the general
public. Paradoxically, his rejection of normal “clear teaching”
methods, and not having graduate students or a stable academic
post, make his work more accessible. He was a strannik, a Russian
word that means wanderer or vagabond, but has its root in stranger
or foreigner. He went wherever he was invited, and his philosoph-
ical style also stranstvuet—brings in strange literary works, and uses
them to condense his ideas and explore a topic in a non-linear way,
using mostly non-technical vocabulary. It is more or less possible to
start anywhere in his oeuvre.
Mamardashvili presents several challenges for the translator,
many of them associated with form: since the lectures were deliv-
ered in person, often to an audience with shared associations and
history, he could employ a gestural shorthand or use tone of voice
to convey a contradiction or question that might not be evident in a
written text. The flexible word order of Russian also creates (per-
haps useful) ambiguity and tension. It is easy to imagine
Mamardashvili floating one of his idiosyncratic metaphors, such as
“snowballing an idea,” and relying on a ripple of understanding
before proceeding with his discussion; in a written text, the transla-
tor must find the precise wording if such a metaphor is to resonate
in the dead room of a printed page. Anyone who lectures is used to
relying on an audience to pull an idea past a momentary loss for
words; the translators occasionally adjusted phrasing to provide
the additional boost.
Mamardashvili’s tendency to gently mangle idioms or collide
with expectations is a major element of his challenge to the reader.
Even when the original expression is conventional, many Russian
idioms, words, cultural contexts, and grammatical constructions in-
clude nuances not readily available in English. When he refers to
“Russia,” or anything/anyone “Russian,” for example, Mamar-
dashvili contends with an ongoing historical problem in the
Russian language, Russian culture and Russian history, and com-
ments indirectly on the synthetic and artificial nature of Soviet
state- and citizen-making. During the time of the USSR, Mamar-
dashvili, a Georgian by birth and ethnicity, was supposed to be, like
all of the inhabitants of the Soviet Union, first and foremost a Soviet
citizen. In reality, Russian ethnicity, even under the (Georgian) dic-
tator Stalin, was privileged, and other “nationalities” were reduced
to the status of weak ethnicities. “Russian” was largely synony-
mous with or at least non-problematically similar to “Soviet,” just
as previously, under the czars, all were nominally subjects of the
Russian empire. National languages and cultures were most fre-
quently repressed or reduced to folklore and kitsch under both the
czarist and the Soviet empires. A case in point is the USSR’s Jews,
whose status was never completely secure even after many Russian
Jews participated actively in the revolutions and subsequent Soviet
governments. Even today, the difference remains between “Rus-
sian” (citizenship) and “Russian” (ethnicity or “nationality”—the
loaded “what are you by nationality?” question familiar to anyone
suspected of being Jewish, Armenian, or Chechen in the multi-eth-
nic former Soviet space) that still complicates Russia’s internal and
external relationships with perceived outsiders. A person can carry
a Russian passport but not be completely “Russian” due to another
identity—Jewish, Ukrainian, Armenian, Chechen—buried many
generations in the past. Until recently, both national and racial
identity were listed separately on the internal identity document
issued to all Russian citizens, and ethnic distinctions are still main-
tained on a “voluntary” basis for birth, marriage, and military
documents. Even without an official record, Russian imperial rela-
tionships with “subject nationalities” and its own internal ethnic
minorities still influence its treatment of citizens. The late Anna
Politkovskaya noted that ethnic Russians who lived in Grozny were
treated as “Chechens” by occupying Russian security services, and
even ethnic Russian troops who served in Chechnya, and may have
oppressed the population there, were viewed as “Chechens” upon
returning to towns and cities outside Chechnya.
The Russian language itself has specific terms that distinguish
between Russian ethnicity—русский, and Russian nationality—
российский. By varying the form of the adjective one can refer to a
Russian (русский) who does not consider him- or herself to be a
Russian national (россиянин). There is an even more subtle implica-
tion of this distinction: when saying “the Russian army,” or “the
INTRODUCTION 45
history of the Russian Empire,” one uses the word российский. To

designate Russian literature, however, one uses the word русский.
(If one wants to emphasize that a particular writer is a Russian na-
tional—perhaps implying that he or she is a conformist—the word
российский would be used.) This distinction also enables a subtle
racism or racial framing to hitch itself to language. Mamardashvili,
a Soviet Georgian who repudiated ethnic nationality or even shared
language as an organizing civil principle, would have paid close
attention to these nearly-invisible distinctions, and we note where
they affect the translation.
Written English must manage clumsy and gendered terms for
talking about people, especially in the singular. Person, human be-
ing, and “man” as a generic person or human being all translate to
a single, very useful word in Russian: человек (chelovek). This word
carries a faint humanistic fragrance, elevating a simple human per-
son into an ensouled being, in a non-doctrinal or non-confessional
sense. For Mamardashvili a chelovek is cultivated, not born, but an-
yone born, however uncultivated, has the seed or germ of a chelovek
within. This is a relational term—we are all cheloveks together—alt-
hough it has a masculine gender in Russian. As Miglena Nikolchina
notes, in this word “the traditional humanist values of ‘man’ have
been invested without producing, at least on a linguistic level, the
exclusion of woman. To be sure, there is—to ward off unrealistic
feminist hopes—the joke that ‘woman is the best friend of čelovek.’
The joke, however, would not be possible if it were not assumed in
purely linguistic terms that woman was čelovek to begin with.”55 For
the most part, we translated человек as “human being.” When using
a pronoun, bearing in mind the explicitly gendered associations in
English, we often availed ourselves of recent innovations in gender-
inclusive language, employing “they.” Where we could, we plural-
ized the sentence, but we also sometimes used “they” as a singular
pronoun. At times, following Nikolchina’s lead, we left “he” if it
seemed that the pronoun had a historical resonance or alluded to a
55 Miglena Nikolchina, “The Humanism-Antihumanism Divide: The Concept of

‘Man ’between the End of World War 2 and the Fall of the Berlin Wall,” Sofia:
Center for Advanced Study, Working Paper Series, 2013, 5.
context or intention where “he” was a genuinely universal or neu-

tral pronoun.
Slightly more difficult to manage was a cluster of Russian
words formed around лик (lik). This word is etymologically related
to лицо (litso) that means both “face” and “person,” and there is one
particular sentence when Mamardashvili could be making a pun.
Лик, however, is more difficult to translate or explain with a foot-
note, because of its poetic and spiritual connotations. Pavel
Florensky distinguishes between лицо and a лик of, for instance, a
saint represented on Orthodox icon. In his theory a лик is not a copy
of somebody’s face—it is not a resemblance, but reveals who they
are, or helps one see this person from the point of view of what
Florensky calls the invisible world.56 He distinguishes both of these
terms from another word from this etymological cluster—личина
(lichina), or a “mask.”
The noun личность (lichnost’), ordinarily translated as “indi-
viduality,” “personality,” or “individual,” is difficult to translate
accurately, not in the least because of its etymological affinity with
лик. Not all cheloveks are lichnost’s—only those who worked to rec-
reate the configurations or constellations of their self. This is why
in Lecture 11 Mamardashvili suggests that lichnost’ could be best
translated by “being”: Breton “uses a characteristic turn of phrase,
claiming that Artaud tries to substitute revolution by the idea of the
internal transformation of a human being or human person
[личности] (the French word être means both being and a separate
human being, and in Russian we can say личность).” We frequently
translate личность by “human person,” or simply “person,” in or-
der to separate Mamardashvili’s term from individualistic
associations.
Signposts along the way forward

Apart from his reputation as a philosopher, Merab Mamardashvili
is helpful in this post-Soviet moment, where the forces of “man-
56 See Pavel Florensky, Ikonostas [Iconostasis] (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AKT, 2003)

and Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 1996).
INTRODUCTION 47
aged” or “sovereign” democracy, to put it generously, or authori-

tarian mafia oligarchy, for a less-generous framing, exert a
powerful imaginative and practical influence over ordinary voters
and citizens. Alongside his socio-political relevance, he raises ques-
tions of consciousness and humanism through transformative
discussions of literature and philosophy. Working in a political re-
ality that relied on propaganda and collective thinking,
Mamardashvili emphasizes that understanding cannot be trans-
ferred from one person to another, but must be acquired through
individual effort, or collective effort that assumes the moral strin-
gency of individual effort. In his subtle way, Mamardashvili
explores how a person or entity can adhere to perverse, even detri-
mental ideals and convictions, and must come to conclusions on
their own—independently even of others who may have expert or
superior understanding. As the Soviet Union was collapsing,
Mamardashvili began to grapple with a new form of outsider status
attendant upon a new freedom to take sides and let atavism return
to the public sphere he so valued, as historian Georgi Derluguian
points out:
The high-status intellectual elite found themselves politically outflanked

and ideologically disoriented. The old government that they were trying to
make civilized, accountable, and rational had suddenly disappeared. Erupt-
ing from below was a tremendous social movement of almost millenarian
zeal whose icon was the former dissident Zviad Gamsakhurdia.57 This
movement seemed to the intellectuals more like an irrational mob. It was
then that the stellar Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili, an all-Un-
ion celebrity, uttered his last famous aphorism: If this is the choice of my
people, then I am against the people! Shortly afterwards, Mamardashvili
died of a heart attack. In hindsight this seems like the symbolic death of the
Georgian intelligentsia and their mission to create a “civil society.”58
Derluguian is most likely paraphrasing what Mamardashvili

said in one of his last interviews, in September of 1990, “If my peo-
ple choose Gamsakhurdia, then I will have to go against my own
people in the sense of my views and moods. I do not want to believe
57 Zviad Gamsakhurdiya (1939-1993) became president of independent Georgia;

nationalist.
58 Georgi Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Admirer in the Caucasus (London, New York:
Verso, 2004), 202.
it.”59 Mamardashvili’s aversion to nationalist positions confirmed

that his non-belonging has deep philosophical roots. It goes back to
the idea that acting on a passion without taking time to think can
only set one back:
I could engage in political struggle, but this space is already filled with pas-
sions, emotions, ambitions. Maturity has become a liability, because adults
have become boring. Adhering to my philosophy, I avoid talking about pol-
itics with young people, because I involuntarily find myself in the position
of an adult who imposes himself and nags. I understand how young people
view those who are older. For them, these people are a part of what, from
their point of view, is not life. I have no desire to be there, where I am not
invited. Desiring nothing is one of the great rules of life for a spy, which I
already discussed and which I follow.60
Now that his Soviet passport is, so to speak, obsolete, it is not

enough to say that Mamardashvili is a “Russian” philosopher: un-
der the artificial stability of the Soviet system, he was an ethnic
Georgian who wrote in Russian and held Soviet citizenship; he
sometimes references Georgian vocabulary or sayings in his lec-
tures. It is impossible to speculate how he would have defined
himself a few years later, after many of the socialist republics, in-
cluding Georgia, established their independence, and after the
economic shock treatment that accompanied the Soviet breakup left
a legacy of social trauma and corruption. Many would consider him
a “Russian” philosopher, but what is a Russian? In his own context,
the one he examined so carefully, Mamardashvili extends “Russia”
to mean the Soviet Union; he says that all peoples who live within
the borders of the USSR “jumped out of history and life” and are
sick as a result. He uses the word “Russia” to underscore that the
primary causes of this infirmity are the Russian imperial aspira-
tions that were taken up and continued by the Soviet Union.
“Jumping out of life,” the Russian Empire pulled with it all of the
59 “Если мой народ выберет Гамсахурдиа, тогда мне придется пойти против
собственного народа в смысле своих взглядов и настроений. Я не хочу в
это верить.” Merab Mamardashvili, “Veriu v zdravyi smysl” [“I believe in
common sense”] (accessed May 30, 2020 https://mamardashvili.com/ru/me
rab-mamardashvili/publikacii-iz-arhiva/interview/veryu-v-zdravyj-smysl).
60 Merab Mamardashvili, “Zhyzn’ shpiona” [“Life of a Spy”], Soznanie i tsivili-
zatsiia [Consciousness and Civilization], 326.
INTRODUCTION 49
peoples it conquered and subjugated since the seventeenth cen-

tury—Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, Moldovans—who soon
after Mamardashvili’s death in 1990 became formally independent
nations, although they are still to a greater or lesser degree conva-
lescent. “Russia” also includes all of the indigenous or ethnically
non-Russian people that made up the Russian Soviet Federative So-
cialist Republic (RSFSR), and then the Russian Federation—for
instance, the Finnic, Samoyedic, Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic
peoples native to Siberia, the Russian far north, and Central Asia.
There are many other ethnic groups apart from these, whose lan-
guage and culture have been methodically erased over the years.
It would make much more sense, then, to call Mamardashvili
an Eastern European philosopher while removing this term from
political and geographic connotations; better yet, to call him a phi-
losopher of an unknown country, as he himself preferred: “I was
thrown or pushed by my birth into the secret, unknown homeland
of all conscious beings, because we all as conscious beings have a
second homeland, of which we are the citizens: as spiritual beings,
as human beings, we are citizens of this homeland.”61
Thinking from this same homeland, and a different in-be-
tween, several Chicana and Latina philosophers, including Gloria
Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Mariana Ortega, discuss what it
takes to move between several “worlds,” or live in the ambiguous
borderlands of these worlds, and the tensions that this creates in a
self.62 This tension, painful and often destructive, allows one to en-
gage in a complex process of thinking. As Mamardashvili points
out, “The ability to think complexly means the ability of the human
to hold together at least two abstractions that exclude each other.”63
Complex thinking experiments with what appears to be untenable,
61 Mamardachvili, La Pensée empêchée, 46.

62 See, for instance, Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
(San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999); María Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-
Traveling, and Loving Perception,” Hypatia 2, no 4 (Summer 1987): 3–19; Mar-
iana Ortega, In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self
(Albany: State University of New York Press), 2016.
63 Merab Mamardashvili, Vvedenie v filosofiiu [Introduction to Philosophy] (Mos-
cow: Merab Mamardashvili Foundation, 2019), 150.
or notices the regions of obscurity in what is presumed to be clearly

established.
Mamardashvili discusses a Heraclitus aphorism that intro-
duces this thrilling and dangerous game: “They do not comprehend
how a thing agrees at variance with itself; it is an attunement turn-
ing back on itself, like that of the bow and the lyre.”64
Mamardashvili elaborates, “our thought is similar to the effort of
holding the differently-directed ends of the bow. An arrow flies
only if I can sustain the ends of the bow pulling in different direc-
tions. Replace it with the flight of our thoughts.”65 The tension of
the bow enables an arrow to fly; the tension of the lyre composes
new harmonies. The flight of an arrow and a melody emerge from
the differences that pull strings in opposite directions. The same is
true for human beings, who can “speak as one” only if they are “dif-
ferently-directed”—if they are aware of their difference from others
and also of being “more than one” themselves. Difference, not sim-
ilarity, makes understanding possible. Inconsistencies and
paradoxes set off “the arrow of thought.”
Nikolchina notes that sameness or similarity of opinion does
not produce understanding: “while being transmitted between
their interlocutors the respective utterances get transformed from
something that makes sense to boredom—to a triviality that says
nothing precisely because what it says looks so familiar. The very
comprehensibility of the said produces incomprehension and even
deafness.”66 Words or messages “are not heard precisely to the ex-
tent that they look familiar.”67 Maria Lugones suggests that only
complex conversations are worth having, because they “rule out re-
duction, translation, and assimilation.”68 Cherríe Moraga urges,
“push it a little more than you are comfortable with. If you are com-
64 DK 51. Translated by Charles Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 64-65, 195-200.
65 Merab Mamardashvili, Vvedenie v filosofiiu [Introduction to Philosophy] (Mos-
cow: Merab Mamardashvili Foundation, 2019), 308.
66 Miglena Nikolchina, Lost Unicorns of the Velvet Revolutions: Heterotopias of the
Seminar (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 53.
67 Nikolchina, Lost Unicorns of the Velvet Revolutions, 53.
68 María Lugones, “On Complex Communication,” Hypatia, vol. 21, no. 3 (Sum-
mer 2006): 75-85, 81.
INTRODUCTION 51
fortable, something is wrong; if you are uncomfortable, then you

are probably in the right place.”69 This decisively uncomfortable
and sometimes unbearable tension allows me to turn back on my-
self, which often coincides with turning toward the other, and
allows me to better or more objectively get to know both her and
myself.70
Being a fully enfranchised citizen of a specific, and especially
of a major nation necessarily limits the scope of my vision: I have
no incentive to question my origins, and my place in the world; I
am not likely to experiment with my way of life. Those, on the other
hand, who do not belong fully—who can never hope to fully be-
long—are more likely to develop an understanding of themselves
and the world that is more objective. Mamardashvili elaborated a
more accurate notion of Europe precisely because he could never
assume that he is European.
At the 1988 International Symposium on the European Cultural
Identity in Paris Mamardashvili spoke extemporaneously in French,
noting: “For me, a Georgian, Russian is like Spanish would be for
you [whose native language is French], so I have chosen this other
Spanish, which French is for me—I will speak French.”71 He was
aware of his literal and metaphorical accent, but also aware that this
accent gives him access to a different, more profound understand-
ing of Europe:
“I wanted to talk about the concepts that formed within me on the basis of
the experience of a young person, the personal experience of a human being
who was born outside Europe, who lived in the hinterland and became con-
scious there of his country’s history and culture. The lesson that I derived
from my experience is that I had a privileged vantage point to see what a
European cannot see.”72
69 Cherríe Moraga, “Sabiduría: Cherríe Moraga on How to Live Free” (Lati-

noUSA, accessed May 30, 2020 https://soundcloud.com/latinousa/sabiduria-
cherrie-moraga-on-how-to-live-free).
70 See Julia Sushytska, “Metics and the Art of Playing with Contradictions,” Ta-
puya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society 2, no.1 (2019): 408-425,
accessed May 30, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2019.1670447
71 “European Responsibility,” included in this volume.
72 “European Responsibility,” included in this volume.
From this precarious, privileged vantage point Mamardash-

vili's lectures and essays shed light on dilemmas facing Western
democracies, including the question of the West’s responsibility to-
ward refugees and immigrants. This is why he elaborated and
simultaneously limited the Greek notion of the agora: without mak-
ing a romantic fetish of Greek democracy, or describing it as a
historical event that gave rise to an ideal, Mamardashvili argued
that the agora is one of the key artificial organs of democracy. The
agora delineates an open place where opinions are rolled back and
forth from one person to another, and where they have a chance to
develop. Mamardashvili uses the image of rolling a snowball: a
small, “miserable” (as he puts it) snowball of thought that would
otherwise melt, in the process of being rolled grows into a sizable
ball of snow, and, occasionally, into a beautiful snowman. Only in
such an open, articulated place “one may feel, want, and think.”73
73 Merab Mamardashvili, Vil’niusskie lekcii po sotsial’noi filosofii [Vilnius Lectures

on Social Philosophy] (Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2012), 124-125.
Texts included in this volume
This volume focuses on essays and lectures from the final seven
years of Mamardashvili’s life; they also coincide with the final years
of the Soviet Union. During this period Mamardashvili was once
again able to travel outside of the Soviet borders—between 1988
and 1990 he accepted invitations to give lectures in Europe and the
United States. The Kettering Foundation invited him to Ohio Wes-
leyan University, where he discussed the topic of civil society. The
essay “On Civil Society,” included in this volume, is dated around
1989 because of this thematic connection with an interview Mamar-
dashvili gave while at Wesleyan.1 A part of “On Civil Society” was
previously translated and published in the Kettering Review.2
“The ‘Third’ State” was published in 1989, and “Conscious-
ness and Civilization” was presented in 1984 and published in
1988.3 Mamardashvili delivered “European Responsibility” on Jan-
uary 14, 1988, at an international symposium on the cultural
identity of Europe. With the exception of “European Responsibil-
ity” (delivered in French), all of the texts were composed in
Russian.4
Mamardashvili’s Topology of a Path: Lectures on Proust is refer-
enced throughout this volume as Lectures on Proust. Our translation
is based on the Russian edition of the text, supplemented (with spe-
cial permission by Alena Mamardashvili) with the audio recording
of the lectures Mamardashvili delivered at the Tbilisi State Univer-
sity.5 Mamardashvili gave the first set of lectures on Proust in 1981-
1982. Topology of a Path: Lectures on Proust is a translation of the sec-
1 Merab Mamardashvili. “The Civil Society: An Interview with Merab Mamar-

dashvili.” The Civic Arts Review 2, no. 3 (Summer 1989).
2 Merab Mamardashvili. “On Civil Society.” Tr. from the Russian Julia
Sushytska and Alisa Slaughter. Kettering Review 33, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 26-34
3 Merab Mamardashvili. Soznanie i tsivilizatsiia [Consciousness and Civilization].
Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2019.
4 Europe sans rivage: Symposium international sur l’identité culturelle européenne. Pa-
ris, Janvier 1988 (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel,1988), 201-205.
5 Merab Mamardashvili. Psikhologicheskaia topologiia puti. (M. Prust. “V poiskakh
utrachennogo vremeni") [The Psychological Topology of a Path (M. Proust, In
Search of Lost Time). Vol. 2]. Moscow: Merab Mamardashvili Foundation, 2014.
53
ond, more extensive round of lectures on Proust’s novel: it consists

of 36 lectures (the first one on March 6, 1984, and May 23, 1985). The
Russian edition includes archival materials and elaborate notes on
which Mamardashvili based his oral lectures. We translated Lec-
tures 1, 6, and 11.
“What Belongs to the Author” was originally a written, rather
than oral, composition, which makes it rare among Mamardash-
vili’s work. It consists of typed text and multiple marginal
comments that feel more like aides memoires for later revisions and
do not always illustrate a clear point. This volume includes the fac-
simile of the original typed draft with handwritten notes. As he was
delivering his lectures on Proust, Mamardashvili intended to or-
ganize them into a book, for which he prepared a title page dated
1982 with an epigraph from Baudelaire, “Hypocrite lecteur,—mon
semblable,—mon frère !” It was to consist of three parts: The Reality
of the Soul, Live Form, and Realization of Life in the Book’s
Memory (The Book of Life and Resurrection).
In transliterating the Russian, we follow the Library of Congress

system except, for the purposes of readability, we have removed
diacritical marks, and spelled well-known names according to their
established English spellings (so, instead of Dostoevskii we chose
Dostoevsky).
All translations are our own, unless otherwise indicated.
In his texts Mamardashvili referenced the three-volume 1954 Pléi-

ade edition of Proust’s novel, and 1971 Pléiade edition of Jean
Santeuil and Against Sainte Beuve, and we maintain these refer-
ences, using the following abbreviations:
I (S.W.) Du côté de chez Swann

I (J.F.) À l’ombre de jeunes filles en fleurs
II (C.G.) Le Côté de Guermantes
II (S.G.) Sodome et Gomorrhe
TEXTS INCLUDED IN THIS VOLUME 55
III (Pr.) La Prisonnière

III (Fug.) La Fugitive
III (T.R.) Le Temps retrouvé
S.B. Contre Sainte Beuve
J.S. Jean Santeuil
In his Lectures on Proust Mamardashvili worked with the original

French text, and most of his students did not have access to either
the French or the Russian translation—by 1984 a part of In Search of
Lost Time was translated, but very hard to find. Whenever Proust’s
text differs from Mamardashvili’s translation or paraphrase, we
provide the relevant quotation from the original French.
European Responsibility1
Merab Mamardashvili
First of all, I apologize for my inevitable imperfections of expres-

sion, for French is not my native language, and I am not able to read
from a prepared text: I always have to work at the moment I speak.
Following the intervention of Alain Touraine, I was tempted
to speak in Russian.2 For me, a Georgian, Russian is like Spanish
would be for you, so I have chosen this other Spanish, which French
is for me—I will speak French.3
I wanted to talk about the concepts that formed within me on
the basis of the experience of a young person, the personal experi-
1 This text, the original title of which is “La responsabilité européenne” was de-
livered by Mamardashvili in French on January 14, 1988 at an international
symposium on cultural identity of Europe. The proceeding of the symposium
were published in Europe sans rivage: Symposium international sur l’identité cul-
turelle européenne. Paris, Janvier 1988 (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel,1988), 201-
205.—Trans.
2 Prior to Mamardashvili’s talk, Alain Touraine, a French sociologist, presented
in Spanish, beginning his speech with the following comment: “Because Euro-
pean cultural integration assumes that we will learn each others’ languages,
and because many non-French participants were kind enough to speak in
French, I would like to try to return the favor, and therefore not to speak
French—I will choose… to express myself in something approximating Span-
ish” (Europe sans rivage, 132).—Trans.
3 Mamardashvili was born in 1930 in Georgia, which became a colony of the
Russian empire in the 19th century; after several years of independence that
followed the Russian Revolution of 1917, Georgia became a part of the Soviet
Union. The Georgian language belongs to the Kartvelian language family. Un-
like Spanish and French, Georgian is not related to Russian, which belongs to
the Indo-European family.
Mamardashvili’s relationship to the Russian language was deep and intimate.
He began speaking it and reading its rich literature in his childhood. Later he
completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Moscow Lomonosov
State University (MGU), and spent the rest of his career writing and lecturing
primarily in Russian. Still, as for many of those writing and thinking in Rus-
sian, it remained for him an imperial language.
At the beginning of his symposium presentation Mamardashvili indicates that
French, in which he was fluent, is just as foreign to him as Russian, even if for
a different reason. This sentence was omitted from the Russian translation of
this lecture (See Kak ia ponimaiu filosofiiu [How I Understand Philosophy]. Mos-
cow: Progress, 1992, 311-314).—Trans.
57
ence of a human being4 who was born outside Europe, who lived
in the hinterland and became conscious there of his country’s his-
tory and culture.5 The lesson that I derived from my experience is
that I had a privileged vantage point to see what a European cannot
see.
You Europeans take too much for granted, treat things as al-
most natural. For instance, you don’t give a second thought to what
constitutes the foundation of your existence. You lack a sharp
awareness that a human being is an effort suspended in time; it is a
constant effort just to become human. A human being is not a nat-
ural state, a state of nature, but a state that is continually created.
Personal experience that turned me upside down and that formed
me for good, I hope, was philosophy as a theory of constant crea-
4 The Russian word человек or “the human being” that refers to both men and
women is one of the key terms in the philosophical vocabulary of Mamardash-
vili. During this presentation at the Symposium Mamardashvili chooses to use
the French “l’homme,” an equivalent of the English “man.” He does the same
in the interviews published as La pensée empêchée. We decided to translate
“l’homme” as “human being” in an effort to be more consistent with the orig-
inal, Russian, term that is more gender inclusive, and also with the novel
approach to humanism that Mamardashvili develops in his texts (see the In-
troduction to this volume and Nikolchina’s “The Humanism-Antihumanism
Divide”).—Trans.
5 Moscow was the main center of cultural and intellectual activity in the Soviet
Union, and in some periods of Soviet history support for and tolerance of local
cultures and languages was ambivalent or inconsistent. This is one of the ways
in which Georgia remained a hinterland of Moscow, and, by extension, of Eu-
rope.
Georgia’s relationship to Europe is also not unambiguous. If we accept that the
border between Europe and Asia follows the watershed of the Ural Mountains,
and then continues along the Greater Caucasus watershed, then Georgia be-
longs simultaneously to Europe and Asia, since 4% of Georgia’s territory is
north of the Caucasus mountains. In recent years, Georgia explicitly aligns it-
self with Europe and the West at the political level. Georgia is one of a few
Christian nations in the region—it accepted Christianity as its official religion
in the early fourth century BCE, and nearly 90% of its population today is
Christian. More significantly for our purposes, however, in his considerations
about Europe Mamardashvili diverges from the usual geopolitical meaning of
Europe and non-Europe. He notes that Europe is a process of becoming a hu-
man being, and as such is something upon which we are just as likely to
stumble in Hong Kong or Kiev as we are in Paris, and, in fact, we might not
find it in Paris at all (see “Problema cheloveka v filisofii,” Neobkhodimost’ sebia
[“The problem of the Human Being in Philosophy,” Indispensability of One-
self], ed. Yu. P. Senokosov (Moscow: Labirint, 1996), 258).—Trans.
EUROPEAN RESPONSIBILITY 59
tion—that is, a Cartesian philosophy—and I have to admit that it

was French culture or philosophy that formed my mindset. To ex-
plain my idea I will use the definition of love that Pascal gave. He
once said that love does not have an age because it is always being
born [naissant].6 I would say the same about European identity: Eu-
rope does not have an age—it is always being born. This is precisely
Europe’s responsibility, the European responsibility toward itself.
In this sense, I felt the absence of something I believed to be funda-
mental, which allowed me to be more aware than a European who
takes Europeanness for granted.
Because of this absence we better understand European soci-
ety and culture—this is why I defined my vantage point as a
privileged one. For me, culture as such is an ability or capacity to
practice complexity and diversity. I underscore the word practice,
for culture is not knowledge. One is cultural when one is capable of
practicing complexity and diversity without necessarily knowing
everything, and without necessarily being able to apply an idea or
an abstract concept to reality.
Starting with the Renaissance, we became irreversibly mod-
ern. I think we have to acknowledge to what one was “reborn”
[“renaissait”] during the Renaissance. The Renaissance of what? In-
sofar as Renaissance is the foundation or the continuum of our
modernity, it is composed of two elements that were “reborn” and
that were becoming irreversible during the that time.
The first element is the Greco-Roman world, specifically a so-
cial or civil idea, or, if you wish, the belief that only a concrete social
form, only a concrete community, can achieve, in life, on earth, an
infinite ideal: a finite form can carry the infinite. This is expressed
by another fundamental Roman idea, which is the rule of law. In
this respect, my country—the term “post-colonial” has been used
here—I would say that my country, where I was born, is a walking
paradox: part of the ex-empire, it is at the same time post-colonial,
6 Mamardashvili has in mind the following statement: “L’amour n’a point d’age;
il est toujours naissant.” It comes from the Discours sur les passions de l’amour
(line 82 of Manuscript G) attributed to Blaise Pascal. See Georges Brunet, Un
prétendu traité de Pascal (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1959).—Trans.
in that it was not touched by the Roman conception of the rule of

law.7
The second element is the Gospel. It is the idea that there is
something inside the human being that could be termed the inner
voice or word, and it is enough to hear this voice, this word, and
follow it, so that God may give help along the way. It is necessary
to walk without external help, following the inner voice, without
counting on guarantees, and with all of that appears a disruptive
and discomfiting element, the element that creates history. Europe
is the form in which one sees clearly that the organ of life, the organ
unique to the human being, is history. The Renaissance, in my view,
is history as organ of life.
This is what was “reborn,” and upon which civil society con-
structed itself. We, whose bodies are less developed, who lack the
complexity and structure of civil society, understand that we need
precisely this. It is only possible to acquire it by historical means,
that is to say we can only begin, commit ourselves to the effort and
sustain this effort, and do it in such a way that things are born in
the space circumscribed by the effort itself.
One may become fatigued or forget the origins of this effort,
and become unable to sustain it, and here a danger lies in wait for
Europe: exhaustion after long historical labor, the incapability to
sustain the effort upon which history depends, to bring it to life at
each moment, to be suspended over abyss without guarantee and
without hierarchies. When I spoke of the Gospel, I wanted to speak
of the distinction unique to European culture; that is, the clear dis-
tinction between the internal principle, or the so-called power of
language, and of the law, the external law. In this respect, European
culture is anti-moralistic and anti-legalistic, because the power of
7 It would be a mistake to assume that Mamardashvili and his Western audi-

ences share a common meaning of “post-colonial.” Consider the idea
elaborated by Miglena Nikolchina that certain terms commonly understood to
be identical in meaning are actually heterotopian homonyms, and, in fact, in-
vert each other, causing major misunderstandings between representatives of
different cultural traditions. See Miglena Nikolchina, Lost Unicorns of the Velvet
Revolutions (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). Even if this is not the
case with “post-colonial,” the reader should allow for the possibility that this
term diverges from the meaning commonly attributed to it in the West.—
Trans.
EUROPEAN RESPONSIBILITY 61
language which comes out of the interior principle is paramount.

This principle itself directs the effort and the human struggle. Eu-
ropean culture is perhaps the first and the only valid answer to this
question: Is change possible in the world? Is it possible that some-
one conditioned by the forces of cause and effect, bound by the
chains of determinism, may be capable of rising up and realizing
an infinite perfection in concrete forms?
A human being is always in a state of self-creation and all of
history can be defined as the history of this effort to become human.
A human does not exist, but becomes. You, the people of the West,
and we, the people of the East, inhabit the same historical moment,
and let us not confuse history with chronology. Today something
is happening, something of the same nature as what the First and
Second World Wars revealed; we stand before the same dangers
and the same responsibility. We are at the point where catastrophes
were born, at the foundations, in the hidden strata of various Euro-
pean cultures.
How would I define this responsibility, if I had to do it in an-
other manner? It’s been said before: the modern barbarity, the
contemporary barbarity poses the great danger. A person without
language is a barbarian. That at least was how the Greeks defined
a barbarian: someone without language. Obviously, the Persians
and others around the Greeks spoke a language, but by language,
the Greeks understood an articulated space of presence of all that
one may feel, want, and think. This emphatic back and forth, this
snowballing of ideas in the public agora8: this is what language is.
How can we become aware of the fact that the human being alone
8 In the French, Mamardashvili uses the phrase “le roulement de ces

‘gueulements’” which suggests haranguing or hectoring. In similar contexts in
Russian he uses the term “обкатывание.” The word means “making round or
smooth by rolling.” In his Vilnius Lectures on Social Philosophy Mamardashvili
uses the image of rolling a snowball to indicate how ideas or opinions are de-
veloped in conversations on the agora: a small, miserable snowball of thought
that would otherwise melt in the course of being rolled around by interlocutors
in an open public space expands into a sizable ball of snow, and, occasionally,
into a beautiful snowman. See Mamardashvili’s Vil’niusskie lektsii po sotsial’noi
filosofii [Vilnius Lectures on Social Philosophy], Saint Petersburg: Azbuka,
2012, 124-125. The translators are grateful to Alena Mamardashvili for this ref-
erence to Vilnius Lectures.—Trans.
is naked before the world, not even human until the surrounding
space is full of language in the living public square? These articula-
tions mediate the nearly-powerless individual’s effort before the
complexity of the human, and permit those speaking to formulate
thoughts of their own, and to think what they are thinking.
The fundamental passion of human beings is to fulfill them-
selves, to midwife that which is in the state of being born. You know
quite well: this is very difficult. Most often, history is a graveyard
for the stillborn, haunted by vague longings: of liberty, of thought,
of love, of honor, of dignity that remain in the limbo of souls which
have never been born. This experience of non-birth of something
which is myself, I have tested on myself, I have personal experience
of it, and thanks to it, I have understood that the passion of humans
is to be fulfilled. One doesn’t accomplish this except in the realm of
language, in an articulated space, and this is our task. We arrive
quite late to this task, but I will call upon Paul Valery who said that
“all that is human is not inside the human.” That is exactly my
point: the greatest part of the human being is outside of him- or
herself in the space of which I have spoken and which I have de-
fined as “the space of language,” and I would add that to become
human is a very, very long effort. It requires courage and patience.
It requires one to pause, suspending the European task on the crest
of this effort, and while waiting for the wave to break, we ourselves
might emerge. I repeat: becoming human is a very long effort.
Topology of a Path: Lectures on Proust
Lecture 11
Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time will be our material, and the
theme will be time and life. Why such a theme? One simple reason:
life is effort in time. (By the way, this is exactly how Proust defined
it; a beautiful definition of life.2 When I encountered it I shouted out
loud.) One must make an effort to stay alive—such is time. At the
level of our intuition, we know that not everything is alive that
seems to be alive. Much of what we experience, much of what we
think and do, is dead in a simple primary sense (for now, I will not
introduce more complex meanings): something is dead because it
is an imitation of something else; because it’s not your thought but
an alien thought; because it’s not your own, true feeling but stereo-
typical, conventional, presumed, and not the one you experience
yourself. In life, we distinguish with great difficulty between what
we experience ourselves and what is “experienced”—what our
neighbors, relatives, or acquaintances experience—what we repro-
duce only at the level of words. In this container of words our true,
personal experience is absent.
I would like to emphasize that dead things do not exist in an-
other world, or after we die. What is dead participates in our life
and is part of it. Philosophers—Heraclitus, for example—always
knew that life is death (ordinarily this is called dialectics, but it’s a
stupid word and it hinders understanding the heart of the matter).3
Philosophers explain: life at every moment is entangled with death;
death doesn’t begin after life, it participates in life itself. In our inner
1 Delivered on March 6, 1984 at the Tbilisi State University. Psikhologicheskaia

topologiia puti (M. Prust. “V poiskakh utrachennogo vremeni) [The Psychological
Topology of a Path (M. Proust, In Search of Lost Time)]. Moscow: Merab Mamar-
dashvili Foundation, 2014, 13-34.—Trans.
2 III (TR), 1046-47. All references to Proust’s novel maintain Mamardashvili’s ci-
tations of A la recherche du temps perdu, édition Gallimard, Pléiade, 1954, en 3
vol. and Jean Santeuil, Gallimard, Pléiade, 1971.—Trans.
3 See Heraclitus’ “Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living the others’
death, dead in the others’ life” (DK 62) and “The same . . . : living and dead,
and the waking and the sleeping, and young and old. For these transposed are
those, and those transposed again are these” (DK 88). Translated by Charles
Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999, 71.—Trans.
65
life, there is always dead waste, or dead products of life itself, and
frequently this dead waste occupies all the space, not leaving room
for living feeling, living thought, for true life.
By the way, the phrase “true life” is one of the most frequently
encountered in Proust’s text;4 on virtually every page we will find
this expression: “my true life.” The intensity of this expression, its
indispensability, tells us that it is very difficult to differentiate what
is alive from what is dead. The idea is not only that what is dead is
a part of our life, but also that it is difficult to differentiate between
the dead and the living. For our every living state there is a double,
a dead double. We know from our own experience how difficult it
is to distinguish something that a human being says, without expe-
riencing it, from the exact same thing that is alive. Why is it
difficult? Because the words are the same. We have, probably, often
found ourselves in a situation when because of a certain constella-
tion of circumstances we didn’t utter a word which was on the tip
of our tongue because at the very moment when we wanted to utter
it we felt that what we say will look like a lie. We remained silent
also because what has been said doesn’t depend on us anymore, it
got caught in a mechanism and coincides with falsehood (even
though it could be true).
Dante has a beautiful line in the Divine Comedy… By the way,
it wouldn’t hurt you to read Dante at the same time as Proust be-
cause just as Proust’s text is an inner journey or the journey of the
soul, so too the Divine Comedy is one of the first great documents of
the inner journey of the soul. Many of Dante’s symbols, words, and
turns of phrase coincide with Proust’s expressions, although when
writing his novel Proust did not at all intend to quote Dante. So
when the hero of this journey, Dante himself, led by Virgil, encoun-
tered the monster of falsehood Geryon, who has the head of a
human and the body of a snake hidden in mist (a human but in
reality a snake) he saw the truth (these are symbols; he did not of
course see the snake, but the embodiment of human deception) but
considered it impossible to say it: “We have to keep with closed lips
4 “La vraie vie.” See I (J.F.), 718, III (T.R.), 881, 885, 896.
LECTURE 1 67
truth that looks like falsehood.”5 This is one of our most frequent
psychological situations and I gave this example to attune6 us to the
idea that it is very difficult to distinguish living things from dead
things or lies from truth because the words and the designations
are the same. Most importantly, the inner difference or distinction
between falsehood and truth, while not existing externally, in
words and objects (the objects of falsehood and truth are alike, in-
distinguishable) entirely belongs to a certain peculiar inner act
which everyone performs at their own risk.7 We could call this act
the keen feeling of consciousness. Consciousness—something that
is not a thing (it is about things and is not itself a thing)—is the inner
difference that is never represented externally. As I said, falsehood
and truth use the same words, the exact same words.
It is an inner act; I create this difference. It’s not given in things,
it doesn’t exist independently from me: the one who lies says the
same words as the one who speaks the truth, which means that
truth is not contained in words and in this sense cannot be written
down. The objects of falsehood and truth are the same. This exter-
nally elusive difference is the inner act. The world does not perform
this act (it cannot be fixed; one cannot say, “this has already been
accomplished and exists” in the way one can remember some for-
mula by having assigned it a symbol and then use only the symbol,
as mathematicians do it, without reconstructing all of its content;
one cannot do it, but every time must perform the act), so I urge
you to perform this inner act in relation to Proust’s text.
I will quote a line. It must be perceived in light of one im-
portant circumstance: because Proust is a great artist his text is
immediately beautiful; it consists of carefully selected and con-
nected words. The beauty of his style is immediate and so accessible
5 “Sempre a quel ver c’ha faccia de menzogna/de l’uom chiuder le labbra fin
ch’el puote/pero che sanz a colpa fa vergogna.” Inferno XVI, 124-126.—Trans.
6 The Russian word настроить refers to tuning an instrument, but is also used
metaphorically (or not, depending on how one conceives of the soul; for Py-
thagoras, for instance, the soul must be attuned or tuned in with the universe,
since everything is based on or made out of numbers) to mean something like
“getting on the same wavelength.” The translators will alternate between “at-
tune” and “harmonize” when rendering this word and its variants.—Trans.
7 See III (T.R.), 1047.
that precisely because of this we sometimes don’t think through

what is being said (a phrase is beautiful; it gave us pleasure). In re-
ality, almost all of the words have multiple meanings; they have
depth, they shimmer. Sometimes Proust compared good writing
with velvet because the surface of this fabric is pleasant to touch
and at the same time velvet gives a sensation of depth.8 This depth
sometimes eludes us because when we stroke velvet it is so lovely.
Proust describes the narrator’s great aunts on his grandmother’s
side. (They remind me of a widespread type of woman in Georgia,
most frequently of aristocratic origin—they belong to a rural, prac-
tically bankrupt, aristocracy—they constituted the backbone of the
nation and suffered the most during the years of the revolution.
They transmitted basic knowledge, enlightenment, and certain
moral and ethical norms and traditions. Imagine a rural Georgian
school teacher.)9 Proust writes that the narrator’s great aunts
thought that one must always confront children with works of art
that are worthy of admiration. It seemed to them that aesthetic
qualities are like material objects: that “beautiful,” “noble,” “sub-
lime” or “honest” is a material quality of an object—a quality that
exists as material objects exist. One who perceives this quality can-
not not see it in the same way as you now cannot not see me because
I am a material object in front of you.10 If we surround a child with
such objects, including good books, we are educating them. Proust
writes: “So they considered that it is impossible not to see an aes-
thetic quality,”—you can substitute “aesthetic” with a moral or
intellectual quality—“they thought so, not understanding that this
is impossible to do,”—or to see—“without letting slowly ripen in
your own heart an equivalent of this quality,”—that is, without per-
forming what I called earlier an “inner act.”11 It might seem that I
8 See III (T.R.), 898.

9 The “rural schoolteacher” is a literary phenomenon in Russian literature of the
19th and early 20th century. See Introduction.—Trans.
10 Mamardashvili delivered these lectures orally, in front of an auditorium. See
Introduction.—Trans.
11 Compare I (Sw.), 146: “C’est sans doute qu’elles se figuraient les mérites es-
thétiques comme des objects matériels qu’un oeil ouvert ne peut faire
autrement que de percevoir, sans avoir besoin d’en murir lentement des equiv-
alents dans son propre coeur.”
LECTURE 1 69
am dealing with a sweet, trifling phrase, but it has a certain struc-

ture, like velvet has a depth.
Some political figures considered a human being an object to
be properly educated,12 and thought that people could be cultivated
if surrounded by the greatest and noblest sentiments of the human
race carved in stone, depicted on the walls of houses in the form of
aphorisms, so that wherever a human being looks, they would en-
counter a lofty and noble saying, and be formed by it. Note that for
Proust a human being is not an object to be formed, but a subject of
development fated to perform inner acts at his or her own risk, so
that the equivalent of what, it seems, already exists externally as
objects or human achievements would ripen in his soul. The trouble
is that we frequently approach books in the former way. For Proust
a book—like a meaning with which we need to engage—doesn’t
exist, but can only appear depending on our inner acts. For Proust,
a book was a spiritual instrument by means of which one might
peer into one’s soul and allow an equivalent to mature. One cannot
transpose great thoughts or states from a book into another human
being.
The book was part of life for Proust. In what sense? Not in the
sense of reading for leisure, but in the sense that something funda-
mental happens with us, that the act of reading is interwoven into
the totality of our acts and manifestations of our life: what hap-
pened to us, what we experienced, what we saw, what we were told
and what we have read—a constellation that would simmer and
crystalize into an understandable form. What I said above is some-
thing like a tuning, a striking of a tuning-fork to harmonize
ourselves with that relationship which Proust himself had with
books (the hero of the novel, too; the text describes the relationship
of a child with books). We must approach Proust’s text in the same
way. He allows us to do this. Proust said that books, after all, are
not such solemn things; they’re not that different from a dress that
12 The Russian word воспитание is broader than the English “education,” be-
cause it also includes the idea of cultivating moral qualities. Later in the
paragraph, we use synonyms—cultivated, formed—but in Russian it is all the
same word.—Trans.
one can cut out in this or that way, adjusting it to one’s figure.13
That is why one must not stand at attention in front of books. Such
is Proust’s thinking, and the thought you and I hold in common.
I already used the word life, so I want to latch on to it. How
would I express the fundamental situation of Proust and his book?
It is a novel of desires and motifs, but not in the psychological sense
where by “motive” we mean the psychological reason for an action.
Proust—and I—use the word “motif” in the musical sense: a certain
stable note traverses a significantly large space of a musical work,14;
a life also has a motif, a certain note that pierces a great space and
time. This motif is most frequently connected to desire in a very
simple sense: if we think about it, in reality we are nothing but de-
siring beings. By the way, one of the greatest desires is the desire to
live. But to live in what sense? To feel ourselves alive! Our desires
are the phenomena that allow us to feel alive. This is the greatest
value: life does not have value outside of itself, but is itself valuable.
Not in the sense that we need to preserve our life as a physical fact
(we know that, physically, somebody died and somebody is alive).
No, desires are manifestations, or qualities, in which we feel alive;
that is why we strive to realize them. Consequently, our main desire
is to live. But, it turns out, it is not easy to live, and not only because
of the reasons I mentioned—because life is interwoven with death.
There are complicated things behind our actions, behind the many
situations that demand from us one thing only: that we perform an
inner act.
I will explain. Take the most typical situation that requires
such an inner act. Decipher this situation along with me, in relation
to the words “desire,” or “to feel oneself alive.” For now, I will call
it the situation of one’s place—where am I? This is the situation of
me knowing—or not—my real status. Figuratively speaking, what
world am I in? Where am I in relation to something? What is really
happening with me? What really happens can differ from what is
happening before my very eyes. What do I really feel? Quite fre-
quently it seems to me that I love, but in reality I hate. We know
13 See III (T.R.), 911, 1033.

14 See I (Sw.), 390-391, II (C.G.), 143, J.S., 559.
LECTURE 1 71
this not only from everyday life, but also from rudimentary psy-
chology. It seems to me that I love Albertine, but in reality I want to
listen to music. For some reason, Albertine became for me the me-
dium for this desire; that is, through some unknown mechanism,
my yearning for music was transferred to my yearning for Alber-
tine. Consciously I strive for Albertine, but in reality I want to listen
to good music. Or I am rushing to a date with a woman, certain that
I want to see her, but really I am obeying some other feeling, and
this fact is frequently revealed during the rendezvous, because
sometimes the boredom that seizes me during the rendezvous and
the desire for it to end as soon as possible is directly proportional
to my impatience to arrive at this meeting. This boredom is incom-
prehensible because having arrived at the rendezvous I discover a
human being who possesses all the qualities (for they have not
changed) that made me rush to this meeting. Yet a turmoil, a mel-
ancholy comes over me—what the Germans call Unbehagen. I can
only think, let’s get it over with as soon as possible, and after this
passionately awaited meeting, I don’t even remember, as Proust
says, the features of the beloved woman.15 I considered these fea-
tures the object or the cause of love, but this is not so, because I don’t
remember them afterward. And what I don’t remember cannot be
the cause of a passionate state.
I brought this up only to explain that when I wonder what I
really feel, this question has no self-evident answer. What I will say
now in relation to Faulkner, and to Proust affected the radically al-
tered, or, if you like, revolutionary form of the novel, making it
unlike the classical one. Evidently the kind of test or experience that
Faulkner and Proust wanted to undergo could not fit in the classical
form of the novel. It would break it. One had to invent a new, dif-
ferent form. Both Proust and Faulkner lack a plot and a named hero,
and have a hero whose last name we don’t even know, whose char-
acteristic features are not even given; all temporal layers are mixed,
the narrative freely jumps from one time to another outside of any
sequence to which we are used in a classical novel. No society is
depicted, nor is any social movement; no objective picture is de-
15 See I (J.F.), 490.

picted externally. Everything is constructed altogether differently.

Why?
Let’s return to Faulkner, who I wanted to cite. He said that the
greatest tragedy of a human being is when he does not know his
real status.16 Where is he? What is happening? More exactly, when
and how did what is happening now lock together?17 For instance,
how and when did it become almost inevitable that having arrived
at the passionately awaited meeting, I can only think of it ending as
soon as possible? What is happening? All of these situations possess
one quality: they need to be disentangled and the form of a novel
must allow the reader to take part in untangling these experiences.
I will point out one very important thought: literature or a text is
not a description of life, it is not simply an external ornament to life,
not something that we do at our leisure—write or read—but a part
of how our life works out, or not, because experience must be un-
tangled, and one needs to have the means, or instruments, for this.
For Proust—and in general, I will argue—a text, or the process
of creating a certain imaginary structure, is the only means of un-
tangling experience. Through a text we begin to understand
something in our life, and it develops a certain contour, depending
on how the text participates in it. Consider a well-known fact:
Proust wrote his novel while racing with death—he was very sick
with asthma, one of the most psychologically complex illnesses. It
induces physical suffering which is closer than other kinds of suf-
fering to the sensation of death because the symptoms, the process
of the illness, feel like dying: you suffocate, and the death is not
somewhere far away, but right here. This was Proust’s predica-
ment. (Excuse me that I am proceeding by association, but it’s better
than to speak too smoothly and sequentially.)18
16 See Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957-
1958, edited by Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, Charlottesville: Uni-
versity of Virginia Press, 1995, 118.—Trans.
17 The Russian verb сцепиться frequently used by Mamardashvili may refer to
two things interlocking in a way the train car is attached to another; something
securely linking with something else. In the following sentence this word is
translated as “became almost inevitable.”—Trans.
18 For a discussion of Mamardashvili’s philosophical style see the introduction.—
Trans.
LECTURE 1 73
If a text is a part of life, then it is part of life not in the sense

that it is written by the same person who also lives, goes to work,
has a wife and children. Rather, to untangle a situation it must be
represented in a special space, in the space of a text. If one manages
to construct this text, the situation itself changes. Nabokov did ex-
actly that. Russian literature, because of its provincial-patriarchal
backwardness in relation to world literature, generally does not do
this, but Nabokov tried. For instance, he describes a protagonist
who, after finding himself in a certain situation, constructs a text in
order to look into himself and through it establishes a truth about
his life: his closest friend is his wife’s lover. And obviously if life
changes because of a text, then the text is infinite. One cannot write
it to the end, by definition. There can be no complete, perfect novel.
In the initial stages of writing the novel, Proust had the begin-
ning and end already finished. He compared the structure of his
novel with a cathedral, and in a cathedral one part always resonates
with another.19 We always look at a cathedral successively; we can-
not see it whole. We look at one part, at an image, but it doesn’t
exist separately, although we look at it separately; it resounds with
the images in another part, the one that we will see in a little while.
For now, let’s call this resonance by a term the Symbolists used:
correspondence.20 Here I’m introducing symbolic correspondences,
which is probably a familiar subject. Let’s say a scene on page fifty
of a novel has resonance of meaning and cannot be definitively un-
derstood without what Proust writes on page 3000, nearly at the
end of the novel, which is already written.
The end and the beginning produce within the novel both the
text and the events of Proust’s life, including the famous book of
love for Albertine. Two parts of the novel foreground this love, The
Prisoner and The Fugitive. Proust cuts the words into his flesh. He
had the beginning and the end of the novel and reshaped his own,
actual love—the love for his secretary Alfred Agostinelli, who died
just like Albertine in the novel.21 I want to make a remark so that I
don’t have to return to it: Proust did not have a conventional sexual
19 III (T.R.), 1033, 1040, 1044-45; S.B., 89.

20 Mamardashvili uses the French term, correspondance.—Trans.
21 III (Fug.), 641-642.
temperament; he was homosexual. He was one of the few who had

the courage to passionately search for the general and not just ho-
mosexual nature of love; search through his own particularity. Love
as such was a problem for him, that is, conventional sexual love,
and he was able to transpose, sort through, and understand it be-
cause, generally, the same laws function there, and sometimes one
can better see love’s general laws in homosexual love (I will return
to this last idea, but I will not talk about Proust's unconventionality,
the analysis of which is altogether uninteresting and has absolutely
no significance).
In his novel, Proust accomplished the entire maddening
course of his feeling with his pen and came to grips with it. Later,
we will see Proust overcoming the main thing in love that snatches
the lover from a human connection: the mania of possessiveness.
He understood that we are terrifying in our love if we want to pos-
sess, and was freeing himself from it by means of the text. A text,
then, participates in real life.
Returning to what I said, the most typical situation is not
knowing oneself and one’s actual status. The main task is to recog-
nize this position. Proust’s novel is liberally peppered with
situations of this kind, and with words that describe them. This was
his mania. He saw the world under the sign of this intensity. All of
us have manias—without a mania you wouldn’t see what exists
without it, by itself. Proust’s text reveals one fundamental law of
our life: unfortunately, we can almost never become sufficiently ag-
itated to see what is really the case; to see the face of reality. For
example, one of the most important experiences for Proust is the
consciousness that we kill those whom we love with our love, be-
cause we are selfish, and want to possess.
There are always stock phrases that hinder us from living
through something intensely. We tell ourselves: it’s not at all like
this, this is not like what happened in the past, this time it is differ-
ent, it will pass, it will work out. Hope prevents us from living
intensely in the present moment, transporting us into the next one.
We postpone until tomorrow. Hope hinders us from perceiving in-
tensely that which is. That is why art contains from its beginnings
something called reverent awe of the real (lately, unfortunately, po-
LECTURE 1 75
ets lost the ability to conjure sacred awe before the real) when the
real appears only through a certain shock. A poet must be suffi-
ciently excited or shaken to see reality, the reality of the image of
the mother in Proust’s novel, for instance. In reality we kill our
mothers, but precisely because we can never get sufficiently agi-
tated, we do not see that we’re deadly for our own mothers.
Sometimes poets paint frightful figures—or we see them in our
dreams—built so well that they break through our insensibility,
and we see reality. The poet’s task is not to agitate us, but to make
us see what is real: our actual state or what we are actually doing—
killing our mothers, for instance.22
“What a charming law of nature,” says Proust, or more ex-
actly, what a charming natural law (by the way, the topic of laws is
very important for him; “law” is Proust’s term for what actually is)
“according to which we always live in perfect ignorance of what we
love.”23 This image repeats persistently in the novel: the lover finds
himself on one side of a glass partition, as in an aquarium. He is
separated from the world by its wall, and has his own world, or
sees the things in the aquarium with his own eyes, and these things
are infinite for him (we see him inside the aquarium, but he does
not see us). There is such a law: the field of our vision is infinite,
and in this field we see everything that our eye sees. But imagine
the wall of an aquarium, in which its water is reflected endlessly. A
fish does not see the walls, it sees only water. If it were to see the
wall, it would also see that it is in an aquarium, but it does not, and
for it there is no other world (I am transposing, connecting Proust’s
images, which appear in different parts of the novel.) But reality
bursts into the aquarium, or into the world of the fish, or the world
of the one who is in love (who is on this side of the glass partition
and remains ignorant about what he loves) like a human hand that
appears in an actual aquarium and takes a fish from the water,
22 At this point the original text includes a sentence that is rendered unintelligible
by a break in the audio recording: “In Proust’s life, there is the following epi-
sode: a person he knew through correspondence, a subtle and sensitive person
with a noble soul….”—Trans.
23 II (C.G.), 282: “car c’est une charmante loi de nature qui se manifeste au sein
de sociétés les plus complexes, qu’on vive dans l’ignorance parfaite de ce qu’on
aime.”
which seemed to it the be all and end all. Water was everywhere,
and suddenly a hand appeared and pulled it from the aquarium.
Or we see the fish moving around and find it funny, just as it is
funny to observe (and Proust tries to observe from that perspective)
the one who is in love or the lover (one can love not only a woman
but also an occupation).
The question of an impervious glass partition interests Proust:
what is on the other side of the glass does not penetrate to this side,
and vice versa, and only certain events, called reality, can move
from one world into another. For instance, a very vivid character,
Baron Charlus, lived like a fish that believes that the water in which
it swims extends to the other side of the glass. The water is reflected
in the glass and extends to infinity, while nearby in the shadows a
pisciculturist observes its movement. Madame Verdurin, the pa-
tron of the salon which he frequented, was such a pisciculturist for
Charlus.24 This salon was for Charlus an extension of his aristocratic
world. It seemed to him altogether natural that all of the salon’s
visitors know that he represents one of the most ancient aristocratic
names of France. But at Madame Verdurin’s they saw him alto-
gether differently, and Proust writes that he would have been just
as astonished to find out how he appears in the eyes of others, as
we are astonished when for some haphazard reason we leave by
the back stairs and see the words our servants wrote about us on
the wall. Servants leave such irreverent graffiti on the back stairs,
where we never go; we see the servants in our own world,25 but our
reflection in their eyes shows up on the back stairs. It is as dreadful
and incomprehensible (if we see it) as the human hand that pulls
the fish from the water.
Society is a collection of individuals and the laws of individu-
als are also, but on a different scale, social laws—this is one of
Proust’s important sociological, or political thoughts: “…the peo-
ples insofar as they are merely collections of individuals give us
examples on a greater scale but identical to those given by individ-
24 II (S.G.), 1049.
25 II (S.G.), 1048-1049.
LECTURE 1 77
uals of this deep disconcerting blindness.”26 Let’s linger on the

words “obstinate and disconcerting blindness.”
I tried to read Proust according to the rules I proposed:
through Proust I was reading in my own experience and in my soul,
and, to tell the truth, one of my experiences (because of which, per-
haps, I chose philosophy) was of this completely incomprehensible
and baffling blindness of people in the face of what is. I frequently
saw that here is two, and there is two, but a human being almost
never adds it up: “two plus two equals four.” This astonishing phe-
nomenon of blindness is really bewildering. It was a foundational
experience for Proust, and is reflected in the novel. The novel and
its form are the instrument with which the phenomenon of blind-
ness is untangled. The novel is written in such a way as to cope with
the ontological situation, as a philosopher would say (please excuse
me for the jargon—I avoid any special philosophical terms which
exist for everything I say—but I will use one.) The ontological situ-
ation of the human being is one of stubborn blindness. Certain
nations and people stand face to face with something and don’t see
it (nations, as I said, are collections of individuals). It’s enough to
take a closer look at some episodes of Russia’s27 history to see that
these are situations when no one learns from experience, when
something happens to us but no one learns, and this is repeated in-
finitely.28
26 “...les peuples, en tant qu’ils ne sont que des collections d’individus, peuvent
offrir des examples plus vastes, mais identiques en chacune de leurs parties,
de cette cécité profonde, obstinée et déconcertante.” II (S.G.), 1049
27 Here Mamardashvili uses the word российский, which suggests that he has in
mind the Russian state or Russian imperial history that exerted its influence on
the peoples it colonized. See the introduction to this volume for a discussion
of the difference between русский and российский.—Trans.
28 Mamardashvili is referring to both the history of Imperial Russia, and Soviet
history. As he mentions in later texts, the Soviet or formerly Soviet population
has not learned from the purges, the Gulags, the horrors of 1937, or the war in
Afghanistan. These lectures were given in 1984-1985, during the years when
Yuri Andropov (1982-1984), and after him Konstantin Chernenko (1984-1985)
were the General Secretary of the Communist Party. It would take the Cherno-
byl catastrophe (1986) and the next General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, to
initiate the policy of open speech—glasnost. This is why here and at the end of
the next paragraph Mamardashvili is speaking obliquely, and does not pro-
vide specific examples.—Trans.
To better understand a text and the experience of infinite rep-

etition, we need images. Proust frequently uses an image of hell.29
We use the word “hell” as an everyday word or as a word borrowed
from religion, but forget its original symbolism. “Hell” symbolizes
something that we know in life and that is the most terrifying thing:
eternal death, or death that is happening all the time. We cannot
manage to die. Imagine that we are infinitely chewing something
and cannot swallow it. This is endless death. Everything is malev-
olently repeated: again and again in our life or in history the same
mistake is made. We do something which we regret, but this re-
morse doesn’t prevent us from doing it again. Why? Because there
is no structure in which, once and for all, we would learn from what
we regret having done. And if we didn’t understand, if we did not
learn from the experience, it will repeat. For instance, in Russia’s
history the genius of this nauseating repetition roamed at will. Try
in your minds to find examples of this. You will find them easily.
Coming back to the situation of blindness: it has laws just as
enlightenment does. I will express this idea, having said “the laws
of blindness and enlightenment,” in the following image. The ac-
tual human experience that occupies Proust, because of which he
turned to literature, became a novelist, is the following question (try
to ask it yourself): Why do we see one thing, and not another thing?
Why do we know one thing and not know the other? Moreover, this
“other thing” exists; one is encountering an already-existing truth.
There are certain laws by virtue of which a human being is blind
and doesn’t see. I will call this for now the situation of encounters,
of touching, or not.
I speak in reference to a book that you either have not read or
cannot read because it is impossible to procure.30 And now I want
29 II (S.G.), 1121-1127. III (Fug.), 518.

30 There was a structural shortage—дефицит—of books in the Soviet Union.
Even if a particular book was not banned it was impossible to достать, or pro-
cure it. Just like with caviar, oranges, or much more mundane articles like
sausage or butter, it took great effort, and sometimes involved waiting for
hours in line to buy a book; one had to use one’s “connections” to “acquire”
books, or bring them from rare trips abroad to the Soviet satellite states—bring-
ing, for example, a volume of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems (published in the
Soviet Union) from a trip to Bulgaria. This was such a pervasive phenomenon
that special vocabulary was developed around it, including the words дефи-
LECTURE 1 79
to explain this unread book to you by referencing another unread

book, one that is particularly unavailable because, let’s say, it is
banned, even though in the domain of culture, for human dignity,
there are no forbidden books. Everything that is created by a human
being belongs to us according to a right which no one can take
away. I have in mind Pasternak’s novel Dr. Zhivago, which is con-
structed as a revelatory novel,31 less successfully than Proust’s
novel, but also a novel of untanglings. In it, there are magical en-
counters: somewhere, at some whistle stop, people who are made
for each other meet without recognizing each other, they walk past
each other. The encounter flashes by like a sign at a railroad station.
The train rattles along thousands of kilometers and dozens of years,
and somewhere this encounter exchanges signals with their other
encounter, when they recognize each other, open up to each other.
This is the situation of intersecting or not intersecting tracks, or a
game of glances exchanged in a mirror that either did or did not
converge, that are separated.
To explain what I mean I will read you a passage. This is one
of the pivotal scenes of Proust’s novel, the internal spiritual axis of
its persistent theme, onto which are threaded many other episodes.
To facilitate comprehension I will express the situation I dis-
cussed—and the laws regulating it—somewhat differently, in a
more ordinary way. Frequently it happens in life that the one who
needs to know cannot know, and the one who has no use for
knowledge, knows. Let’s imagine there is something that is a part
of my life and that I should know, but just this knowledge is not
given to me, and is given to the one who has absolutely no use for
it.
For instance, glances meet in Proust’s novel… (Imagine that
we’re all looking into the sky and at a distant point where our vi-
sions meet certain figures, faces, events, knowledge appear—or not.
All of these are figures or images and sometimes instead of images,
shadows.) Two characters, Marcel—that is, the narrator—and the
цит (shortage), достать (procure), and по блату (блат means a crime, or a

theft and also “the language of thieves,” and getting something по блату
meant getting it through connections, often shady).—Trans.
31 Mamardashvili calls it роман-прояснение: novel of becoming clear.—Trans.
Marquis de St. Loup, a friend of Marcel’s youth, and an attractive

figure as an embodiment of aristocracy… (It’s not accidental that
aristocracy attracted both Proust and the narrator of the novel. Not
because of snobbery, but as a symbol and a real, material embodi-
ment of everything that is completed, everything that became. As
such a perfected embodiment of what became, an aristocrat is a rep-
resentative of those who did something in history and by their valor
established a name. This name can become empty, of course, but
this too must be puzzled out. I remember that in my youth I tried
to solve the riddles of the legendary Georgian names. Many of them
are empty, but puzzling out their emptiness or non-emptiness is
also significant.) So, St. Loup and Marcel: Marcel comes to know
something about St. Loup’s beloved; he knows exactly what St.
Loup needs to know, and what is inconsequential to Marcel. By
chance he met St. Loup’s beloved at a house of ill repute where he
could have had this woman (before St. Loup fell in love with her)
for twenty francs. Consequently, Marcel knows her for what she is.
Her name is Rachel. By the way, her nickname in the novel… Mel-
odies exist like waves. There are years when a tune is popular, it’s
played all the time on the radio or elsewhere, and this wave can
envelop an entire decade, then another decade is engulfed by some
new tune. I remember in my time, fortunately or not, there were no
transistor receivers, no tape recorders, but there was a black plate
of a loudspeaker, from which frequently resounded an aria from
Halevy’s opera La Juive: “Rachel you are given to me by divine
providence…” and in French “Rachel quand du Seigneur…”. The
nickname of this girl who offered herself in this house was “Rachel
given by divine providence.” It was touching to see it in Proust’s
novel.32
Marcel heard a great deal from his friend Robert de St. Loup
about some altogether divine woman, who was simply a queen in-
sofar as her intellectual, moral, and physical qualities were
concerned. St. Loup meant to acquaint Marcel with this queen, and
finally they meet next to a front garden. Suddenly Marcel sees the
32 Mamardashvili was likely touched because this musical tune connected France
and the Soviet Union; Proust’s epoch and his.—Trans.
LECTURE 1 81
very “Rachel given by divine providence” and she is also St. Loup’s
beloved, around whom his world revolves, a tsarina in her moral,
physical, and intellectual qualities. The narrator looks at Rachel, at
her face, and he notes, “Doubtlessly this was the same thin and nar-
row face that both of us saw, Robert and I. But we came to it,” to
this face; our thought is like a path and our vision, too—a path in
this sky where visions converge, “from opposite directions,” our
soul has paths that we follow, “that will never converse,” that will
never communicate.33 We have one more image: first, paths; sec-
ond, paths that do not cross. We will never see one and the same
face because we come from different sides. These are not physically
different sides: physically, as Proust says, it’s the same thin and nar-
row face. Materially it is one, but the paths are different, the paths
of our souls are frequently determined by chance encounter. By
chance, Proust34 was given knowledge of which he had no need:
this woman does not exist in his life, she is simply a woman who
can be replaced by any other woman; he crossed her path in the
house of ill repute. But St. Loup first saw Rachel on the theater
stage. He was sitting close to the stage and upon Rachel’s face fell a
reflection of all the elevated dreams of noble feelings expressed by
art (everything that art projects onto the stage). In this glow of the
footlights, a real woman appeared before him. By chance, the start-
ing point for St. Loup—the starting point of his path—was
different. St. Loup was looking at a point onto which were projected
not the real qualities of this woman, but the qualities of art or the
qualities of our elevated aspirations: all that is sublime, and beauti-
ful.
At another place in the novel (separated by several hundred
pages from the one I mentioned—here are, once again, the fleeting
glimpses exchanged at whistle stops separated by many kilometers
of space and time) St. Loup saw Rachel in the theater. She appeared
33 “Sans doute c’était le même mince et étroit visage que nous voyions Robert et
moi. Mais nous étions arrivés à lui par deux routes opposées qui ne communi-
queraient jamais, et nous n’en verrions jamais le même face.” II (C.G.), 159
34 Throughout the lectures Mamardashvili occasionally says “Proust” instead of
“the narrator,” or “Marcel.” Mamardashvili, however, does not conflate the au-
thor and the narrator of the novel, as is clear, for instance, from Lecture 11.—
Trans.
before him as a spot onto which he projected lofty states suggested

to us by art, and they were reflected in St. Loup as an image of a
beautiful woman. Backstage, in the intermission, he was introduced
to Rachel and saw an altogether expressionless and blurry face (be-
cause it was backstage, not on stage), but decided to postpone
clarifying the question about what Rachel truly was: a blank face
with blurred features, or the beautiful apparition he saw during the
play.35 I purposefully mentioned this passage and, like Proust, used
the words “postpone for the clarification of what Rachel truly is.”
In the word “postpone” is all of Proust’s philosophy. Here is the
situation of blindness: we should know but we do not; we encoun-
ter something that belongs to us, but we don’t see.
I will remind you of another universal image to get us in tune
with this situation. Oedipus the King is an ancient embodiment of the
situation of ignorance and blindness. Oedipus sleeps with a woman
who is in reality his mother, and accidentally kills a traveler who is
not just a traveler but his father. These are parts of his life, not some
indifferent things, his father and his mother. He touches them and
doesn’t see them. In his mother he sees a woman, a wife, and in his
father a traveler who offended him. In reality, every page of
Proust’s novel is about this situation. Blindness does not depend on
our abilities. Here the word “blindness” is not used in relation to
whether we’re smart or stupid. The Greeks didn’t discuss the prob-
lem: King Oedipus, stupid or smart? It is not because of his folly
that he doesn’t see the mother in his wife. All these problems are
outside of the problem of our cleverness—this is what we have to
understand. This has nothing to do with our cleverness, intelli-
gence, or stupidity, but has to do with work. St. Loup postponed
clarification of the question. The second thing connected to the
word “postpone” is the word “work.”
The world of Proust, or the world of blindness, is the world in
which, if we have a fleeting impression—like when St. Loup sud-
35 II (C.G.), 175: “Aussi, le désir de la comédienne aux traits fins qui n’étaient
même pas présents au souvenir de Robert, eut pour résultat que, sautant sur
l’ancien camarade qui était là par hasard, il se fit présenter à la personne sans
traits et aux taches de rousseur, puisque c’était la même, et en se disant que
plus tard on aviserait de savoir laquelle des deux l’actrice était en réalité.”
LECTURE 1 83
denly saw the blurry and expressionless face—we must not post-
pone anything. The instant of the impression exhorts us, “Work! Do
not postpone!” I already said that we postpone, hoping that tomor-
row everything will be different. Let’s wait, things will work out.
We also postpone because of laziness. Most frequently laziness too
is the fear of seeing reality. That is, the cause of laziness is not psy-
chological: although laziness and hope are psychological
mechanisms, they have structures and causes that are not psycho-
logical.
I will tell you what happened to Proust, a story of Proust’s
mistake, to explain what it means to work. First of all, working is
something unique that only we can do. Knowledge cannot be re-
ceived; Marcel cannot hand over his knowledge about Rachel to St.
Loup. It is impossible to put two pieces of knowledge together. St.
Loup cannot enrich himself with the knowledge that Marcel has,
cannot add Marcel’s knowledge to his knowledge. It is non-com-
municable.36 Second, we must use each instant and not let it escape,
we must work within the impression of the moment.37
Here, then, is the tale that I wanted to save for last—a parable.
Proust twice makes a characteristic mistake (explaining the main
idea of his novel in something like an interview and again in a letter
to his friend Georges de Lauris) quoting a canonical text he should
have known by heart. He knew many texts by heart, he had a won-
derful memory, so the mistake was not a lapse of memory, but
instead expressed some inner passion of his soul. It’s a typical mis-
take, or as psychoanalysts say, a symptomatic mistake, non-
accidental, and it allows us to understand something. Proust quotes
the Gospel of St. John, a passage that is important for us regardless
of Proust’s mistake, but also in connection with it. “Yet a little while
is the light with you. Walk while there is light.… While there is
light, believe in the light, that you may be the sons of light.”38 This
says that truth has such a quality or a law that it appears only in the
guise of lightning. Truth does not shine all day like the sun. The
gospel says, while it is, walk. I would translate closer to our prob-
36 II (C.G.), 159.
37 II (C.G.), 163-164.
38 John 12: 35-36.
lems, and as a way of explaining the text of the gospel, “Get a move
on, or get on the ball while the light flashes by.” It’s not accidental
that I am “correcting,” although it is pointless to correct such texts.
Involuntarily, unconsciously, Proust quotes this text twice with a
mistake: “Yet a little while is the light with you. Work, while there
is light.”39 Travailler, he writes.40 Involuntary mistake, but charac-
teristic, because we’re talking about the time of working, the sign
of which is an instant, a split second. The space of truth can be ex-
panded only through work, but in itself it is an instant. If you let it
escape you, that’s it. There will be chaos and disintegration; nothing
will come back, and the world will cease to be, devolving into the
infinite repetition of hell. This will be your indeterminate, or imper-
fect, or corrupt state, it will repeat infinitely, and you will never
extract experience from it, also because every time you let the mo-
ment slip away, you did not stop or pause to work. For now let’s
call this life-work, marked by the sign of lightning. By the way, Her-
aclitus said that the world is ruled by lightning. In a textbook you
can find a statement like this: “Heraclitus taught that everything
changes and the world is governed by lightning,” but the meaning
of this is not clear. Textbook phrases are meaningless.
One last thought. The French poet Saint-Jean Perse has a
phrase which will seem paradoxical. It is paradoxical, but it ex-
presses what we discussed. In one of his poems he uses a phrase,
“syntax of lightning.”41 Lightning by definition cannot have a syn-
tax. Something that takes a split second cannot have a syntax which
requires space. Nevertheless, the poet used this expression, “syntax
of lightning.” Let’s end on this for today. Thank you.
39 See S.B., 219.

40 Mamardashvili is wrong to think that Proust misquotes John’s Gospel. Proust
merely repeats Ruskin’s mistake from the Preface to Sesame and Lilies. Recall
that Proust translated Ruskin’s book, although without the preface.—Trans.
thank Céline Anger.
41 “Syntaxe de l’éclair !
Ô pur langage de l’exil !”
Saint-John Perse, Exil (1942), in Éloges, suivi de La Gloire des Rois, Anabase, Exil,
Paris, Poésie/Gallimard, 1967.
Lecture 61
We face radical doubt and l’écart absolu (I couldn’t translate the term
that we tentatively agreed to call in Georgian განდგომა from
French into Russian); both are absolute.2 We also chose the direction
of the unknown.3 Consider what a strange reality this is: we call re-
ality something different from what we see. This something is
reality, and we have now placed it neither on Swann’s Way nor on
the Guermantes Way, but the way of the unknown, and agreed that
every artist, every philosopher, every human person4 (one need not
be a philosopher or an artist) is organized so that the act that is post
factum called “philosophical” or “artistic” (after it is accomplished,
when we look for words to describe it) is always woven into its
structure. These words, or names, have to do with the poverty of
our language; we, however, must consider and attune ourselves to
the fact that what I call philosophy and art are unsuccessful human
descriptions of some fundamental act that makes the human per-
son.
We have placed the human—the artist and the philosopher—
in an unknown homeland. This human person’s only homeland is
not Georgia, not France, not Russia; this means shedding certain
responsibilities. A homeland always imposes responsibilities, and
if we find out that our present homeland is not the one to which we
belong, then some of the responsibilities disappear while others ap-
1 Delivered on April 10, 1984 at the Tbilisi State University. Psikhologicheskaia

2 This Georgian word means standing apart or separating oneself. Mamardash-
vili delivered Lectures on Proust in Russian in Tbilisi, and his audience was at
least partially bilingual, Russian and Georgian.—Trans.
3 Mamardashvili is referring to the material covered in previous lectures. The
Russian word сторона, translated here as “direction,” is an allusion to the two
paths or ways indicated in Proust’s novel, and also the narrator’s mental and
psychic landscape: Du côté de chez Swann and Le Côté de Guermantes.—Trans.
4 The translators decided to render личность by “human person,” or simply
“person,” in order to separate Mamardashvili’s term from individualistic as-
sociations. This Russian word is ordinarily translated as “individuality,”
“personality,” or “individual.” See Introduction for details.—Trans.
85
pear: the responsibility to one’s destiny, to a human calling. Proust

was obsessed with this, and, obeying its voice, he set off on his mor-
tal path, one of sin, ordeals, suffering, sickness, and death.
A homeland must remain unknown; it cannot be this, that, or
the other. As long as it remains neither that, nor this, nor the other,
it will give productive meaning to our psychic life. I bring up this
unknown country because I am in a strange position once I under-
stand that, as a person, I belong to a homeland without specific
geographical outlines (even if I were to feel myself a fully enfran-
chised citizen). Let’s try to grasp this properly, because we have
only the words we have: it forces us to be spies.
Imagine a spy bristling with antennas of suspicion. This is ex-
actly what Proust says: “antennas of suspicion.”5 Why be spies?
Because everything we face, as we now partially understand, is
mystery and fragments. Making these scraps legible is very much a
job for a spy. When we wish to solve a mystery, reconstructing it
from fragments, we are spies for an unknown homeland, and not
citizens of a particular country. Any philosopher or any human per-
son, to the extent that they philosophize, has the features of a spy.
Every philosopher is a spy (I, in any case, feel this way myself), only
it is not clear for whom.
The artist and the philosopher have one more characteristic of
a spy. Here I have in mind not the formal act of Proust writing a
book. Here is a helpful illustration: Proust’s novel is the creation of
a jealous narrator possessed by suspicious, unhappy love. Every
jealous person is, of course, a spy: he must reconstruct the truth
from fragments of notes and impressions. His antennas must al-
ways be tuned to something other than what has been said. You
were told one thing, but you have to catch something different; you
saw one thing, but have to discern another. This occupation has yet
another quality: the spy should resemble a normal citizen. The spy
is the consciousness of a spy; the less he differs from ordinary citi-
zens, the more effective he is (usually spies work as accountants,
engineers, watchmakers, and sometimes as philosophers).
5 III (Pr.), 356.

LECTURE 6 87
The artist and the philosopher who belong to an unknown

homeland are always tempted to wear the costume of their home-
land despite the proverb “Wear the hat of the place where you
live.”6 Artists wear bow ties, or have affectations tied to a distinc-
tive consciousness. True philosophical understanding of a vocation
requires the artist to blend in: a good spy should be the same as
everyone else. Flaubert said that in normal, everyday life you need
to be a respectable bourgeois in order to be completely free in your
art. Consider how tempting and common it is to look like an artist.
From Proust’s point of view, doing this violates certain“ hygienic
rules” of the artistic worldview.7
Proust has a funny scene, which may provide an image to un-
derstand how every vision of reality involves an act of spying.
(Essentially I am saying that only a spy—a person who does not
belong to this homeland—can see reality.) When he first saw Char-
lus looking at something, Marcel described the properties of his
way of looking. (Charlus is an almost epic, gigantic figure of an aris-
tocrat, monstrously eloquent and intelligent; an expansive,
expressive person who is also monstrously vicious; Charlus is a ho-
mosexual, and by the end of his life he covers the entire trajectory
to which vice usually leads.) In his manner of looking, Charlus per-
ceives what is invisible to others; as Proust says, “madmen or spies”
see that way.8 We catch the eye of a person who looks at the same
thing as we do, and realize that he sees something we do not. The
faces of madmen or spies—the bad ones, of course—show that they
watch on behalf of an unknown homeland.
I speak using the metaphors of our spiritual life,9 and not with
a literal police classification of who is a spy and who is a normal
citizen. We are talking about other things. When it comes to the oc-
cupation of a spy, there is one thing that I don’t understand: how
one can spy for a particular country—it is very boring. Quite an-
6 This is a literal translation of the proverb quoted by Mamardashvili in Geor-

gian. An easy English equivalent is “When in Rome do as the Romans do.”—
Trans.
7 I (J.F.), 580.
8 I (J.F.), 751.
9 Here Mamardashvili uses the Russian phrase душевная жизнь that is literally
translated as the “life of the soul.”—Trans.
other thing to be a spy of an unknown homeland. I already men-

tioned that you don’t need to wear the hat of the unknown
homeland, but of the one in which you live as a normal citizen, be-
cause this will degrade your artistic or philosophical talent: instead
of seeing reality, you always see yourself and, as Proust would say,
you start writing with fatal self-regard10—and that’s a dead end,
nothing will come of it. In addition to this there is something in the
spy’s manner of looking that should stop us in our tracks: radical
doubt—not just a doubt about something specific or concrete, but
radical doubt. We already saw features of this doubt in my descrip-
tion of Proust’s attitude to what he calls reality. That which does
not exist empirically is real, or the most real. We do not see it, we
see something else—the unreal. What we do not see is real.
Recall the narrator’s description of the hotel room and its un-
familiar objects (the word “unfamiliar” is also significant as it is
connected with the problem of time, but for now I will skip it) that
oppress him, ruin his life, with their corners and hostile glances.
What does he see? Objects that have certain properties: a bad closet
is a closet that has the quality of being bad. In fact, something else
is happening. The narrator feels, as the Germans say, Unbehagen:11
malaise caused, allegedly, by the wardrobe. That’s how he is expe-
riencing it, but in reality something altogether different is
happening. This “something different” that does not stand out, but
happens, is reality, and what is happening does not exist. I already
mentioned a scene from Moscow to the End of the Line where two
drunks argue over which side of the Pyrenees a Russian is loved
10 In 1918 Proust writes to Lucien Daudet: “maybe we have value because of this
detachment from ourselves which has enabled us to know in ourselves what
is also in others, and what will never be known to those who think in a selfish
manner and write with self-regard.” (In the original French: “…nous valons
peut-être par ce détachement de nous-mêmes qui nous a permis de connaître
en nous ce qui est aussi dans les autres, et ce que ne connaîtront jamais ceux
qui pensent d’une façon égoïste et écrivent avec amour-propre.” Lettre à Lu-
cien Daudet, janvier-février, 1918. Europe: Revue Mensuelle, Centenaire de Marcel
Proust 496-497 (Août-Septembre 1970): 67.)—Trans.
11 The German Unbehagen means discontent, discomfort, malaise, unease, uneas-
iness, anxiety.—Trans.
LECTURE 6 89
more.12 Sinister cabinets exist to the same degree that people love
or think about Russians on one or the other side of the Pyrenees (I
am linking metaphors). In reality, what happens is neither well- nor
ill-intentioned toward us, but something else—this is the position
of doubt.
Doubt, to paraphrase Dostoevsky, is the “returned ticket.”13
Remember Dostoevsky’s theme: in Brothers Karamazov, with differ-
ent words and for different reasons from ours, Ivan returns the
ticket that God gave him to live in the world, because God permits
a child’s innocent tear to be spilled. We also return the ticket—only
Dostoevsky’s image is important for us now—we return the ticket
to what is empirical.
Let’s put it this way: what is—a malevolent closet or the Span-
iards in the Pyrenees who are thinking about us—does not and
cannot exist, because the world is organized differently. Any argu-
ment about the world that contradicts what we see is an argument
from doubt—radical doubt—and from a rift, l’écart. I step aside,
that is, I have to break connections, shed my skin, my family, my
education, my country (homeland), because while connected to
them, I treat them as self-evident, or true: it is true or self-evident
to be Georgian; it is self-evident to be a spouse in a monogamous
family, to be part of a socialist state. But a first step toward becom-
ing a human person involves suspending the self-evident: it does
not exist.
Indeed, why should a family be monogamous? Is there some
cosmic law? It is clearly a random social form. Or why should we
have the society we have? There is no cosmic basis for this. When
we return our ticket, we allow for other possibilities of human na-
ture to appear before our mental gaze—possibilities that exist even
12 Mamardashvili is referring to a question raised by a character of Venedikt

Yerofeev’s novel Moscow to the End of the Line: “And the man with the black
moustache said, ‘Here you’ve seen a lot and traveled a lot. Tell us, where do
they value the Russian more, on this or the other side of the Pyrenees?’” (Ev-
anston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1992, 102). See also Lecture 11
included in this volume.—Trans.
13 See Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Constance Garnett. Ed.
Ralph E. Matlaw. New York: Norton, 1976, 226.—Trans.
if we have not returned the ticket but that we will never see other-
wise.
Proust begins by returning the ticket; the narrator awakes un-
aware and not conscious of the right to wake up as himself, or the
reason to wake up as himself. He asks: what are, in fact, these rea-
sons? Why is it that when the first thought comes to my head, I seize
myself with both hands as the subject of this thought? The ability
to doubt in this way—not about a specific thing, such as the loyalty
of a spouse—but to doubt radically, is inseparable from our talent
for spying, and this talent is inseparable from that of understanding
and seeing reality, that is, what one can only believe in, because it
does not exist, or exists only as I believe in it. In your courses on
atheism you probably encountered a well-known statement as evi-
dence of the absurdity of any religious faith; it is so ridiculous that
its very proponents openly admit it: I believe, because it is absurd.
The trouble is that this claim is absolutely accurate. It expresses the
fundamental characteristic of who we (human beings) are, how we
and the world are organized. One can only believe in what is not,
or what is absurd (it is the same thing); that which is not absurd
cannot be an object of faith. What does “absurd” mean? Contra. De-
spite appearances, contrary to what I see, to what is considered real.
That which can exist without “contra” cannot be an object of faith.
(I consider it necessary to repeat myself, because these are signifi-
cant things.)
Take the image of the returned ticket to that point where noth-
ing penetrates from outside. Superimpose on this point the image
of a person waking up, but in a way that involves a rather complex
procedure of doubt. We wake up, and it seems to us self-evident
that we woke up, as if our conscious life can continue by itself as
though it were a material object, but doubt indicates that nothing
[conscious] has continuity of itself. There is a gap between the ob-
ject at Moment A and the same object at Moment A1—the gap that
is not self-evident and that is filled with the whole world of our
effort, or our participation in the world.
Take the image of the person who wakes up without there be-
ing a reason that it should be that person who wakes up, and
impose on it an image of death that illustrates the fundamental
LECTURE 6 91
property of consciousness: between an object of which I am con-

scious at Moment A and that same object or content at Moment A1
there is no self-evident continuous transition. Death reminds us of
this.
We all know that we will die, but we do not know when. Every
moment of life contains my projection into the future: from some
point A, I move to point B, but this point B does not follow from the
previous point, if only because in the interval between A and B I
might die. This aspect of death symbolizes the properties of the
mental states we usually experience. Let’s say, I am moving toward
a thought. Every thought, including knowledge, is movement. I
begin to move, and after a certain number of steps I learn some-
thing. The trouble is that what happens after a few steps does not
follow from previous steps; it must have some other basis (this is a
very complicated point). Do not agonize if you do not grasp this
right away; the fact that I’m speaking in a manner that is difficult
for you to grasp indicates that I barely understand it myself. It’s not
that you yourself are an idiot and don’t understand, but that in
some sense all of us are idiots.14
Think about what we can have at will, and what we cannot.
When we think of having something at will, we suppose that start-
ing with A and intending B, we are guaranteed to go from A to B.
A will lead to B, right? But is it possible to have a thought because
I want to have that thought? If so, there must be Moment A filled
with content that would produce Moment B, i.e. the next moment
in time. Or can I get excited, if I want to get excited, or get inspired,
if I want to get inspired? Tons of things cannot be brought about in
this way: you cannot have a thought, can’t get excited, can’t be in-
spired, by wanting it. Consequently, what happens the next
moment does not follow from what was before. And death speaks
of this very simply.
Death reminds us that some fundamental processes of our
conscious life are not continuous in and of themselves. Say this
pipe15 continues into the following moment, and duration is the
14 The last two sentences appear in the audio file for this lecture.—Trans.
15 Mamardashvili would have had a pipe that he referenced in his lectures.—
Trans.
property of this pipe—property in time. Or say it is my self-evident

property that I fall asleep and wake up as Merab Mamardashvili.
No, the world is not structured this way. This is why we have an
image of doubt, which is an attempt to mark out such an area
where, for the first time, something is born or emerges for a reason,
and not of itself.
When I look at something through the eyes of doubt, I un-
dergo a special kind of experience. It consists in the following: the I
does not precede experience as the subject of this experience, that
is, as the one who will understand or feel something, or will have a
memory as a result of this experience. The I does not precede expe-
rience, and we will deal only with the I that is born through
experience.
We assume that each human being, by virtue of a particular
history, has a specific quality of memory, a set of experiences, and
we assume also that the one who learns something new or some-
thing different is a being with certain qualities or narratives:
familial, personal, social stories. To translate into the language of
Musil: we assume that whatever is learned is learned by a person
with certain qualities. Musil’s novel is, however, titled A Man with-
out Qualities.
Doubt is a special, conditional procedure whose goal is to turn
one who wants to understand something into a human being with-
out the qualities that precede this experience. This is the path of
individual metaphysics; metaphysics refers to the implementation
of this procedure. The I without the qualities that would precede it
happens at that place [where we travel having refused our ticket].16
Descartes, who is, so to speak, the author of our new European
thought and of this procedure of doubt (which is usually under-
stood superficially: question everything, or rather question specific
information, scrutinize it; something else, however, is at stake), and
who underwent the existential experience of awakening thoughts
16 At this point in the lecture, Mamardashvili is using Dostoevsky’s image of the

returned ticket in a very different fashion from the novel. Ivan’s argument for
returning the ticket is ethical: he refuses to base his happiness on another per-
son’s suffering. For Mamardashvili, to return the ticket is to acknowledge the
unreality of what we see.—Trans.
LECTURE 6 93
in himself, trying at his own risk to convey his preoccupations to

others, described this procedure in the following way (I para-
phrase): apart from being a thing, I am also a thinking being.17 As a
thing that possesses properties, a human being is a link in some
causal chain: “it” belongs to a certain time, “it” was born from spe-
cific parents, and has certain qualities. What Descartes calls the I, or
the thinking I, or the cogito, is something removed from this causal
chain, as if nothing existed before. Of course, I know that I am a link
in a long chain of births and deaths and that I was born from spe-
cific parents, but the act of thinking, that is, the act of
understanding, has as its precondition the assumption that nothing
existed before me, including myself. After all, I am yet to be born,
because, by definition, I have concrete and definite qualities and
properties.
Descartes adds another exercise or problem to puzzle over: as
if God created only me. Even if we rack our brains, we will not un-
derstand much—the phrase is not capacious, but allows us to grasp
the style of philosophical thinking—what the British call a knack,
or bzik18 in Russian (we could probably find a Georgian equivalent).
Our language and our consciousness are organized so that the
phrase “as if God created only me” is the only way to say this. Each
one of us can say that God created only him or her, and our rela-
tionship with God is the sum of each person’s relationships, where
each one believes that God created only him or her. If the relation-
ship of the human race to the being or force called God is not
structured this way, this experience cannot be true. Try to under-
stand that this experience is the sum of the individual claims that I
alone am created by God.
This place is the starting point for the movement of under-
standing and for the development of our spiritual life, or the life of
our soul; that is why I called it the path of individual metaphysics.
Metaphysics teaches about objects that are never given to us in ex-
perience: God, soul, and immortality. Proust, for example, firmly
17 See the second of Meditations on First Philosophy in The Philosophical Writings of

Descartes, Vol. II, tr. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, 18.—Trans.
18 The Russian bzik means an oddity, a quirk, or idée fixe.—Trans.
believed that he was immortal—not as an empirical person with a

particular last name, but as somebody who enacted the experience19
recorded in the novel In Search of Lost Time.20
This place accommodates strange things, but we have accu-
mulated certain terms that help us understand what can happen
only there, and what has no precedent and no source. Because it
cannot be taken for granted that the content of one moment of time
follows the content of another moment, what is most interesting
happens in the intervals. It is most interesting to consider an inter-
val as if nothing came before, as if the I did not preexist the moment,
doesn’t have any properties or qualities, and if it will have them,
then only those that we will introduce as we enact experiences in
this place. First there is a human being with no properties, and then,
maybe, there will be a free human being. Afterwards, a human be-
ing will possess properties but remain free. This is simultaneously
the path of individual metaphysics, and the path of freedom: a ter-
rible and complex mechanism, burdensome for the human being,
but there is no other way than to bear this burden.
A human is a rather helpless being and not capable of much;
if humans are capable of doing something, they can do it only if
they are free. Even the free cannot do much, and the enslaved can-
not do anything at all.
To connect back to the notion of an unknown homeland, I
would like to use a capacious but hard-to-translate Italian word. Its
energy is lost in translation, because we need several words instead
of one. In this place we find ourselves without a homeland—
19 The Russian expression проделать опыт has a more active sense than the Eng-
lish phrase “to undergo an experience.” Проделал means “accomplish” or
“make,” which does not conform to the idiom of “undergo an experience” or
“have an experience,” or even “experience something” in the sense of an ac-
quisition or a consumer good, such as travel. The more awkward “accomplish
an experience” conforms to Mamardashvili’s preference for experience as an
active rather than a passive concept. He also takes advantage of the identical
word in Russian (as in French) for experience and experiment. A close but un-
idiomatic approximation in English would be “conduct an experience;” even
in Russian, the expression is unusual.—Trans.
20 III (T.R.), 1036, 1037-38.
LECTURE 6 95
spaesamento21 (paese means a country, and “s” is a privative prefix);

one loses the sense of belonging to a homeland, one ends up un-
housed, without a situation, without an address—an alien
wanderer.22
(…)23
Our problem is the fullness of life—the problem of gathering
ourselves, scattered as dead particles. Whoever is fully alive is al-
ways at the same time homelandless, spaesato. This place is really
scary for us. We have to imagine it as a place of life, because our
problem is to remain alive—the only thing we want is to be alive.
So, this living place is located on a curve. Imagine a curved line, and
this point is on it, like in a saddle. Imagine the horse is bucking
fiercely under you, running away with you. You must keep your
seat, connecting threads that do not connect themselves, just as the
previous moment of time does not connect with the next. Death re-
minds us that there is no such obvious duration and cannot be.
We have already accumulated some language to conjure the
qualities of this place, identifying it, for example, with darkness: no
light should precede it. In other, perhaps more understandable,
words I said that we should assume that there is nothing, not even
me, before what will happen in this place—doubt requires me to
adopt this position. So, there is darkness there: everyone has a per-
sonal darkness; each has a personal shadow, just as nobody can die
for me and I cannot die for somebody else. Just as each person un-
derstands for themself, so each casts the shadow that Dante called
“the great circle of shadow”24 that is one’s own incomprehension:
the absence of any previous knowledge. Previously, I cited an ex-
ample from Kierkegaard:25 a person who does not know that he is
baptized, that he is a Christian, has a better chance to be Christian,
because preexisting knowledge is most frequently already a stereo-
21 Spaesamento is commonly translated as disorientation, displacement, or bewil-

derment.—Trans.
22 The Russian странник means a wanderer, but shares the root with the
“stranger.”
23 At this point there is a gap in the lecture recording.—Trans.
24 Mamardashvili is referring to the opening line of Dante’s sestina “Al poco
giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra.”—Trans.
25 Mamardashvili is referring to Lecture 4 (p. 98 of the Russian edition).—Trans.
type; it lacks a living thought or feeling. We take for granted that

because we were baptized, and at the age of thirteen confirmed, we
are indeed Christians. This is dangerous. This is the sickness Kier-
kegaard called mortal danger.26
The notion of a socio-historical mechanism that moves history
(so-called progress), according to which our efforts join with some-
thing that advances by itself, is also a mortal danger. Recall that the
continuity of Moment A and the subsequent Moment B cannot be
taken for granted. So it is in society: we shouldn’t think that I’ve
laid a brick and another person added a brick, and everything, by
itself, adds up and progresses, and for some reason it is assumed
that this all moves in a direction favorable for human beings, as if
there were a providential hand that aligned this self-operating
mechanism. And what is a self-acting mechanism? The mechanism
works fine without me; even if I do something, I only add a drop
that of itself joins other drops, and everything works out as it
should. This is not so; the world is not organized this way. I can
even explain it with a simple mathematical paradox (I will slightly
digress).
We usually imagine it this way: I am a scientist, I do science—
something that, by definition, can be superseded (I have to accept
it) at any moment; someone will discover something that will inval-
idate my previous discovery. Any subsequent knowledge is the
sum of what has accumulated to date. This sum is either more ac-
curate, or cancels something and establishes something else; that is,
as a scientist, I participate in a collective, self-summarizing under-
taking.
The same applies to historical meaning (this example has the
same structure as the previous one; they illuminate each other): a
socio-historical mechanism that progresses by itself, like the wheel
of history. It is not accidental that social idiots came up with the
image of a “wheel of history,” that is required to work in our favor
by moving in a certain direction. The same applies to what we call
moral meaning. We often reason this way: what I do today will be-
26 Kierkegaard speaks of mortal danger in his Concluding Unscientific Post-

script.—Trans.
LECTURE 6 97
come meaningful tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow other ef-
forts will be added to it, and they (as it were, in retrospect) will give
meaning to what I am doing today. For example, if what I am doing
today is only significant based on what kind of society will be con-
structed in fifty years, then, as we perfectly understand, what I am
doing now will have moral and spiritual meaning only in fifty
years. My efforts make sense only as far as the collective undertak-
ing is successful; the undertaking is, by definition, situated in time.
Today I can even kill if, according to this meaning, I think that this
murder today will be justified by what happens in fifty years.
The world is organized in such a way that if something only
made sense retrospectively, then nothing would make sense right
now. If I say that the meaning of what I do depends on what hap-
pens tomorrow, then we can take this infinite movement toward
tomorrow, divide it by the present moment, and understand that
nothing can make sense because tomorrow also consists of today,
so it is also meaningless.
This also applies to knowledge. If what I do now as a scientist
will only make sense in this summation that moves toward an infi-
nite future, then at any given moment I know nothing. If cognition
is summation, then knowledge does not exist at any arbitrarily
taken moment. You cannot get a unit of knowledge by dividing it
by infinity: at every point you will have a zero. This cannot be.
When Tolstoy struggled with the illusion of progress, he came up
with a metaphor: he compared the peasant’s sense of time with that
of the modern person. Although his comparisons are flimsy, his
reasoning is interesting. There is some meaning in every stupid
thing Tolstoy says—a starting point of real exact experience, which
then loses itself in his ruminations, because he was not very philo-
sophically literate. There is always, however, this point, even in his
addled speculations about Shakespeare, or in his famous repudia-
tion of art in The Kreutzer Sonata. This requires us to be generous:
behind the tatters of philosophically illiterate thinking, we should
see real problems, the authentic root of experience that Tolstoy had,
unlike other know-it-alls who, perhaps, were smarter and more lit-
erate, but did not see and feel this. Thinking requires from us
certain properties of the soul, what I call magnanimity. If I am gen-
erous, I can coexist with stupidity, and do not insist that it look
smart. I see what stands behind it and forgive its stupidity.
By the way, this also applies to the initial, humane, or human-
istic, content of socialist ideas at the origins of this movement. Here
is a simple example. At the beginning of the [20th] century, a French
socialist addressed parliament on the question of strikes by
wretched, ragged, hungry people, who were now chastised for be-
ing ragged and illiterate, for not understanding anything and
creating social turmoil. He said: “The wretched are expected to be
perfect.” The problem of magnanimity is to see past the rags of stu-
pidity, or actual rags; to see the real human condition that we share
with others, regardless of how well or poorly they express it. We
will be none the worse for it, if we feel this; we will not lose our
mind or good clothes if we are surrounded by tattered misfortune,
from which we must not demand perfection. But when it comes to
thinking, something else is also at work. People willingly and joy-
fully cling to unfortunate expressions in order not to feel their
intended meaning. We immediately find fault and do not hear. So,
when you want to express something, you need to express it per-
fectly—not because that’s how it must be, but because people will
quibble and will not want to hear. In fact, you can appear in tatters
only before God because, not being a formalist, God will see what
is at stake and will not mind that you are dressed in rags. Before
people, however, you must appear fully arrayed: well dressed in
the wardrobe of thought, not wearing the hat of an unknown home-
land. I digressed.
We can draw the following simple conclusion: from the place
where we are, we cannot transfer anything to the future. If there is
meaning, then it exists only in that place, and if we assume that we
can postpone or shift something onto other people, then there will
be meaning neither here nor there. This is a strange point of obscu-
rity—of our darkness. The light may enter, but only into darkness,
not into half-light, because its way is blocked by what Kierkegaard
called “mortal sickness.” Connect this obscurity with Proust’s de-
LECTURE 6 99
scription of the mysterious activity in a growing seed—he calls it

secret activity.27
Paradoxically, our darkness is simultaneously secret activity
or irreplaceable work. A rational act cannot replace the work of life,
or secret activity, or obscurity; someone who connects rational ele-
ments cannot replace secret activity. You cannot, after all, replace a
seed with yourself. No, you assume that the seed’s activity is not
the realization of your thought or theory—it does it by means of
secret work.
Secret work is happening in this place, where all loads or bur-
dens connect and converge. This is Dante’s equinoctial point. Not
The Divine Comedy, but Dante’s (I almost said Proust’s, it would
have been a symptomatic slip) The New Life (La Vita Nuova) de-
scribes the author’s state when a heavenly voice addresses him, and
as if in a dream says, All the others are at an equal distance from
me, but not you.28 So, he is not at the point where the heavenly gaze
sees him. This gaze is such that everything is at an equal distance
from it. This is not entirely clear now, but you will easily connect it
with what I said earlier: that there is a certain point where there is
no difference between a beggar and a prince; if they are there they
are both at an equal distance from what we will call the gaze of des-
tiny. The point of obscurity, the place of secret work, is also the
point of equal distance: in it, completely different people are
equally close to or far away from a certain center, which, of course,
has no geographical location.29 This place and its action set all our
destinies according to the level of our soul. They equalize every-
thing to the level of our soul, that is, no matter to where we were:
27 See III (T.R.), 899. Mamardashvili discusses this idea in Lecture 4 (p. 92 of the
Russian edition).—Trans.
28 “Ego tanquam centrum circuli, cui simili modo se habent circumferentie partes; tu
autem non sic.” Dante, Vita nuova, XII. 4/5.11. “I am like the center of a circle, to
which the parts of the circumference stand in equal relation; but you are not
so.” Alighieri, Dante. Vita Nova. Trans. Andrew Frisardi. Evanston: Northwe-
stern University Press, 2012, 13.—Trans.
29 The Russian word Mamardashvili uses here—прописка—refers to the address
registered in the internal passport. All Soviet citizens had to have a registered
address, and this is still the case in much of the former Soviet Union. Mamar-
dashvili makes a gentle pun on official Soviet culture here.—Trans.
at the center of this gaze or at an unequal distance. As the voice said

to Dante, for some reason you are far away.
Proust develops the idea of equalization according to the equi-
noctial point, which is, as it were, a neutral point. Proust reasons
that, in this place, the I is without any preceding qualities. Note that
the “equinoctial point” (“equinox” is an astronomical term) is, in
this case, similar to the terms I already discussed: “a person without
qualities, or properties,” “there is nothing prior to experience, only
that which appears in it.” This means that I walk as though naked.
In this “naked” all are equal, and there is only one thing there: what
we do ourselves.
Marcel is rich, and Albertine is poor, says Proust (I repeat the
example I already gave); Marcel has at his disposal all the ad-
vantages of technology and civilization, because he has the means.
He can telephone, send dispatches, send out his agents and ask
them where they saw Albertine, whether she entered a particular
house of ill repute, or had a lesbian rendezvous with a washer-
woman, about whom his servant later told him. Proust says: of
course, the entire telegraph was at Marcel’s disposal, the communi-
cation network, that in an instant could gather information about
where Albertine was located (a poor person does not have these
technical resources, but a rich one does). All, however, came to
nothing where it was a question of loving and suffering on his own,
where Albertine also loved or suffered on her own, and where Mar-
cel’s will pushed against Albertine’s will and desire, or reluctance.
Albertine’s desire cannot be aroused by knowledge or technical re-
sources; she wants or she doesn’t and you can’t kick against that.
Notice that this is not just a simple psychological fact, but also the
crucial fact that all properties are removed here: at this point, before
Albertine’s “unshakable desire”30 (or reluctance) Marcel is a prince,
but also a pauper.
I would like to give another example, which is why I brought
up generosity earlier: Proust says that the material composition of
a given experience or state does not matter. It can be elevated or
humble; I can read a brilliant book, or I can look at a flower. What
30 III (Fug.), 504.

LECTURE 6 101
matters is only a degree—or, differently put, a gradient—of trans-

formation. Transformation originates from this point zero.
Proust gives two characteristic and typical examples. If you
invest yourself, the whole world is equally rich (i.e. there is no dif-
ference between the noble and the humble) and equally dangerous.
It depends on the experience you have accomplished, that is, to
what extent you invested yourself or engaged in an experience at
your own peril and risk—not by relying on the telegraph, for exam-
ple, but rather through encountering Albertine’s unshakable will at
the point where you had to be present; not you, the prince, or you,
the master of modern communication (it will not help). The danger
always announces something significant and important to us. As I
said: we invest ourselves at our own risk. If we take it on, the world
becomes so permeated by us and what happens to us depends so
much on our engagement that one can extract as many noble
thoughts from soap advertisements as from Pascal’s Thoughts,31 or,
I will add, the Gospel.
I warned you that we are at a point where even books do not
penetrate. Even the word of the Gospel, insofar as it is taken from a
text—the book called The New Testament—will not enter. Neither
would the thoughts from Pascal’s book—but what does get
through can come from Pascal’s Thoughts and from the soap adver-
tisements. It is important for us to grasp this neutralization.
Here is a second example that will help us to do this. On the
first pages of the novel (around the hundredth page; I don’t remem-
ber exactly, and there is no point in giving page numbers, for most
of the text is not available in Russian, and I always refer to the
French edition) Proust notes the smell of gasoline coming from the
window; he goes on to point out that people, who are actually ma-
terialists of a kind, believe that elevated states or experiences of
beauty can come only from beautiful objects and that life would be
much more beautiful (as the sum of experienced beauty) if we were
among people dressed in beautiful clothes.32 (Proust has in mind
the clothes of the 16th–17th century, when men walked around like
31 III (Fug.), 543.

32 III (Pr.), 411.
colorful butterflies.) Notice that Proust characterizes such people as

materialists, materialists of the spirit.
Proust expresses the same idea as when I speak of soap and
Pascal’s Thoughts: experiencing beauty does not require surround-
ing yourself with beautiful objects. “Beauty” is not in a beautiful
object, but in transformation, in a gradient of this transformation.
This is why the gasoline smell is no obstacle. A soul capable of
transformation, or a generous soul, can also tolerate the gasoline,
because the source of moral and spiritual movement is not in the
surrounding environment. What I say might seem to be literary or-
namentation, but our life is so organized in that aesthetic and moral
experiences have the same structure.
I will translate this into what seems like a completely different
language. We are steeped in the theory that a human being is
shaped and defined by environment. How does one create a good
human being who experiences noble, beautiful feelings and
thoughts? It is very simple: you need to organize a beautiful, just,
harmonious, or ideal environment. Because the environment deter-
mines a person, it will, like a machine, produce a good state in a
human being or a good human being. Russian raznochintsy33 ex-
pressed it in this inverted way. We hear the familiar tune of this
mindset in the phrase “I’m a product of my environment.”34 I
would be good, magnificent, brilliant, beautiful, happy, but the en-
vironment has ruined me.
I quote Proust not merely because of aesthetic beauty, but for
his entirely different worldview, a different metaphysics. In the
case of Proust, it really concerns metaphysics: according to him,
what he experiences cannot depend on the qualities—or the differ-
33 The term raznochintsy refers to the group of people who emerged in Russia in
the 19th century—they did not belong to the nobility, but because they re-
ceived education, no longer fully belonged to their class of origin—they were
educated people of “miscellaneous rank.” In Russian literature this term de-
scribes angry young men, aimless revolutionaries, irresponsible intellectuals
with nihilist tendencies. Mamardashvili is suspicious of their simplistic attach-
ment to social engineering and material determinism.—Trans.
34 The Russian среда заела means, literally, “chewed by the environment”; in an
English idiom, Mamardashvili might have said “chewed up and spit out,” “put
through the mill.” We have not tried to capture the original phrase’s sense of
exhaustion and helplessness.—Trans.
LECTURE 6 103
ences between qualities—of objects. Fossil fuels are not flowers, but
beauty does not originate from a rose, or gasoline; therefore, you
can coexist with gasoline, and it is futile to blame circumstances.
The origin of the human person is elsewhere: at the equinoctial
point, irrespective of gasoline or a rose. What I experience when
surrounded by exhaust fumes, and what I experience when looking
at a rose, must be at an equal distance from this point, and only then
is there the fullness of life—the human being is alive! It is meaning-
less to wait for fair social relations, beautiful objects, people who
are dressed like butterflies and delight the eye. The world is struc-
tured differently, including the sources of our joy and our life, our
moments of being alive.
Here we encounter that which I will have to call by a scientific
term, and at which I already indirectly hinted...35
We can concede that Pascal’s Thoughts, for he is finite and only
human, may not enrich us as much as, say, the soap advertisement.
It is unlikely, but conceivable, that we could extract very noble
things from advertising, just as we might from Pascal’s Thoughts.
Here, perhaps, Proust simply gives in to his frantic desire to lift the
fetishistic veil from the image we have of literary or intellectual
work. Intellectual work seems evidently noble: one is leaning pen-
sively, head on hand, the subject matter must be refined, and we
can only discuss the beautiful and the sublime. Proust in this sense
is a hooligan: that was just what irritated him, and he tried to de-
stroy this image. By the way, in what I quoted, he said that
everything in his life had nothing to do with literature. This was
said by somebody who, in the same passage, says that literature is
“real life.” Remember, I posed a riddle: how to reconcile this con-
tradiction? Now we are beginning to understand how it can be
done.
What we can presume about Pascal’s text, we, of course, can-
not presume about another text, which is generally considered to
be of non-human origin—the New Testament. But our understand-
ing (or our thinking) is structured in such a way that nothing gets
35 In two paragraphs Mamardashvili gives this term: the non-verbal root of ex-
perience.—Trans.
through to us, even from the Gospel. It will reach us, if we have in
us—I will use a scientific or a quasi-scientific term—the non-verbal
root of experience, if we experienced it ourselves. This is very diffi-
cult to explain. I will quote Descartes, whose words will seem
smooth and harmless; precisely because of their silkiness our atten-
tion will slip away. I will try nonetheless to convey my experience,
which is also difficult, because you need to grasp it and somehow
keep hold. Descartes said this: only one who doubted and thought
knows what doubt and thought are.36 How does one convey this?
Say, for example, I read a book on the theory of knowledge (I
had to do this more than once), where the following is stated (this
is what I mean by a verbal copy of an event): scientific knowledge
begins with the first stage, perception. Then, comparing different
objects, we generalize, isolate a common feature these objects pos-
sess, create a concept—this is the second stage, and so on. The
words are all correct, but I can say that the one who wrote this never
had an experience of understanding anything. He gives a verbal de-
scription of something that he knows only through words, that is,
verbally. There are words for everything. Everything is covered
with words. But if he ever had the experience of getting to know
something, he would at least realize that perception never precedes
a concept; the order of this sequence is altogether different, for we
do not learn anything at all if, for example, we are not engaged, if
we do not take a risk, if there is no impression, as Proust would say,
if the phenomenon—or epiphany, in the words of Joyce—that is,
something that speaks by itself of itself, did not appear to us.
The aesthetic act, too, is structured differently, but there are
verbal equivalents for all acts, and we communicate by conveying
these verbal equivalents, but behind them might or might not stand
non-verbal experience: my own presence of thought or aesthetic ex-
perience of beauty. The non-verbal experience is particular to the
human person. Here I have to introduce a paradoxical expression:
36 In The Search for Truth by Means of the Natural Light Descartes writes: “in order
to know what doubt and thought are, all one need do is to doubt or to think.”
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. II, tr. John Cottingham, Robert
Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984,
418.—Trans.
LECTURE 6 105
the non-verbal inner word. You understand, of course, that a word

cannot be non-verbal. What should I call this kind of non-verbal
form? If it is within you, what is written in the Gospel will reach
you. In other words, you cannot appropriate this from the Gospel,
if it has not happened to you, and you personally, at your own risk,
in your own life.37 Let’s call this the non-verbal existence of experi-
ences, things, thoughts, feelings or anything else. By the term “non-
verbal” I designate the origin of doubt, its zero point, something it
runs up against, as an unshakable rock of evidence: one’s own per-
sonal experience, or state of thoughts, which are one and the same.
I warned you that I do not distinguish between emotions, thoughts,
logic, illogic; this does not yet concern us. (I feel how inadequate
this attempt at communication is, but the same law that I am dis-
cussing applies to what I say, to how intelligible it is to me and to
you. I cannot truly communicate this; you can only recreate it in
yourself non-verbally. It is difficult for me to express this, because
I have to express it verbally—when I speak, I use words, verbal cop-
ies of what should be present non-verbally.)
Descartes called this self-evident: one can doubt everything,
but ultimately doubt encounters the irreducible phenomenon of the
will, or—here is yet another word—an irreplaceable nonverbal
event of life-manifestation, or force, equivalent to the will. What I
call “non-verbal” can be called “will.” Nothing can replace it. In
Descartes’s terminology, this is self-evident, and Proust calls it joy, a
special experience that preoccupied him. Being a secret metaphysi-
cian, that is, a philosopher, Proust was well aware that what he
called joy is very similar to what already happened in French cul-
ture, as identified by Descartes. Proust returned several times to the
idea that what he describes as the certainty that accompanies an en-
tirely unexplainable state of joy is perhaps what Descartes called
37 Mamardashvili uses the word собственнолично that can be translated as “per-

sonally” and then creates two compounds, собственно-рискно, собственно-
жизненно. They are playful, made-up adverbs—one’s-own-riskly, one’s-own-
lifely—that emphasize the personal commitment Mamardashvili describes in
this passage.—Trans.
“the evident” in his cogito ergo sum.38 It is not accidental that Proust
repeats this idea two or three times…
I will wrap up in this way: at the [equinoctial] point there is
darkness, secret work; looking ahead, I will disclose that this secret
work is often called the labor of suffering...39
38 J.S., 703, 490. S.B., 132.

39 There is a break in the audio recording here.
Lecture 111
We left off on the problem of impression, or of a special kind of

perception. Naturally, the words impression2 and perception are con-
nected in our minds with habitual associations, suggested by the
critical literature on impressionism, modernism, the contemporary
novel, etc. In this literature, the word “impression” always appears
in the context of other words: evanescent; the instant that must be
seized (meaning the instants of our psychological life, or of our per-
ception; a certain internal subjective play of imagination connected
with these instants; mental associations that unfold, connect3 in a
human being; the stream of consciousness, etc.), but all these words
I just mentioned bear no relation whatsoever to the task at hand.
Joyce, Faulkner, Virginia Wolf are connected to Proust’s life-task (in
the course of the lectures I will name others who are intimately
joined with him), which then became the life-task of many artists in
the twentieth century. Here is how I define this life-task: if societies
were moving toward slavery4 in the twentieth century, then artists
were shifting to heroic art—such was the schism between them. In
other words, the artists were shifting to heroic art precisely because
society was undergoing what the artists perceived as a decline or a
threat to freedom; they had no other choice but to be heroes, and
being a hero is complicated. It is not difficult to understand what I
am saying, but I want us to have the maximum of associations and
to be able to connect different cultural themes.
1 Delivered on May 15, 1984 at the Tbilisi State University. Psikhologicheskaia

2 Along with the Russian word for “impression”—впечатление—Mamardash-
vili provides the Latinate, “impressia,” not available in Russian.—Trans.
3 The word завязываться is used in many ways in Russian—it can refer to setting
fruit once a plant has been pollinated, meeting in battle, developing a relation-
ship, or tying or knotting something together.—Trans.
4 The Russian word рабство or slavery can refer metaphorically to a condition
of servility, as well as to actual slavery, which has a historical basis in Russian
culture in the form of serfdom. See the Introduction for more details.—Trans.
107
One immediately ascribes psychological meaning to the word

hero, which, doubtless, it has, but I have in mind another, deeper
philosophical sense: in philosophy, a hero is a human being who is
fully present here and now, or the perfected human, who are sim-
ultaneous to themselves in all their parts. Psychological, empirical
human beings are not simultaneous to themselves: they have one
foot or one finger in one place, and another finger or foot some-
where else; in actuality, they are fragmented in time and space and
almost never entirely present where it is necessary to be present. I
already gave a simple psychological example of non-presence: you
are not present if you sleep when you must stay awake. In Greek
philosophy, such heroism was always marked by the symbol of
standing; in other words, the symbol of a vertical human being—
not the one who is scattered horizontally across the points of time
and space, but the one who is fully together, gathered, which is not
at all easy.
There is an ancient philosophical parable which was often
used to explain what philosophy is.5 Solon, an ancient Greek orator,
once met Croesus, one of the legendary and fabulously wealthy
kings of antiquity, and Croesus, feeling himself very happy, be-
cause he was rich and governed a kingdom, asked (while being
certain that he, Croesus, is happy) whether Solon has ever met a
happy person, and what is happiness. To this Solon replied that no
human being can say that he is happy while he lives. In other
words, he meant that a human being is not entirely present in a hu-
man being, he is extended across a much wider space and you never
know when, where, and who will step on a foot or a hand you leave
exposed. To this the Greeks added the following story: during the
Olympic games (and in those times they were actually Olympic)
two young brothers won the chariot contest and were crowned with
a halo;6 they fully became themselves. (For the Greeks, such an ath-
letic victory or some other feat was always accompanied by the
5 Mamardashvili is referring to the story from Herodotus’ Histories 1.29-45.—

Trans.
6 Mamardashvili uses the Russian word ореол that can also be translated as au-
reole or nimbus. In ancient Greece an aureole referred to the circle or the rays
of light that enveloped either the head or the entire body of a hero.—Trans.
LECTURE 11 109
word “halo” and it is not accidental that later this halo migrated
into an icon or into an image. What is a halo? A certain circle inside
of which a human being is fully gathered; in other words, it is the
circle that envelops or incorporates into itself an entire human be-
ing and completes them—the human being is complete and
completed. Let us also recall Tolstoy’s problem concerning the com-
pleteness of meaning. This is not an explanation; it is meant to make
our thinking jump in different directions, and in this way to pull
the thread of life more precisely.) At the zenith of their glory, worn
out by their feat, they fell asleep and while they were sleeping, their
mother implored the god to take them (before they have woken up,
or, to put it differently, while they have not left the enclosing halo);
in other words, asked that they would die in their sleep. The god,
or some divinity, heard the mother’s prayer and the brothers de-
parted this life.7
Here the symbol of death indicates something that is impossi-
ble while we are alive, but that gets accomplished in a certain
moment we call death; when we are dead we do not possess that
which we possess only when we are dying. In other words, we be-
come completed at death, but while dead, we no longer possess
this. Besides, we don’t know when we will die and that’s why the
reflected light of death, or of its symbol, or of our tendency toward
death (not in the psychological sense that I want to die; in the 20th
century the Existentialists are frequently reproached for suffering
from a fixation on death; all of this is nonsense, someone who
speaks like this doesn’t understand what it’s all about), gathers our
life to the extent to which we can gather it. Heroic perfection, as we
can see, is not a simple thing. It is a manifestation of human ma-
turity, or, as the Greeks put it, of acme, and one can neither prolong
nor repeat it. This was an explanation of the phrase “heroic art,”
and it means that people wanted, through their art, to be present
entirely and fully where it was a question of their life and fate, and
not to be the slaves of a scattered state.
7 This myth about brothers Cleobis and Biton is, according to Herodotus, re-
counted by Solon in response to Croesus’ question about happiness (Histories
1.31). In Herodotus’ version the young men’s mother prays to the goddess
Hera, at whose temple the incident occurs.—Trans.
I am explaining the ethical or the civic sense of those abstract

and philosophical or aesthetic deliberations that preoccupied us
during previous meetings. As you can see, I don’t differentiate be-
tween ethics and aesthetics, between philosophy and aesthetics. In
fact, we established an ethical, civic, or metaphysical sense of our
deliberations and thereby ran into the problem of freedom and hu-
manism. The kind of art to which Proust, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and
others belong is usually reproached on the basis that it denies the
ideals of humanism, or becomes disillusioned with them, consider-
ing them impossible. Yes, of course, they renounced traditional
humanism, that is, the traditional image of the human being as a
being that abides by some exalted norms and ideals, but this hap-
pened because of a deep insight that in reality a human being is
human not through following ideals and norms, that a norm or an
ideal, when fulfilled because a human being submits to it as to
something external (cultural norms, for example), is a fragile cap on
top of an active volcano.
Nietzsche warned European culture about this at the end of
the 19th century. This warning remained valid in the 20th century.
What did it mean? That if a human being is hollow, that is, empty
inside, and if the ideals did not grow from the nonverbal root of
experience, then these ideals are not worth a dime, they will col-
lapse into an abyss of disintegration and chaos. And so it went:
there was the first World War, then the second. Consequently, a
human being turned out to be a problem in this sense of the word.
Analyzing perception (or what I tentatively called a topology of
what we can see, understand) we established a simple thing: there
is no “royal road” to knowing an experience or an impression, that
is, nobody, no matter their status, is saved from the need to under-
stand, suffer, love, hate, by themselves. If so, then suffering, love,
hate obey certain laws which we must follow as in a fixed orbit, and
that’s why the route that the artists, including Proust, chose is not a
path of anti-humanism; it is a path that restores the actual image8
of the Renaissance human being, who faces the world one-on-one
8 The Russian облик is etymologically related to the words лик, лицо, личность
discussed in the Introduction and in the following footnote.—Trans.
LECTURE 11 111
and who must undergo an experience of a kind which presents a

unique value, and for which there are no external guarantees. I
called this experience an inner word or an inner root; it has a unique
or an infinite worth. Kant called this the infinite worth of a moral
person. Only I or you, however, can be a person—there are no per-
sons prescribed by a norm, an ideal.9
We will call this path the path of an individual metaphysics,
or the path of an individual ethics (because I said that we brought
to light the ethical, civic sense); in other words, an experience of the
world such that in it I would be possible as an independent, auton-
omous authority, as a person. This is a metaphysics, a metaphysical
act.10 That is, what kind of a world, what kind of reality must there
be, so that I would be possible in it with this claim of mine, with
this demand, with my unique and nonverbal experience. Nobody
can save anybody from this. I would like to name one more human
being, who might seem to you closer than Proust, because in the
case of Proust we have a novel and you, it seems, are more inclined
to cinema and theater. There is a deep affinity between him and
Proust with regard to the kind of experience, the kind of suffering
and the problem he was solving in his life by means of art. This is
Antonin Artaud, a French actor and director who is better known
as a theoretician of theater and who flourished beginning in 1922—
the year Proust died. I have a deep feeling (even though I do not
claim any philological or literary precision) that at the moment
when Proust died his soul transmigrated into an entirely different
human being, into Artaud, and all the same things were performed
anew in a different material: that is, exactly the same inner meta-
physical search was carried out. Artaud was a theoretician of the
so-called metaphysical or alchemical theater.
Let me explain the term “alchemical theater.” When speaking
about Proust’s novel during the very first lectures, I said that a text
9 The Russian word лицо that we translated here as “person” means both “indi-
vidual” and “face.” This sentence, then, could also be translated as “A face
could only be mine or yours—there are no faces prescribed by a norm, an
ideal.” See the Introduction.—Trans.
10 For reference, we have added this sentence from the audio recording.—Trans.
is something inside which the being11 of the one who is creating this
text is born. What did alchemy do? It searched for the Philosopher’s
Stone, or philosophical gold, which had to be generated through
certain transmutations. For the alchemists, all of the names of met-
als and all of the chemical operations were in reality symbols of
inner life and the transformation within it; they tried to generate
something in their souls by way of entirely material structures (in
the case of alchemists, by way of chemical constructions), but in our
case we mean something more general—a fundamental relation-
ship to a text. A text is something that can generate the sought-for
Philosopher’s Stone, it is the text that generates it. For Artaud, the
theater was a machine which through its linkages, its organization,
had to generate a particular quality or state of the soul, and that’s
why he called theater “alchemical” or “metaphysical.”
Artaud, who internally had the same experience of and the
same demand on the world as Proust, was at the same time exter-
nally tied to surrealism, to Breton. Artaud took part in the Surrealist
manifestos of the twenties (he was connected with the Surrealists
starting in 1924, sometimes quarreling and sometimes reconciling
with them). The Surrealists also participated in what I called “he-
roic art,” but owing to the social temperament of those concrete
individuals who were creating this movement… This is first of all
André Breton, who always suffered from what one could call the
revolutionary temptation, or the seduction of social transfor-
mations; and the rift between Artaud and Breton developed over
just this issue. It was characteristic of the Surrealists to sort out their
disagreements by means of creating manifestos: they excommuni-
cated each other from the school, that is, from this movement, then
they tumultuously made up, also by way of manifestos which they
signed (at the beginning of the century it was very fashionable to
sign manifestos). Breton, in a manifesto in which Artaud was ex-
11 The translators decided to render личность as “being” (see Mamardashvili’s

comment at the end of the following paragraph). This Russian word is more
ordinarily translated as “identity,” “personality,” or “individual,” and is ety-
mologically connected to лицо, previously discussed.—Trans.
LECTURE 11 113
communicated from Surrealism,12 uses a characteristic turn of

phrase, claiming that Artaud tries to substitute revolution for the
idea of the internal transformation of a human being or human per-
son (the French word être means both being and a separate human
being, and in Russian we can say личность).
Note the expression, “transformation of oneself,” or “inner
transformation of the human being” in contrast to transformation
of a mass social being. Artaud responded to Breton in the following
way (this is the key issue; that point of which I spoke13): “What is
all this revolution in the world to me if I know that I will remain
wounded and miserable in the midst of my own carnage?”14 Here
Artaud said something simple about which we spoke already: there
is no “royal road”; nobody, nothing, no social organization external
to us will save us from the obligation to suffer, love, understand on
one’s own (I spoke of the implacable will of Albertine, or the point
in which we clash).15 Artaud was obsessed with the fact that
thought and understanding must be generated, and this is almost
impossible, accidental. Artaud experienced this as the “meat
12 Breton first denounced Artaud in a pamphlet Au grand jour (1927) by writing

that Artaud only wanted to see in the Revolution a metamorphosis of the in-
ternal conditions of the soul (André Breton, “Au grand jour” in Oeuvres
complètes, Gallimard, Pléiade, T. 1, 1988, p. 929). Breton then excommunicated
Artaud from the Surrealist movement in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism
(1930).—Trans. who thank Céline Anger.
13 The Russian word точка, or point is a technical term for Mamardashvili,
closely connected with his notion of topology; see the Introduction.—Trans.
14 In “A la grande nuit ou le bluff surréaliste” (1927) Artaud responds to Breton’s
pamphlet Au grand jour: “Mais que me fait à moi toute la Révolution du monde
si je sais demeurer éternellement douloureux et misérable au sein de mon pro-
pre charnier?” (Oeuvres complètes, Textes surréalistes, tome 1, volume 2,
Gallimard, 1976, p. 59-66, reprinted in Oeuvres, édition E. Grossman, Gal-
limard, Quarto, 2004, p. 235-241, the quotation comes from page 237.—Trans.
who thank Céline Anger.
15 III (Fug.), 504. See pages 101 and 141 of the Russian edition, where Mamar-
dashvili notes that at a certain “point,” or at a certain level of Marcel’s
relationship with Albertine—the one he also calls точка равноденствия or “the
equinoctial point”—it no longer mattered that Marcel was rich and she was
poor. This is the point where Albertine’s will comes into play, and in this re-
spect she and Marcel are equals. By “will” Mamardashvili means the internal
work performed by Albertine, or that which grew out of what he calls one’s
inner “obscurity.”—Trans.
grinder,”16 which is to say the psychic regime of our life or of our

consciousness cannot produce thought, and the point at which a
thought is produced (I already described this point) possesses such
a property that it comes and goes; and how it comes and goes is
unknown.
Proust captured it [this point at which thought is produced]
through what he called impressions, but immediately, poor fellow,
admitted that the real I or the inner, true I17 which we virtually
stripped of psychological properties by our previous reasoning and
isolated [as] a certain subjectless consciousness… this certain Con-
sciousness, with a capital C, without me, without my psychological
I, is such that I really experience and understand something only
when this Consciousness is present. Recall that when it comes to
impressions it is not a matter of associations but of experience, and
there is no subject who understands something inside an associa-
tion and connects something through the acts of understanding,
producing what we call an association; instead, events take place
there, and we cannot ascribe to this a subject in the sense of classical
psychology.18 For example, in the case of Proust, only when this I—
again I must call it the “I,” although I warned that it is not the I, but
Consciousness—only when it was present did he really live
through the death of the grandmother, a loved being, that is, he re-
ally experienced it, and everything else was knowledge about the fact
that the grandmother died. Proust presents not simply a splendid
description of a striking scene insofar as the literary qualities are
concerned, he also gives a true analysis of how it happens that I can
really experience something; not merely call it by its name—say,
“grandmother died”—but live through the grandmother’s death.19
These are different things.
16 Mamardashvili translates the French charnier as мясорубка, or meat grinder or

mincer. Apart from its literal meaning, miasorubka refers to senseless blood-
shed, or extermination of people. In criminal or political prisoner jargon, to go
through miasorubka is to endure or experience great suffering or repressions.—
Trans.
17 For Mamardashvili подлинный or “true” is a technical term that he traces to
Proust’s expression “vraie vie.” See the beginning of the first lecture.—Trans.
18 This sentence was a parenthetical remark in the middle of the previous sen-
tence. We moved it for the sake of clarity.—Trans.
19 II (S.G.), 756-757.
LECTURE 11 115
Earlier I said that in those phenomena with which we are oc-

cupied, different things are called by one and the same word. The
word is one, but the thing itself, that is, consciousness or experience,
can be there or not: there can be a verbal copy, but not conscious-
ness itself. When is there consciousness itself? When there is the I,
which we do not know, a certain subjectless I, about which Proust
says: what is this being, this I of mine, the one that, when it was
present, I lived through, understood that Grandmother died, I re-
ally experienced that intimate connection called “living through the
death of a loved one”? What is this being? I don’t know anything
about it, I know only one thing: it is intermittent.20 In other words, it
appears; then there is space and time without it, and then it appears
again. The question is, if there is the I (for example, if when it is
present I understand, experience fully or, if you wish, heroically),
then where are the guarantees? What forms the basis for its appear-
ance or disappearance?
This tormented Artaud; thought was such a problem for him.
He meant that according to psychic laws, the organized flow of our
actions, of our consciousness, etc., works in such a mode where the
appearance of ordered thought is quite unlikely; if it appears, I do
not know the laws according to which I can generate and control it
myself in the next moment. For him this was the torment of think-
ing, and theater was a machine that was supposed to be organized
and built in such a way as to generate with greater probability the
states we call thought. (Do I express myself clearly? Not really? I use
simple words, although of course I understand that this is difficult
to grasp. To this I can only reply: you can understand what I am
saying only under the condition—I already introduced it—that you
yourself would experience this; that is, it is possible to understand
what thought is only if you yourself are thinking. Nobody can save
us from this.)
Proust also quite disliked ideological novels—social novels
preaching revolution, transformation of society, for instance—these
are of course ideological novels. Proust and Artaud were simulta-
20 II (S.G.), 756. S.B., 304. Mamardashvili once again provides the Latinate,
“интермитентно [intermitentno],” not available in Russian, along with its Rus-
sian equivalent, прерывисто.—Trans.
neously aware of the mechanism at work behind the image of a rev-

olutionary, and I will express it this way. The entire problem of
what I called the courage of the impossible, or of heroism, consists
in the following: whatever happens, regardless of time or place, I
can. Such an outlook on the world presupposes that a human being
has accepted fundamental solitude, implied here, because exactly
in this, any human being is alone. There is a profound philosophical
truth in the claim that a real human connection is possible only be-
tween solitary people; all others are more disconnected than they
imagine. (What I said earlier is indeed incomprehensible, although
all the words are simple, but play around with this phrase in your
head, and apply it to your experience; only I warn you, I can prove
what I said.)
So Artaud and Proust perfectly understood—and for this rea-
son avoided the temptation of society—that repudiating the idea I
can is a way toward some calming and consolatory illusion. Con-
necting oneself with the transformation of society in such a way
that I will be good if society is transformed means that I cannot live
in the world, because it makes no sense for me alone to be noble. I
can be noble only if everything is noble around me—that’s the emo-
tional force of the revolutionary. Why is he transforming society?
For a simple reason: he is afraid to be alone—to be the one who
could be called a human being. (The mechanism here is the same as
Marcel’s21 when he describes the archetype of his love life and nar-
rates the mother’s kiss; there the structure is simple: I cannot be
alone. I quote the words of Marcel: I cannot be alone.22 He is divest-
ing himself of this feeling by way of the entire novel; he divests
himself of it to be able to be alone.) This is really slavery, to consider
(it is, by the way, very expedient) that I will be good if the entire
world around me is good, or that for me to be good, I have to make
the entire world around me good (I am slightly vulgarizing the
21 Here and at a later point in this lecture Mamardashvili says “Proust” instead
of his usual “the narrator,” or, much less frequently, “Marcel.” This is, no
doubt, why the editors of the Russian volume chose to write “Marcel.” The
translators follow their text. It is clear from this and other lectures that Mamar-
dashvili does not conflate the author and the narrator of the novel—Trans.
22 “Je n’aurais pas voulu y rester seul…” II (S. G.), 787.
LECTURE 11 117
word good; it is a stupid word, but I used it only to make the main
point clear). A fearful human being needs calming and consolation,
and noble social ideals and dreams about a better society are just
this kind of comfort and appeasement—the entire complex of rev-
olutionary activity (in the sense in which I discussed it) is contained
in this, and it is a way to circumvent a simple problem: I am at this
point, and here and now I have to unite with myself, and I unite
with myself only by working out or working through impressions.
When Proust works with impressions, he does not concern
himself with instantaneous sensations, does not seize instants,
delve deeply into his own world, or indulge in the subjective play
of imagination, but searches for reality, understanding that all that
grows out of ourselves forges chains of slavery for us, but these
chains can be shattered if one understands that they grew out of us
and not out of the world. (Before I go further, a warning about the
way we are to understand the place of the problem of impression—
the impression from a bell tower, from the trees, from a madeleine:
by impression we generally mean immediate sensation, immediate
feeling; impressions are instantaneous and somebody could want
to indulge in them). In a letter from 1912, Proust writes, “nothing is
more foreign to me than to search in the immediate sensation”—
and it would seem nothing is more immediate than what we called
impression—for instance, bell towers or a madeleine—“and, moreo-
ver, in its material realization”—the realization by way of pleasure,
because if I seek immediate, instantaneous sensations, then I realize
them materially right away—I take pleasure—“the presence of hap-
piness. A sensation as disinterested”—or selfless—“as possible,”—
we have selfish or mercenary sensations that have to do with our
appetites for food, or sex, etc., and higher sensations: I take pleasure
in the smell of a rose—I can’t gobble it up, after all—“a whiff, a
glimmer of light”—these, it would seem, are selfless sensations—
“if they are present, they are still too much in my power to make
me happy.”23
23 In a letter to Princess Bibesco, where Proust discusses her latest book, Alexandre
asiatique, he writes: “...rien ne m’est plus étranger que de chercher dans la sen-
sation immédiate, à plus forte raison dans la réalisation matérielle, la présence
du bonheur. Une sensation, si désintéressée qu’elle soit, un parfum, une clarté,
I repeat, my sensation cannot be the source we speak about,

because while present, it still depends on us (recall that I said im-
printed independently from us) in the sense that we are using it.
When the scent of a rose is present, it depends on us in the sense
that we take pleasure in it, or a madeleine is present in that I feel,
take pleasure in the taste of a cookie, and the presence of this taste
will never open the gates for recollections that are inherent in this
cookie: its presence stands in the way of these recollections. While
this madeleine is in my power, while I can use it by way of eating
it, I don’t possess happiness. But when one sensation recalls an-
other, when I experience it “between present and past” (once again,
the word “between,” of which I had warned)...24 but not in the
past—the entire novel, it would seem, is about the past, but you see
how dangerous words are, and how important it is to understand
(at first I wanted to say “to understand differently,” and then un-
derstood that one must say simply “to understand,” because one
can only understand while understanding, and everything else is
lack of understanding) that in Proust there are no immediate sensa-
tions and there is no past, that is, not what we ordinarily mean by
the past. Proust wrote this letter to a lady (even though here I ad-
dress myself to the ladies with much license and force them to listen
to complex reasoning, and so I break the rules assumed by Proust
in his letter), to Princess Bibesco, and that is why he remarked that
here it is impossible to explain why not “in the past.”25
So, I can experience happiness when [one sensation recalls an-
other and I experience it] between past and present. Proust
s’ils sont présents sont encore trop en mon pouvoir pour me rendre heureux.”
Lettre à la princesse Bibesco, 1 mai, 1912, Europe: Revue Mensuelle, Centenaire de
Marcel Proust 496-497 (Août-Septembre 1970): 61.—Trans.
24 Here is the full quotation from Proust: “C’est quand ils m’en rappellent un
autre, quand je les goûte entre le présent et le passé (et non pas dans le passé,
impossible à expliquer ici) qu’ils me rendent heureux. Alexandre a raison de
dire que cesser d’espérer c’est le désespoir même. Mais si je ne cesse de désirer,
je n’espère jamais.” Lettre à la princesse Bibesco, 1 mai, 1912, Europe: Revue
Mensuelle, Centenaire de Marcel Proust 496-497 (Août-Septembre 1970): 61-62.—
Trans.
25 Mamardashvili is engaging in mock gallantry, and pointing out that Proust
was involved in complex discussions with women over his own and their lit-
erary creations. In this particular letter Proust writes to Bibesco about her latest
novel.—Trans.
LECTURE 11 119
continues, “If I don’t stop desiring, I also never hope.”26 This is,
once again, a different kind of standing (a heroic stance), as op-
posed to revolutionary demands on the world. Revolutionaries
hope, but in our world—the world of metaphysical courage, or the
courage of the impossible—there is no hope. There is only one
thing: to find or to continuously reproduce in oneself a foundation,
or in Artaud’s case a machine for the eternity of desire, or for the
self-renewal of states in which you understood something, fully ex-
perienced it, were happy or unhappy (if one gets to know
something through unhappiness). This is why all active—that is,
realized—states exhaust themselves, unlike those states for which
Proust searches: infinite states, which renew the cause of their own
emergence. So, we introduce the theme of infinity into the theme of
impressions. We are dealing with infinite or eternal impressions
that repeat, as an incomprehensible—but precious and bewitch-
ing—theme repeats in music. This repetition is the rhythm of the
hidden life of reality, not the reality that we see with our eyes, and
in which desires exhaust themselves through their fulfillment (that
is, they are realized in practice and thus exhausted).27
Proust tried to explain himself to the numerous readers of his
novel (the second volume of Proust’s novel, Within a Budding Grove,
received the Goncourt Prize immediately after the war—at the time
probably the most prestigious in France, although the first volume
was printed by Proust more or less at his own expense with Grasset,
since it was rejected by the Gallimard press with which later Proust
would publish all the time) on account of misunderstandings con-
nected with the topic of impressions or instantaneous sensations, or
because the novel is written in the first person (in other words, eve-
rything is recounted through “I saw,” “I felt”). Everybody
perceived the novel as the author’s exploration of himself as a con-
crete psychological I, as a sort of autobiography, memoir, but this
had nothing in common with Proust’s conception. Just as by impres-
sion he did not mean instantaneous psychological states, so, too, by
26 "Mais si je ne cesse de désirer, je n’espère jamais.” Lettre à la princesse Bibesco,

1 mai, 1912, Europe: Revue Mensuelle, Centenaire de Marcel Proust 496-497 (Août-
Septembre 1970): 61-62.—Trans.
27 There is a break in the audio recording here.
I, as Proust says, he did not mean self-study, rooting around in one-

self, in the repulsive sense.28
He could not have written memoirs because he perfectly un-
derstood that if we write memoirs, that is, recount concrete events
and are too close to these events, and if they are too much in our
power (if, at any rate, the sensations from these events are too much
in our power, that is, we take pleasure in them, use them to our
advantage, or suffer), then we cannot find truth. For if I write mem-
oirs, I am free from a design, from a fictional construction—and
fictional construction is the only thing that can generate truth and
meaning in its space. A powerful composition extracts truth and
meaning as if from a piece of meat, shot through with instantaneous
sensations, pleasures, joy, misery, concrete events that we use prag-
matically—it rips truth and meaning from this piece of meat, which
cannot generate anything by itself according to its mode of psychic
operation. It’s not memoirs that we must write to understand what
is happening with us; we must employ the fictional composition,
structure, or the powerful form of the novel.29
Proust discusses a cathedral as something that generates his-
tory within itself30 (for a cathedral is not an image of something). In
short (I will add this to the problem of heroic art, or to the idea that
artists, painters, shifted to heroism while their societies moved to-
ward slavery), artists understood that a work of art does not
describe something outside of itself; it is not, to use Proust’s words,
a senseless double of real life.31 Then Pascal’s ironic remark about
painters is intelligible: in pictorial art it is customary for some rea-
son to attach importance to the depiction of an insignificant face.32
In other words, the face has no significance, but for some reason
one takes pleasure and attaches significance to its image, that is, a
copy. For Proust, art is not a description of something.
28 S.B., 640. III (T.R.), 1041.

29 III (T.R.), 1040, 1044-45.
30 S.B., 89.
31 III (T.R.), 874, 871; S.B., 418.
32 Here is Pascal’s aphorism: “116. [21.] Quelle vanité que la peinture qui attire
l’admiration par la ressemblance de choses dont on n’admire point les origi-
naux ! (134.)” Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Œuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade, Paris: Gallimard, 1954, 1121.—Trans.
LECTURE 11 121
Painters, then, understood that a work of art (at first I called

this composition, or powerful form) is not a replica or a mirror of
other objects. It generates in itself its own content, including the
content that it generates in a human being who writes, or under-
stands and perceives this work of art because it coincides with
personal experience. An artwork provides a machine for producing
meaning. This machine is detached from the immediacy of our im-
pressions and from practical realizations. As Proust put it, it is as
though I never experience, never live through something, at the in-
stant of the experience. For me to experience an object, I have to
separate from it.33 The flowers of Balbec, that is, the flowers of
youth, Proust experiences as an adult in Paris—in another place
and at a different time. To love one thing in another, and not when
it is immediately with you—such is the path of searching for the
meaning of impressions in Proust. He warns (in clarifying letters)
that he has a mania to understand after something happened and to
love and experience—to recreate in his heart—when the object itself
is no longer present.
Like every creative person, Proust encountered the fact that
his work immediately generated its cultural shadow, or its cultural
equivalent, which eclipsed and distorted the meaning of the work
itself—a strange, tiresome law. This happened to virtually all think-
ers and artists; for instance, in the history of philosophy this
happened to Kant: as soon as he did something, a commonplace
cultural equivalent of his philosophy appeared, which in reality has
nothing in common with Kant’s philosophy. The cultural equiva-
lent was being generated during Kant’s life, just as during Proust’s
lifetime a commonplace duplicate, or equivalent of his novel
emerged.
33 Mamardashvili paraphrases Proust: “…je conserve mieux par le souvenir et

par le cœur ce que j’ai perdu, et je ne fais presque la connaissance d’un objet
que quand je m’en sépare.”— Lettre à Madame Catusse (après le 3 novembre
1917), Europe: Revue Mensuelle, Centenaire de Marcel Proust 496-497 (Août-Sep-
tembre 1970): 67.—Trans.
Proust most frequently connects the French word dislocation34

or rupture, with the word impression.35 All our impressions have a
duration in time. This time can be minimal but the impressions en-
dure nonetheless; that is, an impression passes into a different
moment of its own time—it endures. However, what Proust calls
an impression does not pass into the next moment of time. It pro-
vokes a temporal dislocation. Take the impression of the bell
towers: the inexplicable joy provoked by the view of the bell towers
does not transfer to a subsequent view or impression of the bell
towers—the subsequent appearance of the bell towers has nothing
in common with the state of the impression itself. Let me put it this
way, and in doing so introduce the notion of time: impression is
such a thing in which I who experience the impression differentiate
between I who search for the meaning of an impression or want to
understand it, and I who experience this impression. I repeat, there
is a difference between the experiencing I and the I who tries to un-
derstand; in other words, I do not coincide with my own state. This
is clear, right? If I think about a sensation or I am conscious of it,
then the I is not this sensation: I differentiated myself from myself.
What is time? Here is a simple intuitive definition of time: time
is the difference of an object from itself, and space is the difference
of one object from another. I repeat: space is differentiation of ob-
jects, and time is a difference of an object from itself. Time, then, is
the only thing that differentiates an object from itself; when we take
this notion in its pure form, then the marginal, minimal difference
is the difference of the object from itself. Objects in space can differ
from each other in many properties, but space is their difference
from each other as such. The way they are different from each other
if one does not consider any other properties is their position or
space. They occupy different points in space; they are different ob-
jects.
Time is when I differentiated myself from a state. This differ-
ence does not enter into a subsequent moment of my enduring
34 Mamardashvili provides the French word, its Latinate version used in Russian
in a narrow context (medicine, geology, and military science/tactics), and a
Russian equivalent of the French word.—Trans.
35 II (C.G.), 91-92.
LECTURE 11 123
state—for instance, I continue seeing a bell tower. I as somebody

searching for meaning, or a state insofar as its temporal difference
is concerned, do not coincide with the state of this experience or
impression in the next moment of time; I (or this state) don’t over-
flow into this next moment, and incite what Proust called
dislocation or rupture and generate that interval which is in-be-
tween: between past and present. Such dislocation, I repeat, can be
in-between: some past recollection of an object overlays its present
view and they do not coincide; that is, a past recollection does not
have the same entourage of objects as the present perception and
cannot connect with them, and thereby rips the perception from its
context. Each time, we’re dealing with sensations torn out of con-
text. For instance, when I am walking (in the footsteps of Proust) on
the paved courtyard of the Guermantes’ palace, and the irregularity
of the paving stones revives Venice in my consciousness through
live smells and sounds (because I once tripped over an irregular
stone near St. Mark’s Cathedral), then it is clear that I am walking
not across the Guermantes’ courtyard; that is, the sequence or the
impression of walking is ruptured: the act of walking does not
match itself at the subsequent moment in time; this is dislocation.
Wherever such dislocation is possible, any impression can be that
kind of impression.
Here is an example of a simple dislocation: Albertine says
something to me, and despite, or independently from the content
of what she says (that is, from some rationally organized message
that Albertine addresses to me) I also have an impression (I will call
this thing I have “an impression”) from the quality of her voice or
from her blushes. To clarify what I mean by impressions that as of
yet have no relationship to facts, I will give an example of what
happened to me in my youth (perhaps that is why I came to love
Proust’s novel). As a young man, I didn’t know anything about
what happens in society; I certainly didn’t know how it’s orga-
nized,36 but I felt one thing: the language of a newspaper cannot be
the language of reality. It had a quality—of what?—not of content
36 Mamardashvili was born in 1930, and the truth about the repressions and
purges of the Soviet authorities became widespread public knowledge only
toward the end of his life.—Trans.
(I could not understand anything about the content because I didn’t

know the facts), but the quality of language.37 This was for me an
impression, something that would later repeat as a motif because it
had a magical effect and induced in me a clear awareness that one
cannot express truth with such language, and which, at the same
time, demanded thinking through; that is, had inside itself a future
history or its own time—not the time of my empirical life and of the
chaos of its impressions, but the time of its motif, or the inner time
of the theme that repeats or has its rhythm. Proust got stuck on cer-
tain impressions at a certain time (for example when he was seven),
and these impressions, crushing his real life, repeat through their
connections in his future: the smell of the public toilet is repeated
by the scene of the room of the “woman in pink” (I already dis-
cussed this; I will not repeat myself), then repeated with Swann’s
real experience of love for Odette (I spoke about this, too, but now
I am tying the threads).38
An impression can come not only from the bell tower or the
cookie, it can also be from ideas, or ideological. I already gave an
example: an impression from a newspaper. In various domains we
can experience something called impression, something that pro-
vokes dislocation in us; that is, there is no place for an impression
in the content of a sensation that I continue to experience, and it
gets suspended somewhere. An impression presupposes that I do
not resolve it with anything, I remain with it: I do not try to replace
it with knowledge, I do not try to substitute the suffering provoked
by the death of a loved one with a thought that one could also love
other people, even if somebody tells me that there is no reason to
suffer because I will one day love another, or if I regret some action,
they tell me that the past cannot be undone and so my regret is
senseless. In reality, the entire problem of the organization of our
inner life consists in remaining in a state of non-action; that is, not
to resolve an experience in any way. Our reactions, our reactive
37 Mamardashvili discusses this quality of language in the essay “The ‘Third’

State,” included in this volume.—Trans.
38 Mamardashvili delivered a total of 36 lectures on Proust in 1984-1985, at Tbilisi
State University, and often refers to other talks; this is one of those times.—
Trans.
LECTURE 11 125
states, drive us to resolve it somehow: for instance, someone killed

my friend, and that is why I take revenge, killing the offender, or a
soldier dies in an ambush, and so his comrades feel authorized to
burn down a village; this is supposedly an experience of a friend’s
death.
There are two different things: experiencing the death of a
friend, in which you are immured by what I call the labor of life (let-
ting the mixture simmer for a while), and there is a reactive
resolution, or canceling an experience through action, in which this
experience is supposedly realized. Such an action can be anything:
during a war, for example, an action of revenge, where a human
being will never recognize any meaning, that is, he will never see
either himself or his enemy from both sides—will never understand
fate, but will be a plaything of reactions, of reactive states. If one
amplifies the reactive states that ten, twenty, a hundred subjects
have, then we get fascist hysterics on a societal scale, which we
could have witnessed in the thirties in Germany, and other places.
So, we get large-scale, global social phenomena—from the mecha-
nisms of individual psychology or individual metaphysics. We get
psychology when we have not performed metaphysical work, and
metaphysical work in this case is the work of the labor of life, when
you stand in one place and do not substitute this standing or im-
pression with anything.
Proust says that he always evaded the material realization of
impressions39 because he understood that if one interrupts the
movement of an impression with some other movement, then an
entirely different destiny, and different connections, including the
bonds of slavery, will develop. By the way, interrupted movements
can be pathogenic: they can produce sickness on a social scale, un-
leash global social phenomena; but also in psychic life those things
in which we did not take our time40 with meaning, having merged
39 Lettre à la princesse Bibesco, 1 mai, 1912, Europe: Revue Mensuelle, Centenaire de

Marcel Proust 496-497 (Août-Septembre 1970): 61.
III (T.R.), 871, 877.
40 The Russian verb временить—to tarry, delay, waste time, procrastinate is a less
common, vernacular version of повременить. Here and in the final part of this
lecture we translate it as “take time,” or “linger.”—Trans.
with the object that interrupted a state by having resolved it and

having settled into the depths of our soul, will—by actualizing—
generate illness.
The point that I called the labor of life now acquires other fea-
tures that have to do with an impression, i.e. with a direct stroke of
truth, in which I must stand firm while taking this blow, without
diluting it in anything, and this of course presupposes a certain
courage. We have to imagine this point as though suspended. What
is the labor of life? It is a state of duration where nothing happens,
a certain inner act which has no products; we are as though waiting.
The Greeks called such states “aporia,” a word we know, but might
find its context unexpected because it opens up the etymological
sense of this word, while we are only aware of its logical sense:
aporia is a logically contradictory situation of judgments, of
thoughts. Etymologically, however, aporia for the Greeks refers to
an impassible place. With this impassible place they connected an-
other ingenious word, amechania, which is a perfect equivalent of an
Eastern term, “non-action.” All the heroes of Greek tragedies al-
ways find themselves in this state of amechania when it’s impossible
to find a gear,41 that is, when one can do neither this nor that: eve-
rything has interlinked in such a way that there is truth both here
and there, and both here and there you will end up caught in some
reactive mechanism. There is no other way; one can only wait.
Amechania is a kind of full and completed state, a kind of ma-
turity. For the Greeks, amechania was always connected with acme,
that is, with the period of human maturity or adulthood distinct
41 In various writings, Mamardashvili uses a complicated image to talk about a

mechanism at work in human beings: two heterogeneous ideas or phenomena
become interlinked and create inescapable patterns of behavior or thinking.
For instance, for Saint-Loup some of his most noble ideals become interlinked
with Rachel when he sees her for the first time on a theater stage. Similarly, in
the life of the mind, or soul, certain fundamental connections have already
been made or “fell into gear,” and now it would take tremendous effort and
work on our part to unlink these heterogeneous phenomena. Mamardashvili
uses the noun сцепление, and the verb сцепиться or the phrase впасть в сцеп-
ление to talk about such linkages. The Russian сцепление ordinarily means
“clutch” (as in an automobile’s transmission) or “linkage,” and the verb or the
verbal phrase literally means to fall into gear, to couple, interlink, or interlock,
as in two train cars or two moving parts of a machine. See the Introduction for
further discussion.—Trans.
LECTURE 11 127
from infantilism. Infantilism turned out to be an entire world view

according to which the world consists of sinister and good objects,
where the former are constantly conspiring against him, and the
latter have to pat him on the head, where the question, “On which
side of the Pyrenees is a Russian loved more?” is most essential.42 It
is as if our narrator, Marcel, were to ask, “On which side of the
Combray gate am I loved more?” Instead, clinging to an impres-
sion, he raises a question about meaning, as does Hamlet, who
reacts to everything through amechania, or non-action, but nonethe-
less through inner action, or through the act of searching. They ask,
what does this mean? What is the meaning of this?
It wasn’t accidental that I gave the example of Artaud’s suffer-
ing when I spoke about Proust (Artaud was an absolutely insane
character; he did later lose his mind). Artaud actually experienced,
in his own body, that a thought is accidental; when it is, that is the
greatest miracle, and one has to pay with his body for it, this
thought has to have flesh (I have to incarnate it). A French painter,
Andre Masson, who at some point was connected with the Surreal-
ists (many of their books appeared with his illustrations) called
Artaud “our Hamlet.” And indeed, in French culture this was an
actual living, un-bookish Hamlet. (I have digressed.)
I reminded you what amechania is—that is, a suspended
state—by providing an illustration of it: there is a certain point
where we remain, aporia, an impassible point. In it, we give our-
selves to amechania, i.e. to non-action—that is why I say suspended.
An impression coincides with—and made me stop at—this point
called aporia or amechania. Superimpose on all that follows (for
which I don’t have much time left) this image: there is a suspended
point on which one assembles from different points of space and
time. In such amechania, our character assembles himself in Balbec,
and into this point he assembles himself from the point Paris, from
the point the Guermantes’ courtyard where he is walking on the pave-
42 Mamardashvili is referring to a question raised by a character of Venedikt

Yerofeev’s novel Moscow to the End of the Line: “And the man with the black
moustache said, ‘Here you’ve seen a lot and traveled a lot. Tell us, where do
they value the Russian more, on this or the other side of the Pyrenees?’” (Ev-
anston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1992, 102).—Trans.
ment, and from the point Venice, that is, different points of space
and time are not connected according to their own connections
(those that seem to us to be their own), according to our spatial and
temporal sequence. Instead, they are treated as independent points
connected only according to the law of the suspended point. From
this point I select from different places in space and time—that’s the
tissue [of human life]43. (In mathematics there is a similar image of
such selection of points. There are, for instance, four points. Then a
point is set, and starting from it two random points of the four are
selected. Then we get a new point, which is a composite of these
three, and from it are selected two more, etc. This is not a necessary
image, I am simply saying that such things are also worked out in
the mathematical imagination, elaborated by mathematicians.)
This is the experience of a human being who felt firsthand
what happens in reality, what happens according to the laws of
such an assemblage: movement not in real space and time, but in
space and time built in such a way that on a suspended point (if
you paused in it) are selected and layered [points] from different,
heterogenous points, including those of the past (although this is
not necessary, for these points can be simultaneous). This tissue—
or composition of our psychic life—is delicate; in effect, nothing
guarantees that it should last, that it should be at all. This was Ar-
taud’s experience: he knew that one could only think having
“suspended oneself” and selecting from different points, but that
there is no foundation and guarantee for this. The place onto which,
or from which, one selects comes and goes in the same way as the
intermittent or periodic I in Proust (as there is a periodic fever).
Where does this I come from, and where does it go? Proust
answered the question of where it goes in a manner at once complex
and simple. He answered through the topic of reminiscent impres-
sions, or impressions organized as involuntary or surfacing
recollections. In the suspended point, or if I have paused, have sus-
pended my experience in amechania, I can sort out the dislocation
(the displacement, the rupture) I experienced; I can enter the rup-
43 In Lecture 8, Mamardashvili develops the idea of a delicate tissue or tissue of

human life, which includes history, ethics, and the human soul. If the tissue is
destroyed, truth is unattainable.
LECTURE 11 129
ture created by dislocation, the interval of rupture, having been de-

layed there by labor. There, the involuntary recollections help me.
In the Russian language, there is no exact translation of the French
word which is simultaneously a religious notion and a religious
symbol: grâce, God’s grace. In that place where we made the effort
and where there are no foundations, sometimes grâce comes to our
aid—“divine grace,” but Proust would say: grâce of involuntary re-
membrances.44
Proust hesitated between two titles for his novel. (This is im-
portant for grâce, because, as I said, one does not know where the
discontinuous I comes from and where it goes; we cannot seize it,
make it our own property, and assume that from now on it will be
there. Something else in the world must provide for its emergence.
We need to exert ourselves for this, that is, we must suspend our-
selves in enduring experience, in non-action or amechania.) He chose
the title we know, In Search of Lost Time, and I will briefly explain
what “lost time” means.
Time past, the problem of our lecture course, is time taken in
amechania; that is, the time of the experience that is held back, en-
dures, or is suspended. Lost time is that in which one did not linger.
For example, Hamlet found out who killed his father—by the way,
it is a shadow45 that told him, and how can one believe a shadow
when one cannot even believe people, because people are shadows
of themselves, of their own opinions or the opinions of society, but
he believed a shadow—and whipped out his sword and stabbed;
these actions in Proust’s terminology are lost time. He does not say
exactly this, but that’s the meaning. That is, time not taken is lost
time. The time in which one lingered also passes into the past, can
be forgotten and can enter some objects, but it has a chance to re-
store itself in memory, to surface involuntarily, because we worked
on it, that is, took our time. Time not taken ends in hell, outside of,
44 See letter to René Blum quoted above. Lettre à René Blum, décembre, 1913,
Europe: Revue Mensuelle, Centenaire de Marcel Proust 496-497 (Août-Septembre
1970): 64–65.—Trans.
45 Mamardashvili deliberately uses the word тень or “shadow,” when he could
use the word призрак, ghost; we opted to keep the more eccentric term.—
Trans.
or beyond being [за-бытием]. Hell is forgetting [забытие] or be-

yond being [за-бытие] (to forget or to be outside of being); you can
place the emphasis wherever you want—these notions are con-
nected.46
Having explained the meaning of “lost time,” I am returning
to the idea that Proust hesitated and chose the title In Search of Lost
Time, although another title attracted him: he wanted to call his
book The Intermittences of the Heart. In the end, only one chapter in
one part of the novel is called “The Intermittences of the Heart” or
The Discontinuities of the Heart.47 The discontinuities of the heart
here can be substituted with the discontinuities of being, of the I, or
the intermittences of the I, of being, of the heart. It is necessary to
have a certain separation or estrangement from ourselves in time,
which, in fact, is time (that is, estrangement from ourselves is time
in pure form), or the time of amechania, the time of non-action, the
time of aporia, or of an impassible place, and so Proust writes in a
letter that estrangement from oneself is the only path to know
something in ourselves and in others, and it creates a certain inter-
val—the in-between: between the past and the present there is a
certain cavernous in-between created, opened, or cleared by disloca-
tion.
We need to take one more step: what can hold us in this in-
between? Proust writes, “I chose a general title, In Search of Lost Time.
This book is extremely real, but in some way propped up, to imitate
involuntary memory (which to my mind, although Bergson48
doesn’t make this distinction, is the only true, because voluntary,
memory,49 memory of the mind and the eyes gives us only impre-
cise facsimiles of the past, which no more resemble reality than
paintings of bad artists resemble spring) by grace, a rhizome50 of
46 Mamardashvili is making use of the fact that the root of the Russian word за-
быть (to forget) is the verb to be, and the prefix за- could mean “beyond.”—
Trans.
47 II (S.G.), 751, Les intermittences du coeur.
48 I was asked in relation to Proust about Bergson.—Mamardashvili’s comment.
49 Voluntary memory is organized by our volitional and consciously controlled
efforts, let’s say, I am recalling something, reconstituting the facts, etc.—
Mamardashvili’s comment.
50 Proust uses the word “peduncle” here, which Mamardashvili interprets as rhi-
zome (корневище).—Trans.
LECTURE 11 131
recollections.”51 “Extremely real” is a characteristic turn of phrase;

right away, our immediate perception finds words which seem un-
necessary, but if you understand this perception, then the words
fall into place. This book is about reality disguised by our everyday
reality; let’s say it is about real reality. In the parenthesis follows a
somewhat complex phrase, but I am not responsible for this; in this
case, it is complex because in his letters Proust could afford such a
poorly articulated phrase (in the novel he permitted himself long
phrases, but they have precise, fantastic articulation—you glide
down such phrases as on a well-ordered wave). Note that he
doesn’t mean the description of spring by bad or even good paint-
ers, but has in mind spring itself; to give spring itself, or to give the
recollected event itself—not its image but itself—in its own person,
in its own existence, personally, as the phenomenologists in the
20th century put it.52 The end of the phrase, on account of which I
quoted the entire passage, follows the parenthesis.
Let’s omit the parenthesis, which was also useful, and read
without the interruption: “This book is extremely real, but in some
way supported, to imitate involuntary memory, by grace,” (grâce or
blessing, translation is tricky) “a rhizome of recollections.” That is,
51 Mamardashvili interrupts this quotation with numerous remarks. For the sake
of clarity the translators decided to include the entire quotation and move
some of Mamardashvili’s comments to footnotes (see the previous two foot-
notes), and prove the rest of his remarks after the quotation. Here is the original
quotation from a letter by Proust: “J’ai pris un titre général: A la Recherche du
Temps Perdu…. C’est un livre extrêmement réel, mais supporté en quelque
sorte, pour imiter la mémoire involontaire [qui selon moi, bien que Bergson ne
fasse pas cette distinction, est la seule vraie, la mémoire volontaire, la mémoire
d’intelligence et des yeux ne nous rendent du passé que de fac-similés
inexactes qui ne lui ressemblent pas plus que les tableaux des mauvais peintres
ne ressemblent au printemps etc…] …par une grâce, un pédoncule de réminis-
cences” (Lettre à René Blum, décembre, 1913, Europe: Revue Mensuelle,
Centenaire de Marcel Proust 496-497 (Août-Septembre 1970): 64–65).—Trans.
52 Mamardashvili is probably referring to Husserl’s principle of principles, or the
idea that “every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cog-
nition, that everything originarily (so to speak in its ‘personal’ actuality [seiner
leibhaften Wirklichkeit]) offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as
what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is pre-
sented there.” Ideas I Sec 24 (Tr. Fred Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1982, 44). In a more recent translation Husserl’s parenthetical remark is ren-
dered “so to speak, in its actuality in person” (Tr. Daniel O. Dahlstrom.
Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014, 43).—Trans.
by reminiscence. Thus, the deposited root of the reminiscences can

by way of grace, having sent an involuntary recollection, connect
that which has no guaranteed foundations for its connection, or no
mechanisms that run smoothly and work by themselves, on which
one could rely while turning away, or taking a nap. In the 20th cen-
tury, or, rather, in our country, we too continue sleeping and think
that all sorts of miracles will appear on silver flying saucers. This is
also a kind of social dream; by our ritual dances—akin to those in-
tended to summon rain—we sometimes attempt to summon an
abundance of food that will then rain down upon us.
So we have an internal root… Imagine a suspended point and
superimpose it on an image of a tree which has a root (this is an
ancient symbol; people were not stupid): those laws of psychic life
which we assert following Proust and Proust’s experience, declare
that for the suspended place from which a selection of randomly
taken points occurs—such points can be my point here, and the
point of a so-called savage…53
53 At this point the recording of this lecture breaks off.—Trans.

What Belongs to the Author1
…l’adolescence est le seul temps où l’on ait appris quelque chose.

Proust2
To begin, I must confess: if I recognized3 anything at all

The consciousness
worthy of this name, then it was only in my youth and of the first two—
only illuminated by—so weak and flickering!—an ex- Georgia and
France—constantly
perience that the French call “impossible love.” There run up against it
is a time to learn, and a time to read what one has
learned.4
Songs, names, faces, stories, legends, jousts, clang-
The key impres-
ing of swords—all flew to the circle of light (Tbilisi in sions of being that
the envelope of light, intoxicating to the eye,5 inimitable belong exclusively
to youth; harmony,
light, cast by the setting sun), flocked to the Georgian justice, love, faith-
fulness—[spiritual]
Table6, around which we feast. Legends, shared outlines
knowledge, historical memory (we, the Georgian com-
munity, unify this memory), performed daily around
the Table. Every event turns into a feast, a banquet, re-
joicing.
1 This is one of the relatively few texts that Mamardashvili com-

posed in written form, rather than it being transcribed from a
recorded lecture. He intended to use it in a book on Proust. It
consists of typed text and multiple marginal comments that feel
more like aides memoires for later revisions and do not always
illustrate a clear point. See the Introduction for more infor-
mation. Psikhologicheskaia topologiia puti (M. Prust. “V poiskakh
utrachennogo vremeni) [The Psychological Topology of a Path (M.
Proust, In Search of Lost Time)]. Мoscow: Merab Mamardashvili
Foundation, 2014, 1040-1044.—Trans.
2 I (J.F.), 730.
3 The Russian word узнать means both “get to know,” and “rec-
ognize.” Its root is the verb “to know” (знать).—Trans.
4 Mamardashvili mimics Ecc. 3 : 5.—Trans.
5 Mamardashvili is paraphrasing Osip Mandelstam: “And the
feminine chain of cursive letters,/intoxicating to the eye in the
envelope of light…” from “He still remembers my worn-out
shoes…” (Voronezh, 7-11 February 1937).—Trans.
6 The translators follow Mamardashvili in capitalizing “Table,”
reflecting his attempt to imbue the “Georgian Table” with a sac-
ramental quality.—Trans.
133
Ancestral clans and clans of friends. Our salon and

What a knight can
and cannot do aristocracy are the Table and the feast. And our dandies.
Run through by
rivers, like hot sil- And our signals. Secular rituals and figures. And every-
ver thing flew to the Table.
But where is truth? What does this living power of
antiquity mean, its spirit of enthusiasm? And why can’t
I? And why do I feel neither the festivity nor the joy of
life, so elegantly and artistically staged, and why can’t I
How do I reconcile
this with what I see be like them? Why? And how envious I was, how I
with my own eyes, wanted to be received at the Georgian hearth, to be like
with the sensation
of my conscious- them. We belong to each other, and this will never hap-
ness?
pen. I am Georgian, and I will never be Georgian.
Intellectual “impos- But—I’m also French, and will never be French. I
sible love” feel that this is so, but too late, I got off on the wrong
It spun [in my foot. What a drag, what dreariness and nostalgia. What
head] like a sad and
proud Khorumi
if the philosopher is always a spy? “The citizen of an
[Georgian war unknown country” and its spy, a witness in this coun-
dance]
try.7
The primordial im- I read Montaigne—one more impossible love, got
age of lies, of death, off on the wrong foot. I will never be French. Mon-
of the void, and the
hopelessness of all taigne, Montesquieu, Stendhal, Rousseau—my
liberty and all
beauty
adolescent loves, transparent and ineffable crystals.
Sweet-melancholy… It can only be expressed in French:
“the impossible love.”
And having lived more than half of my life, having
returned, and—apart from “the impossible love” for
Georgia and France, and one more, this time personal,
male—having caught the sublime Proust virus, I de-
cided to pour it all out in a book. There is a time to see,
and a time to know what I saw. Something in it grabs
the reader and shows the way through the labyrinth of
7 The phrase “le citoyen d’une patrie inconnue” is from III (Pr.),
257. Mamardashvili elaborates on this idea in his sixth lecture
on Proust, included in this volume. See introduction for de-
tails.—Trans.
WHAT BELONGS TO THE AUTHOR 135
experience, past stubborn apparitions8, and something

can pass by and be uninteresting. But in this latter case,
because everyone reads themselves, they simply need
an other book.9 The salutation “Dear Reader” is quite
hypocritical. I have read in myself—this is all that I can
say. I have read myself in a stranger’s soul (akin to read-
Here it is meaning-
ing out loud and making comments); I am what I learn, less to talk about
influences or bor-
what I am able to read (I can merely repeat Pascal’s rowings
words).10 Or I am a notebook which I reread with curi-
osity, with Proust’s help. I continue to experiment and
experience11 with a book as an instrument.
As for Proust, as a human being, the way I see him,
I can only do him justice with Spender’s poem.12 I
couldn’t have said it better myself.
The epic gestures of the Table, the world into
The case of an un-
which we are transported, and where—while at the Ta- imaginative writer
who is also envis-
ble—we live, transfigured by the ritual, mysterium, and aged by Proust
epos of the (symbolic) Table. There is elation, elevation,
and joy of transfiguration facing the gestures and Flung in the face of
sounds that officiate. It is not a tragedy, even though all the triumphant
enemy
the objects are tragic. The epos of “gesture-things,” The void, lies, and
hypocrisy
sounds, “pure objects,”13 that have nothing to do with Is it living, and if
history. Do they really have duration, and if so, how yes, how?
8 The editors freely translate Mamardashvili’s original phrase:

“ghosts that got stuck in the eyes.”—Trans.
9 III (T.R.), 1033.
10 “It is not in Montaigne but within myself that I find all that I see
there.” “Ce n’est pas dans Montaigne mais dans moi, que je
trouve tout ce que j’y vois.” Pascal B. Œuvres complètes. Paris:
Gallimard, 1954, p. 1104.—Trans.
11 The Russian опыт resembles the French, where expérience can
mean both experience and experiment; here, Mamardashvili ap-
pears to draw on both meanings.—Trans.
12 “I think continually of those who were truly great.
…
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.”
Stephen Spender. “The Truly Great,” Collected Poems 1928-1953.
London: Faber & Faber, 1955.
13 “La forme pure,” see J.S., 627-629, I (J.F.), 579.
and in what? (As in a dream—in the epic dream called

Georgia.) The Table is a religious phenomenon, or it has
that from which (religio)14 religious and almost mystical
Religio of our Table
Frozen in an eternal
feelings emerge. We partake in “the body and the
gesture blood” of our memory,15 of Georgia.16
Delirious and shaggy, tangled consciousness,
pierced by the soaring bird of the song: but where are
we? who are we? I could never be Georgian—as in
Proust: I could never be a writer, could never write (my
head is empty, and I am lazy).17
***
I understood the meaning of the Georgian tragedy.

If you are heavy, serious—you are still unfree. Trium-
phant flight of a bird—against all odds. It is not because
the goat and the tree put up a fight that they survived.18
The vortex is so disproportionate that it is ridiculous.
And a Georgian cannot stand to be ridiculous. A mira-
cle is beyond despair, in a different, new life. Tragische
Heiterkeit.19 Or else—a comedy of an impossible trag-
14 In Latin, to connect or bind (see “On Civil Society” where

Mamardashvili writes: “I repeat, religio is the primary bond. It is
simultaneously religion and religio as connection”).—Trans.
15 “…as if our true nature were outside of time, made to taste the
eternal….” “…comme si notre vraie nature était hors du temps,
faite pour goûter l’éternel….” J.S., 401-402; see also III (T.R.),
871.—Trans.
16 At this point, Mamardashvili’s typewritten text ends. The last
few paragraphs are taken from handwritten notes, which he
very likely meant to expand at a later date. The editors rely on
the reconstruction of these paragraphs from the Russian edition.
Or interpreted it beyond references identified in the footnotes.—
Trans.
17 I (Sw.), 178, I (J.F.), 580.
18 This may be a reference to stories from Aesop and Krylov,
where strong or domesticated objects break or die, while weak
or wild ones bend and endure, or it could be a reference to a
Georgian folktale about a goat devoured by a wolf that refer-
ences essentially the first law of thermodynamics, but
Mamardashvili’s intentions are not clear.—Trans.
19 “Tragi-comedy.”—Trans.
WHAT BELONGS TO THE AUTHOR 137
edy. The world is beautiful, and it is not my seriousness

that will save it. Tenaciousness is, actually, inattentive.
But philosophy must reconstruct that which is, and jus-
tify it.20 Above any claims and recriminations. I have to Is it possible in
life?—therefore—
occupy myself with myself, attentive and courageous in this is not it
the face of the impossible. Suicide is a problem
***
Noisy fragment of humanity at the “dance of the

skulls” as in the Reims cathedral.21 One can even dis-
cern the outlines of our hero (by description).
A short flight to the Sun, about which Spender
speaks. Last words should contain “the Last Judge-
ment” and “Hell.” If we can rise from the dead, it is only
in this life. A new life, a new world is here. Everything
is on this side. Nothing will save us from pain and suf-
fering, and from the irremediable. And nothing will kill
the joy, dissolve its sweet-melancholy and proud crys-
talline ringing note. Joy does not equal “joy of art,” of
beautiful things. An inexplicable mystery of time, of be-
ing and vocation to courage, generosity, compassion
and joy, of “joyful horror.” Versus22 all those who want
the mechanisms of happiness and the good. Life is full of
20 “In the end, all my philosophy comes back, as does all true phi-
losophy, to justify, to reconstruct that which is.” “Au fond, toute
ma philosophie revient, comme toute philosophie vraie, à justi-
fier, à reconstruire ce qui est.” S.B., 309.
21 The following passage, taken from Mamardashvili’s notes for
the lectures on Proust (p. 939), associates the party thrown by
the Princess de Guermantes (T.R.) with the Dance of Death,
danse macabre: “We have a noisy bit of humanity, like at a ‘dance
of skulls’, and there we have recognized our author, the writer,
the intellectual, like in the crowd of sculptured figures on the
cathedral at Reims.” In preparatory notes for lectures 39 and 40
(of the Russian edition), Mamardashvili discusses Francois Vil-
lon who makes the same association in La balade des pendus.—
Trans.
III (T.R.), 880; III (T.R.), 1033.
22 Originally in Latin.—Trans.
paradoxes and aporias. Forces of life destroy life. The

human being is tragicomic.23 A chance, an encounter—
through grace. God forbid, according to rank. Hence
“the Last Judgement,” since everything is on this side,
and everything is in truth. I tried my best. And… o broth-
ers, brothers!24
23 In the preparatory materials Mamardashvili added this phrase:

“…and the world is a child who plays and one has no choice but
to smile a noncommittal, insouciant smile.” See preparatory
notes for lectures 39 and 40, p. 939, of the Russian edition. The
reference to the child who plays likely comes from Heraclitus
(DK 52): “Time is a child who plays, moving the pieces around:
the child is a royal being” (our translation; compare Charles
Kahn’s translation in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 228).—Trans.
24 Allusion to the opening lines of Ballade des pendus by François
Villon. Mamardashvili intended to use this poem and the
Spender lines cited above as epigraphs for his book. See the fac-
simile reproduced in the Russian edition of the Lectures on
Proust, p. 1201-1203.—Trans.
Авторское—
Original Facsimile of “What Belongs to the
Author”
139
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Consciousness and Civilization1
My topic has multiple meanings, calls up a wealth of associations,

and is very general, but for me it is something concrete and con-
nected with a vivid feeling about the current situation which pains
and worries me, and in which I distinguish terrifying features of a
deep structure which may prove irreversible. This simultaneously
horrifies me and elicits a desire—apart from laughing or crying—
to think, to understand, to see a general law behind it. It is with a
mixed feeling of horror and fascination that I want to express my
ideas.
To set the tone for these reflections, one can characterize their
main thrust in the following way. It is a feeling that among the mul-
titude of notorious 20th-century catastrophes, which still threaten
us, the main one, and the one most often concealed from the eyes
of reason, is the anthropological catastrophe. It is not expressed in
such colorful, dazzling events as an explosion of a supernova or a
collision with an asteroid, or as the dramatic depletion of the
Earth’s natural resources or excessive population growth, or even
as an ecological or nuclear tragedy “brighter than a thousand
suns.”2 I have in mind an event that happens to a human being and
is connected with civilization in the sense that something vital can
be irreversibly broken in a human being when the civilizational
foundations of life and interaction are destroyed or simply absent.
This event is running at full throttle.
Civilization, history as the “second universe,” (in Vernad-
sky’s terminology the “noosphere”) is a delicate flower. In the 20th
3
1 Presented at the III All-Union School on the Problem of Consciousness, Ba-

tumi, 1984. First published in Priroda 11 (1988): 57-65. The translators follow
the version that appeared in Soznanie i tsivilizatsiia [Consciousness and Civili-
zation]. Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2019, 5-29.
An English translation of this essay was previously published in The Russian
Experience: Ideas in History. Edited by N. Maslova and T. Pleshakova. Com-
mack, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 1995, 1-15. That translation sometimes
deviates from the authoritative Russian original we used.—Trans.
2 A reference to Robert Jungk’s 1956 book on the Manhattan Project.—Trans.
3 Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–1945) was an earth scientist, specializing in geo-
chemistry and radiogeology.—Trans.
145
century it is absolutely obvious that its often invisible connections,

its subtle architectonics, cracked and tore or, just the opposite,
clogged. I find it interesting that those cracks or any slight fracture
in the civilizational foundations of life that also thoroughly damage
the human element, the human material of life—in its extreme
form, this is an anthropological catastrophe which might be a pro-
totype of any catastrophe—are a negative expression of the
immutable and positive existence of ontological laws that organize
human consciousness and existence. It’s as though a human being
cannot withstand the pressure of sustaining them. To everyone ac-
cording to his deeds and beliefs.4
When I read Asimov’s list of the kinds of global catastrophes
and find among them a possible encounter between the Earth and
an all-consuming macrocosmic black hole, I can’t help thinking that
such a hole already exists in a rather prosaic, familiar sense! We
earthlings quite often dive and disappear into it, and everything
that happens to us behind its screen becomes unattainable to others
and ourselves; if there is contact, both parties are annihilated, as
physics predicts happens in contact with a black hole. We do not
participate, we are taken out of the all-connection of living con-
sciousness, from the currents and propagation of life. “A deficiency
in understanding,” Chaadaev would say.
I’ll use the metaphors of “informational inaccessibility,” “dis-
appearance,” “annihilation behind the screen,” “deficiency,” to
clarify my thoughts. But first let’s read a poem by Gottfried Benn5
in my word-for-word translation. It is interesting because the poet’s
insight comes from his personal, inner experience of a certain social
form—the totalitarian Nazi state—an experience which an external,
remote observer cannot in principle have, and to whom its mani-
festations are mysterious. Here is the fate of that inner knowledge
4 Romans 2:6, Matthew 9:29.—Trans.

5 Gottfried Benn (1886–1956) was a German poet, essayist, and physician.—
Trans.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND CIVILIZATION 147
and of its bearer—a human being—in a poem which not acci-

dentally is called “The Whole:”6
One part was drunk, the other was in tears,

Some hours radiant with light, and others steeped in darkness,
Some—all heart, and others dreadfully
Tempest tossed. Which tempests? Whose?
Unhappy always, seldom accompanied,

Mostly concealed, boiling within,
And streams burst out, increasing, and everything
External gathered in the belly.
Someone looked at you sternly, and another gently,

One saw what you built, another what you destroyed.
But they saw everything by halves
For only you possess the whole.
At first it seemed the goal is not far off,

And faith will be bright and clear.
But then what was meant to be presented itself
6 The English version is a translation of Mamardashvili’s Russian translation

from the original German.—Trans.
“Das Ganze” (1936)
Im Taumel war ein Teil, ein Teil in Tränen,
in manchen Stunden war ein Schein und mehr,
in diesen Jahren war das Herz, in jenen
waren die Stürme—wessen Stürme—wer?
Niemals im Glücke, selten mit Begleiter,
meistens verschleiert, da es tief geschah,
und alle Ströme liefen wachsend weiter
und alles Außen ward nur innen nah.
Der sah dich hart, der andre sah dich milder,
der wie es ordnet, der wie es zerstört,
doch was sie sahn, das waren halbe Bilder,
da dir das Ganze nur allein gehört.
Im Anfang war es heller, was du wolltest
und zielte vor und war dem Glauben nah,
doch als du dann erblicktest, was du solltest,
was auf das Ganze steinern niedersah,
da war es kaum ein Glanz und kaum ein Feuer,
in dem dein Blick, der letzte, sich verfing:
ein nacktes Haupt, in Blut, ein Ungeheuer,
an dessen Wimper eine Träne hing.
A stony eye gazing from the whole:
There’s neither radiance nor luster on the outside

To arrest your final glance—
Naked-headed vermin in a bloody puddle,
Its eyelashes beaded with a tear.
The concluding image of the poem is clear to us in the USSR,

as are its inner linkages winding around the idea of a “whole” or,
more exactly, a sensation of partaking in a “whole” which we expe-
rience as a special and familiar exalted mindset and possession of a
certain mystical essence of events, a universal mystery. This is a
sign of what I call inner knowledge of a strange whole, inaccessible
in principle to a distant external observer, but in which even a hu-
man being, its bearer, is inaccessible to themself. That’s exactly the
point. For by nature, not all of a human being is in a human being;
they travel to themself from afar,7 from a multi-dimensional and
expansive space, and in this case they never make it. No thought
takes root, everything flies past. What appears as “thought” in the
mind and feelings is extraneous to reality, outside of the actual sit-
uation and a human being’s state and condition, and similar to a
shadow or a dream.
A thought, however, by definition, is all-communicable; it ex-
ists at multiple points between which the current of life circulates,
also between the mind and itself. At these points—in this all-con-
nection of the eternal present or the eternally new—people jointly
reconstitute and realize their interpenetrating existences, their or-
ganically developed common reality. Indeed, they can think it in
those circumstances when thinking does not lead them to doubt
their own existence. And vice versa—they apodictically exist, af-
firm themselves in what they think—through doubt and the ability
to enrich themselves with what is strange, external, other—in the
all-connection of their continuous living reconstitution. We can
graft the world only on the “I think, I am” limb; only having left
aside the haze of compulsions and substitutions can I have a free
thought-action, choice, decision and fulfill myself. Here we clearly
7 There is an echo of Heraclitus’ paradoxical “I went in search of myself” (DK

101).—Trans.
are at a loss. “The graft of a thought does not take” is, of course,
already a thought, but it is a poet’s thought. The description reveals
a naked soul, scattered fragments of the unborn thrown around like
leaves in a storm. In the continuity of the world this is a yawning
deficiency, a black hole of nothingness, of nonbeing, where there
are only shapeless half-beings and their indistinct squeaks.
These inner connections of the poem will show up in what fol-
lows.
The “DKK”8 Principle

I will focus on a certain principle which allows us to grasp, on the
one hand, describable or normal situations (they don’t have the
mysticism of the “whole” that appears in the poem, although they
are wholes) and, on the other hand, indescribable or peculiar situa-
tions. The two types of situations are related or mirror each other.
They have the same reflexive (analytical) surface (to use an analogy
with the notion “event horizon” in astrophysics). Everything that
happens in the situations can be expressed on their surface using
the same language: the same content and syntax of object denomi-
nations and signs (designations). The resulting difficulty is that the
second type of situations is always a possible companion or an iso-
form of the first one. Because everything happens within a system,
within a whole, that is made a system by the inner products of the
continuous experimental interaction with the world of the beings
who feel, desire, and are conscious. Those products do not exist in
the language separately (or distinctly); they cannot be expressed
and formalized, but only show themselves, because they are defined
by a passing but always actual effect of the whole (or by the opera-
tion of the factor of the whole), of the connectivity of the life of
consciousness. In both cases the inner exists under the analytical
surface, but it might lack force, and in the second case it degenerates
into a system of self-imitation and successive sign transformations
8 In the original, Mamardashvili calls this section the “The Principle of the Three
Ks,” where the first K refers to Renatus Cartesius/Descartes. Cartesius would
be spelled with a K in Russian. We made the change for clarity and to avoid
unnecessary associations with three Ks for an English-speaking reader.—
Trans.
of the topos of consciousness. The language, although the same, is

dead: “Dead words smell rotten,” as Gumilev wrote.9
The indescribable situations (that do not lend themselves to
description) could also be called the situations of fundamental in-
determinacy. When this quality is isolated and realized in pure
form, they are the “black hole” where entire nations and vast areas
of human life could end up.
I will call the principle that organizes the two types of situa-
tions the DKK Principle: Descartes, Kant, and Kafka. The D
(Descartes) of the Principle: a certain elementary and immediately
evident being—“I am”—takes place in the world. While casting
doubt on everything else, it reveals a certain dependence of every-
thing that happens in the world (including in knowledge) on a
human being’s actions and is also a starting point of absolute cer-
tainty and evidence of any thinkable knowing. In that sense, a
human—a being capable of saying “I think, I exist, I can”—is the
possibility of and the condition for a world that they can under-
stand, in which they can act in a human fashion, know and be
responsible for something. The world has been created (in the sense
of its law of coming to be) and now everything depends on you. For
the world is created in a way that enables your ability regardless of
the visible counter-necessities of nature, the spontaneous natural
impulses and circumstances.
It is easy to recognize here the cogito ergo sum—I think, there-
fore I am—principle that I presented in a different form, more
faithful to its actual meaning.10 If the D principle is not actualized
or established anew every time, then everything is inevitably filled
with nihilism that could be defined briefly as the principle “only
not-I can”: everyone else is able—other people, God, circumstances,
9 The final line of the poem “Word” (1919). Nikolai Gumilev (1886–1921) was a
Russian poet and literary figure who cofounded the Acmeist Movement,
which included Anna Akhmatova to whom he was also married. Arrested and
executed by Soviet security forces.—Trans.
10 Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am” formulation is misleading because
it makes one think that existence is logically derived from the act of thinking.
As Mamardashvili argues, especially in his lectures on Descartes, a more accu-
rate formulation of this principle has the form “I think, I am”—the form that
Descartes uses, though inconsistently.—Trans.
natural necessities, etc. Here, the possible is connected to the pre-

supposition of a certain self-acting mechanism that works for me (a
mechanism of happiness, of social and moral well-being, Provi-
dence, etc.). But the cogito principle maintains that what is possible
can be realized only by me, subject to my own work and spiritual
labor for my liberation and development (which is the most diffi-
cult thing in the world). Only in this way can the soul receive and
germinate the “highest” seed and rise above itself and above cir-
cumstances by virtue of which everything that happens turns out
not to be irreversible, not final, not prescribed entirely and com-
pletely. In other words, not hopeless. There is always a place for me
and my action in the world that is eternally becoming, if I am pre-
pared to begin anew, from myself who became.
The first K (Kant) of the Principle: the structure of the world
contains special intelligible (comprehensible) objects (dimensions)
that are directly, experientially ascertained, although further indi-
visible images of a whole—designs, or projects for development.
The strength of that principle is that it indicates the conditions un-
der which a spatially and temporally finite being (for instance, a
human being) can meaningfully perform acts of understanding,
moral acts and evaluations, or derive satisfaction from inquiry.
Otherwise, nothing would have meaning: ahead of us (and also be-
hind us) is infinity. This means that the conditions under which
these acts can have a meaning at all—always a discrete and local
meaning—are realized in the world. That is, we allow that the
world could have been such that they would become meaningless.
Only for a finite being does it makes sense to perform a moral
action or judgement, to realize a searching desire. Questions about
the meaningfulness of these actions fall away and disappear, and
are thus resolved, for an infinite and omnipotent being. But not
even a finite being can always can say “good” or “bad,” “beautiful”
or “ugly,” “true” or “false,” even if there are suitable words. For
instance, if one animal eats another, we cannot say with absolute
certainty whether it is good or evil, just or unjust. The same is true
for ritual human sacrifice. When a human being today makes a
judgement, one should not forget that they are covertly presuppos-
ing that the conditions that give meaning to our claim to
understand, make moral judgements are met. This is why the Kant
portion of the Principle states: this is meaningful because in the or-
ganization of the world there are certain comprehensible objects
that guarantee this right and meaningfulness.
Finally, the second K (Kafka) of the Principle: given the same
external signs, object denominations, and observability of their nat-
ural referents (the corresponding objects), what is established by
the first two principles is not fulfilled. This is a degenerate variant
or regressive way of fulfilling the DKK Principle: the “zombie” sit-
uations that are quite human-like but, in reality, otherworldly,
merely imitating what in fact is dead. Their product is not Homo
sapiens, i.e. the one who knows good and evil, but Homo strange,
Homo indescribable.
From the viewpoint of the general meaning of the DKK Prin-
ciple, the entire problem of human existence is that a thing must be
converted over and over again into a situation that lends itself to
meaningful judgement and resolution (for example, in terms of eth-
ics and personal dignity), into a situation of freedom, or refusal of
freedom as one of its own possibilities. Morality is not a triumph of
a certain morality (for instance, “a good society”, “a wonderful in-
stitution”, or “a perfect human being”) compared with its opposite
but rather the creation and ability to reproduce a situation to which
moral terminology could be applied, and which could be described
uniquely and completely on their (and only their) basis.
It follows that there are also certain primary acts or acts of in-
cluding the world11 (absolutes) that belong with Kant’s intelligibilia
and Descartes’ cogito sum. It is through them and in them—at the
level of their development—that human beings can gather the
world and themselves as the part that is reproduced by this world
as a protagonist of human requirements, expectations, moral and
cognitive criteria. For instance, an artist’s way of seeing is an act of
11 Mamardashvili here uses a word with its root in вместить, which means lit-
erally “fit it,” or “contain, encompass, hold, find room,” here and especially in
Lectures 20 and 21 of Lectures on Proust. It is difficult to translate this concept
precisely into English, and so we use “include” and, especially, “gather” be-
cause it has the connotation of work or effort rather than passively
“containing” or “holding” something.
primary gathering and experiencing nature as landscape (outside

of this irreversible state, nature by itself cannot be a source of cor-
responding human feelings).
This means that no natural external descriptions of, let us say,
acts of injustice or violence contain any reasons for our feelings of
indignation, anger, or any other experience based on values. It does
not contain them unless a rational state is added as a given or ful-
filled in practice—what Kant called the facts of reason: not rational
knowledge of specific facts, their reflections, so to speak, but rather
reason itself as a realized consciousness that cannot be assumed in
advance, introduced as an assumption, replaced by a “powerful
mind,” etc. If such a fact exists, it is omnipresent and ominitem-
poral.
For instance, we cannot say that a people in Africa lives im-
morally, or that something is moral in England but immoral in
Russia, without actualizing the first and second parts of the DKK
Principle. But if acts of primary gathering have been performed and
we are in successive connection with them, if we are included in
this connection, then we can speak meaningfully, attaining a com-
plete and unique description.
The Situation of Indeterminacy

In situations of the second K, also called situations of absurdity, ex-
ternally described by the same object and sign denominations, the
acts of primary gathering are absent or reduced. Such situations are
alien to their own language and incommensurable with a human
being (it is as if an underdeveloped “body” of one nature were to
express itself and give an account of itself in a “head” of a com-
pletely different nature). The situations are similar to a nightmare
where any attempt to think and understand, any search for truth
resembles in its meaninglessness a search for a lavatory. A Kafkian
being uses language and follows the pathos of his search in states
where the acts of primary gathering have clearly not been per-
formed. For him, searching is a purely mechanical way out of the
situation, its automatic resolution: found, or not! This is why the
indescribably strange human being is ridiculous and laughable, not
tragic, especially in his quasi-sublime exaltations. This is a comedy

of the impossibility of tragedy, a grimace of an otherworldly “ele-
vated suffering.” It is impossible to take a situation seriously when
a human being seeks the truth in the same way as they look for a
lavatory; or the other way around: someone is looking for a bath-
room while imagining that this is truth or even justice (for example,
K. in Kafka’s The Trial). It is funny, ridiculous, pompous, absurd, a
tiresome drag, something otherworldly.
Kafka expresses the same heterogeneity differently through a
metaphor of complete inner ossification: Gregor Samsa turns into a
slimy, disgusting animal that he cannot shake off. What is this, why
does one have to resort to such metaphors? I will refer to a more
familiar example.
Can we, for instance, apply the terms “courage” and “coward-
ice” or “sincerity” and “mendacity” to situations involving the
“third”—indescribable—human being? (I’ll call them situations in
which it’s always too late.) Until recently one such situation was a
Soviet tourist’s trip abroad. There he would find himself in circum-
stances that required merely personal dignity and naturalness, to
simply be a man and not look like he is waiting for instructions on
how to behave, or how to answer a specific question. Some were
inclined to conclude that a tourist who didn’t prove himself civi-
lized was cowardly, while the one who did was courageous.
However, the terms cowardice or courage, sincerity or insincerity,
are inapplicable to this tourist because his trip abroad was granted
to him as a privilege, and that is why it is too late to express himself
as a person. This is ridiculous and one can only laugh at it.
An absurd situation is indescribable; it can only be conveyed
through laughter and the grotesque. The language of good and evil,
of courage and cowardice, does not apply here, because the situa-
tion is not circumscribed by the acts of primary gathering, whereas
language emerges on the basis of these acts.
For instance, the expression, “I know my rights!”12 refers to
someone who formally pushes for legality. But if a person’s behav-
12 An imperfect rendering of качать права, “pumping rights,” originally gangster

slang for insisting on one’s own opinion in a bullying manner.—Trans.
ior is already restrained by a situation where there was no primary

act of law, then his search for the law (conducted in the language
that we all share—the European language, rooted in Montesquieu,
Montaigne, Rousseau, Roman law) has nothing to do with this sit-
uation. But we, living in one situation, often tried and still try to
understand it in terms of another, following in the footsteps of K.
in The Trial. If there are seeds of the mind, one can also imagine the
hair of the mind.13 Imagine that hair grows inward into the head
(instead of growing outward as it should); imagine a brain over-
grown with hair where thoughts wander as if in a forest, unable to
find each other and not one of them can take shape. That is a pri-
meval condition of civic thought. Civilization, on the other hand, is
first and foremost spiritual health of a nation and therefore we must
not damage it, because the consequences would be irreversible.
So, the indeterminate [Kafka] situations and the situations of
the D and the first K elements use the same language. Those two
types of situations are fundamentally different, and that fleeting,
outwardly indistinguishable and inexpressible difference between
the word “courage” in these two situations is consciousness.
The Formal Structure of Civilization

To further understand the connection between consciousness and
civilization, recall another of Descartes’ laws of thinking, which
pertains to all human states, including those in which the causal
connection between events in the world is formulated. According
to Descartes, it is exceptionally difficult to think, you have to hold
yourself in thought, because thought is movement and there is no
guarantee that a thought will give rise to another as a result of a
rational act or a mental connection. In order to be itself in the next
moment in time, everything that exists must transcend itself. The
fact that I am now does not follow from the fact that I was before,
and that I will be tomorrow or the next moment does not follow
from the fact that I am now. This means that a thought that arises
13 As an idiom, “seed of the mind" could resemble “a kernel of an idea” or “plant-

ing a thought in someone’s mind.”—Trans.
at the next moment in time is not there because its beginning or a

part of it is here now.
Civilization is a way of supplying such support to thinking. It
enables systematic detachment from specific meanings and content,
it supplies a space for realization, and gives a chance for the thought
that began at moment A to be a thought at moment B—or for a hu-
man state that began at moment A to exist at moment B. Here is an
example: today, there’s a certain fascination with specialized think-
ing, which is considered real thought performed as if by itself. Art
and all other spheres of so-called spiritual creativity can be in-
cluded in such special thinking. However, the skill of thinking is
not the privilege of any profession. To think, one must be able to
gather what for most people is unconnected and hold them to-
gether. Unfortunately, most people are, as always, capable of little
on their own, and know nothing apart from chaos and chance. They
are only capable of making game trails in the forest of vague images
and concepts.
Meanwhile, according to the D principle (“I can”), in order to
persist in thought, one must have “muscles of thought” developed
on the basis of certain primary acts. In other words, paths of connec-
tive spaces for thinking must be blazed, paths of openness,
discussion, mutual tolerance, and formal legal order. This rule of
law creates space and time to freely interpret one’s own experience.
There is a law of being called by one’s own name, the law of being
named. It is a condition of the power of history, an element of its
form. Only form seriously requires freedom. In this sense, we can
say that laws exist only for free beings. Human institutions
(thought among them) are work and perseverance of freedom,
there is no other recipe. Civilization (as long as you work and think)
ensures that something got moving and then resolved, that mean-
ing was established and you found out what you thought, desired,
and felt—it opens up a chance for all this.
This also means that civilization presupposes that the cells of
the unknown are present within it. If there is no room for the-not-
altogether-known to manifest, civilization, like culture (the two are,
essentially, the same) disappears. For instance, the economic cul-
ture of production (that is, not merely material production of finite
goods that perish in the act of their consumption) means that it is

illegitimate to have a management structure that determines when
a peasant should sow and distributes this knowledge over the en-
tire space of his activities. We must allow for the occasional
autonomous appearance of what we don’t know and can’t know in
advance or can’t presuppose to exist in some omniscient head.
Another example. Marx said that as many stupid things have
been said about the nature of money as about the nature of love.
But suppose that the nature of money is unknown and fixed in a
formal civilizational mechanism: people have mastered money as
culture to such an extent that it is possible not only to count, but
also use it to produce something. Why is this possible? It is assumed
that the exchange of money for a purchased product does not itself
take time because hours of labor are already built into money. This
is civilized behavior. The abstraction is fixed by civilization itself
into the civilized organization of human experience. Behavior that
is similar, but through the looking glass, is uncivilized. When there
is no cultural mechanism of money, a behind-the-looking-glass be-
havior with money appears. If I earn twenty-four rubles (by
investing eight hours of labor), I need to put in another ten hours
(that is, another thirty rubles) to spend them.14 In such a conscious-
ness, obviously, the notion of money as value is absent and we
cannot, using a currency unit symbol as a sign, make economic cal-
culations or organize a rational system of economic production. Yet
we use monetary symbols and, moreover, having found ourselves
behind the looking glass, using, it would seem, the same objects, we
squared the circle: without knowing the value of money, we’ve
managed to become mercenary and cunning.
Civilization presupposes a formal mechanism of ordered, law-
ful behavior as opposed to one based on someone’s benevolence,
idea, or goodwill. That is the condition of social, civic thinking.
“Even if we are enemies, let us behave in a civilized manner; let us
not cut off the branch we sit on.” This simple phrase can express the
essence of civilization, of a legal culture, of behavior that exceeds a
14 Mamardashvili is referring to the additional burden on Soviet citizens who

were obliged to stand in long lines and search for consumer goods in short
supply.—Trans.
situation. After all, from within a situation it is impossible to agree

forever not to harm each other, because it will always be “clear” to
someone that he must restore justice. In history, there has been no
evil committed without such a “clear” passion, for any evil is justi-
fied on the very best grounds; I am not at all being ironic. The
energy of evil draws on the energy of truth, on confidence in a vi-
sion of truth. Civilization blocks this, and inhibits it as much as is
humanly possible.
In short, destruction, fraying the threads of civilization that
human consciousness could follow to reach a crystallization of
truth in good time (not only for the heroes of thought), also destroys
the human being. When, under the slogan of other-worldly perfec-
tion, all formal mechanisms are eliminated precisely because they
are easy to criticize and formal, and therefore abstract compared to
immediate human reality, then people deny themselves an oppor-
tunity to be human, or to have a consciousness that is not
disintegrated and not merely based on signs.
Monopoly and Disintegration of Consciousness

I will give another example of such destruction. It is known that the
system called monopoly is outside civilization because it destroys
its body and completely depletes the human world, and not only in
the sense that monopoly encourages the most primitive and asocial
instincts and creates channels for their manifestation. The achieved
state of thought must still roll around15, as on the agora; it must
build up its muscles there, just as a snowman builds up its bulk
with snow; it must acquire the strength to realize its own possibil-
ity. If there is no agora—something that is being developed—there
is no truth.
Since ancient times, human beings have faced the task of curb-
ing the wildness, ferocity, and selfishness of their own nature, but
their instincts, greed, darkness of heart, callousness and ignorance
are quite capable of adjusting mental abilities and reason and being
actualized in them. Only a citizen who has and actualizes the right
15 See “European Responsibility,” footnote 8.

to think independently can resist. This right, or law, can exist only
when the means of achieving the goals are also lawful, or when the
spirit of the law is diluted in them. To put it differently, the specific
existences of people, tools and implements of life, minutely present
in everything the law might touch and in everything it regulates,
embody the inner law.
It is impermissible to engrain the law through willfully arbi-
trary and administrative means—external to the law—even if one
is guided by the best intentions and noble considerations or ideas,
because then the application of law sets a precedent and a model of
lawlessness contained in these means (the wider and stricter such
applications, the more painful the lawlessness). And all this inde-
pendently of intentions for the greater good and our salvation, or
some evil intent. This is obvious in the case of any monopoly. If I
can, even for the sake of the highest common good, one fine day set
a special price for certain goods, conceal and secretly redistribute
income, assign benefits, distribute goods, change previous agree-
ments with workers for the sake of production goals, then that very
day (and henceforth—along the same trajectory) the same will be
done by someone somewhere (or by the same people in the same
place) for completely different reasons (personal gain, profiteering,
deception, violence, theft, bribery—specific causes and motives in
those structures are irrelevant and interchangeable). The law is one
and indivisible at all points of time and space where people act and
connect with each other (including the law of public good).
Consequently, the aim of law is achieved by legal means only!
Laws are violated also because the rule of law is usually replaced
with the rule of ideas or “truth,” as if the law exists on its own rather
than in individuals and in their understanding of what they do.
There is a desire to do without individuals, without individual
forces, without maturity, not trusting common sense and personal
conviction and the ability to act based on them. But this is impossi-
ble according to the laws of being, if we distinguish them from
knowledge of legal norms! That is the whole point. The ability to
circumvent the individual is excluded not because of a humanistic
preference and concern, but because of the immutable structure of
being itself, of life.
Something can happen only at the level of individuals’ essen-

tial equality. No one owes anybody anything; everyone must make
their own way down a path and move on their own “in the midst
of being” as Derzhavin wrote.16 Without this movement nothing is
gained and nothing is established. Otherwise, the entire production
of truth—its ontological basis and nature—will be destroyed, and
lies will prevail, produced by other causes but now inhuman and
total, occupying all points of social space and filling them with
signs: a hall of mirrors and a surreal- signifying reflection of some-
thing else.
The Mirror World

Of course, the hall of mirrors appears because it seems these special
inner “through-the-looking-glass” meanings really possess a su-
preme wisdom. After all, people see the whole; for them, an
external observer is always wrong. Remember Gottfried Benn: “For
only you possess the whole.”
One observer sees destruction, another construction, while
many watch and wink: “we know what is actually happening, we
see the whole.” This is what the “inner” is. But that inner self-ab-
sorbed life without an agora is the same as searching for truth in a
lavatory. If I had Kafka’s talent, I would now describe this inner
soul-searching as a fantastic, strange quest for truth where, accord-
ing to the ontological laws of human life, it simply cannot be found.
In this sense, people of indeterminate situations, or of total sig-
nifying otherness, remind me of those whom Nietzsche had good
reason to call “the last men.” Indeed (this is exactly what his sick
Christian conscience screamed about) we shall either be “overmen”
in order to be human (the D and the first K are the principles of a
human being’s transcendence toward the human within) or we’ll
become “last men”—people of organized happiness who can’t even
despise themselves because they live in a situation of destroyed
consciousness and destroyed human matter.
16 Gavriil Derzhavin (1743-1816), Russian poet and statesman.—Trans.

If human events happen anywhere, they do not happen with-

out consciousness, which is inseparable from them and not
reducible to anything else. This consciousness is dyadic in the fol-
lowing fundamental sense. When I introduced the DKK Principle I,
in fact, presented two intersecting planes. The one that I called on-
tology cannot be anyone’s real experience, but nevertheless it exists.
For instance, death cannot be anyone’s experience, while the symbol
of death is a productive moment in a conscious human life. The sec-
ond plane—the “muscular,” the real one—is the know-how to
actually live under this symbol based on the acts of primary gath-
ering. Neither of those planes can be ignored: consciousness is
fundamentally dyadic.
Meanwhile, through the looking glass, where left and right
change places, all meanings are turned upside-down, and the de-
struction of human consciousness begins. The anomalous space of
signs sucks in everything it touches. Human consciousness is anni-
hilated and so is a human being who ends up in a situation of
indeterminacy where everyone exchanges winks that are not even
ambiguous but have multiple meanings: there is no courage, honor,
dignity, cowardice, or disgrace. These so-called conscious acts and
knowledge cease to participate in world events, in history. It does
not matter what’s in your “consciousness,” provided you give a
sign. In extreme cases, the need for people to have any convictions
disappears. Whether or not you believe in what’s happening does
not matter, because by giving a sign you turn the wheels and join
in the action of the social mechanism.
Twentieth-century literature was fully conscious of such situ-
ations. I mean not only Kafka but also, for example, Robert Musil—
the great Austrian writer, the author of “The Man Without Quali-
ties.” Musil understood perfectly that amidst the threatened
collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, anything you did was
going to turn into nonsense because it was too late. Whether you
search for truth or lies, it’s all the same—you have to follow the
preset routes of nonsense. He knew that it is impossible to act or
think in such a situation—it is essential to get out of it.
To avoid making you think too seriously about certain terms
(I have in mind only terminology, not problems, because problems
are indeed worth serious thought; my terms, however, are not ob-
ligatory), I will speak of my experience of existing “through the
looking glass” in the following way. My entire “theory” of con-
sciousness could be reduced to one kernel of an early experience:
the primary impression of the meeting point of civilization on the
one hand, and stupefying17 life on the other. I felt that my attempt
to remain human in this situation was grotesque and ridiculous.
The foundations of civilization were undermined to such an extent
that it was impossible to expose, discuss, and think through my
own diseases. The less we could expose them, the more, having re-
mained in our depths, they would germinate within us;
imperceptible decay—connected to the demise of civilization, the
absence of agora—was catching up with us.
The rotten regime fell in 1917 but the dust and soot of the pu-
trid giant, the ongoing “civil war,” remain with us. The world is
still full of un-mourned victims and flooded with unredeemed
blood. The fates of the many who perished for who knows what
reason demand meaning. It is one thing to perish completing and
for the first time establishing a meaning (for instance, in the libera-
tion struggle), and quite another to vanish in feral blindness, so that
after perishing one still has to find meaning. Nevertheless, blood
seeps through here and there, as on the tombstones of the righteous
ones in legends, in completely unexpected places and without any
clear connection.
We still live as distant heirs of this “radiation sickness” which
for me is more terrifying than any Hiroshima—strange descend-
ants, who have so far understood and learned little from our own
misfortunes. It is as though previous generations did not them-
selves bear offspring, because what was not born, what didn’t
create in itself a foundation or the vital energy for germination, is
incapable of giving birth. And here we are, wandering around dif-
ferent countries without language, with tangled memory, with
rewritten history, sometimes not knowing what has actually hap-
17 The Russian глухой and its associated idioms can mean deaf, muffled, voiceless
and also refer to a provincial, backward existence, such as the life endured by
Chekhov’s Three Sisters, who lament their distance from the fascinating society
and intellectual stimulation of “Moscow, Moscow!”—Trans.
pened and what is happening around us and in us, feeling neither

the right to know freedom nor the responsibility for how to use it.
Unfortunately, even today the vast, isolated spaces of the Earth are
occupied by the “through-the-looking-glass” anti-world, revealing
a wild spectacle of a degenerate human visage.18 The “aliens” be-
hind-the-looking-glass, who can be imagined only as an exotic
hybrid of a rhinoceros and locust, are intertwined in a vicious
dance, sowing around them death, horror and the stupor of impen-
etrable gloom.
Hunchbacked and nocturnal

They bring with them
Sandstorms of fear
And sticky gloom of silence.19
That is why when I hear of ecological disasters, collisions in

space, nuclear war, radiation sickness, or AIDS, all this seems to me
less frightening and more distant—maybe I am wrong or lacking
imagination—than what I described and what is, in reality, the
most terrible catastrophe, for it concerns the human beings on
whom everything else depends.
18 The Russian лик is etymologically related to лицо—“face” or “person”—but is

more difficult to translate because of its poetic and spiritual connotations.
Pavel Florensky distinguishes between лицо, or a face and a лик of, for instance,
a saint represented on Orthodox icon. In his theory a лик is not a copy of some-
body’s face—it is not a resemblance, but reveals who they are, or helps one see
this person from the point of view of the invisible world. See the Introduc-
tion.—Trans.
19 Mamardashvili quotes a Russian translation of Federico García Lorca’s Ballad
of the Spanish Civil Guard (1928):
Jorobados y nocturnos,
por donde animan ordenan
silencios de goma oscura
y miedos de fina arena.
This can be translated thus: “Hunchbacked and nocturnal,/they encourage
and order/dark rubbery silences/and fine sandy fear.”—Trans.
The “Third” State1
I’ll begin by defining the character of our social thinking, by which

I understand not the activity in professional departments of social
sciences, but people’s social thinking in everyday life: in other
words, the state of civic literacy. Speaking directly and succinctly,
this state is simply monstrous—but, apparently, it couldn’t have
been otherwise. The people who jumped out of history and life (I
have in mind all peoples who live within Russia’s territory) could
not have avoided being sick as a result.2 Human beings themselves
are sick. We can see it when we look at how they react to events, to
authority, to the surrounding world, and to themselves.
It is obvious that we are dealing with a disorganized, lost, feral
consciousness that can be represented only in phantasmagorical
images: as if the hair on a human head, for instance, didn’t grow
outside but inside. Imagine these wild growths in which everything
is entangled, where one half of a thought can never find another to
create a complete, finished, legitimately-born thought. People still
thirst for blood, they still see saboteurs everywhere, and this means
that they are to all intents and purposes in that state of suspension
when every mutation, every jolt, can harden them into a crystal, one
we call the 37th year.3 It seems we will not be able to cleanse such a
consciousness, or allow it to heal, if as professionals we continue
using such wooden, ugly words as “mistake” “deviation” “unjusti-
1 This text first appeared in the journal Kinostsenarii [Screenplays]. Vol. 3 (1989):
182-186. The translators are following Soznanie i tsivilizatsiia [Consciousness
and Civilization]. Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2019, 142-155.—Trans.
2 Mamardashvili probably has in mind the territory of the Soviet Union, or the
Russian Empire. This topic, as well as Mamardashvili’s skepticism of every
kind of nationalism, is discussed in the introduction to this volume.—Trans.
3 1937 in the Soviet Union was the peak year of the Great Purge—Joseph Stalin’s
campaign of repressions that ran from 1934 to 1940. Communist party and gov-
ernment officials, peasants, the Red Army leadership, poets, writers, and
cultural leaders were imprisoned, underwent torture and humiliation of vari-
ous kinds, and were executed, or sent to the Gulag (forced labor camps) where
they were worked to death. 1937-1938 was the period of the most intense
purges, and is known as Yezhovshchina, after Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the
Soviet secret police, NKVD, that later became the KGB (its main successor to-
day is the FSB).—Trans.
165
fied repressions” (as though there are justified repressions!?) “false

denunciations” “excesses.”4 This meaningless string of words fa-
tally signifies that, remaining in all of the pious, well-intentioned
states that operating with such words requires, we cannot once and
for all derive meaning from what happened to us, from what we
experienced ourselves. That is why suffering and injured feelings,
which such words conceal, will last forever. And every time we
evaluate some events we will again and again talk about the fact
that this is violence, lawlessness, and so on.
Even in his era, Saltykov-Shchedrin5 noted that Russian peo-
ple (or, if you wish, Russian citizens)6 are ready to suffer infinitely,
thinking that Russia is good because one suffers more here. But in
the metaphysical sense, insofar as the world is set up, there can be
no suffering in the plural just as there can be no death in the plural.
If somebody really suffers, they do it one time, as one exemplar.
Only by following this path can we derive any meaning from lived
experience, derive it once and for all so that whatever was once ex-
perienced enters historical existence. Those who suffer multiple
times constantly return to the kingdom of shadows, condemning
themselves to a whirlwind where an uncompleted act, an un-
4 These terms were developed and used by the Soviet regime. They became a
part of Soviet vocabulary, understood by everybody and nobody—convenient
screens that allowed people to hide, and that relieved them from the responsi-
bility and the effort of thinking. Some equivalents from the present-day
Western context might come to mind.—Trans.
5 Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (pseudonym Nikolai Shchedrin) (1826–1889) was
a major Russian satirist.—Trans.
6 Not all citizens of the Russian Empire, then the USSR, and now the Russian
Federation, are culturally or ethnically Russian, or consider themselves Rus-
sian. In addition, not all ethnic Russians, and not all of those for whom Russian
is the first language, are Russian in the sense of identifying with Russian im-
perial politics, the cultural and political institutions of the USSR, or, most
recently, the Russian Federation. Such people might be Russian without con-
sidering themselves part of the Russian nation. The situation in Ukraine during
the political crisis of 2014-2015 illustrated this when some Ukrainian citizens
of Russian background took to the streets to publicly declare their allegiance:
“I am a Russian, I speak Russian, I want to live in Ukraine.” By specifying that
he has in mind Russian, or, more generally Soviet, citizens, and not merely eth-
nic Russians, Mamardashvili underscores his point that the Russian and then
the Soviet Empire infected all of the peoples it colonized.—Trans.
THE “THIRD” STATE 167
chewed chunk of truth, is forever dragged by the torrent of our life

and consciousness.
It’s not accidental that I place such emphasis on “words.” The
problem of a sick consciousness is also the problem of language. We
live in a space where a monstrous trash heap of thought and lan-
guage has accumulated. This space is maximally polluted by the
byproducts of normal thought and spiritual activity, its mytholo-
gized shards. That’s why even when we want to think, when there
is a call, an incitement to thought, we find ourselves at a loss. Some-
thing is already disrupted in the language itself, in its foundation.
Before we can begin to elucidate the causes of this illness, I
would like to warn the reader about a particular way of perceiving
this text. Philosophical thinking, professional at its core, has to op-
erate with bigger units of time and space. Its logic is the following:
to derive meaning from today, we have to think in big units that
embrace and connect the 20th century, for instance, with the 18th;
we have to think in terms of long-lasting forces that drift through,
for instance, Russia’s history. And to do this we would have to at
least make them visible, to establish an actual temporal and spatial
measure of our (possible) thought about the events of this history.
Only in this case might we be able to see that the sum of problems
about which we talk so much today can really be reduced to one—
the problem of civil society.
To put it briefly, the problem consists in splitting or tearing
apart the strong weld binding state and society together, in devel-
oping an independent social element which, on the one hand,
would be a natural boundary of state authority, and, on the other,
would not be propped up by any state guarantees or parasitism.
The Modern era began with this problem—the problem of the pre-
bourgeois or pre-natural-law state of society. To convince ourselves
that this is our state today, we do not need to look for special proof.
It is enough that we return to the problem of language.
I will point to a very simple element of the pre-civic state of
our consciousness. For instance, we say “social labor”7 and imme-
7 “Social labor” or obshchestvennyi trud was one of the key terms in the Soviet
lexicon. Most Soviet citizens were supposed to perform on voluntary basis a
certain amount of social labor. Subbotnik is one example of such labor—the Sat-
diately presuppose the difference between social and individual la-

bor. We think in approximately the following way: first we have to
work for society and only then for ourselves. But this is the very
welding of consciousness, that mocking word, through which, by-
passing our will, something entirely different gets said, namely,
that our labor is conscripted, uncreative, working off an obligation.
This situation is different from the very beginning of Modernity,
from the new European society and culture that emerged. This
problem doesn’t exist for the Enlightenment. The enlightened state
of humanity corresponds to a level of maturity where labor is con-
ducted by free producers who enter among themselves and with
their employers into contractual relationships.8 Here there can be
no difference between laboring for yourself and laboring for soci-
ety; even if it emerges, this reflects the enserfed state of the
economy, which in our time is considered a complete absurdity. But
once again we cannot forget about the historic-cultural context in
which we find ourselves.
At some point, Pushkin had an argument with Chaadaev,9
who first introduced our philosophical tradition to the opposition
between “historical” and “non-historical” formations. Chaadaev
tried to define Russia as a socio-cultural phenomenon, but encoun-
tered something strange that I would call “indescribability,” in the
sense that there are things that can be described, and things that
don’t yield to description. Russia became such a mysterious phe-
nomenon for Chaadaev.
Indeed, they say about Russia that she does not belong either
to Europe or to Asia, writes Chaadaev. It’s a world apart. Let it be
so. But it still needs to be proven that humankind, apart from the
urday work done by many Soviet citizens, which was voluntary in name but
mandatory in practice. A contemporary reader might think of “community ser-
vice” as a punitive or corrective form of civic engagement.—Trans.
8 Mamardashvili may sound naive or Eurocentric here, but, as in “European Re-
sponsibility,” he is using “The Enlightenment” in the same way he used
“Europe”: as a thought experiment or synecdoche for integrity: a regulatory
ideal.—Trans
9 Petr or Pyotr Chaadaev (1794-1856) was a Russian philosopher whose first of
The Philosophical Letters Addressed to a Lady, critical of Russia’s cultural back-
wardness, incited the famous controversy between Westernizers and
Slavophiles. This controversy is ongoing in today’s Russia.—Trans.
two sides that we define by the words East and West, also has a
third side, which does not actually exist.10 In fact there can be no
such thing. Our language gets that idea very well. We say “on one
side,” and “on the other side.” And we will never say “on the third
side.”
If we now connect this with other observations of Chaadaev,
with our own experience, we will understand that in reality there
can be no third side. But it can exist in irreality. In the mirror world.
For Chaadaev, evidently, Russia was such an indescribable
country through the looking glass. It is not accidental that he called
Russia “a gap in understanding,”11 something that does not exist in
a historical world of distinct forms, principles, traditions, and clear
articulations. Pushkin objected, but in fact his own life confirmed
the correctness of this thought. He tried to create in Russia the tra-
dition and principles of home and of family, almost with his bare
hands, but in the irreal world one must pay for this with one’s life.
Concepts that people use in that irreal world are phantasmagorical.
They are the creations of a sick, feral consciousness. Among the first
to understand this, by the way, was Gogol. It was he who devel-
oped a special technique of literary description of these
otherworldly things. In this sense it is true that all Russian literature
emerged from under Gogol’s Overcoat.12 Nabokov, who was him-
self sensitive to the topic of the otherworldly things, notes “…how
can Chichikov be a swindler? The object of his swindle is irreal.”13
He is just as indescribable as today’s Moscow or Georgian million-
aire. Just try to describe him in a literary-typological way as, for
instance, Gobseck, Shylock, or some Rougon-Macquart was de-
10 Mamardashvili is paraphrasing passages from Chaadaev’s first of The Philo-

sophical Letters Addressed to a Lady. See Philosophical Works of Peter Chaadaev,
edited by Raymond T. McNally and Richard Tempest, Netherlands, Springer:
1991, 20, 24.—Trans.
11 See Philosophical Works of Peter Chaadaev, 24ff.—Trans.
12 Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) was a Ukrainian writer who wrote in Russian. His
short story “The Overcoat” influenced Russian literature to the extent that, al-
legedly, Fyodor Dostoevsky said that “we all come from Gogol’s Overcoat.”—
Trans.
13 Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) in his Lectures on Russian Literature discusses
the character of Gogol’s Dead Souls, Paul Ivanovitch Chichikov, who travels
around the Russian Empire buying the souls of deceased serfs.—Trans.
scribed.14 You will fail because the object of his striving is just as
irreal as our Soviet money.
In the very beginning of the 20th century, Osip Mandelstam
joined the dispute between Pushkin and Chaadaev—one of the few
poets in the contemporary Russian tradition with a well-defined
historisophic15 and metaphysical mindset. Agreeing on many levels
with Chaadaev, Mandelstam at the same time asserted that Russia
is after all “a historical formation,” because it has at least one or-
ganic structure that stands on its own feet, that lives according to
its own laws, that has its own traditions and principles. This is the
Russian language.
This was tragic because Mandelstam expressed his thought
just when the process of the language’s falling out of history had
already begun, when Blok’s presentiment started to come true: that
someone could destroy the innermost sources of harmony, as op-
posed to merely treating their external products barbarically.
Mandelstam understood this also. His entire dispute with Chaa-
daev is qualified by one strange phrase: that if we fall away even
from language, then we will decisively collapse into the abyss of
nihilism. And that’s how it happened. But something else is also
interesting here. It is just at this historical point, on the edge of a
precipice, in Russia, against all odds, people appeared who contin-
ued the already existing literary tradition. I have in mind first of all
Zoshchenko, Zabolotsky, Platonov.16 They were the first ones to
begin describing strange people who speak “the language of the
neighborhood warden,” the language of the humanoid being
spawned by Bulgakov in his novel Heart of a Dog.
14 Jean-Esther van Gobseck is a character in the novel Gobseck by Honoré de

Balzac (1799-1850). Shylock is the principal antagonist of Shakespeare’s The
Merchant of Venice. The Rougon-Macquart family is depicted in Émile Zola’s
(1840-1902) 20-novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart: Natural and social history of a
family under the Second Empire.—Trans.
15 The term “historiosophy” was coined by Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem (1897–
1982), a scholar of Jewish mysticism, to refer to a specific understanding of
history and metaphysics. The term can also mean, more generally, a philoso-
phy of history.—Trans.
16 Soviet-era writers. Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895-1958), Nikolay Zabolotsky
(1903-1958). Andrei Platonov was a pen name of Andrei Platonovich
Klimentov (1899-1951).
This language consists of otherworldly immobile blocks re-

sembling cancerous growths. How can we think with phrases such
as “the vegetable conveyor of the country”?17 Monstrous muscular
model workers out of a propaganda poster emerge from behind this
language,18 but to see or to think about what happens to the vege-
tables at that moment is decisively impossible. It is as though you
immediately fall into a magnetic field and cannot escape its force.
Such a [disorganized] consciousness resembles a room in which, in-
stead of windows, only mirrors exist, and you can see not the
outside world, but instead your own reflection. Moreover, it resem-
bles not who you are but who you should be. The least spark of
consciousness can become trapped in these reflections and go mad.
The human being with such consciousness can have only one de-
sire: to blow himself up, to annihilate himself and simultaneously
the entire world. For the evil of the human heart is loathing of what,
within oneself, is beyond one’s own strength. Only then is the ha-
tred projected onto the outside world.
Something very similar happened to philosophical language.
Take any textbook on Marxist philosophy and you will see that the
entirety of it consists of similar otherworldly expressions. It’s im-
possible to get them to move. It’s impossible to use them
professionally. They resist being developed through thinking. This
language was constructed according to a fairly simple mechanism.
Imagine a social democratic political circle of the revolution-
ary era where “the learned person” had to pack the entire world,
with all of its most complex problems and content, into the heads
of the audience. He had to do it in such a way that the head of the
listener need not make any effort, need not strain, think, or torment
itself. This could have been done by one means only: reducing the
entire complexity of the world to simple formulas. For instance:
“Why are there poor people?” “There are poor people because there
17 This is one of the standard phrases of the Soviet-speak used widely in daily
propaganda.—Trans.
18 “За этим языковым монстром сразу возникает образ этаких мускулистых, пла-
катных молодцов у конвейера.” This translates, literally, “From behind this
language monster immediately emerges an image of muscular poster-men
next to a conveyor,” and this image would have been clear to an audience fa-
miliar with socialist-realist posters of the Soviet era.—Trans.
are rich people.” “How can we make it so there are no poor peo-
ple?” “We must eliminate the rich.”
I want to direct the reader’s attention not to the questionable
content of this statement, but toward what it connects in the con-
sciousness of the listener, and toward what it generates in the end.
First, it deprives the listener of the need for independent labor; it
instils the idea that thinking requires no effort of mind, that it is
sufficient only to hear or to read. Second, there is a mechanism of
self-respect. Apart from the powerful need to be, to become, or to
abide, as philosophers say, the human being also needs to under-
stand. Human beings cannot live in a world that is
incomprehensible to them. But the principle of its comprehensibil-
ity always fuses with the fundamental relationship of human
beings to themselves both in the sense of being able to identify and
to respect themselves. If, however, they reach a level of self-respect
through simplified formulas, they would rather kill whoever tries
to destroy these formulas than part with them. This is not surpris-
ing, because their simplified understanding of the complex world
already merged with the fundamental human question of life and
death.
Now imagine that we are trying to free ourselves from this
“philosophical” language: we want to learn how to think and we
propose, to counterbalance Stalin, such thinkers as Plekhanov, Bu-
kharin, Lunacharsky.19 Nothing will come of it. The level of these
thinkers is trivial. It was necessary first to pull down the mountains
of humanistic thought in Russia, so that in this cleared space such
people would look like the Mont Blanc of philosophical thought.
Their texts are not only monstrously boring, but also written in an
altogether wooden, dead language. They a priori exclude living and
free thought. That’s why, returning to our topic, I will say that with-
out solving the problem of clearing the linguistic space in general
and the philosophical space in particular, we will not advance any-
19 Georgi Plekhanov (1856-1918) was a revolutionary and a founder of the social-

democratic movement in Russia. Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) was a Bolshe-
vik revolutionary, Soviet politician and a writer. Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875-
1933) was a revolutionary and the first Soviet Commissar of Education.—
Trans.
where, for we constantly live in a situation which Platonov de-

scribed very exactly with one phrase. A character of his, instead of
the “voice of the soul,” hears “the noise of consciousness” that is
pouring out of a loudspeaker. Each one of us, at his own risk, in her
concrete task, inside himself or herself, has to somehow withstand
this “noise.” For as I already said, the human being with feral con-
sciousness and simplified notions about social reality and its laws
cannot live in the 20th century. They become dangerous not only to
themselves but also to the entire world.
Today we talk about the need to take care of our common Eu-
ropean house, but for this, at minimum, we first need to reinstate
our membership in this house. The main task that confronts social
thinking and the citizens of the Soviet Union is reunification with
their homeland, and this homeland is irreversibly Russia’s Euro-
pean fate. True, until now we only actualized the “third”
phantasmagorical side, and that is why the problem of “civil soci-
ety” fell outside our field of vision for a long time.
As I already said, the core problem of “civil society” is to rup-
ture the soldering of government and society, to develop an
independent social element. Diverging from social and economic
theories, I will try to explain the meaning of a word fundamental to
any civil society: “private.”
European culture is first and foremost a Christian culture, and
this is entirely independent of how many people go to church and
perform confessional or church ritual. I mean that Christianity
found its way into all institutions of European civil society, and ex-
ists already crystalized in them.
The idea of Christian culture is fundamental and simple. This
culture belongs to people who are able in their private vocation20 to
embody the infinite and the divine. When I say “private,” I have in
mind the shoemaker’s job, the merchant’s and the worker’s activity,
and so on. In the opposite cultural situation, one encounters a phe-
20 The Russian дело can mean affair, work, business, undertaking, cause, case (in
the legal sense), or record of proceedings. In the present context Mamardash-
vili uses this word to mean an undertaking or a job that a human being does
freely and fully engaged, hence the word “vocation” better conveys his idea.—
Trans.
nomenon that hinges on a fantastic indifference of the human being

to his or her own vocation. Why does this happen? Because nothing
I do ever coincides with some mystical absolute and infinite point.
What I do lacks, according to such a template, any meaning; that is
why I can be vile today in order to become impeccable tomorrow.
For European culture there is no such tomorrow. There is only what
is now, inside a concretely-formed, completed undertaking. That is
why some sociologists even try to turn economic theory upside
down and set as the cornerstone the fact of religious consciousness.
I do not share this point of view, but to illustrate such a train of
thought I will give one example.
Max Weber’s famous theory tied the very emergence of the
phenomenon of capitalism with what he called the “Protestant
ethic.”21 For capitalism to develop, Weber thought, it was necessary
that, for instance, the act of trade, which is a private undertaking,
become a carrier of some very profound values, including relation-
ships with God, responsibility, and so on. When this happens,
Weber thinks, a class of capitalists, entrepreneurs, merchants will
emerge, along with such words as “burgher” and “private human
being.” In the Russian language there is an analogue to this, “mesh-
chanin,” or petty bourgeois. It was just in this meaning that Pushkin
used the word in his famous poem.22 But for us the words
“burgher,” “bourgeois,” “meshchanin,” and others have long be-
come a symbol of vulgarity and philistinism.
I repeat: I don’t consider Weber’s theory correct insofar as it
analyzes what caused the emergence of capitalism. I have my own
criticisms. But his train of thought in this case is very telling and
reveals a lot about the real character of European Christian culture.
If, on the other hand, we turn now to Russia at the beginning of the
20th century, we will see that the consciousness of the people was
only lightly touched by the New Testament. Even Rozanov in his
21 Max Weber (1864-1920), a German sociologist and philosopher, the author of

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.—Trans.
22 In “My Genealogy” (1830) Pushkin claims that he is no aristocrat, even though
he comes from a noble family. He calls himself a bourgeois, redefining the con-
cept less as a class, and more as a status of freedom in a system where the
nobility and aristocracy gain their positions by servile relationships to author-
ity.—Trans.
time noted, fast on the heels of the first revolution, the proliferation
of “the living Christs” and “the living Mothers of God”—some-
thing that is absolutely impossible in any literate religious
consciousness.23 Here everything is moved by different forces.
“Speaking about Russia,” wrote Chaadaev, “they constantly imag-
ine that they speak about the same kind of nation-state as others; in
reality this is not at all the case. Russia is an entire world that is
submissive to the will, the dispensation, and the whim of one hu-
man being, be it Peter or Ivan, it does not matter: in every case it is
the same—the embodiment of despotism.”24
In other words, Chaadaev as a thinker would also maintain, if
he were to participate in contemporary discussions, that there was
no Stalinism, that it’s a fiction by means of which it is impossible to
understand the phenomenon called by this name. In reality, Stalin
is a product of a million “autocracies” or, more precisely, he is their
focused reflection. He spoke about this himself, by the way, ac-
knowledging that the party made him according to its image and
likeness. The millions of “Stalins” is the social reality in which the
multitude of autocrats live. This is exactly what Chaadaev called
the “embodiment of despotism.” We are now trying to identify in
that era something like an intellectual, a party or even a spiritual
opposition movement. But in reality there was none, and there
could not have been. Bukharin was simply a bit out of tune with the
image with which millions of autocrats identified. Stalin turned out
to be equal to their consciousness; that’s why he became what he
became.
But this story has not ended. We have not learned to draw
meaning from what we have lived through. Otherwise we wouldn’t
talk about the cult of Brezhnev, who in reality also did not exist.
23 Mamardashvili is referring here to the idea of Russian philosopher Vasily Va-

silievich Rozanov (1856-1919). The revolution mentioned is that of 1905.
Any moment of major crisis breeds instability, and with it the tendency to grab
onto something tangible and stable; to foreclose the metaphorical gap. Roza-
nov cited Russian messianic movements as illustrative of a tendency to
literalize, and to seek an embodiment of Christ or Mary in a living person, as
opposed to understanding the Bible, or the New Testament, as allegory.—
Trans.
24 Compare Chaadaev’s “Four Fragments (1854)” in Philosophical Works of Peter
Chaadaev, 240.—Trans.
There was “the cult of Brezhnev,” by means of which a ritual dance

was performed and a certain group of people busied themselves
with self-glorification. Through him they talked about themselves,
about their own authority, about their strength and so on.
I would like to end these meditations with a thought, still rel-
evant for us, with which Chaadaev concludes the discussion of the
fact that Russia is not just a state among other states. “In opposition
to all laws of human society,” writes Chaadaev, “Russia is proudly
strutting solely toward its own enslavement and the enslavement
of all neighboring nations. And that’s why it would be salutary not
only in the interests of other nations, but in its own interests to send
her on a different track.”25
At one point this problem had already begun to be solved,26
but we were derailed and became feral. Now if we really want to
save or take part in saving civilization on earth, if we want to go
back to our European house and have a right to talk about it as its
defenders, we ourselves have to first become civilized—more civi-
lized or simply civilized people; in other words, to jump to a new
track altogether.
25 Compare Chaadaev’s “Four Fragments (1854)” in Philosophical Works of Peter

Chaadaev, 240.—Trans.
26 Most likely Mamardashvili has in mind the so-called Russian Enlightenment,
when some Enlightenment ideas made their way from France and Western
Europe to Russia. Such institutions as Moscow University (founded in 1755)
and the Imperial Academy of Arts (founded in 1757) educated many of Rus-
sia’s intellectual elites.—Trans.
On Civil Society1
I want to emphasize that this paper is strictly about the concept of

civil society, and the discussion will be quite abstract. Only when I
apply the consequences of abstract principles will one recognize
concrete realities.
As an epigraph to my reasoning, we can take the following:
“And they did not think until the flood came and destroyed them
all.”2 This is the gospel of Matthew. In addition to the image and
consequences of non-thinking that are outlined in this gospel text,
we need to grapple with the word “think.” When we raise ques-
tions about social or political theory, thinking can cut two ways, has
two meanings: first, thinking in the sense of “bytological”3 or socio-
historical theory, the apparatus or content developed by profes-
sionals in academic institutions. The second meaning refers to
thinking (no matter what fate it may have in the hands of those who
themselves live in society but at the same time are professionals in
sociology or social historical theory) that is at the same time an ele-
ment of life, or life activity, an element of the mental, psychic
composition of the subjects of this socio-historical life who simply
live their lives. This life takes shape and happens according to some
laws and connections unknown (and sometimes known) to them,
but thinking in this case is an element of how these connections de-
velop, how the shape, the configuration of the historical process,
1 “O grazhdanskom obshchestve,” Soznanie i tsivilizatsiia [Consciousness and

Civilization]. Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2019, 156-201. This essay has strong
thematic connections with an interview that Mamardashvili gave at Wesleyan
University while a Richard D. Lombard International Fellow at the Kettering
Foundation: “The Civil Society: An Interview with Merab Mamardashvili,” The
Civic Arts Review 2, no. 3 (Summer 1989).
A part of this essay was previously published as “On Civil Society,” tr. from
the Russian by Julia Sushytska and Alisa Slaughter Kettering Review 33, no. 2
(Fall 2016): 26-34.—Trans.
2 Mt. 24:39.
3 The logos of ordinary life; bytological (бытологический). This difficult-to-trans-
late concept combines byt (an ordinary state of being; everyday life) with
“logical.” It is used in the West primarily by scholars of Russian formalism.—
Trans.
177
develops, and what a complex curve it describes in the social space

of the event.
The first thing that comes to mind (because thinking appears
simultaneously under the two guises) is to distinguish, in the very
concept of thinking, between ordinary thinking or thought, and
specialized thinking.4 I will not discuss specialized thinking, and its
socio-historical variety, but thought, or thinking, as primarily a con-
scious activity, distinguishing it from specialized thinking.
Thought constitutes the ether of specialized thinking, which is why
we can discern how far such thinking is or is not carried out in the
ether of thought. One can complete the process of thinking and not
have or generate a single thought, and, conversely, one can be in
the state of thinking consciousness, including thinking feeling (here
I do not distinguish between thought and feeling), and not execute
any specialized professional thinking process, which is usually de-
scribed logically.
So, I want to warn you that I will discuss the concept of civil
society and other concepts in social theory to the extent that I can
see the consequences of a metaphysics of thought and freedom. I
will be interested in what follows from this metaphysics of thought
and freedom at the level of those concepts by which we compre-
hend the very consequences of freedom: history and society. I will
reason by analogy with what follows from this metaphysics for
thought, for the thinking consciousness, as I defined it, and not for
specialized thinking. Here is, for example, a metaphysical conse-
quence for thought, a consequence of looking at thought and
freedom metaphysically; it is a postulate: someone must think—re-
ally think—in order for there to be an object. Here the emphasis falls
on the words “really think.” This emphasis can be understood if we
distinguish between ordinary thought and specialized thinking,
but view it in a slightly different light.
4 Mamardashvili uses two nouns—думание and мышление—that are translated

by the English “thinking.” Думание is rather rare, and is usually a part of spo-
ken language; he uses it throughout the essay to refer to thinking as an element
of life. Мышление describes thinking as an analytical process usually per-
formed by professionals. We have chosen to distinguish the two by referring
to the first as “ordinary” and to the second as “specialized,” although ordinary
thought is not commonplace; it is rare and requires effort.—Trans.
ON CIVIL SOCIETY 179
In logic, thinking is represented as...,5 because an abstraction

of logical infinity is introduced—that is, the presence of certain
predicates in objects, their presence in themselves or by itself, and
then—an infinite process of approximating this reality, which has
this or that predicate, or attribute. This process is endless insofar as
the act of attributing an unambiguous and reliable predicate pre-
supposes that an infinite number of mental steps are accomplished,
covering the entire field of observation, which would rule out the
possibility of a contrary characteristic. In this case, thought is a log-
ical possibility; that is, thought is the conceivable possibility of
thought. If we can conceive of this possibility, this thought exists
regardless of whether it is fulfilled or not.
So my distinction requires that when I say “really think,” I as-
sume that a thought is actually fulfilled, the actual realization of a
finite construction. This is approximately the way that intuitionists
once looked at mathematical thinking. By the way, this is also
Kant’s principle. In a letter to Mendelssohn, he announces this prin-
ciple. “Of course,” Kant says, “if there is no one who really thinks,
then there is no object.” This is an ontological postulate. It does not
say that there is no object for someone—the object simply does not
exist in the ontological sense.
By the way, I want to establish that the realization, the actual
fulfillment of a thought (not the assumption of a logical possibility,
but the actual fulfillment of a thought) means the public character
of the thought itself. However, the condition for the public charac-
ter of thought—that is, the condition for the actualization of
thought—does not in itself need to be public. Social, legal or civic
thinking does not require a public legal formulation; it can only suf-
fer from such an attempt, because such thinking should remain as
if fundamentally a private right that does not require public expres-
sion in the form of an unambiguous legal formulation. In this case,
the legal wording would mean an attempt to make obvious and to
exhaust a non-obvious meaning of the very conditions of public
character. This is a consequence.
5 The ellipsis indicates undecipherable fragments deleted from the published

text; without the missing material, it is difficult to discern the grammatical
logic of the sentence.—Trans.
By analogy (let me remind you that I am drawing an analogy),

what follows for thought, for the theory of thinking, also follows
from the metaphysics of thought and freedom for society, for public
objects, events, phenomena as objects of historical communication
(that is, for something that happened and about which we can re-
port). According to the principle I introduced, the object of these
communications might not exist, and so when we ask what follows
from the metaphysics of thought and freedom for public objects,
events and phenomena as the objects of historical communication,
we are discussing the nature of communications and socio-histori-
cal judgments; certain conditions, rules, and ways of constructing
such judgments.
All these conditions and rules derive their essence and possi-
bility from the depths of another of Kant’s postulates. Actually, it
belongs to Descartes—that is, it is a rationalist postulate of the mod-
ern era. For now, I’ll call it Kant’s. You will immediately
understand why I speak abstractly, about postulates: even an ab-
stract enunciation of the postulates imposes a restriction on all our
mental impulses to judge history and society. Kant says, and I am
paraphrasing his reasoning in the form of a postulate: Let’s con-
struct a world described by our laws and concepts, and see if it can
generate, from within itself and according to its own laws, a being
that can describe it. I repeat, let’s describe the world objectively
from this perspective: let’s see if such a world can produce a crea-
ture that can describe it. The implication is that a world that could
not produce a creature capable of describing it could not be an ob-
jective world for us and we could not picture it objectively. On the
other hand, this also means a very simple thing: history begins with
its own description, and the science of history begins with a de-
scription of history. Yes, history begins with its description, with
the fact that such a skill may be necessary, possible, and that such a
task and question can arise, be conceivable.
For example, if one compares, say, Indian and European his-
toriography, it is clear that Indian history is a manifestation of
historical existence, a historical sequence; even if it were to seem
like incoherent, disjointed chaos, these are historical events, radi-
cally related to the way Indian people conceive history, whether or
not they set out to describe it. Before they deliberately describe it,
we cannot speak of Indian history as objective history.
By the way, to have some fun with our own, Russian state af-
fairs, I want to cite the sarcastic remark of Vladimir Pecherin,6 the
first political exile in Russian history, a kind of boutade7 against
those I would call by a completely ridiculous, even unpronouncea-
ble word “nostalgchiks” and mopers who are ready to crawl back
to Russia on their knees (as they see it), if only they were allowed
to do it. Here is Pecherin’s bitter screed: “While Nikolay lived, it
never crossed my mind to think about Russia.” Imagine a Russian
to whom it would not occur to think about Russia. “What was there
to think about? You can’t think without an object.” Recall the Kant-
ian postulate. “You can’t get blood from a stone.8 Some soldier
brought me two sheets of Petersburg newspapers from Crimea.
Apart from appointments to imperial service,”—imagine, instead
of this, decrees of the Central Committee, Pravda editorials, reports
from council meetings, etc.—“there was a cloying (using Bulgarin’s
style9) description of some public ball”—substitute a description of
the harvest, steel manufacturing, etc. That’s all there was to know
about Russia. Why think? What is there to think about? It’s point-
less.
But this also means the opposite (it follows from the Kantian
postulate): in order for there to be something, it is necessary to
think. If someone is not really thinking, then he does not have an
object. In Russia, in the current situation, we realize that often we
do not have an object for thinking, because nobody has been think-
ing for a long time, the internal element of the socio-historical
6 Vladimir Pecherin (1807–1885), was a contrarian Russian writer who spoke out
against despotism in Russia and Catholicism after moving away and becoming
a Redemptorist monk. He was the last person tried for blasphemy in Ireland,
before the authorities eliminated that category of crime.—Trans.
7 French for “humorous outburst.”—Trans.
8 На нет и суда нет, which could be rendered as “Nothing there, no lawsuit.”
The opposite of “no harm, no foul.” There may be harm, but there is nothing
there, no case. This expression owes more to the forces that influenced Franz
Kafka than traditional jurisprudence.—Trans.
9 Thaddeus Bulgarin (1789-1859) a Russian writer and notoriously quarrelsome
journalist. He picked fights with literary celebrities, most prominently Push-
kin, whom he dubbed “Chushkin” (a play on чушка: pig, slob).—Trans.
process is absent, the one that I defined at the beginning as thinking,

in contrast to specialized thinking and its academic variants. This
means that here we confront a law of continuity of thought in the
social being; the fact that, in general, one cannot begin—in the ab-
solute sense—a thought (including civic thought) about social
objects. You can’t think if somebody has not already thought, if only
because there would be nothing to think about. Moreover, by an act
of will one cannot join or, better, create a tradition. We can never
start thinking in the absolute sense, although we can in the relative
sense (I am thinking for the first time).
Platonov’s10 characters, observed and drawn from Russian so-
ciety of the 1920s and 1930s, are trying to solve such a problem (not
in reality, but on the other side of the mirror): trying to square the
circle, thinking for the first time. They are beginning in the absolute
sense from a thought, from themselves, which is impossible, just as
autogenesis is impossible. If one does not join the universal origins,
there can be no birth. Spontaneous generation of life (in this case in
the sense of living thought) is impossible. Instead, we get incubi,
who have only an external ideological mechanism of thought’s pro-
duction; such “thought” develops according to the mechanical laws
of ideological illusion, and not according to its own laws, which we
cannot induce, but only join, and in which we can become reborn
and revived, but not born in the absolute sense from zero, for auto-
genesis is impossible. No order appears out of chaos; order arises
only out of order. After all, God created the world from the begin-
nings. The material of chaos can be turned into something, if there
are already beginnings, and, being inside, we cannot ask about their
historical origins in the absolute sense of the word. This is certain.
In this sense, there is no time preceding human beings—that is, a
creature that thinks through the symbol of God, who created the
world with time (not in time, but with time).
10 Andrei Platonov (1899–1951) was the pen name of Andrei Platonovich

Klimentov, a Soviet Russian writer, philosopher, playwright and poet. Alt-
hough Platonov came from a proletariat background, his work was
thematically and formally out of sympathy with political and aesthetic con-
cerns of the time, and largely banned. His most famous novels are The
Foundation Pit and Chevengur.—Trans.
Having taken this approach, we face the following complex

task (we have a two-sided, or invertible, postulate): there is no ob-
ject if someone does not really think or someone did not really
think, and, on the other hand, there must be something that can be
spoken of as existing, as opposed to the nightmares of incubi. For
instance, the incubi dream of profiteers (speculators who need to be
caught and shot so that there is plenty to buy and no shortages).
This Russian hallucinosis started in 1917 when there was nothing,
but life after death began. In the incubi’s dreams this life after death
looked as though the incubi passed the whole world and stand at
the forefront of social progress. Korolenko,11 a perceptive observer
of that time, warned, “It seems to you that you became the leader
of social progress, having overtaken everyone and having ad-
vanced, but in fact you are at the head of a dying country in which
the normal current of life, normal metabolism, stopped.”
If we pose the question this way, then it is clear that the object
before us contains a mixture of reality and unreality, the visible and
the invisible, and we can talk about the unreality of the visible. We
can talk about a speculator, whom an incubus sees (“incubus”
comes from “incubation,” generating what cannot be born natu-
rally), about the unreality of the visible or, more broadly, the
unreality of the visible world and the reality of the invisible
world—greater reality than empirical and everyday reality, which,
by the way, can turn out to be nonexistence.
What follows from these non-obvious conditions of the public
sphere is more real than a whole array, a whole range of experi-
ences and undeniable evidence, such as the construction of
socialism, which I see when building a factory (no one doubted this
self-evidence in the 1920s). This primary obviousness is a visible
unreality; in reality, I’m simply building a factory. If I am really
thinking, nothing can be evident to me in this way. How, when I
am building a factory, is it obvious to me that I am building social-
ism? And after which factory—the second, the third—will
socialism be built? But this is obvious and unquestioned, and social
11 Vladimir Korolenko (1853-1921) was a Ukrainian-Russian writer, journalist,

and human rights activist, equally critical of the Tsarist and Bolshevik re-
gimes.—Trans.
life can be filled with such self-evidence. When thinking that is an

element of social historical situations, processes and actions is de-
stroyed, self-evident unreality results. The Gospel of Matthew
speaks of this situation: “And they didn’t think until the flood came
and destroyed everyone.” Given a universe of extended objects
that, under certain conditions, reveal their real dimensions, and un-
der other conditions manifest as unreal appearances, given the
actions and the elements of the invisible, we are faced with the fol-
lowing task in our elementary social historical orientations: we
must untangle what we ourselves produce in the social field with
our desire and acts of orientation (we condense the space around
us in which we would like to orient ourselves and move). Here we
need some principles—the principles of understanding (which are
simultaneously the principles of orientation).
I will take four of these principles. I will list them, and then
comment.
I call the first the principle of constructive connectivity: it is a
certain realized construction, only through which and within which
we can really experience and see phenomena and things in society
and in history (this needs clarification, which I will try to provide).
Second is the principle of objectification: that particular real-
ity, which was announced (I will show how) by the first principle,
is the reality by which we can objectify our civic states, feelings, and
thoughts. The principle that encompasses this space of objectifica-
tion can be expressed as follows: everything that is in a human
being must be represented in the external space of objectification,
so that what is in a human being could develop and find expression,
be articulated in such a way that personal states, motivations, im-
pulses, passions, instincts would receive clarity and form, and not
remain suspended between born and not born, in incubal underde-
velopment, underthought, underfeeling. I warn you that both
principles (of objectification, and of constructiveness, or construc-
tive connectivity) together raise a question and a problem of the
artificial and natural, the problem of the naturalness of human feel-
ings and states, including the problem of social or civic feelings and
states.
The third principle is that of understanding, or comprehensi-

bility.
And the fourth one is (I have a very strange name for it) the
principle of indispensability of labor, or the principle of non-imme-
diacy. Now we’ll try to somehow work with these principles.
Let us return to the first principle. It comes first when applied
to a particular problem and the concept of civil society, but it is not
primary in the absolute sense, because it follows from the human
being’s artificiality: the human being is always on the border be-
tween the artificial and the natural. In order to really experience a
living feeling or perception, a human being must have, receive or
create some kind of construction, which is an organ, or a means to
experience inorganic perceptions and feelings that they could not
experience naturally.
This is clearly seen in art. Art—or form—is an instrument
through which we can for the first time animate or experience a
feeling, or a state that is not naturally generated or that is naturally
impossible for us. For now, let’s call it the organ of the sixth sense.
This sixth sense is not specific, it is neither vision nor hearing. It is
the sixth sense of any feeling. We hear music or simply even a
meaningful sound, not physical stimulation, which is impossible to
do in the natural way, and, by the way, there is no continuity be-
tween the physical composition of a sound and a word’s meaning.
In this gap (the lack of continuity), within the limits of this gap, all
human understanding is contained. We cannot grasp the moment
when meaning is generated from the physical matter of sound; we
always already have it, yet the gap nonetheless exists. And all our
understanding of what is human, the whole human mind is con-
tained in this incision, in this interval, into which is it physically
impossible to fit, to wedge (it’s like an uninterrupted continuum).
Or you can, but only supersensibly, that is, with one’s mind (like in
mathematics there is a continuous segment; you cannot find a point
to which you could ascribe a specific number, i.e. you cannot fit into
this continuity with a specific number). There is no physical inter-
val, it only exists as a kind of supersensible pause, in which I situate
the birth, that otherwise does not fit anywhere. I can’t get to its be-
ginning—it already exists (I deviated a little, this apparatus is too

bulky, I didn’t need it).
Even everyday feelings, empirically accessible and verifiable,
or certifiable, we experience through a construction or an organ of
the sixth sense. Without this creation (this is especially evident in
art), this invention of something, we cannot experience even ordi-
nary, everyday feelings, empirically accessible, verifiable, and
experienced by a human as a special being. But as I said, a human
being exists at the limit of artificial and natural.
In a certain sense, we can talk about the art of society and pol-
itics. Recall homo politicus... Aristotle said that a human is a state or
political being, where “state” and “political” have the same mean-
ing. A human being is impossible and unthinkable outside the state
or politics; only God above or an animal below can be outside of
politics and the state.12 This is what I mean when I say: something
exists only to the extent it passed through a construction. (I am not
yet talking about the properties that this construction has. It is not
simply created by a human, but something more complex. For now,
I only want to introduce the material.)
I want to establish something important. The principle of con-
structive connectivity poses—or galvanizes—a question that is
always there, but that we often do not notice. The seemingly famil-
iar, known, worked-out things that we do not even notice seem to
us self-evident, and our attention glides over their surface. The
question is: what does it mean to know, to get to know? For exam-
ple, a human being has died. Do we know this, and what does it
mean if we know that they are dead? What does it mean to actually
experience, live through the death of another being—beloved or
not? (By the way, in the death of somebody we hate, we can learn
something about ourselves.) What does it mean to experience, to
know injustice? What does it mean to know human rights and so
on? Indeed, art has shown that to know that someone has died does
not mean knowing the meaning of the word “died” as applied to
an event or object, that is, to a dead person.
12 See Aristotle’s Politics 1252b29 and 1253a1-25.—Trans.

It turns out that in order to find out that someone has died,
one must first disengage oneself from a relationship with this death,
from what follows from it for you, how you react to it—from all
these reflections in the mirror (as Proust reasons in the case of the
grandmother’s death). One can learn about death only by fully re-
viving or imagining his beloved alive, and then really understand
that she has died. Inside me there is always a part of the mind (we
will get to know this in the principle of objectification), connected
with the mind outside, in which there are no reflections, and my
shadow is never introduced by my act of looking (by looking at
ourselves in the mirror we always introduce the shadow, and there-
fore, we can never see ourselves).
Or, applied more generally to knowledge, which in the Clas-
sical tradition was always power: not the power of technical
invention and application, but a state of knowledge in which there
is at the same time the power to realize the potential of this
knowledge. For instance, knowing the meaning of words is not that
kind of knowledge. When I know in this way that someone has
died, or when I know injustice, or the right,13 I don’t know, don’t
recognize or get to know;14 I pass by. The current of life does not
13 The Russian noun право (pravo) is used by Mamardashvili throughout this es-
say, and as “right” or “rights” does not exactly correspond to the English
words primarily because the English “right” can mean that which is morally
honorable, correct, or righteous, and a moral entitlement to something. More-
over, право does not refer to conservative or “right-wing” organizations and
their members, although an adjective derived from it (правый) can have that
meaning. When Mamardashvili uses the Russian право in the singular, the
translators chose to render it as “right,” even in the contexts where it has an
unfamiliar ring in English.
As will become clear in what follows, Mamardashvili is relying on Immanuel
Kant’s notion of Recht or right, which is an equivalent of the Latin ius, a condi-
tion of external lawfulness to which a Roman citizen was entitled by virtue of
citizenship, and had no direct connection with morality. As Paul Guyer notes
in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, the term “does not connote the moral or
legal claim of a particular person or group of persons to a particular benefit or
cluster of benefits, as does the contemporary English term “right” (which, un-
like Recht, can be naturally used in the plural); rather, like a mass term, it
connotes a total situation of external lawfulness (as contrasted to inner moral-
ity).” (The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992, 364.)—Trans.
14 The Russian verb узнать/узнавать means both to get to know (to find out) and
to recognize. In what follows, узнать and its derivatives are translated by “rec-
circulate there. That is, this postulate also speaks to a topologically

arranged space in which the current of life passes through nodes, at
the intersections (as opposed to not passing), although the words
are the same: “he has died” in one case, and “he has died” in an-
other case, when I really know this. Or “injustice” in one case and
also in another, when I know that something is unjust. When the
word “injustice” is applied to a sales clerk who has kept goods be-
hind the counter,15 I know the world of appearances, the world of
the unreality of the visible, let’s say unreal appearances. I can live
in it, as our Soviet people do, who know both injustice and the right.
The right to what? The right to buy a bar of soap, so that it is not
stolen in the process of redistribution.
Speaking abstractly, the terms that denote manifestations of
some invisible reality (that only constructs help us experience) and
that appear in the natural and specialized language, are secondary.
For example, our ordinary language that contains visual terms is
secondary to painting. First there was painting, and then there was
our vision with the visual terms that make it up. This secondary
nature of language is very important. Later it will come up in a dif-
ferent context.
When it comes to our axiom, or principles, this second nature
is so natural that it brings us back to the principle of actualization I
spoke of: someone is really thinking. This entails the idea of thought
as activity (including in society), and not as a theory. Thought is an
activity, or an active state, not a theory.
In this sense, thought is not specialized thinking, not part of
an intellectual system that inevitably involves signs, that is, lan-
guage. Consequently, when we say “thought is activity, not
theory,” this means that we consider the signs through which we
ognize” and “recognition,” with one exception, when it is translated as “aware-

ness.” The word “recognition” is etymologically related to cogito, a key notion
in Mamardashvili’s philosophical framework that he develops in his lectures
on Descartes. “Recognition” as it is used here is far removed from the activity
of overlooking or repressing differences (and Difference) that has been criti-
cized by Gilles Deleuze.—Trans.
15 Mamardashvili refers to the Soviet practice of petty mercantile corruption,
where goods in short supply were often reserved for preferred customers or
sold on at a higher price by sales clerks.—Trans.
think to be a secondary or parallel phenomenon (by the way, for

constructivists this was the case, and also for mathematics).
Notice (because this differentiation from language will be use-
ful and necessary to us) that when we introduce the principle of
constructive connectivity we have also introduced the need to
know ourselves. In general, to get to know something—injustice,
death, the right, or any event—implies the need to engage in the
process of knowing, and to know oneself. There is no mechanism
for this. Something must happen in the world; its happening pre-
supposes that I get to know myself, unlike, say, Platonov’s
characters, who did not get to know, did not know themselves.
There is no mechanism for this, no mechanism for the development
of a sixth sense, that is, for the functioning of social feelings and
states, civic thoughts, states, and feelings.
This is a situation of uncertainty, in particular in the sense that
no physical composition or physical sequence determines the state
of thinking. For example, one cannot deduce from any imaginable
procedure or from the physical properties of gold, that it is money.
It is money, because we deem it money. This is one of the reasons;
here a gap of uncertainty opens up, which is filled with something.
With what? We don’t know yet, although we know at least that we
cannot move through this space to the place of origin. All our un-
derstanding is inside this gap.
We will conclude one more thing: if there are structures
through which certain inorganic states are born in us (civic thought
and feeling, or social feeling are such inorganic perceptions, or
states), then we are dealing with an infinity. In other words, by an-
alyzing this kind of structure, we cannot reach any element, or part,
even the smallest, which would not be this very structure, but
something completely different—inert or material. Imagine a car:
we can disassemble it into elements that share no properties with
this car. But here we cannot in principle do this. This is a kind of
inner infinity, so to speak. I note this, because this unanalyzable in-
finity indicates that any smallest part of it contains all the properties
of the whole.
I would say that this distinguishes our art, the art of society.
That is, there are some structures: for instance, imagine the horse’s
hoof as a product of art—not human art, but nature’s. It organizes

a whole field of possible mechanical movements, and contains their
understanding—the understanding of this field. This is an arche-
typal invention of evolution. Of course, this is not an empirical, but
an invisible reality of the hoof, just as there is an invisible reality of
the leaf, according to Goethe’s presupposition, perhaps unsuccess-
ful, insignificant. He considered the leaf a visible form, which
contains all possible plant forms. A leaf is a contracted tree—not an
empirical leaf, but an ideal image, or archetype. In fact, these arche-
types, or ideal images, contain infinity in the sense I spoke of earlier.
This distinguishes them from machines; that is, from what a human
being can invent.
We have in us certain organs of our artificiality, that generate
states that are not naturally generated; superhuman forces are at
work in such structures—forces that cannot be fully analyzed and,
therefore, cannot be composed. What can be analyzed can be com-
posed and repeated, and it can be composed and repeated
differently. But these formations cannot be otherwise. Therefore,
when we say that this is a kind of art of nature, of course we use a
metaphor, and understand that it has not been made, although for
human existence constructivism...16 sheds light also on art.
In any social or historical event, something like a plan is at
work, what Kant called aiming without a target or a plan of rea-
son.17 This is what I called infinity—its embodied metaphor is ratio,
16 The original text was unclear.—Trans.

17 “Aiming without a target” is a translation of “целесообразность без цели.”
Mamardashvili is referring here to Kant’s idea that is ordinarily rendered as
“purposiveness without a purpose.” See, for instance, section 17 of The Critique
of Judgement: “Beauty is an object’s form of purposiveness [Zweckmäßigkeit] inso-
far as it is perceived in the object without the presentation of a purpose [Zwecks].”
(236) (Critique of Judgement, tr. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett Publish-
ing, 1987, 84) The translators chose a different way of formulating
Mamardashvili’s (and Kant’s) idea in order to emphasize its other shades of
meaning, and to suggest the image of the bow that can be traced to both Her-
aclitus and Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu). In his lectures on ancient Greek
philosophy, Mamardashvili notes that the ultimate goal of archery is the ten-
sion that the bow produces in the human being. Another echo of the same idea
can bе found in Gilles Deleuze’s notion of a copy without a model.
Kant’s notion of the plan of reason is discussed in The Cambridge Companion to
Kant (ed. Paul Guyer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 288-295)
or a planned proportion, such that after a few steps or even as long

as possible, I am still free and can freely think something that exists
and cannot be otherwise. I will clarify what I mean. The ancients
used to say there cannot only be visible things in the world, some-
thing invisible must also be at work, because the limit of things is
measured by foresight. Foresight is a thought directed towards the
possible, what is already assumed by this thought. If this is the case,
then we can never see anything else. In general, given the infinity
of time behind us, the world, as information, would have exhausted
itself long ago and there would have never been anything new in
it; having turned several times, it would have exhausted itself a
long time ago. And having thought something today, tomorrow we
could no longer think. A mechanism would simply project and
bring about the possibilities inherent in it. Foresight is knowing
what a thing will be, and from the known, one cannot get the un-
known. This is a law.
Where does the new come from, in artists such as Cezanne,
Filonov,18 for instance? This is a very old trick, and it always seems
like modernism. In reality, only this is art, this is how it has always
been done. When an operation has been performed on the eye, and
we begin to see, then we see it as natural and forget that this oper-
ation was performed; that someone performed it. As Proust said,
now all of us see a Renoir woman on the street, and yet somebody
needed to notice her. The prescient eye cannot see. It sets both arti-
ficial and natural boundaries already contained in it. This means
that one can see an object only by accident; something new can ap-
pear unintentionally, just out of view (a head-on look is always
directed at the known or the pre-known). It turns out that the
form—invented or discovered, stumbled upon, revealed by art—is
that by which what exists is created, or it is what already exists, but
what we still have to see, get to know. In this sense, all development
is a manifestation of what exists. But we do not see this when look-
ing deliberately, with a gaze formed independently of this act of
creation.
and in Onora O’Neill’s Toward Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Prac-
tical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 60-61).—Trans.
18 Pavel Filonov (1883-1941), avant-garde painter, art theorist, and poet.—Trans.
To create is to create the act of thought and not its content. The
task of art, then, is to generate the act of thought, and not just any
particular thought. This kind of construction has as its task not to
think but to allow to think.19 Such constructions operate in society
in relation, for instance, to what we call human rights. The rights
that came to be called natural are natural only in one sense: not that
there are some inherent rights in nature, but, instead, the theory of
natural right shifts naturalness to another domain, raises it to the
second power; this is natural. Here in topology act the forces that
cannot be constituted by human beings themselves (in that case
they could have been constituted differently). Instead, these forces
surpass human beings, amplify their capabilities and allow them
for the first time to know something through some form, but to
know it in the sense of our postulates, which is different from
knowing the meanings of language and the meanings in language.
In this respect, sense and presence—or existence—of right coin-
cides with consciousness of rights in their creation, if by creation
one understands it to mean creating what is already present. In
other words, rights presuppose maturity of consciousness. Here a
tautology is possible: meaning and presence of rights is a condition
of becoming conscious of them, it’s a condition of consciousness.
Being conscious of them is a way into these rights and into this ex-
istence of rights.
When it comes to civil society, we mean rights only as rights
that can be actualized, executed, that possess the force for their own
execution as rights. I said that knowledge is force. Knowledge is
that which possesses the power to realize its potential capabilities.
The same is true of rights. We always operate with words on two
levels. We say the word “justice”: this is simultaneously the feeling
of justice which is certainly invariant in any society, however its
scale of values, or differentiation between good and evil, might
vary. This feeling is invariant (in the sense in which it can be and is
a product of a test in form) and dual: it is the referent of the meaning
of the word “justice,” and an event of justice sought by a subject
19 “Another kind” of the visible by means of the power of thought (or a new lan-
guage, symbol, and not facts or information).—Mamardashvili’s marginal
note.
who has the power to realize, as a real state in the world, the possi-
bility of justice as a concept or a feeling.
All the states that we ordinarily designate as objects (for in-
stance, the states that have to do with rights, and detailed structures
in the form of institutions are ordinarily considered to be simply
objects that naturally exist, even if we also have in mind a certain
dynamic, such as their alteration in time, or their movement)—all
such states are more complex things; civil society is a complex fig-
ure, described by a self-generated movement. I introduced events
and objects that exist in the world only to the extent that the human
being makes a certain effort and to the extent that these objects and
states remain at the crest of the wave of this human effort—of self-
knowledge, self-mastery, self-liberation, self-transformation, the ef-
fort to rise above oneself.
Reason establishes, in the form of a plan, a society’s aim to lift
up the human being through society in a given program. How does
this happen? Through a social connection which is something that
people could not do separately, and which augments the joining of
their efforts. The primary social form arises from the accretion cre-
ated by the joining of efforts. It turns out, then (I am returning to
civil society, as I already introduced the notion of effort), that civil
society is not a collection of objects, but is instead the state that is a
complex figure traced out by a movement.
I will give a simple example. Take a chessboard. On it ob-
jects—chess figures—are assigned; certain qualities are ascribed to
them. In the chess field, or on the chessboard, there is always a fig-
ure, and then there is a sequence that creates a configuration in
which figures have a different meaning, or a meaning non-deriva-
ble from that of a pawn, or of a bishop. This is a dynamic living field
sustained by movement or effort; it is a figure traced out by move-
ment and effort that is different from the one we could get by
adding the qualities of the bishop, pawn, queen, etc.
Whatever exists in this state is civil society. It is not merely a
society constituted from objects and phenomena. Here we are dis-
cussing (this is important for understanding the metaphysical or
invisible side of constructive phenomena in society in general and
in civil society in particular) the symbolic character of this reality,
its meaning: it is made of symbols, which are things of a special

kind. Let’s call them things of reason, or things of consciousness.
The social contract or the Greek agora is such a thing of con-
sciousness or of reason, which has perfectly observable, or
empirical, and in this sense material consequences. It is a thing; a
symbolic thing; a symbol. A symbol is a thing. The social contract
is something that has never existed, exists nowhere, and will never
exist; one cannot even imagine it as fulfilled by people. If we would
want to derive the social contract empirically, we would be deriv-
ing it from human qualities, and it could never be possible that
people could agree.20 Concrete empirical people could never reach
an agreement, that is, this not only does not exist as an object, but it
is even unrepresentable as something empirically possible for peo-
ple (unrepresentable in the same way as an empirically possible
selfless love). If we were to assume that this once existed and exists,
and if people were to take this ideal as an example of something
that once existed, we would run up against the most basic impossi-
bilities. These would be impossible figures, impossible forms—to
use the terminology I discussed—such as in the drawings of Escher
where there are figures that cannot be traced out by a single move-
ment, in no dimension (that is, in three dimensions).
Nevertheless, the social life of European society functions, or-
ganizes itself and generates events because at any given moment
people decide something regarding this social agreement, while
keeping it in mind and thinking it. This agreement is named by a
word21 that has as its referent an object, and that has an empirical
analogy in the possible empirical agreements between people, even
though the symbol itself has a different, empirically unrealizable,
meaning. Moreover, it is not necessary, as Kant put it, that at any
20 This is practical reason (in its full employment), because it is unrepresentable

that we could do it on our own. The opposite of this is either sickness, or de-
bility, or infantilism, childish immaturity. As in the case of a hand (it either is
or isn’t) or in the case of language (its internal form).—Mamardashvili’s mar-
ginal note.
21 Here by finite words we register infinity, the invisible. Precision is in us, in the
maturity of our consciousness (in a “thermometer,” an organ of the “sixth
sense”; laws are us ourselves, in other words the desired = the given).—
Mamardashvili’s marginal note.
point our predecessors realized and passed it on as a covenant or

testament. The agreement has some reality in our own reality but
as though across it or in a different dimension.
These symbols or meanings, apart from enabling one to expe-
rience and get to know (one experiences and recognizes something
only through them in such a way that one can speak of “getting to
know,” or “experiencing”), are also the reserve and the background
from which one draws the terms for formulating solvable social
problems made meaningful by history itself, by life itself. There-
fore, a certain invisible reality (semantic and symbolic, and not
literal and real, material) is the condition, the background, and the
repository from which one draws, from which one forms meaning-
ful terms to formulate social and historical tasks that neither
resemble nor are that reality. They are in this reality, but their pres-
ence there in empirical form is conditional upon the symbolic
reality I mentioned. And vice versa, when we observe these actions
in the world—for instance, the act of the French Revolution—we
must understand that they receive their symbolic meaning from
this background reality. Consequently, one should not consider an
empirical action to be an attempt to realize in reality, in objects, that
symbolic reality which is simply the condition of the possible mean-
ingful terms in which social and political tasks are formulated. In
other words, civil society is civil to the extent it understands or is
conscious at the level of muscles and skills of its members, that
some phenomena and events are symbolic “givers” of meaning, not
models of the real organization of society and society’s objectives.
Aiming without a target. This is very important. The citizen of
a civil society keeps something as a symbol. There is a prohibition
against its natural fulfillment, prohibition against naturalizing ab-
solute notions. All chiliastic or gnostic movements that have existed
for a long time (all of them coexist with Christianity) accompany a
European civil society that crystallizes the Christianity of the Gos-
pels22 in secularized social and civic institutions. These movements
coexist with civil society in the form of a naturalistic heresy and—
22 Here Mamardashvili means something like the living, liberating spirit of the
Gospels, as opposed to the doctrine of the Church, in which this spirit is nec-
essarily disfigured.—Trans.
how should I put it?—an abyss of solemn non-being. It is as though

the being of forms is always accompanied by the abyss of non-be-
ing, on the edge of which one constantly experiences temptation.23
One can fall into this abyss, tempted to ascribe a natural meaning
to absolute, symbolic notions, if insufficiently civically educated,
i.e. disciplined, or forged.
Everything that the human being is must be represented in so-
ciety in structural form through this symbolic reality. These are, of
course, motile representations because one cannot represent to one-
self in advance that something somewhere at some point is
accomplished at once. They are fluid in the sense that this repre-
sentability can be obtained only historically. History is, in fact, an
attempt to represent externally all that is in the human being: any
impulses, potentialities, capabilities—those thinkable now and
those yet unthinkable. The distinctive feature of civil society is that
if there is something in the human being in which they feel fulfilled,
fully present and alive, and this something is sensual, then sensu-
ality must exist in the public space as an institution. Somebody has
to make sexy movies, somebody has to write erotic novels, etc.
What follows is an inner postulate. There are two sides to it.
(The very idea of civil society at the same time can call forth many
associations, such as an open society—everything that we associate
with the new European democratic societies, but for now I’m delib-
erately not using the word “democracy,” because it is secondary in
my approach; democracy can, by the way, be democracy only when
it is secondary and not primary.) I’ll shed some light on both sides
with Kant’s postulate. By the way, a great political scientist, I be-
lieve one of the contemporary French philosophers, said that, in a
sense, there is a fourth Kantian critique—his socio-political theory.
It may well be compiled from some of his texts, including “Theory
and Practice” and “On Perpetual Peace.”24 Kant said that maxims
(one could substitute “maxims” with “ideals” or “moral and reflec-
tive intentions”) that require public exposure for their realization
23 Antiworld of civil society.—Mamardashvili’s marginal note.

24 The full titles of Kant’s essays are “On the Proverb: That May be True in The-
ory, But Is of No Practical Use” and “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical
Sketch.”—Trans.
accord with politics, are consistent with right and ethics.25 I repeat:
maxims that require public exposure to be realized agree with pol-
itics and ethics. This is terribly interesting.
We know that experiencing a live feeling, such as love or
recognition, requires public exposure for its realization. Something
is realized and fulfilled only through constructions (including a
sensual construction, and in this case sensual feature films, sensual
books, etc.). If a phenomenon can allow itself publicity and also re-
alizes itself through it, then it is consistent with right and ethics.
And vice versa: in civil society everything that is consistent with
right and ethics must be public, since the meaning of all this, its
content and essence, is its realization in public. Otherwise, it is non-
existence, shadows, a realm of shadows.
The other side of this (the verbal material of this other side al-
ready flashed by in the form of the words “shadows” and
“nonexistence”) is that in the space of objectivation a gap is being
filled—the gap between intention of thought and thought, between
the impulse to right and right as a human state. This is the space of
the objectivations that allow one to be born or to be fully born; to
become entirely fulfilled. Such fulfillment exhausts the archaic,
doesn’t leave our human feeling—the human in the human—in the
womb or in the limbo of an archaic chthonic mass, permeated with
the “ligaments” of myth, the archetypes of the unconscious, etc.
These objectivations never leave us face-to-face with the chthonic
abyss that breathes destruction, including the abyss of human in-
stincts, but always allows one to master them, having transferred
them onto a screen.
Thinking consciousness is simultaneously a screen that sepa-
rates human beings from what they cannot master in principle, and
25 In the second appendix of “Toward Perpetual Peace”, Immanuel Kant writes:

“After abstracting in this way from everything empirical that the concept of
the right of a state or the right of nations [Staats- und Völkerrechts] contains
(such as the malevolence of human nature, which makes coercion necessary),
one can call the following proposition the transcendental formula of public
right [Rechts]: ‘All actions relating to the rights [Recht] of others are wrong if
their maxim is incompatible with publicity’.” (8:381) (Immanuel Kant, Practical
Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999, 347.)—Trans.
cannot in principle understand: that which is in principle incom-

mensurable with them, and with which they can be only
overwhelmed, in the same way as a living being—which has a liv-
ing consciousness—is overwhelmed by the Saint Vitus dance. You
are inside a gnashing machine of entirely mechanical and relentless
sequences of gestures and bodily positions (like a human being
jumping in a monkey skin) and these are not at all your intentions.
You can only observe, helpless to intervene, the developing action,
yet it is your own body that is acting: your own hands, and nose,
etc.26 This image is very clear if you ever observed a human being
suffering from Saint Vitus dance.
We now understand the principle of objectification, and
through it we understand the meaning and content of the institu-
tional—the so-called democratic—organization of society. The
public space consists of the instruments by means of which one is
fulfilled, and this public character is the condition of my getting to
know what I think, what I want, of getting to know my right, not in
the sense of right’s meaning, but of its power, which is simultane-
ously the power of realizing myself in the world as a state of right.
If there are such tools by means of which we are fulfilled, then these
are public things in the strict sense.
I assumed that there are things of consciousness in a symbolic
reality that casts the light of meaning on all that we can do in this
reality, and I said that the things of consciousness and of reason are
in that same sense social things. For instance, a social contract is a
social thing. We can call this differently: connectivity. I discussed
constructive connectivity. (Social “ligaments”…religio. The primary
connection.27) It—for I ascribed to it a symbolic character—is the
26 The nose may at first appear an unlikely candidate for the frantic movements
Mamardashvili describes, but the image, though absurd, is also logical. Rus-
sian literary eminence Vladimir Nabokov notes that, starting with Gogol, the
organ of olfaction plays an important role in Eastern European literature. As
well as providing the comedic, satirical, or bawdy associations common to
Western literature (Tristram Shandy, Cyrano de Bergerac, Pinocchio), Gogol’s
noses twitch, bend, and eventually achieve identities of their own, culminating
in The Nose (1835). Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, New Di-
rections Publishing, 1944.—Trans.
27 Initial primordial proto-image (name-image of a line traced out by tension).—
Mamardashvili’s marginal note.
connecting representation of an infinite manifold; the representa-

tion connects this infinite manifold, representing it locally. The
infinite manifold is infinite, and this is its connecting representation
here and now, a representative not in the sense of a mental represen-
tation, but in the sense of representing.
Here we deal with what the Greeks invented and what the Ro-
mans concerned themselves with and named, because they in
general found all the words for the state of right (we did not get far
from Roman right, and, I hope, will never get far from it, but, to the
contrary, will return to it.) This is res publica, a public thing that be-
longs to all in the sense that all are citizens to the extent to which
they can represent themselves publicly and then, by the light re-
flected from public deliberation,28 articulate in themselves their
own wishes, aspirations, states and thoughts; inform themselves,
get to know and teach themselves. Before what? Before acting, as it
turns out. For then the plan of reason29 is legible there. In other
words, if I inform myself, then also on the second and third steps I
can preserve the imprint of freedom in my actions, I can be free
again. Constructions for reviving feelings exist. I work in them, in
their terms, and then tomorrow and the day after there is an artic-
ulation of my feelings, it preserves the possibility of iteration,
realization in potential infinity.30 Recall that infinity is built into
these formations and differentiates them from a machine. Tomor-
28 Here Mamardashvili uses a characteristic and difficult-to-translate term, пуб-

личное катание, to discuss the back and forth of ideas in the public square. In
his Vilnius Lectures on Social Philosophy (1981) he develops the same idea of об-
катывание, which refers to rolling a snowball, to indicate how ideas or
opinions are developed in conversations on the agora: a small, miserable snow-
ball of thought that would otherwise melt in the course of being rolled around
by interlocutors in an open public space expands into a sizable ball of snow,
and, occasionally, into a beautiful snowman. See the Introduction. See Mamar-
dashvili’s Vil’niusskie lekcyi po sotsial’noi filosofii [Vilnius Lectures on Social
Philosophy], Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2012, 124-125.—Trans.
29 Kant’s notion of the plan of reason is discussed in The Cambridge Companion to
Kant (ed. Paul Guyer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 288-295)
and in Onora O’Neill’s Toward Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Prac-
tical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 60-61).—Trans.
30 In the texts of consciousness there is still no separate act of reading (I am this
knowledge, the text of which is read by a text).—Mamardashvili’s marginal
note.
row, then, I will not simply react to something mechanically, but

will be able to think again (in the sense of the definition I gave at
the beginning); that is, think freely what is and cannot be otherwise,
see reality. My feeling of reality is eternally new. To the extent it is
new I will never be a captive of irreality; in this context the novelty
will always be a sign of reality.
Res publica.
Returning to the republic…it is the primary reality and the pri-
mary basis of all democratic transformations, of all democratic
societies. It is higher, broader, and more primary than democracy.
In what sense? Republic means the independence of res publica, a
public thing, both from the minority and any mercenary advantage
in general, and from the majority. The constellation of rights that
exist and make up the life of a republic emerge from the force for
right, the power to actualize in the form of a real state in the world
one’s capability or impulse to right. Once again, there is the differ-
ence between the two levels of words. The word is the same, but we
have already concluded that language is secondary in comparison
with thought as an activity and in comparison with symbolic real-
ity. I indicated how this symbolic reality will be denoted when it
has a consequence in objective reality. This is secondary and never
coincides.
I will introduce one more postulate. I have already discussed
the connecting representation of an infinite manifold through struc-
tures [that open] a transformative space, a space independent of
matter, so to speak, a space of structures, because the matter of feel-
ings can differ dramatically, but the transformation of forces, their
transposition through a connecting representation is something
productive and creative, and invariant with respect to matter. I
would say that this transposition of the force of action on oneself is
an element of the structure that creates; the content can change, but
the form can transfer from one content to another.
I need to remind you of the plan of reason, which is like a sign
of freedom at the next step or after several steps, a guarantee that
there I will turn out once again capable and free. This plan attrib-
utes to a society the goal to raise the human being, of civilization as
the human ability to rise above oneself, above one’s natural or ani-
mal nature. The possibility of this elevation is measured from the

next step, if it exists at the next step. Let’s put it this way: conscious-
ness is the possibility of greater consciousness, and from the greater
we can count down to the lesser: to consciousness, to the possibility
of greater consciousness. Thought is also thought when it is the pos-
sibility of greater thought.
We can apply a notion of density to the space of objectification
(if we have such a space) in which civil society is situated, transpar-
ently represented on the agora, where citizenship is not a right, but
a duty to participate in civic affairs, for only such participation crys-
talizes civic states in you, and for the first time you get to know
what is it that you are analyzing, wishing, thinking, etc. This is a
spatio-temporal density: the density of history, how many, how
many more or fewer nodes and points, in which human beings can
rise above themselves through connecting representations of the in-
finite manifold. If these are constructions in the symbolic sense of
this word, in the sense of historic points, interlinkages of historical
motives, human motives, actions, etc., then their condensation
(where there is an impulse to a still greater or further elevation) is
the intensive or dense space. In other words, there are many such
points, and their multiplicity makes the space dense. Say, Russia’s
space is empty, almost empty. European space is very dense, in the
sense that one always finds oneself at the point (there are tons of
these points) where there is a motive, a stimulus to rise above one-
self. Otherwise it is impossible for me to be, I cannot not rise above
myself. There is always an active impulse to elevation. An histo-
rial,31 so to speak, to realize the design of history, which is for
human beings to fulfill themselves, to become.
When it comes to humankind, the interval of this becoming is
the entire history, the end of which is merely symbolic. It cannot be
a point or a part of history. The immobile social connections, the
31 Historial is French in origin; the 1958 edition of Larousse defines it as a rarely-

used adjective: “having to do with history.” The Oxford English Dictionary
also lists it as an adjective that means “belonging to or of the nature of history;
historical, historic” and noun: “a history, a record.” Historial does not exist in
Russian; Mamardashvili formed it following the memory-memorial pattern.—
Trans.
connecting representations, trace out a very complicated curve of

historical events, the curve of civil society, civil being, civil life, and
civil history. These immobile connections approximate a motor and
a motive of a still greater elevation of the human being (and not
simply above animal life or above some squabble) also because they
demand to be continuously “bound.”32 A human being binds his-
tory through these historical acts. History doesn’t flow by itself. In
order to flow it is continuously bound by human activity. We then
observe this flow, but in reality history does not flow by itself, but
is tied again and again. Different special entities or institutions can
exist to summon the human being to new historical connections.
I mentioned that outside there must be everything that is in-
side. History is fulfilled, bound together as externally flowing
objective history. Similarly, certain abilities are deposited inside the
human being, including rights that survived the crucible of these
new historical ties. In this case they are natural rights, not the rights
distributed by the state, but natural rights, the constellation of
which is the foundation of civil society or civil society itself. There
are special mechanisms for this: certain democratic institutions
(now I am using the word “democracy”33) are mechanisms that
both incite and provide tools and resources for these new ties. The
rite of initiation could have been such a mechanism in antiquity.
I repeat, religio is the primary bond. It is simultaneously reli-
gion and religio as connection. A simple mechanical or natural
constellation or communal life of people turns into society only
through connection of this kind. Civil society is, of course, not soci-
ety in general, and not a society separate from other societies, but a
certain quality of society. It is not the entire society, but society
brought to a certain state—the state of the figure that exists while
the movement that traces it out exists, the movement with human
effort, or with the effort of many individuals who are in a certain
32 Mamardashvili uses the Russian adjective завязанный, and in the following

sentences verb завязать and its reflexive form завязаться, which, apart from
“to bind,” or “to tie,” also means “to set” (when referring to fruit), “to begin,”
or “to spring up.”—Trans.
33 See Mamardashvili’s remark earlier in this essay that the republic, and not de-
mocracy, is primary.—Trans.
state of this effort. Remove the effort and civil society will disap-
pear. Take the Greeks: the effort disappeared and Greek society
disappeared even before it was crushed by the barbarians. There-
fore, if there is civil society, then it has the actions or democratic
institutions through which the human being matures, achieves self-
mastery and is able to do this because there are always external
equivalents for all possible states. Say there is aggression in a hu-
man being. Very well; something exists in which the only humanly
acceptable meaning of this aggression can be explicated and real-
ized so that this natural passion can be resolved, dissolved—but
under the condition that the figures or the forms that are in this so-
cial field, in this social realm, are not themselves dissolved or
dispersed.
Their disintegration is, of course, possible and imaginable, and
so is the appearance of entire zones where social connections disin-
tegrate and human beings consequently go feral. Then this entire
abyss empties out, because in the external space it does not have
any channels to crystalize, allow for movement, and settle meaning
backwards, on the side of the human being.
In Russia’s Soviet history starting from 1917 there is clearly a
zone where social connections break down. This zone first emerged
in Petersburg, and then at once, instantly, without any transmission
in time or space (there is no such thing because it happens in an
entirely different way) there came an avalanche of consequences,
the ever widening zone of disintegration of public social connec-
tions—the zone where society was absent—that enveloped the
entire space of the Soviet Union. In 1917, a collective suicide of so-
ciety and statehood took place. As a result we have this maximally
rarefied space, empty space (as opposed to dense), where there are
minimal or almost no points at which my effort would bind and
incite me to rise above myself and to master myself. There must
always be this space of objectification: the density of space-time, an
area of slack or free play (the gap between a natural feeling and the
same feeling as civil, social, human). The gap must not be filled by
prohibitions, or by catastrophic events, when this density passes
onto pure matter, the weighty physical mass of human bodies. Then
the space and time at a historical point disappears, contracts; the

gap disappears for the human being. Which gap?
Nobody wants to part with their body, if their flesh, including
social flesh, is already god-given, that is, constructed in the light of
symbolic reality, and lit up from within. This is no longer a simple
natural body but god-given34 and unique. Only such a body is ca-
pable of certain perceptions or visions that are valuable for all of
humanity, and it would be a pity to part with it. But a human being
who did not undergo, say, social initiation (I will not discuss reli-
gious initiation), who had not matured through social connections
both doesn’t mind parting with his own body, and does not know
the value of life. I return once again to Platonov: his characters do
not know the value of life, they are like children. Death for children
is pure abstraction. They don’t know the value of life.
I said that nobody wants to part with the body. By the way,
according to the essence of Christianity, the body is divine, it is god-
given—after Christ, not the body before Christ but, let’s put it this
way, the second body. Nobody wants to give up their soul. Why?
This sounds better in French: personne ne veut rendre son âme—no-
body wants to give up the soul—give it up to another. Why?
Because there is the most important thing there, of which the hu-
man being does not yet have knowledge and in relation to which a
human being did not yet become. This empty gap is this being’s
own “space and time.” One cannot become and fulfill oneself with-
out movement in this free space and time. Nobody, of course, is
ready to relinquish the soul. I don’t have, don’t know it myself. It is
the most vulnerable and bashful—and in this sense the least pub-
lic—part of me. Recall that I said that the conditions of the public
sphere must not themselves be public or obvious.
Imagine now that this gap is narrowed, as if the electrons were
to collapse out of their orbits, surrounded by empty spaces, onto
the nucleus. The gap is compressed—for example, for the soldier
34 This material was delivered as a lecture, and Mamardashvili often modified

“god-given” with a rhetorical disclaimer, “so to speak,” perhaps to signal that
he did not mean the phrase as a confessional or dogmatic reference to orthodox
religion, but rather as part of the metaphysical apparatus he was construct-
ing.—Trans.
who fought in Afghanistan. The clearance of space, in which he

would have been able to learn something about himself while
fighting in Afghanistan, is flattened, compressed, by the term “in-
ternational freedom fighter.”35 He is suffocating inside this label.
The Greeks, as you know, executed human beings by roasting them
alive inside a brazen bull. This was an execution and simultane-
ously a torture: they placed the condemned person in the brazen
bull sculpture, lit up a fire underneath it, and roasted the human
alive. Similarly, one can roast a human in a brazen statue of himself.
This of course wouldn’t occur to the Greeks. It could only come to
mind in Absurdistan, in the world behind the looking glass. In the
land of homo sovieticus, this did come to mind. How many people
roasted in the brazen image of themselves! They can scream as
much as they like, “No, it’s not me! I am different!”—or “I can be
different.” This is the cry of somebody roasting inside the brazen
statue.
We distinguish between something knowable through lan-
guage, and something that one knows through that very word.
These are fundamentally different things. In language itself, how-
ever, we don’t get this difference, we cannot differentiate
“international freedom fighter” from “fighter” in language. In this
sense language is a terrible thing. It’s just as much our enemy as is
the past. Here we need to introduce an ontological difference. The
two differ in consciousness. Co-gnition differentiates.36
This differentiating consciousness is exactly what I call the
principle of understanding, or comprehensibility. We find this prin-
ciple at work in rights. Recall “human rights”—I said that the
meaning and the existence of rights coincides with being conscious
of them in the creation of what already exists; in other words, it
presupposes a mature consciousness. Maturity of consciousness is
differentiation, which is consciousness itself. It is not difference be-
35 The Russian euphemism воин-интернационалист is more literally translated

as “internationalist fighter,” reminiscent of “freedom fighters” or “heroes” in
current usage.—Trans.
36 Mamardashvili plays on the fact that when the first two letters of the Russian
word for consciousness, сознание, are separated off with a dash, one gets со-
знание, where со can be understood to mean “with” and знание means
“knowledge.”—Trans.
tween objects, not something external. For example, “responsibil-

ity” in language, and as a human state, called by this same word,
are indistinguishable. The difference between them (they are indis-
tinguishable in language) is consciousness, which is also
understanding—the understanding which is an element and a con-
dition of the existence of that which is understood. Understanding
as an element of being.
Notice this simple thing. On the one hand, comprehensibility,
the principle of understandability, differentiates what is objectified
from a machine, from mechanical action, protects the field of inner
space from collapsing, and prevents spiritual paralysis. Otherwise
we cannot make a distinction. Without the principle of understand-
ing, for instance, the actions of a machine would be
indistinguishable from the actions of a human being. What we see
could very well issue from a machine, and behind the visible we
would never presuppose or recognize a human being as an agent
who generates actions and consequences observable or visible to
us.
On the other hand, any sociological or political theory has lim-
itations. It can study anything at all, any details or any degree of
detail of any social law, but to a limit: as a living subject in social
processes and history I need to know what I am to do, of what I am
capable, and how I should understand. If a social theory discusses
something that I cannot do, in which I cannot participate, and the
understanding of which cannot become an element of my action,
then such a theory does not exist. It must be reduced. In the same
way, I can understand interlinkages of neural circuits, the product
of which is consciousness, but this understanding of neural circuits
cannot be an element of my conscious action. In this sense, with re-
spect to a conscious action it is superfluous, and a theory of neural
circuits bears no relation to a theory of consciousness, and cannot
be included in it. This a variant of Ockham’s razor. In exactly the
same way, there is a principle of understandability for a human be-
ing. It cuts, sets limits to sociological and sociopolitical theory.
One could say a lot more about the principle of understanda-
bility. I will, however, briefly speak about the indispensability of
labor, the fourth principle. It is simple. I discussed what it means to
know. We really have to know that injustice exists—not the word,

its meaning or associations, but we have to get to know in the sense
of really experiencing. The following question arises: why not take
the direct route? Why can’t one desire to be, and then be? Why can’t
one want the good, and then be good? This reminds us why we
need to work. Why isn’t it enough to have good wishes and inten-
tions? We walk past this question, do not notice it, and say: “The
road to hell is paved with good intentions.” By the way, such a
phrase is a product of wisdom. Only now it became a cliché, and
we glide along without noticing the meanings hidden in this
phrase. Why is everything not immediate? Why doesn’t the desire
for thought constitute thought? Why isn’t it enough to desire the
good? This is a variation on the first part of the first principle when
I talked about artificiality. In fact, this is a statement about the im-
possibility of natural good.
By the way, one creative product of Dostoevsky’s lifelong
work was the proof and the demonstration that the presupposition
of almost all Russian literature about some natural good is false.
There is no natural good, the good is done, is made laboriously and
indirectly. This is why questions emerge: why not have everything
at once and directly, why do we need time at all? Time is simply
another term for effort. In this sense time is a phenomenon of indi-
vidual consciousness—but ontological consciousness, or
consciousness as an element of ontological organization. Time is ef-
fort—the effort of being. Why do we need history? Why do we need
others, or society? In other words, why do we need a more complex
kinship (either kinship or a way to “measure” the world through a
human being) of a more complex type than consanguinity or sexual
affinity?
To invert this: we clearly see that not working is the main prin-
ciple of Soviet society. People scream and shout so they don’t have
to work. There is some other metaphysics or anti-metaphysics in
this. Most likely, anti-metaphysics, in the same sense as there is
world and anti-world, anti-metaphysics not in the sense of “against
metaphysics,” but as actualized: no working! In metaphysics, how-
ever, we have the principle of indispensability of labor. Something
can come to be only through labor in time, in society, not immedi-
ately, but through the principles of understanding, comprehensibil-

ity, objectification, constructiveness. This axiom or principle of
indispensability of labor can be expressed differently: the principle
of the soul’s drama. One of the implications of the metaphysics of
thought and freedom is that we situate this drama as a human his-
torical force. What appear to be social reactions, social roles, masks
and so on, are in reality the drama of the soul and presuppose the
movement in the soul to counterbalance what is developing out-
side. In other words, there must always be an equivalent to the
movement in the soul: what is possible and what develops outside.
So the labor of the soul and of freedom is, in fact, history. In the
historical sphere or in the sphere of consciousness (the two are one
and the same) only curved paths are straight (as, evidently, in non-
Euclidean geometry). Nothing direct is possible. I cannot stretch my
hand and… Too bad! For a human being always wants things to
proceed directly. Why not directly? I am transparent, clear to my-
self, because I am well-intentioned. The good is straight ahead. But
straight ahead is no good.
The Illegal Joy of Merab Mamardashvili1
Annie Epelboin
Merab Mamardashvili’s thought had a resounding effect in the pe-

riod subsequent to his death, after the collapse of the USSR. In the
flurry of new books authorized by the end of censorship, he was a
publishing success even though this was not a post-mortem discov-
ery, because his oral lectures were already successful. His work was
heard, rather than read, by a very diverse audience—young philos-
ophers, students of all disciplines, artists, filmmakers—who came
to his classes, despite all obstacles, to live the experience of invigor-
ating thought, of demanding and innovative reflection. Because
educating was quite different from professing, it was, with each of
his interventions, the art of philosophizing aloud, taking public
risks that bring about “the incredible effort that man makes to reach
his own thought.” He warned his audience, “Philosophy is not a
profession but a temperament, a way of life. I cannot transmit a sum
of knowledge to you, but only something rigorously intimate, and
therefore risky in the sense of mutual understanding.”2 With this
warning, Mamardashvili began one of his last lectures, given in
Moscow in 1990. He referred less to his current reflections on “Vi-
enna at the Dawn of the 20th Century” than to his wager on all his
activity as a philosopher-teacher: to live and make the audience also
live the “rigorously intimate” experience of a developing thought.
Before taking form as a book or an article, his reflection was most
1 An earlier version of this text appeared as a preface to the French translation

of Mamardashvili’s lectures on Descartes, Méditations cartésiennes (Arles: Actes
Sud, 1997). Translated from the French by Alisa Slaughter and Julia
Sushytska.—Trans.
2 The translators are following the original Russian text of the lecture “Vienna
at the Dawn of the 20th Century” presented in October 1990 at the Pushkin
Museum of Art: “Философия—это не профессия, а темперамент и способ
жизни, и я не могу вам сообщить никакой суммы знаний, а могу передать
лишь нечто совершенно интимное и потому рискованное в смысле взаи-
мопонимания” (Ocherk sovremennoi evropeiskoi filosofii [A Study of
Contemporary European Philosophy] (Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2010),
567).—Trans.
209
often elaborated for lectures, in front of a more varied audience

than just the students of the Institute who had invited him: the work
of the philosopher is above all oral. Writing hardly suited him: he
had suffered too much, no doubt, from reading or writing articles
which, from the opening paragraph, exhausted themselves in ob-
ligatory quotations from Marx and Lenin and whose language
searched in opacity for a way to confuse the censors. Oral delivery
admitted more spontaneity. Above all, he wanted to be an awak-
ener of the spirit, whose living speech was immediately perceived
by the recipient. His friend J.P. Vernant compared him to Socrates
even so far as a physical description.3 This is how he “awakened,”
if not formed, the generation of philosophers who in Russia so eas-
ily adopted modernity at the end of the 20th century, in the 1970s:
they said the life-giving force of this free speech taught them, above
all, that one could think. In fact, if anyone objected at the time, at
the end of a lecture, that the authors he had mentioned, such as
Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl or even Descartes, would not be read by
students, since their works were not found in libraries, he replied
that it did not matter because they would find other books and
know what reading meant. In the intellectual oppression of the
Brezhnev years, Mamardashvili, neither dissident nor doctrinaire,
simply taught the possibility of thinking.
He was born in 1930 in Gori, the birthplace also of Stalin, who,

conversely, proclaimed that an intellectual must be an “engineer of
souls.” Mamardashvili laughed at this coincidence, finding that one
could see “a divine symmetry” there. But he did not stay in Georgia
long because his father, a professional soldier, was sent to the
Leningrad Military Academy in 1936, and that kept him alive: at
this very time, in Tbilisi, all the officers were shot during a purge.
When war broke out, Mamardashvili returned to Georgia and, until
1949, lived an adolescence that was freer intellectually than it
would have been elsewhere in the USSR. These are the years of the
first awakening, which he owes not to his schooling, but to books,
3 Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Le Socrate géorgien,” Entre mythe et politique (Paris: Édi-
tions du Seuil, 1996), 600-605.
THE ILLEGAL JOY OF MERAB MAMARDASHVILI 211
discovered in the forgotten stacks of the district library; censorship

did not always reach the periphery. He was captivated by the
“French thinkers” who would remain dear to him: Montaigne, Des-
cartes, Racine, Montesquieu. To this serious reflection he added
another formative experience, apparently opposite: he absorbed
Georgian culture as an art of living, what he will call “illegal gai-
ety.” He made the living tradition of the Georgians his own, their
sense of dignity, the art of daily celebration, the primacy of the joy
of existing: “illegal” in the sense of baseless, maintained as a per-
manent challenge to misfortune, whether political, social or
personal. He would keep this acquired taste for light exchange and
conviviality, which made him love France; a casual and affable ele-
gance as well as a total aversion to complaint.
In 1949 he decided to come to Moscow to study philosophy.
He learned nothing, he would say, at the University (“words could
not make themselves heard there”) but again collected human ex-
perience. Moscow, in these post-war years, was a capital that was
both miserable and bustling with life. He rubbed shoulders with
other students, older than him by ten to fifteen years, who were in-
firm, sometimes disfigured: disabled veterans set apart by their
injuries, who were now resuming their studies. They carried with
them the experience of death, and their war stories, evoking a world
beyond the Soviet Union’s borders, set a somber tone. This atmos-
phere marked a generation; many of his fellow students would
become leading intellectuals, some of whom are known in the West:
the philosopher Alexander Zinoviev, author of The Radiant Future
and The Yawning Heights, the sociologists Boris Grushin and Yuri
Levada, and philosopher Alexander Piatigorsky. All of them found
their subjects later, and for the time being labored over authorized
texts, studying, for example, the epistemology of Marx’s Capital.
Having completed advanced studies, Mamardashvili joined
the editorial staff of the journal Questions of Philosophy in 1957,
where he published his first article (“Processes of Analysis and Syn-
thesis”). A few years later, he left the USSR for Prague as an editor
of the review Problemy mira i sotsializma.4 This five-year stay (1961-

66) in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, much more open to the world
than Moscow, would be decisive for him. His new colleagues were
communist intellectuals from all countries, in particular from
France and Italy, he spoke French or Italian with them, and felt like
he was living in Europe. Some remained friends forever. He discov-
ered jazz, detective novels and especially Prague and the life of
cafes; it was there that he understood in practice what a civil society
was. The infinite political discussions, the confrontation of ideas
and experiences, the public nature of debates constituted for him
what he would call the agora: without this fundamental achieve-
ment of European culture, unthinkable in the Soviet Union, no one
can feel like a citizen.
Back in Moscow, he was deputy director of Questions of Philos-

ophy until 1974, and in 1968 he published his first work, Forms and
Content of Thinking. The year before, he took advantage of an official
invitation to Italy to come to Paris without a visa, helped by a
French friend. During the previous year’s visit he met Althusser.
They had very different views on Marx and even more on Lenin,
but did not dwell on them. They became friends and wrote to each
other often, unable to meet again until 1974 when Althusser risked
going to Moscow. Mamardashvili himself was condemned to inter-
nal exile by this illegal stay in France. He was warned that he would
no longer be allowed a visa: a trip abroad was a gift from the state
and not for the accomplishment of a personal project. He persisted,
however, in his appetite for encounters, even with foreigners, defy-
ing the prohibitions without becoming a dissident. He wanted
simply to be a free man, within the constraints imposed on him. He
worked briefly at the Institute of the International Labor Move-
ment, which welcomed both Soviet researchers and communist
intellectuals from all countries. Discussions with Mamardashvili,
rather than edifying them, led them down the slope of disillusion-
ment: according to him, studying Marx does not preclude opening
4 This journal was also known outside the USSR as World Marxist Review.—
Trans.
one’s eyes to reality. As the borders were opening in the 1970s, he

received other visitors, journalists and researchers, defying the iso-
lation the authorities would have preferred. Visitors brought him
news, books and letters. From the middle of the 1970s, he would
pay for his passive disobedience, suffering the systematic suppres-
sion of his teaching despite invitations from various institutes.
These are years when the circle of friends compensated for the
lack of freedom. There he found a network of exchanges and col-
laboration which also involved the work of the Tartu Semiotic
School. They discussed and compared unpublishable ideas, meet-
ing in the workshops of painters or sculptors. Absurd humor
unmasked the fraudulence of language. This is the atmosphere that
Alexandre Zinoviev recreated in The Radiant Future. Friends in turn
took pains to invite Mamardashvili to their workplaces, such as the
Institute of Cinematography, the Institute of Applied Psychology,
and various scientific or technical establishments. Each time the au-
dience, more and more numerous, moved with him.
In 1972, he lectured on Descartes, Kant, and Husserl. How-
ever, we must keep in mind the cultural context in which these
lectures took place: Descartes, like Pascal, Plato, Nietzsche and even
Kant were classified, according to the criteria of official dogma, in
the category “idealist philosophy.” As such, they were subject to
systematic denigration by servile professional scholars, whether in
education or in scholarly journals. Researchers less concerned with
conformism, however, allowed the phrase “idealist philosopher”
into their work—or even, in reaction to dogmatic Marxism, ele-
vated a religious interpretation of this thought. Mamardashvili’s
position is fundamentally different and, in this context, paradoxi-
cally innovative: in Descartes, for example, he sees only an object of
philosophical reflection, the Cartesian God only interests him phil-
osophically. The simple affirmation of the thinking subject as the
foundation of human existence is a challenge to the presuppositions
of Soviet science. It upsets the balance of the ideological structure
based on the primacy of the social. This outlook—commonly ac-
cepted elsewhere—allowed him to affirm in his lectures that the
three foundations of modern thought are to be found in Nietzsche,
Freud…and Marx (despite Marxism). Refusing any label of belong-
ing, Mamardashvili also rejected national identity, whether Soviet,

Russian or Georgian; he called himself a citizen of the world be-
cause he was a philosopher. He gladly returned to French authors
and undertook variations on Proust, but also Kantian Variations.
Over the course of his teaching he wove a continuous reflection on
consciousness, which over and over again brought him back to
Proust.
But, faster and faster, each lecture undertaken was officially
canceled and it was exhausting to keep going. The end of the 1970s
was sadly marked by waves of emigration, which deprived him of
his friends. It was then that he responded, in 1979, to the invitation
of the Institute of Philosophy in Tbilisi: he left Moscow for Georgia,
where he became a tenured professor. However, he frequently re-
turned to Moscow for conferences. The 1980s were a more peaceful
era for teaching, and he published a second book (Classical and Non-
classical Ideals of Rationality, Tbilisi, 1984). The third and last work
published during his lifetime is a collection of articles and presen-
tations (How I Understand Philosophy, Moscow, 1990).5
He had planned in 1988 to publish in Tbilisi his reflections on

Descartes, but he did not finish the final edits. The course of history
accelerated abruptly, perestroika lifted prohibitions and opened
borders. Mamardashvili spent the last three years of his life divided
between two new activities: he went abroad (he was invited to Paris
in 1988 and 1990, as well as to New York and Rome) and he partic-
ipated actively in the political debates taking place in Georgia. The
emancipation of the republic was not effortless. Very quickly, he
found himself at odds with “neo-Bolshevism,” a new menace he
denounced in the growing strength of the nationalists. He openly
fought against the new conformism: “I do not want faith, I want
freedom of conscience” he declared two weeks before his death, ac-
cused in the Georgian press of being an “enemy of the people.” He
died of a heart attack in 1990, in the Moscow airport, while awaiting
the plane which was to bring him back to Tbilisi.
5 Mamardashvili also co-authored a book with Alexander Piatigorsky, Symbol

and Consciousness, published in 1982.—Trans.
All his life he had fought “as a good European,” as if in re-

sponse to the call made by Husserl in 1935: “The greatest danger
that threatens Europe is weariness. Let us fight this danger of dan-
gers as good Europeans, animated by this courage that even an
endless fight does not frighten…” In fact, in the depths of difficult
times, he gladly re-read The Crisis of European Humanity and Philos-
ophy, contemplating the “Phoenix of a new living interiority” and
persisting on his own path, “because only the spirit is immortal.”
Verwandlung, or the Human Crucible
Miglena Nikolchina
Kafka’s name appears—for the first time in Mamardashvili’s

works, so far as I know—in his 1984 lecture entitled “Consciousness
and Civilization.”1 At that point, Mamardashvili had already pub-
lished his major works on inverted forms, Marx’s verwandelte
Formen.2 He had had to give up on completing his epistemological
treatise on scientific discovery which would appear posthumously
as The Arrow of Knowledge.3 And, he had already embarked on a dec-
ade of frantic lecturing, which would cover the history of
philosophy from Ancient Greece to his contemporaries and engage
areas of research ranging from quantum mechanics to psychoanal-
ysis and the study of literature.
Behind this intellectual trajectory, there is a lot of biographical
drama related to the political situation in the former Soviet Union.
It involves two radical shifts regarding the audiences Mamardash-
vili addressed: from the theoretical complexity of his early writing
to the much more accessible rhetoric of the lectures, which were
fabulously successful, and, when the perestroika allowed it, to the
even more conversational style of the interviews. There is a debate
as to whether these shifts amount to a radical break between an
early non-metaphysical and a later metaphysical Mamardashvili. I
am of the opinion that they do not. To begin with, Mamardashvili’s
concept of metaphysics does not coincide with a certain contempo-
rary dogma. He considers his interest in being, consciousness,
cognition, ontology, etc., as belonging to metaphysics in spite of re-
lating his own approach to the 19th century counter-metaphysical
1 Included in this volume.

2 Two of them have been translated in English: Merab Mamardashvili, “Analy-
sis of Consciousness in the Works of Marx,’’ Studies in Soviet Thought 32 (1986):
101–120.; “Converted Forms. On the Need for Irrational Expressions,” Stasis 5
no.2 (2017): 204-217.
3 Merab Mamardashvili, Strela poznaniia [The Arrow of Knowledge] (Moscow:
Merab Mamardashvili Foundation, 2019).
217
turn exemplified by Marx, on the one hand, and Nietzsche, on the

other, and to later developments that came with Freud and Witt-
genstein among others: in fact, as he puts it, “it is impossible to
personify this turn.”4 His own designation for this new direction in
thinking is “non-classical rationality” and he considers it in terms
not confined to philosophy. Understanding it demands considering
the transformations,
carried out by the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, the theory of

ideology (which begins with Marx and is radically non-classical, i.e., clearly
distinct from the routines of classical ontology and epistemology) […] psy-
choanalysis, etc. and drawing from all this some lessons that are in line with
the task […] which can be summarized as follows: elaborating an extended
ontology of rationally comprehensible phenomena, an ontology that in-
cludes the psyche and consciousness.5
In short, the non-classical approach demands an understand-

ing of the implication of the observer in the observed phenomena.
In Mamardashvili’s early work this problem is formulated through
his analytics of Marx’s inverted forms, verwandelte Form. The word
Verwandlung appears in the title of the second part of the first vol-
ume of Marx’s Capital, signifying the turning of money into capital.6
In the English translation it is rendered as “transformation.”7 The
same word is translated as “metamorphosis” in the title of what is
probably Kafka’s most famous work, The Metamorphosis: in Ger-
man, once again Verwandlung. Famously, in the first sentence of this
novella the protagonist Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself
transformed (verwandelt) into some sort of monstrous vermin, un-
4 Merab Mamardashvili, Soznanie i tsivilizatsiia [Consciousness and Civilization]

(Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2019), 299-300.
5 Merab Mamardashvili, Klassicheskii i neklassicheskii idealy ratsional’nosti [Classi-
cal and Nonclassical Ideals of Rationality] (Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2011),
11-12.
6 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Das Kapital, vol. 23, Werke (Berlin/DDR: Dietz
Verlag, 1968), 161. Of course the term appears multiple times throughout
Marx’s text.
7 I refer here to the first English translation of volume one by Samuel Moore and
Edward Aveling, overseen by Engels, which was published in 1887 as Capital:
A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production and reissued recently in Karl Marx,
Capital: Volumes One and Two (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 2013).
This translation also renders “verwandelte Form” as “converted form.”
VERWANDLUNG, OR THE HUMAN CRUCIBLE 219
geheuere Ungeziefer, as Kafka puts it.8 The references to Kafka in

Mamardashvili’s later texts reiterate the centrality, complexity, and
originality of the philosopher’s elaboration of the notion of Ver-
wandlung.
The Gravedigger of Totalitarianism

At this point a reminder is, perhaps, necessary. It concerns Kafka’s
dramatic reception in Eastern Europe during the Cold War era. It
was so dramatic, in fact, that two conferences held in Liblice, Czech-
oslovakia (today the Czech Republic) in 1963 and 1965, were later
denounced as having caused the 1968 political upheavals of the Pra-
gue Spring, which unsuccessfully tried to soften the repressive
communist regime. It was claimed that the two conferences
“started the process of the ideological destruction of Marxism-Len-
inism in Czechoslovakia,” and that, according to the memoirs of
communist leader Antonin Novotny, they caused moral and eco-
nomic devastation!9 In Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and
Guattari evoke the absence of Russian participants at the Liblice
conferences in order to illustrate their claim that “petit-bourgeois
intimacy and the absence of any sort of social criticism will be the
primary themes in the opposition of the communists to Kafka.”10
In fact, the story of the Eastern bloc ideological battles sur-
rounding Kafka is much more complicated. In Poland, it would
seem, the Kafka problem was resolved in his favor as early as the
8 Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung (Project Gutenberg, 2007) http://www.guten

berg.org/files/22367/22367-h/22367-h.htm The translation of ungeheuere Un-
geziefer has become inevitably the subject of interminable discussions. See for
example the note to Benofsky’s translation in Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis:
A New Translation, Texts and Contexts, Criticism, ed. Mark M. Anderson (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2016), 3 n.2. One of the reasons I prefer Corngold’s trans-
lation (Kafka 1996) is precisely his choice of “vermin” because this translation
preserves the indefiniteness of the creature into which Gregor is transformed,
as well as its pejorative aura. Cf. Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis, “ in The
Metamorphosis. Translation. Backgrounds and Contexts Criticism, ed. Stanley
Corngold (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 2-42.
9 Veronika Tuckerova, Reading Kafka in Prague: The Reception of Franz Kafka
between the East and the West during the Cold War, (Dissertation, 2012), 194.
http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac%3A172916
10 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, tr. Dana
Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 96 n.3.
1950s.11 In East Germany, Kafka was officially tolerated in spite of

Deleuze and Guattari’s claims to the contrary (moreover, he did not
need to be translated there). In Czechoslovakia, where he suppos-
edly almost brought down the regime, he was officially
condemned, but this fact is very far from the intricate history of his
underground publications and heterogeneous reception. Although
no Russians were allowed to take part in the Liblice discussions, in
1965 an elegant volume appeared in a Moscow publishing house,
which included, among other pieces, The Trial and The Metamorpho-
sis.12 In Bulgaria, the publication of translations of Kafka began only
in 1980, but as early as 1965 the first Liblice conference was referred
to as an instance of authority in a little book (in Bulgarian) by very
young Julia Kristeva who summed up the positive “communist”
evaluation of the Prague writer in one succinct sentence: “The com-
mon man, Kafka’s protagonist, is dehumanized by society.”13
Kafka, of course, has been read in multiple ways both East and
West: Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem rightly notes, ap-
ropos “The Metamorphosis,” the existence of a “throng of equally
justified but antagonistic interpretations.”14 Kafka has been read in
multiple ways also in the times of communist censorship: both as
an author to be legitimized, and as an author to be stigmatized and
11 See Kajetan Mojsak, “The Polish Trial of Kafka. On the Reception of Franz
Kafka and So-Called “Dark Literature” by the Censorship Board,” Acta Univer-
sitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Polonica 37, no. 7 (2016): 183-201.
12 For a bibliography of both translations and writing on Kafka in the USSR, see
Dmitry Konstantinov, “Kafka in the USSR. Bibliography 1959-1989, “ http://libr
ary.by/portalus/modules/history/special/kafka/bibliogr.htm. Between 1968-
1985, Kafka all but disappears, which confirms his denunciation as the culprit for
the Prague spring.
13 Julia Kristeva, Harakterni tendencii v zapadnata literatura ot XX vek [Characteristic
Trends in 20th Century Western Literature], (Sofia: Izdanie na komisijata po
idejno-vyzpitatelna rabota pri CK na DKMS, 1965), 13. The publisher of this
book is striking: it is the Central Committee of the Organization of Communist
Youth, in a series focused on the ideological education of young people. There
is a huge untold story behind this fact, having to do with struggles between
the old Stalinist and the new nomenclature. Kristeva, who was 23 at that point,
was part of a dynamic group of intellectuals who tried to utilize such conflicts
for broadening the territories of artistic freedom. In the year the book was pub-
lished she left for France and never returned.
14 Stanislaw Lem, Microworlds, (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1984),
227.
banned. The problem with him was that, no matter how he was
read, he might look suspicious to the authorities. If he was read the
way Bulgarian-born French structuralist Tzvetan Todorov did—as
implementing “an oneiric logic, if not indeed a nightmare one,
which no longer has anything to do with the real”15—he clashed
with the dogma of socialist realism. When Todorov observes that,
“a common and simplistic view presents literature (and language
too) as an image of “reality,” as […] a kind of parallel and analogous
series,”16 he is dealing a direct blow at the “theory of reflection”
underlying dogmatic aesthetics.17
A different problem would be presented if Kafka’s work was
read as realist in a “petty bourgeois” manner which offered no crit-
icism of capitalist society: this was Deleuze and Guattari’s
explanation why communists did not accept Kafka. And yet, this
was, perhaps, the smaller problem. The bigger problem arose if
Kafka’s fiction was read, on the contrary, as effective social critique
because its “oneiric logic” could easily be—and was—perceived as
a transferable parable of any oppressive regime, the communist one
included. Such a reading might yield, for example, the interpreta-
tion of Gregor’s becoming-animal as a revolt, be it successful, or not
(this is what Deleuze and Guattari did, among others). Stanislaw
Lem, who attacked Todorov’s approach, demonstrated this poten-
tial by transposing (as I believe he did) the becoming-animal into
becoming-machine and transforming The Metamorphosis into the
story of a rebellious robot. I will return to this.
Tzvetan Stoyanov (a Bulgarian writer and literary scholar not
to be confused with Tzvetan Todorov) provides an example of the
multi-layered subtlety provoked by communist censorship. Osten-
sibly, his analysis emphasizes the destructive effects of capitalism
on Kafka’s protagonists. This emphasis, however, tacitly targets the
passivity and conformity imposed by communist repression. A fur-
ther implication, quite transparent for Stoyanov’s contemporaries,
15 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to A Literary Genre, tr. R.

Howard (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1973), 173.
16 Todorov, The Fantastic, 175.
17 See Kamelia Spassova, “Subverting the Theory of Reflection: Modernism
against “Modern Realism”. History of Humanities, 4, no.2 (2019): 357-364.
would be that, unlike communist regimes, capitalism allows writ-

ers the freedom to criticise it. Ultimately, Stoyanov’s interpretation
works as a double-edged critique of both the capitalist and the com-
munist systems for their de-humanizing effects:
There is hardly another example in world literature for a character who is as

inert as Kafka’s protagonist. He is moved, pushed, tortured, attracted, or re-
pelled: he is like a crumb, a pulverized pebble, a wind-blown leaf, a pawn.
His existence is a nightmarish death-dream. His existence is the unfolding
of a fateful passivity, a movement towards inanimateness – he is just an ob-
ject, a thing, he belongs to a pre-human world. (…) Something happened to
him, some sort of “metamorphosis.” He was a human being until yesterday,
today he woke up a caterpillar18, some disgusting monstrous vermin, a
shame for those around him. The only human traits he still possesses are
anxiety and horror, and some deep, dark, mystically clinging feeling of guilt.
Guilt about what? Perhaps, precisely about the loss he suffered, the annihi-
lated humanity. 19
Stoyanov died young under somewhat suspicious circum-

stances. His take on Kafka is part of his unfinished project to write
a history of European thought in a quasi-Marxian perspective of al-
ienation. Each next epoch would be seen as an attempt to resolve
the problem of alienation exacerbated by the previous one, and yet,
in its very effort to do so, it would lead into ever deeper alienation.
Stoyanov’s passionate analysis and deep admiration for the objects
of his study deferred the impasse inherent to this vision of moder-
nity as regress but, after his death, the deadlock would surface into
the writing of his circle as a rightist retro-utopian nationalist isola-
tionism.20 Such temptations—whereof the critique of the
contemporary malaise, including the defective communist modern-
18 Kafka deliberately did not clarify what creature exactly the bug is. Although
the German word Verwandlung does not imply “a natural change of state asso-
ciated with the animal kingdom such as the change from caterpillar to
butterfly” (Kafka, The Metamorphosis: A New Translation, xviii), there is at least
one analysis of “The Metamorphosis” (G. Thomas Mann, “Kafka’s ‘Die Ver-
wandlung’ and Its Natural Model: an Alternative Reading,” University of
Dayton Review 15, no. 3 (1982): 65-71), which supports Stoyanov’s interpreta-
tion of the “bug” as caterpillar.
19 Tzvetan Stoyanov, Kulturata kato obshtenie [Culture as Communication] (Sofia:
Bylgarski pistel, 1988), 324.
20 I deal with this outcome in Miglena Nikolchina, “Anti-Odysseus: Orphism and
Late Communism in Bulgaria,” Slavica Tergestina 20, no. 1 (2018), 46-69.
ization, would ultimately add up to a rejection of the advancements

of “consciousness and civilization”—were precisely the perils that,
in Mamardashvili’s view, philosophical thinking needed to ward
off. His invocation of Kafka allows an insight into the systematicity
of his endeavour to sustain the discoveries of non-classical ration-
ality while steering clear of the “anthropological catastrophe,”
which Mamardashvili, like Stoyanov, saw looming in the structural
depths of the contemporary situation.
Anthropological Catastrophe
When Mamardashvili turns to Kafka in the 1980s, he no longer
needs to disguise his invective against the communist regime.
Kafka appears in significant ways in two late works: the essay
“Consciousness and Civilization” and the interview “Solitude is
My Profession.”21 Both represent Mamardashvili’s most accessible
style, a mixture of poetic idiom and examples from everyday life,
through which he tries to make his philosophical views under-
standable to non-professional audiences and elucidate their
political and ethical relevance in the context of huge impending so-
cial changes. In both cases, Kafka is evoked to throw light on what
went wrong at the deepest level during the Soviet era. And yet, far
from being a mere rhetorical device, the reference to Kafka encom-
passes major aspects of Mamardashvili’s philosophical ideas. To
begin with, in the earlier of these texts, “Consciousness and Civili-
zation,” Kafka’s name is situated at the turn which, as pointed out
above, Mamardashvili describes as impossible to personify, while
relating it to thinkers like Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgen-
stein, and to developments in 20th century science: the turn to non-
classical rationality. As Mamardashvili’s ongoing posthumous
publications make abundantly clear, at this point he had already
covered a formidable territory in his search for a philosophical so-
lution to the crisis which non-classical rationality involved. He had
21 Merab Mamardashvili, “Odinochestvo—moia professiia. Interviu Uldisa Ti-

ronsa“ [Solitude is my profession: An Interview with Uldis Tirons], in Ocherk
sovremennoi evropeiskoi filosofii [A Study of Contemporary European Philoso-
phy], (Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2012), 516-548.
scrutinized in his unique perspective the major epochs in the his-

tory of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to 20th century
antihumanism; he had dealt extensively with the philosophical cor-
ollaries of the natural sciences, sociology, psychoanalysis, and 20th
century literature. Certain figures stood out as his focus: Descartes,
Kant, Marx (who marks the earliest stage of Mamardashvili’s ca-
reer) and, so far as literature is concerned, Proust, among others.
Kafka never became such a focus: in fact, after “Consciousness and
Civilization” Mamardashvili would continue his work on Proust.
And yet, it is Kafka who appears in a rather crucial way in
“Consciousness and Civilization” as an emblem of our times and as
the third aspect of what Mamardashvili calls the DKK principle.
The first two aspects of this principle are named after Descartes and
Kant and relate to worlds and human beings that can be described.
The third one, named after Kafka, encompasses a world and a hu-
man being which are indescribably strange (uncanny in
psychoanalytic terms), marked by indeterminacy (a quantum phys-
ics term), and ultimately a black hole (a term from modern
astrophysics) which annihilates whole nations and areas of life qua
“human material.” Kafka thus becomes the emblem for an “anthro-
pological catastrophe,” whose quiet explosion Mamardashvili finds
more terrifying than any nuclear or ecological disaster. Bringing to-
gether Freud’s notion of the uncanny and Heisenberg’s notion of
indeterminacy, Mamardashvili describes Kafka’s protagonists as
symptomatic of “’zombie’ situations that are quite human-like but,
in reality, otherworldly, merely imitating what in fact is dead.”22 In
“The Metamorphosis” the zombie situation is rendered through “a
metaphor of complete inner ossification: Gregor Samsa turns into a
slimy, disgusting animal that he cannot shake off.”23 A few years
later, shortly before his death, Mamardashvili returns to Gregor
Samsa:
22 Reference to present volume, p. 152.

23 Ibid.
“With Kafka, the metamorphosis (prevrashchenie) is the demise of the living

within its own imitation of itself. It remains breathless in its own imitation
of itself, the imitation takes the place of what it imitates.24“
Kafka’s metaphor of metamorphosis in the eponymous no-

vella is hence equated by Mamardashvili to the impossibility of
change, the impossibility, in fact, of metamorphosis. Although
other writers like Musil—as Mamardashvili notes—bear witness to
the same “zombie” situation, Kafka is the one chosen by Mamar-
dashvili to share, along with Descartes and Kant, the tripartite
principle, which produces (or not) the human being, consciousness,
and civilization. The reason for this is hardly the K in Kafka’s name
although, notably, K. designates Kafka’s protagonists in both The
Trial and The Castle.25 Apart from his lucidity as to the black hole,
lurking in the structural depths of the contemporary situation,
Kafka offers a unique perspective on a Marxian term, which is of
paramount importance for understanding Mamardashvili’s philos-
ophy: Verwandlung. The strange crossing of Marx and Kafka in this
term might throw light on Mamardashvili’s take on both what is
wrong and what could be, perhaps, hopeful in the ruses of non-
classical rationality.
Prevrashchenie: Transforming Transformation

Some clarifications are in order here concerning the translation of
Verwandlung across Mamardashvili’s elaboration of the concept as
prevrashchenie. The title of Mamardashvili’s most influential paper
on Marx, “Prevrashchenye formy (O neobhodimosti ir-
ratsional’nykh vyrazhenii)”, has been translated in English as
“Converted Forms: On the Need for Irrational Expressions.” I say
“most influential” in spite of the convoluted saga of this article,
which appeared in Polish in 1972 and, in Russian, only in 1990.26
There is a clandestine history surrounding the dissemination of
24 Mamardashvili, “Odinochestvo,” 546.

25 The Latinized name of Descartes, Cartesius, is written with K in Russian.
Hence, in Russian, the triple principle Descartes—Kant—Kafka is of the three
Ks – which would, of course, lead to totally unrelated associations in the Amer-
ican context, so the translators have rightly chosen to stick to DKK.
26 For the history of this article, see Mamardashvili, “Converted.”
Mamardashvili’s ideas in Eastern Europe through xerox copies, stu-

dents’ manuscripts, tape recordings, and sheer hearsay, which I
cannot address here and which would demand a collective multi-
lingual effort to reconstruct today.27 Translating Mamardashvili’s
rendering of Marx’s verwandelte Formen, prevrashchenye formy, as
converted forms is, of course, correct in so far as this is how this has
been done in translations of Marx. In Marx, however, as Rastko
Močnik correctly observes, “the ‘converted form’ is rather feebly
thematised. It was isolated as a philosophical category and devel-
oped under the philosophical perspective of ‘the necessity of
irrational expressions’ by Merab Mamardashvili.”28
The problem is that the philosophical category, as developed
by Mamardashvili, but also previously with Marx, does not quite
fit the translation as “converted.” It is remarkable that in a single
volume dedicated to Althusser the term has been rendered in three
different ways: as “converted,” “transformed,” and, in a note refer-
ring to Mamardashvili, also as “transmuted.”29 The trouble with
“converted” is that it implies convertibility, i.e. a certain transpar-
ency and reversibility of the instances of the process, which is
exactly what Mamardashvili’s initial take on Marx’s Verwandlung
excludes. Verwandlung produces forms which erase the scene of
their emergence. They are irreducible, opaque, and completely cut
off from the connections and processes which have produced them:
a transformation of something which can no longer be recovered or
even conceived. We are dealing here with an “enchanted, be-
witched, topsy-turvy world, densely populated with wonders and
phantoms,”30 where it is impossible to revert the magic, as one
would in fairy tales, and reveal the truth that the phantoms and
wonders hide. Transformation would be a neutral way to render
27 I offer a snapshot of the Bulgarian facet of the legend in Miglena Nikolchina,

“The West as Intellectual Utopia,” in Lost Unicorns of the Velvet Revolutions: Het-
erotopias of the Seminar (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 43-68.
28 Rastko Močnik. “Ricardo – Marx // Foucault – Althusser,” in Jernej Habjan
and Jessica Whyte (eds), (Mis)readings of Marx in Continental Philosophy (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 74.
29 Katja Diefenbach, Sara R. Farris, Gal Kirn and Peter D. Thomas, JVE, eds., En-
countering Althusser: Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 341, 369, 370, 405.
30 Mamardashvili, “Converted,” 210.
this process, yet it cannot really grasp the emphasis on its outcome
as “square root of minus one,” as “imaginary or quasi-objects,” in-
volving distortion (iskazhenie), perversion (izvrastenie), indirect
figuration (kosvennaya figuratsia), transfiguration (preobrazhenie),
substitution (zamestenie), putting something on its head (na golovu),
replacing the cause with its effect and re-making (pererabotka) which
makes the thing unrecognizable but also irreducible to true or false.
And finally, prevrashchenie may also mean turning around and thus
align itself with the primary meaning of revolution as rotating. I
have previously translated as inversion this crossing of distortion,
perversion, and transfiguration.31 Yet it won’t do for cases in which
an alchemical term like transmutation – as in connection with Ar-
taud’s “alchemical theater” discussed in the lectures on Proust –
would provide a more illuminating perspective. In fact, the later
uses of prevrashchenie move closer to notions of transubstantiation
and transfiguration with their Christian implications. Ultimately,
we might be dealing with one of those cases where the word would
best stay in its original form as it is, strictly speaking, untranslatable
by a single term.
For Mamardashvili, it was important to emphasize that in-
verted forms are not sheer illusion or “fiction.” Although the
inverted form is “an objectivized orientation of the concatenation
of atomic conscious acts in it,” it is nevertheless “the object posited
as real outside of the subjects.” It draws its life from the relations of
the system as a whole, not from the understanding individual, and
it determines the possible movement of thought while simultane-
ously closing its horizon, throwing shadows of incomprehension,
and creating dead spaces “impenetrable to the rays of conscious-
ness.”32 Subject and object are hence implicated in each other in a
manner which does not allow their disentanglement and entails the
impossibility of an “external,” “absolute” point of observation.
Mamardashvili offers inversion as a tool for addressing the
changed epistemological situation. Like the spinning coin used to
31 Miglena Nikolchina, “Inverted Forms and Heterotopian Homonymy: Al-

thusser, Mamardashvili, and the Problem of ‘Man’. boundary 2 41, no. 1 (Spring
2014), 79-100.
32 Mamardashvili, “Converted,” 207.
illustrate quantum computing in so far as the spinning coin’s state

is both heads and tails at the same time, the inverted form cannot
be described by the alternative meanings of truth or falsehood: it is
the superimposition of both. Hence the necessity for “irrational ex-
pressions” which ushers in “non-classical rationality.”
In one of his earliest essays dealing with inversion Mamar-
dashvili describes the shift brought about by Marx as a paradigm
change.33 A year before his death Mamardashvili will reiterate the
importance of this shift by calling Marx a tragic thinker who created
a method for removing “the poison from the socialised, alienated
consciousness,” however, the antidote then became a poison in its
own turn,34 i.e. Marx’s critique of ideology became itself a toxic ide-
ology. This statement testifies to Marx’s enduring (though, we
might say, verwandelte) significance for Mamardashvili’s thought,
as well as to what he found unacceptable in Marxism and what he
set as his task to set right in his further work with its emphasis on
the sustained effort of thinking. Mamardashvili’s critique of Marx
should be read carefully as it might be taken to imply the possibility
for a return to “pure” consciousness, which has somehow undone
the discovery of non-classical rationality. The references to Kafka
provide a shortcut for avoiding this misstep. The problem with
Gregor’s prevrashchenie is that it has stopped dead; that it has been
replaced by imitation. Instead of transforming, Gregor just copies
the moves. Read in the political context which Mamardashvili am-
ply provides, this observation acquires a chilling relevance for so
much that went wrong with the East European revolutions. Rather
than transform society (perestroika, the term which brought East
European communism down, appears in “Analysis of Conscious-
ness”), didn’t they try simply to imitate existing models? “We
might, after all, wake up transformed into insects as one of Kafka’s
protagonists does.”35 Beyond this topical relevance, however,
Mamardashvili’s interpretation emphasizes the direction which his
understanding of Verwandlung has taken in the decades after the
33 Mamardashvili, “Analysis of Consciousness,” 102.

34 Merab Mamardashvili, La pensée empêchée: Entretiens avec Annie Epelboin (La
Tour d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, 1991), 40.
35 Mamardashvili, Soznanie, 307.
essays on Marx. This direction could be rendered as a long story

covering Mamardashvili’s philosophical engagements with the nat-
ural and the social sciences, the humanities, as well as literature and
the arts, but it could also be summed up by the question: How does
prevrashchenie, Verwandlung, bring forth the human being rather
than imprison it? Or, with reference to Kafka’s Gregor, how can it
be stopped from stopping?
The Crucible: Technos, Symbol, and Device

With this question, Mamardashvili both recognized and went
against the grain of 20th century philosophical anti-humanism.36
He recognized anti-humanism as an inescapable corollary to the
non-classical turn with the radically modified status of the observer
it presupposed. His conceptualization of inverted forms relates
clearly to concepts developed by Kuhn, Althusser, Foucault, and
Agamben, among others, concepts like paradigm, episteme, dispos-
itif, ideological apparatus, etc. However, Mamardashvili also saw
antihumanism as a proclivity which has accompanied philosophy
from its ancient beginnings. It implies a “distrust in the human,” in
the sense that a human will be human only to the extent that the
human is transcended:
As the crazy Ophelia put it, we know what we are, but we do not know what
we could be. In the human being, in fact, there is a deferral of the search for
what s/he could be, but “could be”—this means every time a negation of
human identity. Negation—and then there is identity, that is, the condition
for having any identity is the negation of identity, any identity.37
Or, to put it with reference to contemporary debates, the hu-

man is and can be only in so far as it is transhuman. In this
perspective, anti-humanism does not amount to the end of man,
which has been famously proclaimed by Foucault, nor to the inop-
erativity of the anthropological machine as it is with Agamben, but
36 I address this question in greater detail in Nikolchina, “Inverted Forms,” and

Nikolchina, “An Unfinished Project: Man as Comedy” in Lost Unicorns, 88-108.
37 Merab Mamardashvili, Ocherk sovremennoi evropeiskoi filosofii [A Study of Con-
temporary European Philosophy] (Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2012), 270-1.
it is the very operation which produces the human through the ne-
gation of the human.
More concretely put, the human is nothing without extra-hu-
man—or superhuman—add-ons attached to it. This idea is behind
Mamardashvili’s claim in “European Responsibility” that history is
a human organ of life. Although in his later utterances Mamardash-
vili will usually attribute his vision of the human as perpetual
creation to Descartes, the idea of human organs as having nothing
to do with biology can once again be traced back to Marx. Referring
to Marx’s suggestion that “social theory should be the history of the
organs of production by man of his life,”38 Mamardashvili proposes
the neologism technos to designate the specifically human organs
which, so to speak, produce their producer. Throughout his works
Mamardashvili employs various other terms: artefact, symbol, de-
vice, primary gathering, world-container… They are taken to cover
anything from history to technology to a drawing of the tree of life;
what unites them is the process whereof the human being produces
what produces it as human in so far as,
…the human being is an artificial creature that gives birth to itself by the
process called history and culture, and it gives birth in such a way that it
cannot answer the question about its own origin. I do not mean biological
material .... for a person to be born, there must be some constitutive devices
or what I have called a crucible…39
Crucible is thus added to the anthropogenetic devices by var-

iously evoking metallurgy, baptism, second birth, or alchemical
transmutation. The problem of anthropogenesis takes center stage
in Mamardashvili’s writing and his lectures from the second half of
the 1970s on, regardless whether he was extensively dealing with
the conditions that make scientific discovery and paradigm
changes possible, or that lead to innovation in literature, art, moral
values, politics… In a strange twist of Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on
Feuerbach, Mamardashvili transmutes the question of how we
sneak “behind” the inverted forms and get to know the world in
38 Mamardashvili, Klassicheskii i neklassicheskii, 92.

39 Merab Mamardashvili, Vil’niusskie lektsii po sotsial’noi filosofii [Vilnius Lectures
on Social Philosophy] (Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2012), 19.
which the observer is inextricably bound up with the observed; the

question, that is, how we unravel the objects created by us but now
imprisoning us. This question becomes more and more a question
of how to keep producing the human-producing technos: the cruci-
ble of the human as perpetually deferred.
There is an unpredictability to this process: it “happens.” It
may happen not to happen: “history is a graveyard for the still-
born” as Mamardashvili puts it in “European Responsibility.” Yet
it will definitely not happen in the absence of incessant effort and a
“crucible,” a “world-container” that would ensure the continuity of
thinking. Mamardashvili would sometimes call this container civi-
lization, sometimes agora, or the “place of language,” emphasizing
its political aspect and the simple fact that, although solitude is the
profession of the philosopher, one cannot think alone. In fact, what
defines “civilization” or “agora” is precisely their function to guar-
antee the devices—artefacts—technos—symbols—“higher
objects”—that make possible one thought to be followed by another
and allow the human to be born. For “nothing human can exist by
itself, it must constantly be renewed […] and it can be renewed only
on the crest of human effort. The effort, however, is impossible if it
is not combined, not paired, with the very objects that we called
‘higher,’”40 i.e. the human-producing devices.
The last—and decisive—decade of Mamardashvili’s work
with its focus on the human crucible took place against the back-
ground of a general fading of the project of the human, which then,
for a time, seemed to lie dormant. The fall of communism rendered
it obsolete in the countries where it had played a crucial political
role. At the turn of the millennium technological advancement
moved so quickly that science fiction seemed unable to catch up
with it, let alone theoretical conceptualization. Revisiting the legacy
of the 20th century with its various visions of the human, Alain
Badiou notes that the growing technological possibilities are devoid
of a project due to the implosion of the political.41 In philosophy,
Foucault’s end of man and Agamben’s inoperativity of the anthro-
40 Mamardashvili, Vil’niusskie, 24.

41 Alain Badiou, The Century,” trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2007), 9.
pological machine took various post-humanist directions and to a

large extent shaped contemporary sensibilities. With the 2020
Covid-19 crisis, however, and its coincidence with the first Ameri-
can human space mission since 2011, a certain crystallization
occurred which brought to the fore processes that had been brew-
ing for years. There is, on the one hand, the renewed impetus of the
classical idea of scientific exploration which would allow, through
technology, human beings as they are to extend their knowledge
and make new worlds habitable, taking risk and danger as an inev-
itable price of such endeavors. There is, on the other hand, the
pushing of the virtualization of all human activities to the next
level. For a time at least—and while I write this time is not yet
over—this pressure deprived people of their faces, constrained
their physical togetherness, made embodied travelling suspect, suf-
focated all economic activities that couldn’t be done online,
shushed any non-complying scientific and philosophical perspec-
tives, all this in the name of safety, and, as many psychoanalysts
pointed out, an underlying denial of death. A further indication of
the epoch is that two billionaires, Elon Musk and Bill Gates—irre-
spective of their personal virtues, or the facts pertaining to their
concrete activities—were foregrounded as the emblems of these
two tendencies. The crisis, regardless of other considerations, has
been unanimously recognized as ushering a radical change. The
question now is, will we wake up transformed and into what?
The Zombie and the Robot

I have noticed one reference to Stanislaw Lem in Mamardashvili’s
works. It is a reference to the novel Solaris.42 In the novel, humans
come across a planet entirely taken by an intelligent Ocean, a brain
the size of the planet. Mamardashvili’s point is that we cannot
know what or how this huge brain thinks: Lem would very much
agree with this. Lem’s emphasis, however, is not so much on the
Ocean but on the humanoid artificial creature which the Ocean
emits in its own attempt to understand how humans think. Some
42 Mamardashvili, “Ocherk,” 242. See Stanislaw Lem, Solaris, trans. Bill Johnston
(Kindle edition, 2014).
years after the novel, Lem returned to the artificial creature theme
in his novella “The Mask.”43 According to his preface to the Russian
translation of the novella, in returning to this subject he was guided
by an interest in a classical philosophical problem: is there free will?
In cybernetic terms, the problem is the following: “if an artificial
creature is designed to perform a specific task, which is imposed by
its program, can it fully realize its assignment as a forced action,
conditioned by the program, and can it rebel against this program?”
Or, Lem continues, “we are dealing here with the so-called ‘prob-
lem of the auto-description of a finite automaton,’ that is, putting it
in traditional language, the possibility for complete self-knowledge
of one’s mental processes. (By the way, the human brain and any
other devices that are functionally equivalent to it are just such, that
is, finite automata).”44
The Mask, hence, is a finite automaton but so is the human
being. Lem is quite adamant that, alone, an automaton cannot
achieve full consciousness as to the purpose and limitations of its
actions: “alone, auto-description can only be achieved by an infinite
automaton, which, however, is just a mathematical abstraction.”
(Or God, we might add, with a reference to Heinrich von Kleist’s
“On the Marionette Theatre”). There is, nevertheless, a tiny differ-
ence with dramatic consequences between Solaris and “The Mask.”
Unlike Solaris, “The Mask” is written in the first person, from the
perspective of the automaton. The automaton is an assassination
machine in the guise of a courtly beauty. Initially, she is not aware
she is a robot whose task is to eliminate a dissident philosopher
with whom she falls in love as she is, perhaps, programmed to. Yet
her passion for thinking, the pride she takes in her sharp intellect,
her distrust in appearances and her ceaseless effort to “turn the eye-
ball around, such that the pupil can peer inside the skull”—
although she knows this is impossible—lead her step by step to dis-
cover that “I was a mind imprisoned, chained at birth, born into
43 Stanislaw Lem, “The Mask,” in Mortal Engines. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

1992),181-239.
44 Stanislaw Lem, “Neskol'ko slov o povesti [A Few Words About the Novella],”
in Sbornik nauchnoj fantastiki. Vyp. 18 (Moscow: Znanie, 1977), 19, 21.
bondage, but a mind still.”45 Lem’s heroine thus incorporates

Mamardashvili’s definition whereof “the creature calling itself hu-
man is such to the extent to which it is set to solve infinite tasks
while being finite itself.”46 In a rather drastic scene, the Mask stands
in front of a mirror and—whether because this is part of the pro-
gram, or a gesture of defiance against the program—she makes a
surgical cut in her flesh. A metallic insect-like machine emerges
from the female body: a second birth of a sorts.
Now certain details make me believe the novella was a spin-
off of Lem’s disagreements with the interpretation of Kafka's “Met-
amorphosis” by Tzvetan Todorov.47 “The Mask” seems to
incorporate as intertext Kafka’s story: similarities between the two
novellas are surprisingly numerous if we keep in mind that Kafka’s
narrative concerns an ordinary traveling salesman and Lem’s—a
bizarre assassin machine. However, the salesman wakes up to dis-
cover he has turned into something like a gigantic bug, and the
machine discards her human appearance to discover she is… some-
thing like a gigantic bug. In both novellas it remains unclear what
kind of bug exactly: perhaps, cockroach or dung-beetle in the case
of Kafka’s protagonist; praying mantis or scorpion in the case of
Lem’s Mask. The list of crossovers between the two novellas can be
prolonged: what matters to me here is the rendition of Verwandlung
in Lem’s novella.
Gregor Samsa wakes up as monstrous vermin: the suddenness
and the lack of surprise regarding his transformation is one of the
most striking aspects of “The Metamorphosis.” The Mask extracts
the metallic insect from the shriveled human body: it was again I,
she comments, but this “again” marks, precisely, another inversion,
another mask. Phantoms of her names and biographies (she was
given more than one) as a woman, love for her intended victim, re-
bellion against her program, yearning for freedom, all these human
45 Lem, “The Mask,” 194, 208.

46 Mamardashvili, Vil’niusskie, 35.
47 See Stanislaw Lem, “Todorov’s Fantastic Theory of Literature,” in Microworlds,
(New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1984), 209-232. I deal with this ra-
ther intricate story in “Tzvetan Todorov and Stanislaw Lem: A Productive
Misunderstanding,” Divinatio, forthcoming.
organs proper linger on in her self-awareness as a super-efficient

assassination-robot. With all his emphasis on the limitations of the
individual automaton Lem grants the Mask a little victory. She does
not try to save her lover-and-prey although she has fantasies about
this: she does not trust herself sufficiently for this. But she does suc-
ceed in not killing him. It turns out that the human can be—I say
this with reference to Badiou’s concept of subtraction as “the af-
firmative side of negation”48—subtracted. In Lem’s story, therefore,
the subtraction of the human by the machine inverts the metamor-
phosis of the human into a zombie. And yet, isn’t the zombie a
human from which the human has been subtracted? If the human
is withdrawn from the human what do we end up with? Popular
imagination knows the answer. Zombies. Walking dead.49
For Mamardashvili, the zombie designates both a starting
point, the creature before the crucible, before its second birth as hu-
man, and a residue symptomatic of the contemporary
anthropological catastrophe. Mamardashvili and Lem had a shared
utopia whose precise genealogy in Eastern Europe before, during,
and after communism still needs unravelling: the utopia of the
power of thinking, of consciousness as passion. Still, they both were
not overly optimistic, to say the least. After all, we could wake up
insects, or zombies, couldn’t we? Mamardashvili says this apropos
of the late Soviet Union. Yet there is also the European fatigue with
“the effort upon which history depends;” there is the disappearance
of the “agora” as the shared space of human beings whose organ is
history. Perhaps the right turn has been missed, Mamardashvili
sometimes muses; perhaps it is too late. But then again, one needs
to make the effort.
48 Alain Badiou,“Destruction, Negation, Subtraction,” in The Scandal of Self‑con-

tradiction: Pasolini's Multistable Subjectivities, Traditions, Geographies, eds. Luca
Di Blasi, Manuele Gragnolati, and Christoph F.E. Holzhey (Vienna: Turia,
2012), 269.
49 I owe the observation on the complementarity of robots and zombies to Bul-
garian philosopher Darin Tenev.
A Note on Primary and Secondary Literature
The Mamardashvili Foundation has brought out authoritative edi-

tions of Mamardashvili’s texts in the original Russian. There is
extensive secondary literature on Mamardashvili in Russian; here
we list the primary and some secondary sources that have appeared
in other languages.
Six of Mamardashvili’s essays have previously appeared in
English. In 1986 a translation of Mamardashvili’s essay on Marx
was published,1 and in 1995 his lecture “Consciousness and Civili-
zation” appeared in English—it was based on a Russian version of
this text that has been corrected since and republished by the
Mamardashvili foundation.2 In 2010 a short lecture on the problem
of consciousness appeared in print,3 and, most recently, two other
essays: “Thought in Culture” and “Converted Forms”4 Several
years ago we published an excerpt of Mamardashvili’s essay “On
Civil Society.”5 Two interviews from 1989 appeared in English:
“How I Understand Philosophy,” and “The Civil Society.” The last
one was given by Mamardashvili during a scholarly visit to Ohio
Wesleyan University.6
Mamardashvili’s work appeared in French both during his
lifetime and after his death. He gave several lectures and inter-
1 “Analysis of Consciousness in the Works of Marx, ’’Studies in Soviet Thought 32

(1986): 101–120.
2 “Consciousness and Civilization,” The Russian Experience: Ideas in History, ed.
N. Maslova, T. Pleshakova (Commack, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 1995).
3 “The Problem of Consciousness and the Philosopher’s Calling,” Russian Studies
in Philosophy 49, no. 2 (2010): 8-27.
4 “Thought in Culture,” Transcultural Studies 5, no. 1 (2009): 17-29. “Converted
Forms. On the Need for Irrational Expressions.” Stasis 5, no. 2 (2017): 204-217.
5 “On Civil Society,” tr. Julia Sushytska and Alisa Slaughter, Kettering Review 33,
no. 2 (Fall 2016): 26-34.
6 “The Civil Society: An Interview with Merab Mamardashvili,” The Civic Arts
Review 2, no. 3 (Summer 1989), http://car.owu.edu/pdfs/1989-2-3.pdf, ac-
cessed on October 22, 2014.
An essay entitled The Mind of Mamardashvili: Interview by Bernard Murch-
land was published in 1991, and although it contains several quotations from
a conversation with Mamardashvili, it is mostly Murchland’s commentary on
Mamardashvili’s ideas. The Mind of Mamardashvili: Interview by Bernard Murch-
land (Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation, 1991).
237
views, some of which appeared as a book, La pensée empêchée: Entre-

tiens avec Annie Epelboin.7 Mamardashvili’s lectures on René
Descartes have been translated into French and published in 1997;
this translation, however, was based on the Russian text that has
since been corrected and republished.8 Mamardashvili’s book on
Kant was translated into Italian, and his selected works have been
translated into Bulgarian.9 A collection of Mamardashvili’s essays
was published in 2018 in German.10
The intellectual research activity around Mamardashvili is al-
ready robust, mostly in Russian and other Slavic languages. Serious
publications and forums dedicated to Mamardashvili’s ideas have
appeared in English, even though the number of scholars is limited
by language. Several scholarly English-language journals dedicated
their entire issues to Mamardashvili’s work: Studies in East European
Thought (vol. 71, no. 3, 2019 and vol. 58, no. 4, 2006), Transcultural
Studies (vol. 5, no. 1, 2009), and Russian Studies in Philosophy (vol. 49,
no. 1, 2010, and vol. 49, no. 2, 2010). Analecta Husserliana: The Year-
book of Phenomenological Research (Springer) has recently published
more than six articles on Mamardashvili.11
Alyssa DeBlasio published a book on Mamardashvili and Rus-
sian cinema.12 Miglena Nikolchina emphasized the significance of
Mamardashvili’s notion of the human being, arguing that it can
lead Western thinking out of the dead end of its “end-of-times” dis-
7 Merab Mamardachvili. La pensée empêchée: Entretiens avec Annie Epelboin. La

tour d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, 1991.
8 Merab Mamardachvili. Meditations cartesiennes. Traduit du russe par Tanya
Page et Luba Jurgenson. Arles: Actes Sud, 1997. The new, authoritative Russian
edition appeared as Kartezianskie razmyshleniia [Cartesian Meditations]. Mos-
cow: Merab Mamardashvili Foundation, 2019.
9 Merab Mamardashvili, Izbrano (Sofia: Iztok-Zapad, 2004), M. K. Mamardash-
vili, Variazioni kantiane (Torino: Trauben, 2004).
10 Merab Mamardaschwili, Die Metaphysik Antonin Artauds (Berlin: Matthes &
Seitz, 2018).
11 See, for instance, Dolidze, M. “Phenomenological Thinking in the Georgian
Philosophy of XX Century,” ed. Tymieniecka, Analecta Husserliana: The Year-
book of Phenomenological Research (Springer, vol. 80, 2002), 307-312, and Stafecka,
M, “Mamardashvili on thinking and sensitivity,” ed. Tymieniecka, Analecta
Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research (Springer, vol. 93, 2007),
219-229.
12 DeBlasio, Alyssa. The Filmmaker’s Philosopher: Merab Mamardashvili and Russian
Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
A NOTE ON PRIMARY AND SECONDARY LITERATURE 239
cussions.13 Mikhail Epstein used Mamardashvili’s notion of trans-

culturalism in The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto.14 Evgeny
Dobrenko employed Mamardashvili’s concept of logocracy.15
13 See Miglena Nikolchina, “The Humanism-Antihumanism Divide: The

Concept of ‘Man’ between the End of World War 2 and the Fall of the Berlin
Wall” (Sofia: CAS Working Paper Series No. 5, 2013), 12.
14 Mikhail Epstein. The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto. London: Blooms-
bury Academic, 2012, 60-61.
15 Evgeny Dobrenko, Political Economy of Socialist Realism, translated by Jesse M.
Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, 16 and ff.
Selected Bibliography
Mamardashvili Foundation Editions

Mamardashvili, Merab. Besedy o myshlenii [Conversations about Thinking].
Moscow: Merab Mamardashvili Foundation, 2015.
—. Formy i soderzhanie myshleniia [Forms and Content of Thinking]. Saint
Petersburg: Azbuka, 2011.
—. Kartezianskie razmyshleniia [Cartesian Meditations]. Moscow: Merab
Mamardashvili Foundation, 2019.
—. Klassicheskii i neklassicheskii idealy ratsional’nosti [Classical and Nonclas-
sical Ideals of Rationality]. Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2011.
—. Lektsii po antichnoi filosofii [Lectures on Ancient Greek Philosophy]. Saint
Petersburg: Azbuka, 2012.
—. Ocherk sovremennoi evropeiskoi filosofii [A Study of Contemporary Euro-
pean Philosophy]. Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2012.
—. Psikhologicheskaia topologiia puti. [The Psychological Topology of a Path].
Moscow: Merab Mamardashvili Foundation, 2015.
—. Psikhologicheskaia topologiia puti. (M. Prust. “V poiskakh utrachennogo
vremeni”) [The Psychological Topology of a Path (M. Proust, In Search
of Lost Time). Vol. 2]. Moscow: Merab Mamardashvili Foundation,
2014.
—. Soznanie i tsivilizatsiia [Consciousness and Civilization]. Saint Peters-
burg: Azbuka, 2019.
—. Strela poznaniia [The Arrow of Cognition]. Moscow: Merab Mamardash-
vili Foundation, 2019.
—. Vil’niusskie lektsii po sotsial’noi filosofii [Vilnius Lectures on Social Philos-
ophy]. Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2012.
—. Vstrecha: Merab Mamardashvili—Lui Al’tiusser [An Encounter: Merab
Mamardashvili—Louis Althusser]. Moscow: Merab Mamardashvili
Foundation, 2015.
—. Vvedenie v filosofiiu [Introduction to Philosophy]. Moscow: Merab
Mamardashvili Foundation, 2019.
Mamardashvili, Merab and A. M. Piatigorski. Simvol i soznanie [Symbol and
Consciousness]. Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2011.
241
Previously Published Essays and Interviews in

English
Mamardashvili, Merab. “Analysis of Consciousness in the Works of Marx.’’
Studies in Soviet Thought. Vol. 32 (1986): 101–120.
—. “The Civil Society: An Interview with Merab Mamardashvili,” The Civic
Arts Review. Vol. 2, no. 3 (Summer 1989).
—. “Consciousness and Civilization.” The Russian Experience: Ideas in His-
tory, 1-15. Edited by N. Maslova and T. Pleshakova. Commack, NY:
Nova Science Publishers, 1995.
— “Converted Forms. On the Need for Irrational Expressions.” Stasis. Vol.
5, no. 2 (2017): 204-217.
—. “How I Understand Philosophy.” Russian Studies in Philosophy. Vol. 49,
no. 1 (Summer 2010): 7-19.
—. “On Civil Society.” Tr. from the Russian Julia Sushytska and Alisa
Slaughter. Kettering Review. Vol. 33, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 26-34.
—. “The Problem of Consciousness and the Philosopher’s Calling,” Russian
Studies in Philosophy. Vol. 49, no. 2 (2010): 8-27.
—. “Thought in Culture,” Transcultural Studies. Vol. 5, no. 1 (2015): 17-29.
Mamardashvili’s Works in French, Italian, Bulgarian,

and German
Mamardashvili, Merab. “Comment je comprends la philosophie.” Europe.
Vol. 841 (Mai 1999): 226-235.
—. Izbrano [Selected Writings]. Sofia: Iztok-Zapad, 2004.
—. “Le langage des ombres.” Cosmopolitique. Vol. 14-15 (1990): 156-160.
—. Méditations cartésiennes. Arles: Actes Sud, 1997.
—. Die Metaphysik Antonin Artauds. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2018.
—. La pensée empêchée: Entretiens avec Annie Epelboin. La Tour d’Aigues: Édi-
tions de l’Aube, 1991.
—. “La responsabilité européenne,” 201-205. Europe sans rivage: Symposium
international sur l’identité culturelle européenne. Paris, Janvier 1988.
Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1988.
—. “Tout le monde a peur: Entretien avec Merab Mamardachvili.” Esprit.
Vol. 179, no. 2 (February 1992): 74-81.
—. “La typologie psychologique d’un chemin.” Europe (January-February
2000): 83-104.
—. Variazioni kantiane. Torino: Trauben, 2004.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 243
Selected Secondary Literature in English

Akhutin, A. V. “In Mamardashvili’s Country.” Russian Studies in Philoso-
phy. Vol. 49, no. 1 (Summer 2010): 20–52.
Bykova, Marina F. “The Georgian Socrates.” Russian Studies in Philosophy.
Vol. 49, no. 1 (Summer 2010): 3-6.
DeBlasio, Alyssa. The Filmmaker’s Philosopher: Merab Mamardashvili and Rus-
sian Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
—. “Mamardashvili on film: cinema as a metaphor for consciousness.”
Studies in East European Thought. Vol. 71, no. 3 (October 2019): 217-
227.
Deyanov, Deyan. “Foucault and Mamardashvili: The Critique of Moder-
nity and the Heritage of the Enlightenment (Towards a Sociology of
the 21st Century).” Sociological Problems. Issue: XXXIV (2002): 32-40.
Dobrokhotov, A. L. “The Tradition of Immortality: Mamardashvili as a Phi-
losopher of Culture.” Russian Studies in Philosophy. Vol. 49, no. 2
(2010): 51-76.
Dolidze, M. “Phenomenological Thinking in the Georgian Philosophy of
XX Century.” Ed. Tymieniecka. Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of
Phenomenological Research (Springer, vol. 80, 2002), 307-312.
Emerson, Caryl. “Mamardashvili, Merab Konstantinovich (1930–90)”
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 6: 66-71.
Litvin, Tatiana V. “An outline of the natural-historical epistemology of Me-
rab Mamardashvili and the possibility of its phenomenological
interpretation” Studies in East European Thought. Vol. 71, no. 3 (Octo-
ber 2019): 293–303.
Motroshilova, N. V. “Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations and Mamardash-
vili’s Cartesian Reflections: (Two Kindred Ways to the
Transcendental Ego).” Russian Studies in Philosophy. Vol. 37, no. 2
(1998): 82-95.
—. “On Merab Mamardashvili’s Dialogue with Jean-Paul Sartre.” Russian
Studies in Philosophy. Vol. 49, no. 1 (Summer 2010): 74-95.
Nikolchina, Miglena. “The Humanism-Antihumanism Divide: The Con-
cept of ‘Man’ between the End of World War 2 and the Fall of the
Berlin Wall.” Sofia: CAS Working Paper Series. No. 5, 2013.
Padgett, Andrew. “Dasein and the Philosopher: Responsibility in
Heidegger and Mamardashvili.” Philosophy, Sociology and Psychology.
Vol. 6, no. 1 (2007): 1-21.
Pontini, Elisa. “The Aesthetic Import of the Act of Knowledge and Its Eu-
ropean Roots in Merab Mamardašvili.” Studies in East European
Thought. Vol. 58, no. 3 (September 2006): 161-178.
Pushchaev, IU V. “The Relationship Between Dialectics and Phenomenol-

ogy in the Work of E.V. Ilyenkov and M.K. Mamardashvili.” Russian
Studies in Philosophy. Vol. 49, no. 2 (2010): 77-99.
Regnier, Daniel. “Consciousness and Conscience: Mamardašvili on the
Common Point of Departure for Epistemological and Moral Reflec-
tion.” Studies in East European Thought. Vol. 58, no. 3 (September
2006): 141-160.
Ryklin, Mikhail K. “Consciousness as a Domain of Freedom: The Meta-
physical Theme in Merab Mamardashvili.” Russian Studies in
Philosophy. Vol. 49, no. 2 (2010): 28-50.
Senokosov, Yuri. “The problem of violence and the structure of rationality:
Philosophical remarks.” Religion, State and Society. Vol. 23, no. 3 (Sep-
tember 1995).
Šķesteris, Jānis. “Merab Mamardashvili’s Cultural Understanding: Fascism
or the Spinal Cord?” Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities
& Social Sciences. Vol. 1, no 6 (2013): 110-117.
Solov’ev, E. IU. “The Existential Soteriology of Merab Mamardashvili.”
Russian Studies in Philosophy. Vol. 49, no. 1 (Summer 2010): 53-73.
Steila, Daniela. “Merab Mamardashvili and Immanuel Kant: a dialogue on
transcendental consciousness and moral responsibility.” Studies in
East European Thought. Vol. 71, no. 3 (October 2019): 229–240.
Stafecka, Mara. “Mamardashvili on Thinking and Sensitivity.” Analecta
Husserliana. Vol. 93 (2007): 219-229.
Tirons, Uldis. “I Come to You from My Solitude.” Eurozine. (June 2006).
Available https://www.eurozine.com/i-come-to-you-from-my-soli
tude/ (accessed May 30, 2020).
Veresov, Nikolai. “Vygotsky, Ilyenkov and Mamardashvili: Searching for
the Monistic Theory of Mind (Methodological Notes),” 131-145. Evald
Ilyenkov’'s Philosophy Revisited. Edited by Vesa Oittinen. Helsinki:
Kikimora Publications, 2000.
Vladiv-Glover, Slobodanka. “What Is Classical and Non-Classical
Knowledge?” Studies in East European Thought. Vol. 58, no. 3 (Septem-
ber 2006): 205-238.
Zweerde, Evert van der. “Philosophy in the Act: The Socio-Political Rele-
vance of Mamardašvili’s Philosophizing.” Studies in East European
Thought. Vol. 58, no. 3 (September 2006): 179-203.
Acknowledgments
This has been a work of many years, and we have benefitted from
various sources of support and good advice.
Primarily and above all, the editors acknowledge the help and
support of Elena Mamardashvili, the copyright holder and the di-
rector of the Merab Mamardashvili Foundation, who granted us
access to materials and provided feedback.
We thank Noëlle McAfee and the Kettering Foundation for
supporting the publication of an excerpt from “On Civil Society” in
the Kettering Review 33, no. 2 (Fall 2016). We also thank the Merab
Mamardashvili Foundation for publishing an earlier version of
“European Responsibility” on their website.
We warmly thank Caryl Emerson, who supported this trans-
lation project.
Céline Anger tracked down several texts, especially in Lecture
11.
Andrii Lysenko helped to clarify many of Mamardashvili’s
terms and expressions.
Many thanks to C. E. Emmer for helping track down some of
the references to Kant.
Alisa Slaughter acknowledges and thanks the University of
Redlands, particularly Kendrick Brown, Dean of the College of Arts
and Sciences, Provost Kathy Ogren, and the chairs of the Creative
Writing Department, for a course release in Spring of 2020.
Julia Sushytska is grateful to Damian Stocking and Compara-
tive Studies in Literature and Culture department at Occidental
College for enthusiastic support of this project.
Many thanks to Katie Millsom, Robert Baird, and Stephen
Moore of the University of Redlands Finance and Sponsored Re-
search offices for vital assistance with grant writing and
administration.
We thank Valerie Lange, Kamilla Khairullina, Jana Dävers and
the editors and staff at ibidem-Verlag for their consistent and pro-
fessional editorial support.
245
Librarians and staff at the University of Redlands Armacost

Library, The Claremont Colleges’ Honnold Library, and Occidental
College’s Mary Norton Clapp Library provided careful and timely
assistance—thank you.
We thank and acknowledge our families—Les Canterbury,
Vatche Sahakian, Gaia Sahakian, Pat Slaughter, and Lyudmyla
Sushytska—for their support and patience with all things Mamar-
dashvili.
Contributors
Caryl Emerson is A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emer-

itus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University.
Her work has focused on the Russian classics (Pushkin, Tolstoy,
Dostoevskii), Mikhail Bakhtin, and Russian music, opera and thea-
ter. Recent projects include the Russian modernist Sigizmund
Krzhizhanovskii (1887-1950), the allegorical-historical novelist Vla-
dimir Sharov (1952-2018), and the co-editing, with George Pattison
and Randall A. Poole, of The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious
Thought.
Annie Epelboin is Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature at Uni-

versité Paris-8, and a translator and specialist of Andrei Platonov.
Her books include La littérature des ravins, Témoigner sur la Shoah en
URSS, Laffont, 2013, and La pensée empêchée. Entretiens Annie Epel-
boin—Merab Mamardachvili. P. Editions de l’Aube, 1991, Russian
edition published as Mysl’ pod zapretom, beseda M. Mamardashvili s
Annie Epelboin, Moscow, Voprosy filosofii, 1992, N° 5-6.
Miglena Nikolchina is a literary historian and theoretician. Her

writing engages the interactions of history and theory of literature,
philosophy, political studies, and feminist theory, with a focus on
literary utopianism and the post-communist legacy. In English, she
has published Lost Unicorns of the Velvet Revolutions: Heterotopias of
the Seminar (2013) and Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kris-
teva and Woolf (2004).
Alisa Slaughter is Professor of Creative Writing at the University

of Redlands. Her collection of short fiction Bad Habitats, was pub-
lished by Gold Line Press in 2013, and she is a regular contributor
to literary journals, particularly Santa Monica Review.
Julia Sushytska (Ph.D., Philosophy, SUNY Stony Brook) is an As-

sistant Professor in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
at Occidental College. Her research focuses on metics: those who
find or place themselves in-between major cultures and languages.
247
She published scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals (Tapuya,

Mosaic, Angelaki, Philosophy Today, and Journal of Aesthetic Education)
and edited volumes (Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics, Society and the
Cunning of History in Eastern Europe).
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Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

Cover image: Merab Mamardashvili. © copyright 2020 by Elena Mamardashvili.

Preface by Caryl Emerson .................................................................... 7

Авторское—Original Facsimile of “What Belongs to the

Consciousness and Civilization ................................................. 146

1 Vladislav A. Lektorsky, Chapter 1. “The Russian Philosophy of the Second

2 Mikhail N. Epstein, Chapter 2. “Main Configurations of Russian Thought in

3 On this see A. V. Akhutin, “In Mamardashvili’s Country,” published in Rus-

owed much to “a forced stay in a closed repressive society.”4 Nev-

4 Mikhail K. Ryklin, “Consciousness as a Domain of Freedom. The Metaphysical

(or non-) classical rationality,” when an act of thinking can no

Presence, infinity, event

9 Diana Gasparyan, “The Transcendental dimension of consciousness in Merab

knowledge” but the cultivation and “development of internal states

10 “How I Understand Philosophy. A Conversation with Merab Mamardashvili

13 Alyssa DeBlasio, The Filmmaker’s Philosopher. Merab Mamadashvili and Russian

historian of philosophy, Igor Evlampiev, wrote the following exas-

14 I. I. Evlampiev, Russkaia filosofiia v evropeiskom kontekste, ch. 4.4 “M. Mamar-

Julia Sushytska and Alisa Slaughter

Merab Mamardashvili was born in 1930, developed his philosoph-

Mamardashvili was born in the small town of Gori, in what

2 Merab Mamardashvili, “European Responsibility,” included in this volume.

dashvili with a 200-year tradition of flight to Western capitals that

To live well is to learn how to look and see, or to discern the

7 Merab Mamardashvili, (Psikhologicheskaia topologiia puti. (M. Prust. “V poiskakh

learn how to change this structure. Proust was able to do this—to

10 For instance, the work of Gloria Anzaldúa.

It is necessary to have a certain separation or estrangement from ourselves

Becoming a stranger to myself as a Georgian, a Russian, a Eu-

13 Lecture 19, Lectures on Proust (page 489 of the Russian edition).

a child, etc. places me in the in-between where I can actually learn

I am a Georgian and a philosopher; since my youth, I have been in internal

strength to it; there’s no energy left to put on a show. Personally, I am not

As a philosopher of the in-between, or an Eastern European

15 Merab Mamardashvili, “Zhyzn’ shpiona” [“Life of a Spy”], Soznanie i tsivili-

Russian and Soviet—where for political, but also cultural reasons

17 Caryl Emerson, The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature (Cambridge:

surrounding structure of life, and had no inner dependence on an ideology,

He recognized his indebtedness to Marx’s critical method—

19 Mamardashvili, “Moi opyt netipichen” [“My experience is atypical”] in Soz-

endt,24 who, taking as her starting point Kant’s political philosophy,

I stand a chance of expanding, improving, or correcting my

28 Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cam-

therefore a culture.32 The first of Chaadaev’s Philosophical Letters

Speaking of Europe, Chaadaev praises it for something that,

One of Mamardashvili’s key terms is artificial organ, or some-

34 Chaadaev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i izbrannye pis’ma [Complete Works and

geopolitical meaning (that could be easily dismissed for being ide-

37 Merab Mamardashvili, Lektsii po antichnoi filosofii [Lectures on Ancient Greek

cannot be an official record of what they did, and of their death,

Socrates and the Human Voice

38 Merab Mamardashvili, Formy i soderzhenie myshleniia [Forms and Content of

Behind this claim of ineptitude is an aversion to the watery

39 Mamardachvili, La Pensée empêchée, 19: “Seulement quelques-uns de mes livres

philosophers like Heidegger, Derrida, or Deleuze approximate po-

41 “Consciousness and Civilization,” included in this volume.

Mamardashvili put himself on the line while philosophizing

Do I express myself clearly? Not really? I use simple words, although of