DMITRY LEONTIEV

LIFE AS HEROIC EFFORT: MERAB MAMARDASHVILI’S PSYCHOLOGICAL TOPOLOGY OF THE WAY

Existence is what you must do here and now. That excludes postponing to tomorrow or transposing it to the shoulders of another one, to the shoulders of thy neighbor, the nation, the state, the society. You must yourself. But the human being does not feel like doing this. Merab Mamardashvili (1995, p.20)

The object of the reflections proposed below is Merab Mamardashvili’s system of views explicated in two books: Lectures on Proust 1995)1 and Psychological topology of the way (1997).2 Both books are transcripts of lecture courses read in 1982 and 1984/85 correspondingly. They are devoted to the same subject and have multiple overlaps; however, they are textually quite different. The second text presents a somewhat later version of Mamardashvili’s attempts to treat the same issues in a more elaborated form. Speaking or writing about Mamardashvili and his ideas, especially ideas and views of the last decade of his life, is an extremely complicated task. It would be absolutely impossible to summarize his views in a few statements, nor to extract some definitions from his texts. His lecture courses of the 1980s give a picture of a curvilinear, spiral movement of his thought, constantly coming back to the issues already discussed and trying to express the same meaning by different words – for there were no words directly corresponding to the meanings he had in mind in everyday language, nor in the philosophical and psychological discourses. People say that when Mamardashvili was giving his course on Proust in , , he started lecturing in Russian language and many listeners felt offended – why a Georgian is giving lectures for Georgians in other language than Georgian? Mamardashvili explained calmly that Proust cannot be translated into Georgian. One should be aware that Mamardashvili’s philosophical meanings cannot be exactly articulated also in Russian, or English, or any other language; he always struggled with limited possibilities of language. Another anecdote says that in a break between lectures a listener approached Mamardashvili who was smoking his pipe and said: “Sorry, but I am afraid I failed to understand all you said” – “There has been no task like this”, imperturbably answered the latter. Editor: I suggest putting these in to footnote. Mamardashvili’s thought transcends the disciplinary subdivision of — there is no ontology, epistemology, anthropology, ethics, aesthetics etc. there apart from each other. “There is no ethics separately, no aesthetics separately, no logics separately, no feelings separately, etc.”

1 M. K. Mamardashvili, Lektsii o Prouste: Psikhologicheskaya Topologiya Puti [Lectures on Proust: Psychological Topology of the Way]. : Ad Marginem, 1995. 2 Mamardashvili, M.K. (1997). Psikhologicheskaya Topologiya Puti: M. Proust “V Poiskakh Utrachennogo Vremeni” (Psychological Topology of the Way: M. Proust “In search of the lost time”). St Petersburg: Russian Christian Humanitarian Institute Press. (Mamardashvili, 1997, 340). Considerations on the nature of understanding change into the statements on human nature, on functions of art and literature, into phenomenological analysis of making sense of the immediate experience, then transform again into ontological statements, into historical and sociological analysis of homo soveticus and then the phenomenology of love feelings…. However, complete and systematic explication seems neither possible nor necessary; putting it in Mamardashvili’s own terms, it is not the accumulation of information or experience that helps us to come to an insight, but rather viewing the same things through a new structure to see the truth that has long been there. For me Mamardashvili’s texts provide a structure that helps me to make sense of what is the object of my concern – the practice of human life. This concern sets my limited viewpoint on the inexhaustible Mamardashvili’s world; for me it is trivial that other scholars would read this world in different ways. It is the context that makes any content meaningful; the context of my life has made Mamardashvili’s ideas meaningful for me. In fact, Mamardashvili was in the same position while he was revealing ontological presumptions implicitly contained in Proust’s prose; he labeled them “the philosophy of severity” (Mamardashvili, 1997, 36). He tried to reveal and explicate Proust’s meanings through his own experience; in the same way I will be trying to explicate some of Mamardashvili’s meanings through my academic and life experience. I am thus facing a hermeneutical, rather than analytical, task: what follows is my way of understanding and conceiving of Mamardashvili’s “Topology of the way”. Etymologically, understanding means looking upwards to the object to understand, a humble awareness of grasping only some piece of it; conceiving is related to conception, that is being fertilized by some idea or meaning. My encounter with the views presented below did powerfully fertilize not only my academic work but also my understanding of life at large and my way in it. This paper thus presents my experience of conceiving Mamardashvili conceiving Proust; I hope it would be conceived further. This inescapable subjectivity is balanced by a large amount of quotations, far above the commonly accepted measure. Its necessity stems from the lack of translations of Mamardashvili’s works into other languages. The main task of this paper is in fact to present Mamardashvili’s ideas as they are rather than my view on them – however, this can be done through my (or someone else’s) view only. I also accept the full responsibility for all the translations of the quoted excerpts from Russian into English.

Mamardashvili, psychology, and existentialism In many respects Mamardashvili’s later views are close to the existentialist worldview. Their similarity is already seen in their stylistic peculiarities: Mamardashvili’s reflections are fluid and cannot be frozen in categories, resist any structuring, on the one hand, and are often quite radical, clear and unambiguous, on the other; “Devil is playing with us, when we are not thinking precisely”, was one of his frequently quoted motto (Mamardashvili, 1997, 207; Mamardashvili, 2004, 154). His starting point was, however, reflexive consciousness of an individual moving in the world Editor: That should be reformulated. Mamardashvili’s starting point was rather problem of consciousness, on the one hand, the reflexive c., or reflection, instead, he elaborated in a special way also. That is a very complex topic, and not the very topic of your contribution, but the “reflexive consciousness of an individual”