Mamardashvili: Symbol and Consciosness

The paper discusses a few tensions “crucifying” the works and even personality of the great Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili: East and West; human being and thought, symbol and consciousness, infinity and finiteness, similarity and differences. The observer can be involved as the correlative counterpart of the totality: An observer opposed to the totality externalizes an internal part outside. Thus the phenomena of an observer and the totality turn out to converge to each other or to be one and the same. In other words, the phenomenon of an observer includes the singularity of the solipsistic Self, which (or “who”) is the same as that of the totality. Furthermore, observation can be thought as that primary and initial action underlain by the phenomenon of an observer. That action of observation consists in the externalization of the solipsistic Self outside as some external reality. It is both a zero action and the singularity of the phenomenon of action. The main conclusions are: Mamardashvili’s philosophy can be thought both as the suffering effort to be a human being again and again as well as the philosophical reflection on the genesis of thought from itself by the same effort. Thus it can be recognized as a powerful tension between signs anа symbol, between conscious structures and consciousness, between the syncretism of the East and the discursiveness of the West crucifying spiritually Georgia.

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Appendix: Observation as Action: an Observer and the Totality

The fundamental concept of phenomenology, that of phenomenon can be interpreted as an original and initial invariance in relation to the fundamental opposition of classical philosophy, that of subject and object. Consequently phenomenon can be thought as an initial structure or “eidos” of any entity, which is as single as plural. In particular, its plurality requires at least doubling, just which classical philosophy designates and studies as that opposition of subject and object.

Furthermore that concept of phenomenon correlates with that of the totality generating and/ or generated by a counterpart in terms of the totality. That “plural singularity” of the phenomenon can be directly deduced from the definitively necessary properties of the totality: any externality of the totality should be within it just being total. Thus the totality generates infinity in itself by itself and can be thought as equivalent to infinity in a restricted sense.

The observer can be involved as the correlative counterpart of the totality: An observer opposed to the totality externalizes an internal part outside. Thus the phenomena of an observer and the totality turn out to converge to each other or to be one and the same. In other words, the phenomenon of an observer includes as the necessity singularity of the solipsistic Self, which (or “who”) is the same as that of the totality.

Furthermore, observation can be thought as that primary and initial action underlain by the phenomenon of an observer as above. That action of observation consists in the externalization of the solipsistic Self outside as some external reality. It is both a zero action and the singularity of the phenomenon of action.

As a zero action, it serves as a reference frame, in which any other action can be situated and thus its phenomenon can be yielded. The essence of that zero action consists in the totality to be ordered in a “zero” way so that to be the same or to remain the same after being ordered as reality. That condition constitutes observation as that, to which the totality is invariant in the two hypostases: (1) a primary and initial “chaos” unorderable in principle and (2) the reality, which is already somehow well-ordered within it and by itself.    

As the singularity of the phenomenon of action, the “action” of observation is the common ground of all actions and therefore making them both possible and juxtaposable. Thus it can be “bracketed” so that as if only reality and real actions take place and so grounding the natural attitude to the world, commonly shared by people.

Furthermore, observation as if generating reality should be discussed in terms of ordering. The phenomenon of ordering is choice: Ordering represents a primary choice between the ordered and (the) unordered i.e. between at least two alternatives, among which only one should be chosen as ordering rejecting all the rest. Consequently ordering is equivalently representable as a series of choices or even as a single choice in a philosophical sense: the choice to be chosen the choice itself and therefore choosing ordering and reality. However reality hides that choice, which generates it. The mechanism for the choice underlying reality to be hidden can be found in observation as follows:

The observation itself is invariant to the choice. Observation is just the zero action: that action, which is “not” yet an action, but a reference frame or benchmark, to which any other, “real” action can be constituted as adequate to reality somehow already existing “in advance”.  Thus observation needs only some pure existence to remain from the choice after it is invariant to that choice and does not need it properly but only the abstract, “pure” existence (of it or at all). After the choice turns out to be hidden, only the result of the choice, i.e. reality is only what can be endowed with that unconditional existence.

Therefore and as a conclusion, the phenomenon of observation as a “zero action” is what can constitute reality as somehow already ordered ostensibly by itself and thus ground the natural attitude to the world as properly natural hiding all process of the phenomenological genesis of it.