Empty Form and the Beginning of History

Transcendental Philosophy of Nascence in Merab Mamardashvili’s Works

Abstract

Within the framework of his own phenomenological project, Merab Mamardashvili deals with the question of the absolute transcendental origin of human action. The philosopher must combine the principled tautology of the act of consciousness with the human ability of nascence. Solving this problem, he reinterprets the transcendental itself in a new way. The main problem of historical existence is an impossibility of extracting an experience that drives an individual into a situation of bad infinity. For Mamardashvili, all human philosophical activity should be an act of resistance to the history by stratifying complex structure of overlaps that produces an individual event, so that this event could be collected as an event of consciousness. It is the will “to finish the story on oneself” that forms the event of consciousness, as well as the event of deed. Mamardashvili understands the transcendental not as a priori, but as a revealing world of nascences. The nascence is a “surplus” act of being, not deducible from the content of being. It is caused by the symbolic appeal of a human being. The existence is “monstrously concrete”, there cannot be any predetermined plan: “it is impossible to give birth by the force of thought”, repeats Mamardashvili. In unpredictable concreteness of here-and-now, the transcendental act occurs, in which birth itself is born, desire itself is desired, etc. This metahistorical condition of the history coincides with the gap in the time of history and forms the free phenomenon — the cause of itself.