Studies in East European Thought

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-019-09335-4

Impossible possibility: event as a real condition

of the transcendental in the philosophy of Merab
Mamardashvili

Victoriya Faybyshenko1 

© Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract
Merab Mamardashvili’s philosophy can be defined as the philosophy of the trans-
cendent event. An event is at once extremely concrete and extremely abstract. It
occurs in an act of a special kind: an autonomous act which is not the realization of
any pattern of transcendental historicity, is not attached to any teleology, that is, its
meaning does not consist in the realization of a goal. It is, plainly speaking, purpose-
less and therefore indeterminate. However, this is not a variety of actionism, not an
outburst of absurdity subverting all order. An act turns out to be the realization of
the “ontological abstraction of order” by means of a symbol actualized by the very
event of the act. The article examines various aspects of the event from the aesthetic
to the meta-historical.

Keywords  Event · Possibility · Form · Historicity · (Creative) attachments · Artefact

Introduction

In this article I will seek to describe the event as one of Merab Mamardashvili’s key
concepts and his philosophy in general as the philosophy of the event. In addition, I
attempt to show that the optics of the event determines the configuration of Mamar-
dashvili’s thought realized in a wide variety of subject areas.
The concept of the event became a philosophical topic in the twentieth century
that was due to a number of reason, which analysis is beyond the scope of this
article.
The main turning point in Continental philosophy in the last century involved
the critique of metaphysics in its broadest sense, not the old metaphysics which was
criticized by Kant, but the metaphysical type of thought focused on understanding

* Victoriya Faybyshenko
vfaib@mail.ru
1
St. Filaret’s Orthodox Christian Institute, 29 Pokrovka st., Moskow, Russian Federation 105062

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essences and developing conceptual systems that describe general and a priori struc-
tures of knowledge and/or of being. The event is a revolutionary concept which
describes the movement of life and consciousness which elude the stabilizing stand-
ards of concepts.
Understood in such a way, the event becomes necessary for radical thought of
whatever orientation. One could argue that the concept of the event came to the fore
after Heidegger’s works though its pivotal role cannot be reduced to the powerful
influence of Heidegger’s thought. For example, Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Theses
on the Philosophy of History,” written in 1940, is imbued with anticipation of the
event which creates the here-and-now and establishes its relationship with the resur-
rected past. The event is the central concept of the “logic of sense” developed by
Gilles Deleuze whose texts Mamardashvili read attentively. With Deleuze, the event
is also connected to a new understanding of time joining the elusive aspects of the
past and future into a point of singularity.
In contemporary philosophy we encounter “the event” where there is a reference
to the rupture with patterns of thought characteristic of the philosophy of transcen-
dental subjectivity. This rupture proves to be connected with the constitution of a
new temporality insofar as temporality, shapes the very structure of subjectivity.
What makes Mamardashvili distinctive here is that he creates a radical philosophy
of an event which claims to be a new transcendental philosophy and simultaneously
a new “non-metaphysical” (“physical”) metaphysics. Mamardashvili rejects the
ideological project of the subject thrown into the world in favour of a different kind
of interaction where all the agents are problematical. The “event” thus understood
is located at the intersection of the philosophy of history and the meta-theory of
consciousness.
The problem of the event permeates all the key topics in Mamardashvili and,
if only for that reason, attracts the attention of scholars. Marina Bykova speaks
about the event as “the event of thought” viewing Mamardashvili’s philosophy as
part of a tradition that attempts to restore metaphysics and that is centred around a
certain interpretation of transcendental subjectivity which can “most accurately be
described in terms of ‘assembling’ and ‘self-confinement’ of the self in its whole-
ness” (Bykova 2011, pp. 162–163). Natalia Voronina, on the contrary, interprets
Mamardashvili’s concept of the event in terms of a “non-classical ontology” com-
paring it to the Deleuzian “event” (Voronina 2003). Daniel Renier believes that the
event of consciousness is rooted in “living thought” which rejects the idea of real
separation of practical reason from theoretical reason (Renier 2009, p. 313). Dmitry
Ryndin describes how the contradictory structure of the event can be understood
through the relationship between the “inner” and the “external” word (Ryndin
2016). It can be said that for the most part scholars interpret Mamardashvili’s event
above all as the event of cogito, the event of thought incorporating its constitutive
paradox. Natalia Voronina formulates it in this way:
For Mamardashvili the event is not an auxiliary concept, but the key and
central concept. He sees the basic limitations of the classical ontology of the
mind in the fact that the event of thought is not treated as a part of reality, and
only the content of the thought is seen as real. Reflecting on the consequences

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Impossible possibility: event as a real condition of the…

of introducing the concept of the eventness of thought in understanding the

nature of rationality, he searches in Descartes and Kant traces of such an inter-
pretation. Unlike Deleuze, who stresses the impersonal nature of the event,
Mamardashvili connects the event of thought with cogito as understood in the
non-classical way. Cogito is the event of thought as such, the Event with the
capital E. (Voronina 2003).
While largely agreeing with this definition, I see the purpose of my article in reveal-
ing the structure of the event as an event of Being and simultaneously the event of
an act, because, as Voronina rightly puts it, “in order to extend the minimum inter-
val of time (Chronos) and squeeze one’s way into an event one has to transform, to
change” (Voronina 2003).
The first and most important property of an event is that there is no cause before
it happens. The event is the impossible that has happened. The paradoxical structure
of the event is already assigned with this formula. The event is a switch from the
state of impossibility to the state of accomplishment. It establishes a certain oppor-
tunity which did not exist before the event happened. The translation into being of
its own transcendental condition is the raison  d’être  of the event. Basing himself
on Kant and Husserl, Mamardashvili shifts the limits of transcendental philosophy
towards the direction of the “physical metaphysics” of the event which ushers us
into history and even beyond it.
From the position of the subject, the event can be described from three angles:
as an event of engagement, an event of understanding and an event of an act, with
all three aspects being moments of a certain unity. (Cf. Voronina on the event: “It is
not a question of creation coming first, followed by embodiment and then by under-
standing. It is one and the same act, within which its effective conditions and result
are held together. The temporal sequence emerges if one steps back and looks at the
event from Chronos, from the time of presentation.” (Voronina 2003))

The event and the phenomenology of time

In his 1990 speech addressed to Georgian film-makers (this is perhaps the best brief
introduction to understanding the problem in hand), Mamardashvili starts out by
analyzing the event of a work of art and then turns to the event as a form in which
history occurs. He himself refers to the event as the main subject matter of his phi-
losophy whose pursuit leads one beyond the phenomenological problematic of “the
inner consciousness of time”:
Actually, I tried to reject the construct of the subjectivity of the inner time and
to speak not about real time or physical time, and not even the ordinary every-
day time and space, but about the space and time of the event (and the event is
far from being a subjective thing) and to discover, first, what it is that we call
an event, or could be called an event, and what has not happened as an event
(Mamardashvili 1990).

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Let us try to understand what Mamardashvili means by saying that the event is
“not a subjective thing.” The event does not belong to a given horizon of con-
sciousness. An event has already happened, leading us to this existential perspec-
tive. We never plan events “before us” in the perspective we are aware of; we
discover ourselves “here.”
By our own willful decision, “by sheer effort,” we cannot create a “real” event.
It is precisely the spontaneous and retrospective irreversibility of an event that
establishes it as a real form. It removes us from that vicious circle repeating again
and again “one and the same thing” which is a projection of our desires, needs
and conceptions of that “one and the same thing” as the point of assembly which
is at the same time the event of the rebirth of ourselves. The event assembles the
very way of life by which it can be experienced.
On the other hand, “there are in society, in history certain ordered structures
which have, first, their own law of life, and second, exist dependent on how much
power and intensity of effort people exert to make these structures and these
objects exist” (Mamardashvili 2018, p. 22).
Can we view the event as a unique concatenation of what is not created by con-
scious intention and as an effort to stay within an ordered structure to be the same
phenomena? Relying on an analysis of a large body of Mamardashvili’s texts we
can say, yes, these are different aspects of Being of one and the same presence.
The event is the moment of simultaneity when something artificially created pro-
vokes into being an individual form of consciousness over which the subject has
no direct power and which it cannot attain simply by willing “to think about it.”
The insufficiency of diffuse, unassembled time, or in other words, the time of
decomposition, which is that of “natural time”, is replenished and crystallized by
the artificial body parts (organs) of human life.
This artificial body part is to which Mamardashvili refers as exemplary form,
or individual, or a work. He seems to be speaking about a work in the most
ordinary sense, as an artistic text, for example, a novel by Proust, Faulkner or
Pasternak:
These works may be films, literary works, poetry or paintings – anything, but
in all cases we are looking at some body parts (organy) of human life which
create some other life regime compared to the regime we follow in our ordi-
nary, everyday lives, that is, in the flow of empirical, or real, or physical or
mental space and time (because mental reactions also submit to temporal and
spatial definitions) (Mamardashvili 1990).
This other time regime obviously assumes a discontinuity; it is asymmetrical in rela-
tion to the continuum and which forms a whole with regard to its infinite divisibility.
What is the unit which allocates discontinuity?
A simple philosophical question arises: in what sense can we say that an act
of sensation and an act of perception have occurred, i.e. have taken place as
an event? After all, an event is always associated with completion. If we are
talking about conscious events, something is an event to the extent that some
meaning has been extracted – and then we can say that an act of perception has

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Impossible possibility: event as a real condition of the…

taken place, has occurred, or that an act of sensation has happened. (Mamar-
dashvili 1990)
So, an event is a violation of the natural course of things, “the flow of sensations”
and simultaneously their assembly into some kind of order. In an event, a person is
removed from the limits of her [immediate] life and transfer into "another dimen-
sion" of life.
Mamardashvili says:
There are machines that we call [products of] work [proizvedeniia]; in the
broad sense of the word, I would call them artifacts, that is, something that
objectively does not exist in nature or the world outside and independently of
our research inquiry. This is one tenet of the term “artifact”, and the second
tenet is that these kinds of things are made by human hands, or made by man,
and it is these [products] of work that place us in some specific space and time
and create special dimensions of conscious life that are not naturally inherent
in our psyche (unlike consciousness). (Mamardashvili 1990)
A proizvedenie is a kind of machine. Not a dead machine, but a machine of life.
It creates a constellation of experience that a person cannot create in the course of
ordinary, everyday experience. Yet this is precisely why we can say that a person
cannot create such a machine at will. It is created by a person’s inclusion in the
process, but it is not the person who is its sovereign author. This “machine” is the
means through which a certain “life structure” establishes itself, though the con-
cept of “structure” in this case is different from the meaning of the same concept in
structuralism that came to the fore in Mamardashvili’s time. Rather, he reinterprets
structuralism (as well as phenomenology and psychoanalysis) in the way that these
different methods would describe the structures that crystallize themselves in the
machine:
In fact, leaving aside the formal definitions of genres and the formal differ-
ences in the titles (for example, “Zhenia’s Childhood”) we can say that all his
life Pasternak was working only on one novel, “Doctor Zhivago,” writing it
as a text that could be a unifying body of life, i.e. a body of life that would
make it possible to unify all that has been collocated at all life’s crossroads
by magical manifestation and experiences (or what I chose to call testimony).
You remember the huge importance, in the novel, of the mutual overlap of
encounters, of intersections on which flickering lights (impressions) are
arranged; they effectively inform us of some other encounter which may not
occur for another twenty, thirty years and which will complete the meaning of
that which is merely flickering now, and all of them are fateful just as the danc-
ers’ scene in Proust’s novel, a scene organized by knowledge itself, i.e. by the
novel, so that the same impressions could later happen in a more compact way.
(Mamardashvili 1990)
Thus, the structure of the novel can assemble the diffused existence and it is this
assembly which turns separate moments into “magic signs;” it creates not the narra-
tive but the capacity of the author and reader (the author as the reader of his own life

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and the reader as its author) to see the meaning in the chaos of events. This meaning
itself is created by an inclusion of reader in an anomalous situation which is organ-
ized by the novel.
To sum up: Mamardashvili views texts and works of art as special organs of
human life that create a new time dimension: time scattered and lost in the stream of
life is collected in the experience of reading/writing.

An event reveals possibility

The effect that a work has on the author and the reader is to “extract meaning”
(Mamardashvili 1990). The very completion of an event is signaled by the extrac-
tion of meaning. But what is this meaning? Mamardashvili repeatedly stresses that
this is not something of a moral value which could be measured by "good" or "bad".
Perhaps it is something like a diagnosis? In the speech referred to above, Mamar-
dashvili says that the main thing Proust’s hero discovers by assembling the whole
time of his life is that Albertina has replaced his mother, made up for lack of her.
But this brief summary cannot be equated with the meaning. If we took it for the
meaning we would obtain a fairly predictable outcome, that would have required just
a supericial acquaintance with psychoanalysis. Such a final summing up is a mere
substitution. In reality, the meaning extracted from novel is its impact on the subject
(reader/writer), its capacity to introduce the possibilities a person never had, and
above all the possibility of the possible as such. The work does not retrieve the past
but bestows it as a gift that has only now become possible for the reader.
Here we deal with another theory of reception of a work of art, but its meaning
is not that narrow. Mamardashvili also describes a human action of a special kind,
an action that has no direct connection with the work. This action puts into place a
certain structure which requires this action to be present and, simultaneously, this
structure enables the possibility of the action.
We live a real life and not a life of half-dead apparitions when there are add-
ons ((creative) attachments) to our normal sense organs, add-ons called works
of art, i.e. films, novels, etc., and we live through them and in them or in the
crucible (gornilo) of these add-ons. [In other words], acts of life happen to us
and we live in reality, in what is really happening. (Mamardashvili 1990)
Such an add-on can be a poetic metaphor, a philosophical concept, for example, the
“eternal return” or an entire theory:
Here, in creating a conceptual matrix, we create a text by referring to which
we can prolong our experience, prolong it beyond empirical possibilities. In
this case, concepts are similar to things which render meaning, physically and
actually creating my conditions, my experience. (Mamardashvili 1989)
The machine of a work of art is an add-on (an attachment) to human life, generating
human life. It points to the constitutive paradox of the event of consciousness as an
event of Being. The possibility of the possible is revealed through “impossibility.”
Mamardashvili stresses this constitutive paradox many times. It is the anticipation

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of the impossible, maintaining its impossibility which is at the basis of the original
possibility, the possibility of birth.
The add-ons work to make life possible; but for life to come to fruition in reality it
has to be a realization of another life which is not to be found in reality. Mamardash-
vili makes a point of stressing that he does not mean ideals or constructed notions
but being itself, which makes itself known precisely through its absence.
I started by examining the structure of an event using as an example our relation-
ship with a literary text as an artificial body. The writing and true reading of a text
are events during which the autopoesis (self-production) of the subject and his/her
hermeneutic movement towards understanding take place. In other words, this is the
point where autopoesis is “unmasked,” laid bare and correlates with another life.
Let me summarize. The human creates machines, or artefacts, or add-ons that gen-
erate possibilities which transcend the empirically realizable ones. A sorting out of
empirical possibilities lead us to bad infinity. Mamardashvili speaks of another kind of
possibility: the one that creates a situation of integrity (which does not exist and cannot
be obtained inductively or analytically) and thus responds to the initial impossibility.

Possibility is revealed in an act

On the one hand, an event is a real, individual and concretely experienced and embod-
ied act. An event replenishes a certain significant absence, and at the same time lays
this absence bare. It leaves a gap as if breaking into the sequence of empirical connec-
tions. An event is entering into reality, creating a form of the real. An event always adds
to a definition of reality by discovering participatory consciousness, “my conscious-
ness.” But this is not a psychological self, not a consciousness belonging to an indi-
vidual. Mamardashvili calls it “the place of human being” or an “empty place,” a “non-
place place.” (see, for example, Mamardashvili 1986).
When a person finds herself in this place she can describe this by using the words
of Martin Luther which Mamardashvili often quotes: “Here I stand; I can do no
other.” And as in the case of Luther, that definition assumes an act which appears to
be unthinkable and doomed to failure. The value of such an act is not measured in
terms of its success or inclusion in the flow of cause-and-effect.
A characteristic example of an act which Mamardashvili frequently refers to
in his lectures is that of joining the Resistance in France in 1940 when resistance
appeared futile (Mamardashvili 2010, pp. 234–235; Mamardashvili 1980), or the
courageous behavior of the Decembrist Lunin under interrogation (Mamardashvili
2018, pp. 228–229; cf. Mamardashvili 2000). Paradoxically, though, conscious non-
interference in politico-religious debates (a path chosen by his favourite philosopher,
Descartes) is also an act (Mamardashvili 1980). An act is not determined by external
connections or by its separate ideological content, but only by a flash of conscious-
ness shining within it.
For Mamardashvili the reality of an act is defined, that is, delimited, through
understanding, which is a constitutive part of the act. The understanding, in turn,
brings to light the origin of the act. But what is it that is understood in such under-
standing? There is no direct answer to this question. Understanding is a tension of

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form which reaches the point of individualization in the act or the event. Thus, the
event of an act is fundamentally closed within itself but nonetheless it is open to any-
one capable of fully understanding it –that is, entering it and taking it upon oneself.
An act always initiates an origin, but in some sense the origin has no continua-
tion. It remains an origin that has to be established each time and which anyone who
has attained understanding can enter. Its key characteristic is that it is impossible to
“simply continue” (or imitate) it. An act’s self-sufficiency turns it into a pure epiph-
any of what is not of the world. But the focal point of an event is that this transcend-
ent can exist only in an immanent state: it enters the “empty place,” or the non-place
of the human.
An act is also a kind of a work of art, it is also an artefact creating optics for the
assembling of life. But the aesthetics of an act is by no means equal to the creation
of life in the forms practiced by decadent artists and modernists. Their creation of
life assumes above all overcoming the habitual means of morally evaluating an act.
Mamardashvili also proceeds from the assumption that an act is an epiphany of a
different order that cuts across the customary linear cause-and-effect interpretation
of life (the view of conventional morality is also linear and causal, albeit its causal-
ity differs from a physical causality). However, for Mamardashvili an act is not a
mimesis whose expressiveness actually creates its meaning. An act adds to the defi-
nition of being, precisely because it does not follow any existing being but sets its
own benchmark:
the state I have been speaking about inevitably exists simultaneously on two
levels and only on both of them together. An object in the world or an essence
in the world (the first level) must be additionally defined by an empirical,
unique event at the second level: I have found myself in perception and percep-
tion has been completed, I have found myself in an event, and the event has
been completed. This means, on the one hand, that the essences, the objects
have not been defined, or not fully defined until an empirical event of individu-
alization has occurred (individualization can only be an empirical act) and on
the other hand, I cannot place diversity in the range of essences. For there to
be an event or an object it has to be additionally defined also in the sequence
in which I participate with an empirical act, participating as a perceiving being
extracting from it a certain empirical and therefore objective experience. But
I cannot place the event directly in a sequence of objects where the empirical
acts have been completed. (Mamardashvili 2018, p. 98)
Thus, in Mamardashvili’s philosophy, an act is a point at which “the being that
doesn’t exist” reveals itself in the world. It is a moment of birth.

An event forms historicity, not coinciding with historicist ideologies

An event under consideration is an event of experience which informs us of what

is not given in experience. Here we see a fundamental difference between the phi-
losophies of event in Mamardashvili and Deleuze (whom Mamardashvili attentively
read). For both Deleuze and Mamardashvili , the event is not a given; it exists as a

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relationship produced by the text. Yet, for Mamardashvili the text is only a means
(unique each time, but only one of many) of entering in the elusive moment of addi-
tional definition. The two types of time, Aeon and Chronos, identified by Deleuze
(1990) are “logical times” realized in different textual formations. Mamardashvili
speaks about the time of history. Meaning reveals its paradoxical extraneousness to
history. Mamardashvili defines its place/non-place as meta-historical, and not supra-
historical or extra-historical, as it is usually understood in metaphysics. While with
Deleuze, Chronos is an expanded present and Aeon is the boundary setting up a
relationship between past and future, the frontier from which the superficial event of
meaning arises, Mamardashvili’s eternal present, is precisely that whole revealed
by the event and momentarily bursting into flame within it.
Mamardashvili’s initial premise is that everything that defines the history of the
human world is itself impossible. Every completed event, that is, one preserving
itself, is the overcoming of impossibility. Hence it is asymmetrical in relation to the
natural sequence of events determined by inertia and reaction. Even so, it has con-
sequences in this environment. The paradox of the event also lies in the fact that it
is not equal to the “physical” act of its realization. The act itself (“additional defini-
tion”) is the final point of the existence of the event, however, it alone can exist as
its origin because it is a concrete act and is the form of the event. It is the form of
the event that is not given but comes into being in the act. The form is actualiza-
tion which, on the one hand, makes history irreversible and, on the other, is open to
understanding and renewal of the event. The true history of the human and human-
ity is auto-poetic. It is the fabric which weaves itself in every act of untangling or
unweaving of the fabric.
Thus, the event encompasses a complex temporality of engagement, vision,
understanding and action: but these actions of the subject do not follow on from
each other, they cannot be pulled into line but form a complex unity of crystalliza-
tion. This crystallization is the realization of a certain structure which is impossible
to construct. It is determined by my ability to act within it, to endure it.
The necessary inclusion of the artefact leads one to believe that the event is
similar to a scientific experiment. We are indeed looking at something that does not
happen naturally. It is brought about by the introduction of an add on or “an artificial
body” and informs us of a certain law. However, despite some similarities the event
differs from the experiment due to a key feature: it cannot be reproduced. It cannot
be repeated at will, there cannot be a controlled reproduction of it again and again
insofar as it is primarily a life-event transforming whomever it befalls. Understand-
ing resides in being–being that understands, beholds the law.
Herein is concealed another important paradox of thought about the event: an
unreproducible event “uses” the artefact in order to “be plugged into” to the machine
of machines or the form of forms (Mamardashvili 2018, p. 103). The allusion to the
form of forms seems to assume that the same initiating act can be reproduced. How-
ever, the reproduced act is never a carbon copy of the original, it is the form which is
born of form and which generates the form. There is no hierarchy of authenticity, no
descent from the primary prototype to an ever-diminishing likeness.
The single-leveled nature of the generator and the generated, which exist only
within an event, corresponds to the paradox of the temporal structure of the event

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in which a priori and a posteriori cross over with each other. But this is why in the
linear time perspective the event has no “inside,”, precisely because it assembles all
time within itself. It is a pure relationship which has no prolongation (although it has
consequences).
A similar interpretation (in some ways) of the structure of an event can be found
in the work of the contemporary phenomenologist Claude Romano:
the measurement of the a posteriority of the event by which an event manifests
itself, it is very essence of event as a phenomenon and consequently it is a
priori its definition. … Perhaps, to put it more simply, it can be said that this
a priori of the event presents itself in experience in such a way that it can be
experienced again only “in retrospect” or a posteriori. In other words, in taking
an event seriously we have to revise our division into a priori and a posteriori
(Romano 2017, p. 242).
It is this kind of revision that Mamardashvili seeks to achieve in his approach to the
event as the nucleus of “life in history”, a history that transcends the historiographic
dimension. This position differs from the notion of the event as the moment of self-
defining human activity. The event is not simply a question of throwing a project
onto some unformed possibility. The event occurs in a special way: as the condi-
tion of its own possibility. The possibility is engendered a posteriori in the already
occurred experience of “the law”. This is a special kind of law—the law of birth
(Here is an interesting overlap with a notion of natality in Hannah Arendt). The
event is the point where classical phenomenology, on the one hand, and classical
philosophy of history as well as political theory, on the other, require revision.
We can compare the intuition of the event of an act in Mamardashvili and the
way it is represented in the work of Arendt. Arendt believes that human acts main-
tain a certain public space which makes the acts themselves visible and audible and
preserves them in being. Acts create the reality in which they have meaning. For
Mamardashvili the problem is the very presence of the acting agent in historical
existence. He describes the political reality of totalitarianism and authoritarianism
as a phantom that social field shaped by the non-presence of its (imaginary) agents.
They are present as physical bodies, but the interactions of physical bodies do not
create the act.
In the perspective outlined by Arendt, the human ability to act includes as its key
aspect the capacity to interrupt the fateful chain of irreversibilities launched by the
action itself (therefore it is possible to open up the past and future in forgiveness and
promise) (Arendt 1998, Ch. 5, Para. 33–34). For Mamardashvili the act has above
all such an “interrupting” meaning. It severs the network of causal dependencies,
opening a clearance in it.
The event has a complicated non-homogeneous modal structure. It includes not
simply an understanding of what happened, but a certain encroachment changing
the life of someone who has positioned himself as the subject of an event. The event
pulls time together and imparts to time a messianic character, to use the terminology
developed by Giorgio Agamben following St. Paul and Walter Benjamin. Agamben
speaks about the modality of demand: “The demand is the relationship between
what is and what was and its possibility which does not precede but follows reality”

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Impossible possibility: event as a real condition of the…

(Agamben 2018, p. 59). The demand is described by the formula: “all that exists
demands its possibility, demands to become possible” (Agamben 2018, p. 59). Mes-
sianic time is precisely the non-linear “consequence” of the event and simultane-
ously a mode of its presence in historical time. But this messianic character differs
radically from all types of historicist teleology, the search for the goal of history
logically built into the historical process. Mamardashvili constantly criticises this
kind of historicist presumption and also the illusion of progressivism.
An event is a free phenomenon. A free phenomenon is, for example, the aware-
ness of the moral law as described by Kant. Mamardashvili expands the meaning of
law, though, in a perfectly Kantian way: the law does not only have an ethical mean-
ing but elevates the cognizing subject to “ontological abstractions of order”, but this
is a paradoxical ontology. A free phenomenon does not follow on from anything. It
has no roots in empirically and socially determined human life but it makes it human
by itself. Therefore, it does not belong to any place or time but those to whom it hap-
pens is always localized in the world and in history. Mamardashvili speaks about a
special kind of utopianism of philosophical consciousness which stands in contrast
to socio-political utopianism (though sometimes they are confused). The place of
the event is ou-topos, the non-place which is created by a person’s effort to complete
a thought, it is in the ou-topos that a thought “becomes” an event and being becomes
thought (Mamardashvili 2018, pp. 104–105). This is the constitutive condition of
philosophy as human experience proper.
Mamardashvili understands historical dimension of human life in a dual fashion.
On the one hand, the human presence in history inevitably produces the converted
form of consciousness which an individual has to reduce in the philosophical act.
On the other hand, an immanent historicity is a unique place of insufficiency, a gap
in the unified composition of reality which makes personal presence irreplaceable.
This is the point in which person must fulfil herself and make it irreversible. Thus, a
genuine event—as a free phenomenon of the human—is the attitude to his own his-
toricity which has freed itself from the power of history as an ideologically shaped
and socially reproducible totality.
We can represent the idea of Mamardashvili as follows: the historical event is an
act of thought or action that brings history to the beginning. But this beginning is
not the previous stage of the history itself. It establishes a new origin.

An event is the transcendental mode of being in the historical world

The transcendental dimension is not the realization of some a priori structure pre-
sent in consciousness before the event of an act has come into being. In that case we
could have built an algorithm to distinguish correct and incorrect acts. But it would
be senseless to apply this distinction (which may work in jurisprudence and com-
mon morality) to “the world of births.” The event is the materialization of meaning.
The meaning cannot be derived from any knowledge about the world:
For example, this can be said about meaning. The meaning of history is not
part of history itself. Goodness is not part of the good world, i.e. there are

13
 V. Faybyshenko

good acts in the world, but it is hard for us to judge how good they are. One
person considers them to be good, they are 50 percent or 60 percent good or 50
percent evil, everything good has a flip side and then we start to get confused.
Meanwhile goodness is what does not exist in the world, or, to put it another
way, there is a tense border in the world that harnesses it in such a way that
there may occur in this world acts we recognise and evaluate as good, akin,
familiar. Not because by themselves, by their content they are absolutely good
or absolutely evil. We recognize them as such allowing for the fact that we are
anyway feeble partners in the relationship with something that is beyond the
limits of human strength. (Mamardashvili 2000)
We recognize good acts not because all their consequences are absolutely good; this
is an empirical requirement that can hardly be complied with. We recognize some-
thing good in a good act not as an abstract truth about what good is, but as a living
distinction, a mark. It leads us to the phenomenon of good, it is transcendental as an
epiphany and not as some general concept of the good.
The historical life of the human (or, say, human life as a truly historical life) is
determined by the truth of “ordered thought” or “human feeling” as an “ordered
phenomenon, an event reproduced or continued due to the properties of conditions
and structures (and not based on our imitations of them”) (Mamardashvili 2018, p.
21).
A historical event is an event that radiates a certain excess of form not assimilated
by the present and not dissolved in the future. In this sense, the historical does not
belong to history. Its historicity consists in the fact that by being self-sufficient it
actualizes other events (outside any direct cause-and-effect chain) as recognizable
through themselves and creates visual organ for them. The key problem of history is
how is it possible to prevent what has happened once from falling apart and how to
maintain it as a kind of form?
The “event” correlates with another key concept of Mamardashvili’s, the concept
of “the way” (or path) (Mamardashvili 2018, p. 192). Events happen on the way.
The way is realized in events. However, there is no two-dimensional or three-dimen-
sional map on which one can plot the sequence of events and thus get an idea of
the way. The way does not lead anywhere and all the events on it are one event, the
impulse of one electrical current.
In fact, all human philosophical activity is, for Mamardashvili, an act of resisting
the density of history, the stratification of the complex structure of superimpositions
which assimilates an individual event in order to assemble this event as an event of
consciousness.
The experience of consciousness is not the particular affair of a professional philoso-
pher pursued behind closed doors. On the contrary, it is an act every person is called
upon to perform: “philosophical work is aimed at analyzing the conditions of world’s
cracking open and one’s arrival at a zero-point (the origin), the constant renewal of
which is a condition of life force, or life, its constant recomposition. We philosophize
because force is not given by itself, it is always subject to recomposition at any given
moment, therefore the law of pulsation operates at the level of historical thought”
(Mamardashvili 2018, p. 261).

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Impossible possibility: event as a real condition of the…

The philosophical attitude of the human is to resist “the course of history,” the
mechanism of culture, the self-sufficient flywheel of the ready form which pick up and
direct individual effort. Historicity itself—what makes history history and not a mere
string of events—arises in this loop: it is a paradoxical return from the effective form to
the zero point which the demand for form itself creates.
Mamardashvili constantly holds in his purview and connects two levels of under-
standing of history: on the one hand, the unfolding of a process in time and space which
enables us to speak about the historical process and on the other hand, the event of birth
which is at the same time the fulfilment, the final realization of a certain meta-state,
something he refers to as the structure of structures. Thus, the paradoxical historicity of
the event embodies the same paradox of the “metaphysical a posteriori” as in thought
proper. This is how Dmitry Ryndin describes this feature of the event: “the event, a
concept which by definition has to do with historicity, becomes something ahistori-
cal, forever repeating and reproducing itself. Yet, on the other hand, Mamardashvili
localizes the sources of the logic of the event in European culture and links it with the
Renaissance in his famous speech on “Europe’s responsibility.” Arguably, here we are
looking at what Mamardashvili calls the “metaphysical a posteriori:” the structure of
the event exists because the event of Renaissance has occurred” (Ryndin 2016, p. 24).
The event, on the one hand, turns out to be the realization of an unrealizable struc-
ture of structures and, on the other, an understanding of what cannot be understood,
an understanding which is identical to being. To what extent does the event introduce
irreversibility into the world and to what extent does it bring us back to the origin, the
world of births? It does both: it constitutes the origin of history and completes it. It is
the will to “end history” that marks out people who have attained the philosophical
state and simultaneously it marks out tragic heroes. It is the images of “heroes” such
as Socrates and Hamlet that turn out to be generating attachments for those initiated by
these images (See Mamardashvili 1986).
We live in a world in which something has already happened that creates a tautology
of recognition, “that same thing” in which we have to discern law. To stay within the
law is a historical event. An event means hitting the mark of individuation in which law
reveals itself.
This is how the performative force of embodiment operates. Embodiment is one of
the central motifs of Mamardashvili’s thought which links his phenomenology with his
ontology (Faibyshenko 2013). This demonstrates the unexpected relation of Mamar-
dashvili’s “embodiment” with Erfüllung (fulfilment) in Husserl’s phenomenology). A
true event is an embodiment or fulfilment, but not of a preconceived idea or plan; it has
to do with personal irreplaceable existence which reveals itself before the law.

Conclusion

The event establishes a link between the transcendental and the transcendent

The event can be said to be a kind of theological concept, but this is not a reli-
gious but a philosophical theology, a secular theology of embodiment, a theology

13
 V. Faybyshenko

that radicalizes the underlying concept of transcendental philosophy so that it

becomes something else before our eyes.
This is a theology in which the transcending is in stark opposition to the ready-
made essence of transcendent. The tense gap between them forms what Mamardash-
vili calls “a transcendental act” or “a transcendental event, or the event of Being.”
“Transcending what? There is no object, says philosophy. There are no
transcendent objects, consequently it transcends nothing but form, sym-
bol, that is, form and symbol is something orientation towards which is the
reverse of a condition of being in the human being.
“Existence does not arise there where transcending occurs. I repeat, it is
focused on something called symbols or empty forms …
“Transcendental consciousness wrestles with the question, how, not being
able to jump out of oneself, nevertheless, of doing something similar. One
can suspend oneself in symbols which have nothing concrete or objective to
say”. (Mamardashvili 2010, pp. 209–210)
The event of Being is at once extremely concrete and extremely abstract. It hap-
pens through a special kind of act: an autonomous act which is not the realization
of any pattern of transcendental historicity, is not attached to any teleology, that is,
its meaning is not allocated for the realization of a goal. It is, plainly speaking, pur-
poseless and therefore indeterminate. However, this is not a variety of actionism,
not an outburst of absurdity that undermines all order. An act turns out to be the
fulfilment of “an ontological abstraction of order” by means of an empty symbol
(empty, but not devalued or exposed) that was realized by the very event of an act.
The whole meaning of an empty symbol consists in its ability to transcend, that is,
to establish a relationship to the limit. Therefore, the supreme symbol of thought as
a state of consciousness, according to Mamardashvili, is death, but the symbols of
“the same thing” are love, good, and other “grand words”. The symbols are senses
generated by literature, philosophy and other “artificial bodies”.
The event is the point that unfolds in space and time. It is “that which does
not exist” but which acquires embodiment in the real action of the symbol in the
human (who nevertheless is not hypostatized, remaining “just a symbol”) or a
symbolic action of the human.
The event is the vehicle of paradoxical eschatological historicity because his-
tory ends in it each time, though not having an end on its own.
An event is a way of describing something that links all the ideas of Mamar-
dashvili’s philosophical views: from the aesthetic phenomenology formulated in
his “Lectures on Proust” to the physical metaphysics laid down in the “Lectures
on Social Philosophy.”

Funding This study was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research project 18-011-01234
“The Principle of Transcendentalism in Russian Philosophy (XIX-XX)”.

13
Impossible possibility: event as a real condition of the…

Compliance with ethical standards 

Conflict of interest  The author declares that she has no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval  This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by
the author.

Informed consent  This article does not contain any studies with individual participants.

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