Contents

Introduction.

CHAPTER I. Philosophy and the practical.

CHAPTER II. On social physics (the notion of politics and political action).

CHAPTER III. Consciousness, or metatheory of what?

CHAPTER IV. "Physical metaphysics" as the authentic notion of pragmatics.

CONCLUSION

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Normally, the name of Mamardashvili would require no special introduction. "Normally" stands here to designate the bulk of conditions which, had they been present in the Russian culture, would inevitably make Merab Mamardashvili well-known to the international community of humanitarians. However, for this community to be present it is necessary to allow for the existence of institutionalised publicity; that is, for the possibility of free discussion regulated by the rule of law. This is the condition necessary to sustain (and here I introduce the basic concepts of Mamardashvili's political philosophy) the state of civilisation in a given culture. Civilisation, as opposed to culture, appears to be the constancy of social forms and institutions where individual deliberations come to their articulated expression. This guarantees that once there is something to be expressed, it rightfully possesses all the possibilities to be listened to and weighed upon. In other words, civilisation creates the public sphere independent of any coercion. In this context, with all due respect to her culture, Russia can in no way be regarded as civilised.

Ironically, it is Mamardashvili whose political philosophy may well be defined as the theory of civilisation, and it was Mamardashvili who fully experienced all the consequences brought about by its absence. He never held the position of a full time professor at a University, had only few publications, and was known in a respectively narrow circle of colleagues and disciples. For them, however, he appeared to be something more than an outstanding scientist. Rather, he was taken to be a philosopher as such -- the living demonstration of the fact that philosophy as a self-dependent thought, reached in a personal effort, may survive whatever restrictions. Thus, he was perceived as a personage of his own philosophy; one who, traditionally speaking, embodied the Socratic figure of a wiseman, or, using Mamardashvili's own terminology, represented the symbol marking the border of one's conscious experience and the impersonal realm of philosophy as such. Wherever he was known, he was loved; whoever did not love him could simply be said not to really know him. This figure induced humane gratitude and respect, rather than formal professional discussions.

Unfortunately or fortunately, these humane feelings and experiences are principally incommunicable. This implies that there exists no way to introduce Mamardashvili's philosophy for people outside the aforementioned cultural context, other than to establish the clear points of reference found through his publications. I have chosen the word "publications" as that most fitting the character of what we now refer to as Mamardashvili's texts. Only a few of them were originally created as books. Others include his courses of lectures, held in various higher education institutions mainly in Moscow, innumerable single lectures that he occasionally gave in the universities of the former Soviet Union, symposium speeches, and interviews to Russian and Western reporters taken in his last years. Publication of the second group of Mamardashvili's heritage is still in progress since this undertaking requires a good deal of editorial work being conducted by Mamardashvili Philosophical and Interdisciplinary Research Foundation, under the guidance of Juri Senokosov.

Beginning with his books, I will refer in this research mainly to two of them: Classical and Non-classical Ideals of Rationality, published in Tbilisi in 1984, and Symbol and Consciousness, which was written together with A. Piatigorsky and first appeared in Jerusalem in 1982. The second edition of this book, revised by A. Piatigorsky, was published in 1997 in Moscow. In comparison with other publications, these two contain the attempt to provide a coherent terminology for the analysis of consciousness and can be regarded as the elaborated theoretical basis for any of the other Mamardashvili's texts. As for the courses of lectures, I am going to particularly discuss only one of them, namely Lectures on Social Philosophy, held in July, 1981 at the University of Vilnius. However, references will also be made to Cartesian Meditations (January - February, 1981, Institution for General and Pedagogical Psychology, Moscow), Introduction to Philosophy (Spring Semester, 1979, State Institute of Cinematography, Moscow), and Lectures on Proust (1982, Tbilisi State University; 1984-85, Moscow). Speeches, articles and interviews which I will take into consideration, are comprised in two collections, namely What I Understand by Philosophy (Moscow, 1992), and The Necessity of Self (Moscow, 1996).

As it may be grasped from the titles of these publications, the central theme of Mamardashvili's philosophy is the phenomenon of consciousness. This is reflected in the set of personages from the history of philosophy in which he took primary interest: Plato and Socrates, Descartes, Kant, Husserl. The question, which arises at this point, is that of the possible relation between philosophy of consciousness and political action. What is questionable here is not the fact that these two phenomena are commonly attached to different branches of science: "departmental" divisions between sciences merely follow the principle on which science as such is established. The point is that Mamardashvili affirms the necessity of the analysis of consciousness for understanding political sphere.

According to him, political realm is self-sufficient. It comprises various political institutions which have science and culture at their disposal. Both this institutionalised science and culture are incapable of self-understanding, as well as of understanding the context they are embedded to since they themselves appear to be the modes of socio-political structuring. This implies that they have no possibility to reflect upon themselves and the whole: were they to have had this possibility, the society would have ceased functioning. By contrast, philosophy is described by Mamardashvili as an entity capable of crossing these institutional borders. As such, philosophy discovers the physical character of social reality: once established, institutions may well function without any human interference. To describe the laws of this functioning is the authentic task of a theory, meaning the classical constitution of knowledge built up on the assumption of the complete transparency of being for the absolute observer, or science itself.

What can not be reached in terms of theory is the concept of rupture since in order to formulate it, a theory would have to overcome itself and thus cease being a theory. Mamardashvili argues that a metatheory is necessary if one is to understand "social reality" (which is a theoretical term) as a "product", or that is to say as a complex "phenomenon" (both metatheoretical terms) -- a phenomenon being that which had been established and is now transparent with regard to the conditions of its being. This shift would allow to introduce the notion of pure action different from the automatic functioning of institutions. His point is that action as such can only be described in terms of consciousness. Thus, on this very basis does Mamardashvili construct the whole of his philosophy.

My work is intended to demonstrate the relevance of such an approach as to resolve a number of difficulties currently discussed in political philosophy. However, the way in which metatheory of consciousness would propose its solutions appears to be essentially philosophical, and can be reduced to the following rule: whenever you are stuck with a question, you may always ask why it is the question. In other words, none of Mamardashvili's answers (as well as none of the answers in philosophy) are going to take a form of a direct instruction. Rather, they may be assessed as to what extent these answers are themselves questionable. No matter whether this is deemed to be an oversimplification or a further complication, this is the way philosophy works. With regard to this circumstance, my minding of Mamardashvili's philosophy will be framed by two of his (and, most likely, mine) "under-mindings" concerning its simplicity and complexity.

On the one hand, Mamardashvili allows for a number of "simplicities" -- culture, society, "the psychic", and the automatism of their functioning -- all of which can be united under his notion of "adjacent and penetrating reality". On the other hand, his pretension to understand everything in terms of consciousness results in the invention of a number of complexities, such as "quasi-objects", active notions, "practical contemplations", and symbolic sedimentations.

In relation to the first point, I would ask back how exactly Mamardashvili understands philosophy. Insofar as philosophy is to remain itself, it has to question all the aforementioned simplicities. Once it does not, it itself immediately turns into a question, or rather the practice of questioning -- "real philosophy", to use the original term. Ironically, Mamardashvili shares this hypo-philosophical layer with his beloved Kant, who, were he to have been asked about his three famous questions -- why, in fact, it is possible for me to know something, necessary to do something, and permissible to hope for something -- would barely have pronounced anything perspicacious. Similarly, being in the Kantian manner precise in drawing borderlines between different "spheres of reality", Mamardashvili amplifies the notion of philosophy to such an extent that it becomes impossible to distinguish between his "real philosophy" and "the automatism of life".

With regard to the second issue, I would remind Mamardashvili of a number of simplicities he overlooks while engaged in the subtleties of his analysis of consciousness. Why is it consciousness that appropriates and, in fact, privatises the notion of "happening", and not pure moral action or poetic oration? Why does actuality appear only in consciousness, and not in speech, contemplation or ostensibility of an object? To sum up, why does consciousness -- being, to use the Cartesian terminology, modus and certainly not attributum -- remain the only one analysed? That is, why did the analysis of non-consciousness remain not only inaccomplished but not even announced?

In my work, I will take these two sets of questions through Mamardashvili's analysis of the sphere of the practical in terms of its relation to philosophy; politics, or "social physics"; consciousness itself; and pragmatics, or consciousness in its "quasi-application". Hopefully, my fifty-page long wandering among all these "meta-s", "quasi-s", "pseudo-s", and "hypo-s" will end up with the clearness of the leading questions.

What "the practical" is, seems to be obvious to the extent that this Germanismus looks awkward. What philosophy and her relation to our everyday affairs can possibly mean, remains unclear. As it was long ago coined by Aristotle, philosophy, in contrast to other sciences, does not pursue any utilitarian end:

Insofar as philosophy maintains its particular character of complete inutility, she frees herself from all subservience to the people. Insofar as she does not serve anyone, she is not entitled to be taken into account, recommended or defended. Indeed, who cares to know only for the sake of knowledge, and what an oddity it is to wonder at something instead of making use of it! Moreover, how can philosophy lay claim to her worth for considered respect by anyone if she has completely lost all the self-confidence which was originally inherent in Aristotle, and now proceeds directly by questioning her own existence? How can she flatter herself with the title of "useless, but the best science", if she lives only in the measure in which she combats herself , deprives herself from the evident character of her existence?

Given that all these confusions are not completely unreasonable, we are first to ask, why philosophical work is still conducted by some people who, by virtue of their being people, must be somehow similar to us. Provided these confusions may be developed into elaborated arguments, we are second to anticipate the concept of utility to form their basis. To sum up, it is clear that what would be persuasive for us as to the relation between the practical sphere and philosophy, would be a philosopher's account on the utility being produced in his discipline.

Apparently, Aristotle's reasonings about philosophy do not satisfy this condition. He described philosophy in terms of plenitude of knowledge which we already have at our disposal and which is to be completed by the "first philosophy's" inquiry into the first principles. She starts working at the point where all the questions concerning what to do and who is responsible for what are already answered, and answered not by particular sciences that might initiate a sort of conflict among themselves as to the truth of their knowledge and limits of their respective subject-matters, but solely by art that is agreeably and silently supposed to be the imitation of nature (meaning everything that is, apart from our "artistic production") in human affairs. In this lay out, philosophy appears to be an authentic occupation of those moderate men who, by virtue of their nature, do not wish to become richer, healthier, happier -- who have found the present state of things and affairs to be perfect and are now interested in completing the perfectness of being through their awareness of the principles on which a thus disposed being rests. This entitles these men to conduct their private research without rendering to "the general public" an account of what they are engaged in, merely because the public is much more interested in the public promotion of one's own well-being than in one's private wondering at "the greater matters". In this way, a citizen keeps seeking the useful, that is, good for his particular end, and a wise man, without any interference with the particularity of citizenry affairs, keeps inquiring into the good as such. Similarly, as a particular affair reaches its end thanks to certain means, philosophy recognises its thinking (no matter that this recognition will have been articulated two millennia later, in Heidegger's writings) essentially as thanking the revealed good. Wouldn't it be an oddity to demand an account on the produced utility from thanking?

It is hardly worth mentioning that Aristotle's picture is as plausible as it is fictitious: one can imagine a novel character to exist, but the point is that he does not. Philosophy no longer seeks to complete the prosperity of artistic practice by its actual, but facultative theory. At some point (and this point was clearly fixed by Kant), philosophy lost the awareness of its environs and started to perceive herself as a way of orientation among her disorded Gegebene. To be able to orient oneself when a compass is only to be given, it is necessary to know one's own "here and now". This circumstance engenders modern philosophy's preoccupation with the problem of self-disposing, of which Kant's question Was ist die Aufklä rung? was the first manifestation.

The Enlightenment happened to be the first self-portrait of philosophy through which it characterised herself by self-invented definition, self-composed motto, and self-formulated precepts; through which it put herself into the general history of thought, reason, and knowledge by self-identification with a certain event within this history; through which philosophy recognises her situation as non-enlightened, natural or corrupted, and finds herself to be a means to alleviate this situation. Since that moment, philosophy, while asking of herself, necessarily has asked about her surroundings; that is, about the practical in its broadest sense. Since then she has become necessarily sensitive to common sense's demand to provide an account of her utility. Since then she has had to variously rename herself under the careful public eye by filling out the already habitual form "philosophy as ...".

While conducting this public service, philosophy, by and large, claims that she is useful due to the fact that she is being used. Although the practical is not the sphere where philosophy is intendedly applied, it is nevertheless the sphere where one can find her applied; that is, philosophy secretly works inside this sphere and, therefore, may justify herself by laying claim to public utility itself. To prove this claim, philosophy traces the principle in accordance with which her public application is conducted, and the modes and regularity of such application.

We are now to consider two such claims in order to end up with the clearness of what Mamardashvili contrastingly assumed as to philosophy's relation to the practical. These are those laid by the most representative figures in modern philosophy, Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault. Surprisingly, these two "enemies" (if we take into account their adherence to totally different traditions of philosophy, each of which, however, pretends to incorporate the other) will show a close similarity in views, and their understandings of language will appear as a symptom of this similarity.

In his article (whose title looks as if it had been purposefully arranged to fit the mentioned "public form") Philosophy as Science, Metaphor, Politics, Richard Rorty deals with different philosophy's self-understandings in order to demonstrate the possibility of interbreeding Heidegger with pragmatism expecting the progeny to be more productive in terms of public utility than each of the sires. Thus, in his view, it is not a question whether philosophy is useful, because it is evident that she is; the question is how to increase her utility. In order to provide a sufficient answer, Rorty distinguishes three conceptions of the aim of philosophising ("metaphilosophies", in his terms), evaluates each of them, and draws a project of their possible "co-operation". The first metaphilosophy understands philosophy as science. Rorty attributes this metaphilosophical belief to both Husserl and his positivist opponents. In this view, philosophy is to be modelled on science -- no matter whether she is to provide positive sciences with a solid foundation or to serve as a warehouse for their achievements. That what unites them is their common assumption that "philosophy has a prelinguistic subject-matter" and, thus, that "there is an ahistorical reality to which a given philosophical vocabulary[,] may or may not be adequate". This "thus" is the most telling among all that was said by Rorty so far. By this "thus", language is assumed to be the essence of, or rather a synonym to historicity; moreover, it is synonymous to philosophy, since the latter can be reduced to the "vocabulary". Thus (this time without quotation marks), the scientific metaphilosophy postulates the existence of a sort of logic behind the language she uses. By contrast, both "poetical" (that is, Heidegger's) and "political" (that is, pragmatism's) metaphilosophies, according to Rorty, do not.

Heidegger is involved in looking for words that are to express what a being is, and pragmatists are occupied with utilising any word that allows for utilisation. They both opt for "dissolution of philosophical pseudo-problems through letting social practice be taken as a primary and unquestioned datum" and share a "deep distrust of the visual metaphors" supposedly proposing instead the aural ones. However, they differently treat the relation between the metaphorical and the literal, and have different attitudes towards the relation between philosophy and politics. It appears that Heidegger's poetic usage of metaphor is better to be used for pragmatists' political purposes.

Since it might not be so evident for "continental" philosophers, who are used to concepts rather than to words, I have to explain here why the issue of metaphor is of such importance for Rorty. The point is that he shares with Heidegger the understanding of the true task of philosophy, which is to "reweave community's web of belief". No matter that Rorty reads this understanding into Heidegger -- we know already that the latter, as a linguistic philosopher, is completely deprived of the faculty of understanding. One who understands here is Rorty himself, and the thing he understands (apparently, together with common sense) is comprised to "a curt, dogmatic claim":

Both perception and inference can not cause any changes in our language. All they can do is to re-label sentences as true or false, but they leave the very set of sentences untouched. To assume them to be the only ways to change one's beliefs (and this is Husserl's and positivists' assumption) is to take the language one presently uses to be the only possible one. Philosophical work in this case consists simply in clarification of what we already have and is not supposed to introduce any changes.

By contrast, metaphor as a third source of belief (and this is pragmatists' direct and Heidegger's implicit claim) allows for possibility to change one's present language. Not to induce any difficulties, by metaphor Rorty does not mean any mystical revelation of truth or spontaneous expression of the hidden spirit of language: metaphor is an unhabitual way of usage. Given that we usually say "we all live on Earth", the expression "we all live in a yellow submarine" can be considered as a metaphor, not to take Copernicus' discovery and "the Copernicanian revolution in philosophy" as equally relevant examples. The only difference between Heidegger and pragmatism is that the first seeks to preserve metaphors from their becoming usual usages regarding this process as banalisation while the latter intendedly work on such banalisation continuously committing a kind of Kuhnian "scientific revolutions" which are thought to contribute to social progress. As a result, the malevolent Heidegger "makes everything more difficult", while the benevolent pragmatists "make things easier to everybody". However, Rorty's scientist-like honesty does not allow him to directly accuse Heidegger (from whose works on the history of Being the pragmatists picked up the figure of poetic Thinker in order to convert it into a Producer of metaphors) of a crime against humanity. Therefore, he has to use a more subtle way of doing the same. He introduces the difference between his fellow pragmatists and the lonely Heidegger as a political one: the latter dedicates himself to poetry while the first are involved in the political improvement of the quality of life. The conclusion is evident:

What I am to conclude has to be more Aesopian than Rortian appeal to the good will of fellow citizens. His amazing project of philosophical promotion of social progress rests on a peculiar rashness: Rorty does not take the trouble of clarification of what philosophy is, and thus does not seek to discover in which political situations and social institutions she may be found to be already applied -- in order to finally and thoughtfully extract her essence and determination. To make everything easier from the outset, Rorty takes philosophy as an institution, as a part of Universities' administrative divisions whose relation to the practical is, therefore, evident. In other words, philosophy for him is not a problem of which he thinks, but a fact about which he speaks. As language was found to be a mere vocabulary for a better or worse use, equally, philosophy appeared to be a tool. Whenever there is a lack of culture in science (that is, when science can not cope with correlating its problems with those of a general world view which do concern everyone); whenever there is a lack of science in culture (that is, when culture is overwhelmed with resistant prejudices and traditional left-overs); and whenever there is a possibility to prompt the general progress of civilisation -- philosophical instruments are to be used. The purpose of their usage is unquestionable: they are to be automatically involved in "achieving the greatest happiness of the greatest number". What is, however, the entity which is entitled to use this tool?

This is the question that Rorty was too far from asking. It was also this question which was posed by his French colleague, and in those very writings that "upset his American admirers".

Let us take a brief look at the late Foucault's project of the history of sexuality. It intends to clarify the constitution of sexuality and to describe its historical transformations. Sexuality is taken here as one of the practices a human being conducts throughout his life. Foucault assumes that each of the practices is constituted in this or that way, and that in this very constitution a certain meaning is embedded. This implies that a practice necessarily confines a discourse about itself -- a set of rules, taboos, connections that are evident for those who are doing something. It also confines indications of the limits of a practice: one who is doing something necessarily knows what he is doing, at least one is always able to distinguish between eating and sleeping.

To translate Foucault's understanding of practice into Rorty's terms, each practice possesses a certain philosophy, and Foucault while conducting his study, builds up his metaphilosophy, which, as we already know, is intended to explicate the aim to be realised by means of philosophy. Such translation forms the basis of pragmatists' critique of Foucault: since his metaphilosophy takes a form of history which discovers the variability of the constitutions of practices throughout different epochs, the products of this history can only be used for a historian's individual maturation, for widening his personal world-outlook, and are therefore of no use in the practical conditions of mankind. On these grounds, pragmatists transform their objections into a condemnation of Foucault for his adherence to political anarchism.

I would rather use this situation as a good example of what happens when one does not find it necessary to be attentive to a philosopher's own terminology. One would never discover a word "metaphilosophy" in Foucault's writings -- by contrast, he characterises his work as "archaeology" or "genealogy"; that is, he takes the opposite direction of inquiry. Instead of asking what purpose the transparent institutional body of philosophy serves, Foucault wonders on what grounds the present functioning of philosophy confined in practices rests. To put this question into the words understandable for Rorty's politically-oriented intellect, who uses the philosophical tools? However, the answer Foucault provides does not justify the inaccuracy of such translation: one who uses philosophy is power, which is neither to be personalised nor rebelled and defeated. "My books don't tell people what to do". Rather, they bring to light "the relations between the subject, truth, and the constitution of experience".

Thus, sexuality is described by Foucault as experience that unites in itself fields of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity (meaning the ways individuals recognise themselves as the subjects of this very experience). Variety of the ways in which these three components correlate appears to be the subject-matter of the archaeologically understood history. However, history, which is supposed to and actually does emphasise the variability in the constitutions of experience, simultaneously discovers the continuity of its subject:

Thus, experience loses all its complexity and appears to be the experience of thought itself. For a historian-archaeologist, this means that it is thought that is to be, by means of archaeology, made explicit in any of the practices, which is the same as to say that his work (which we have already identified with philosophy) is itself essentially a practice or, as Foucault once named it, "the art of telling the truth". Therefore, the question of its relation to the practical cancels itself out. Philosophy in this lay out becomes a way of life, a practice conducted by some strange people who claim it to be necessary for their personal liberation, education, protection, even for surviving: "Knowledge is a means of surviving by understanding".

I am not in the position to defend a thus understood philosophy from the usual accusations inherited by modern public from the ancient Athenians: we do not understand this suspicious practice and, therefore, it aims either at corrupting the young or at advocating blasphemy. Now, philosophy in Foucault's person would hardly drink hemlock -- she would rather reject the accusation by suspending the meaningfulness of all the other practices. Similarly, as a reaction to the questions concerning her utility, she will ask in return what the utility means, and will certainly tease Rorty's "greatest happiness of the greatest number" by asking what if I personally, like a medieval monk, privilege my salvation over anyone's happiness.

What I would lay at Foucault's door is somewhat different. I would rather ask him, in what language would his art "tell the truth", if all the languages, understood as discourses, are already present within the practices themselves? What is this language if not a silent attention to everything going on? If it is true that "there is always a little thought even in the most stupid institutions, [and that] there is always thought even in silent habits", then what is the philosophy's own status? What distinguishes philosophical discourse from all the others if each of them (including sexuality) have appeared to be the practicing of thought, and "thought is regarded to be the authentic form of action"? Philosophy, together with all the other discourses will ever keep its automatic functioning being unable to discover the instance of non-action.

Thus, philosophy either becomes an instrument at the service of the practical or equals herself to the practical and, in these ways, completely loses her self-dependence. Is it possible to conceive philosophy as related to (since this seems to be the unavoidable and already natural requirement left to her by Kantianism), but distinguished from her surroundings (since this seems to be the necessary condition for something to exist as something and not as something else)?

An attempt to endow philosophy with such a status was made by Mamardashvili, and if not made exactly in the Kantian terms, then certainly with the Kantian elegance. According to Mamardashvili, philosophy is related to the practical (although he uses the term "world" meaning the abode of living beings who are commonly called "men") in the measure in which she poses the question "how is the world possible?", or, "what are the conditions that allow for the existence of the world as it is?". In this sense, the one who philosophises appears to be also a politician, and a public figure since he conceives the very conditions and the possible meaning of these activities.

What philosophy expects to receive as an answer is not, however, a sentence composed of words already present in the language. The point is that since language can supply an infinite number of sentences grammatically fitting this question as possible answers, there must be the non-linguistic ground (pausing for silence, speaking negatively) that would allow for recognition of the actual answer among all of them. What philosophy expects as an answer to her question is also not a list of operations that must have been made to receive the world as it is now. To postulate a preceding state of the world to be the cause of the actual one, she must possess the non-operational ground (negatively, паузой недеяния [pausing for non-doing]) to distinguish between the indefinite number of possible events and the one that actually happened. Philosophy, in order to remain herself and not to slip into the art of delivering speeches or into the methodology of whatever, must find this ground here and now, in the very act of philosophising. She finds it in consciousness and thus defines herself as "сознание вслух [consciousness aloud]", as a conceptually articulated consciousness.

A thus understood philosophy reveals her practical relevance against the background of science being stuck in the inevidence of its results; of culture deadened by its own legacy; of the civilisation requiring the "quality" of meaningfulness to keep functioning. Consciousness is not an under-standing of the world -- the under-standing that lays a foundation for it to exist, it is rather an in-standing of the world -- the elimination of which results in the world's rendering as unintelligible, unbearable and disastrous. The only difficulty is that this in-standing does not reside in the world in a way that it automatically "animates" everything going on; consciousness, as it was already said, resides in the act of philosophising, which otherwise may be defined as a "state of consciousness".

At this point, philosophy, once she pertains to remain related to the practical, finds herself obliged to reformulate her initial question into the following: "Как должен быть устроен мир, чтобы событие под названием "мысль" могло произойти? [How must the world be constituted to allow for the event called "thought"?]". In a way, the question necessitates the answer: there must be a kind of inner-world philosophy that fills the gaps between actions people conduct in their lives -- to be able to make a chair or to write a poem, one must have a certain "philosophy" uniting all the steps one takes. In this context, Mamardashvili introduces a distinction between "real philosophy" and "philosophy of doctrines and systems". "Real philosophy" contains understandings, perceptions, beliefs one gained from his personal experience and efforts. Philosophy, which in terms of this distinction should be called "the philosophy of doctrines and systems", appears to be an explication of real philosophy by means of specific conceptual apparatus.

Thus, philosophy is related to the practical in the measure in which the events going on in the world have some meaning, of which actors are conscious, while philosophy gains its authentic sense in the measure in which she adequately articulates these contents of consciousness in the precise conceptual language. Philosophy is spread in the practical as a private thinking of one's own affairs and is brought into the political and the social as a communicable thought expressed in the language, which appears to be understandable and meaningful insofar as it renders the facts of consciousness.

Let us keep in mind the questionable character of "real philosophy" and proceed by tracing philosophy's route in the political realm, which at first sight is not over-populated by those practicing real philosophy.

In this chapter, I will shift my focus from the practical, which I understood in its broadest sense as non-philosophy, including all human affairs, moral concerns, political evaluations, and various opinions and beliefs, to the political and the social, whose meaning this chapter is intended to clarify. Once I said "meaning", I made an explicit reference to the philosophy as she was understood by Mamardashvili. I will take the notions of his philosophy through my analysis in this chapter in order to bring them into their native context in the two next parts of my work as already known and explicit with regard to the problems they were engendered, and the circumstances of thought they are surrounded.

To describe the political sphere, I will take the term "politology" as the most appropriate one. On the one hand, it designates the logos of the political sphere; that is, the principle or the set of regularities that rule this sphere, and produce and guarantee its functioning. On the other hand, this principle coincides (or, at least, should coincide if the science intends to possess or to seek the truth) with the knowledge and explanation which a scientific politology provides as a conception of this sphere. In this sense, taking into account the fact that everyone is involved in this or that way in the functioning of the political and holds related opinions, any human being can be regarded as a politologist.

The last statement would certainly cause a protest from the part of institutionalised politology, whose scientific status is confirmed by its membership in various Academies, Societies, and Universities. This politology would argue that only that part of mankind which is equipped with specific terminology, methodology, and analytical apparatus is able to pronounce well-grounded judgements about society and politics. I will give floor to this argument in order to examine the ways this scientific investigation takes, to look through its results, and finally to decide what it can and what it can not say with regard to understanding politics and society.

The assumption underlying politology's claim postulates that from the process of scientific observation, all the contingencies must be excluded -- otherwise, the results will not satisfy the condition of the objectivity of knowledge. This implies that on the side of object there exist the privileged areas of investigation, namely large scale phenomena -- societies, economies, cultures -- that are deemed to annihilate any contingent causes and factors and to elucidate "real" ones simply due to their dimensions. On the side of subject, the condition of objectivity of knowledge implies that there should be constructed the specific conditions of observation which are intended to prevent any interference of human elements (since any scientist remains a human being whether he wishes to or not) with the process of objective cognition. In fact, formalised terminology, methodology and other technical apparata are intended to provide an artificial subject for scientific investigation.

The adjective "artificial" is not intended to show my condemnation of the social science based on quantitative methods and explanatory techniques (as opposed, for instance, to Dilthei-like projects of understanding socio-cultural phenomena by Einfü hlung). "Artificial" here stands to designate a constitution which has been purposefully made and which, therefore, can be unmade or, which is the same as to say, can be analysed. In other words, politology as a science refers to a certain ideal of rationality which determines the ways it approaches its subject-matter, the constitution of objects with which it works, and the conclusions it finally draws. Mamardashvili's term "ideal of rationality", as opposed to various rational formations (such as science, culture, state), means

What are the components of the ideal of rationality, which sets up the conditions of scientific work?

At first sight, the way politology maintains its knowledge is confined in terms of what Mamardashvili called the "classical ideal of rationality". This construction implies, first, that one who is acquiring knowledge at any point of his (better to say, "its") activity is completely aware of what it is doing because it holds the unfolded process of cognition in the actuality of consciousness. Second, since a cognating subject appears to be a mechanism the principles of whose functioning are transparent, it is only capable of receiving data that conform with its own constitution. In other words, any operation of subject is correlated with a specifically prepared object. Third, such a correlation exhausts the realm of experience and demarcates its limits; that is, experience appears to be homogenous, equal to itself at any of its points. Therefore, any content of knowledge can be and, in fact, must (to confirm its status as that of knowledge) be reproduced by anyone, whenever, in any other place under the same conditions. In other words, all of the scientists are, as such, identical in their equality to the subject of knowledge.

At second sight, these conditions appear not as those about which a science could tell us while reflecting upon itself -- these are those the realisation of which a science foretells in the infinity of its progress. Evidently, these "ideal" conditions can be only approximately satisfied by a particular institutionalised science and are, therefore, taken as the requirements, directing this process of approximation. In this way, anything which does not fit the construction of rationality which science took as compulsory for itself, is to be regarded as "contingent" by contrast to the scientifically known "necessary". To exclude all these contingencies, the process of cognition is to be formalised and converted into a list of steps and operations (methodology); among the objects, the operable ones are to be chosen -- that is, those countable, measurable, statistically or otherwise representable; and the scientists are to be disciplined to reduce their activity to serving as a speaking and writing appendix of the automatically working methodology.

Let us assume that a thus constituted politology knows better than any of us, "natural" politologists, what politics and society are, and let us see what it can present as an account on these matters. Since science revealed itself in our analysis purely as a procedure of correlating the operations prescribed by methodology and the objects predefined as allowing for investigation, the only knowledge a science can acquire is some particular characteristics of the objects that are already understood in the very structure of scientific knowledge. In other words, before any investigation starts, science already knows what are its objects, and, by virtue of its consistent and self-sufficient strive for the realisation of what it regards as its ideal, science converts the whole world into its own mirror image. Therefore, to find out what science understands by politics and society, there is no need to immerse ourselves into the details of its studies -- the conception may be well deduced from what I have already said.

Thus, insofar as science appeared to be a set of methodologically directed actions motivated by the intention to fill all the gaps in the texture of knowledge and followed by the evaluation of the acquired results, all the social things are the actions initiated by desires, interests, and needs of the actors; that is, socio-political action can only be teleologically structured. Similarly, insofar as science is conscious of its own methodology, the actions conducted in the world can only take the form of the intended or preplanned actions or, which is the same as to say, of the steps completely transparent to the actors in terms of their ends and means. The conclusion concerning the constitution of politics (as it is understood by our scientific politology) is evident:

Therefore, all the existing establishments are to be regarded as the embodiment of the contents of consciousness and the results of goal-means structured actions: society itself is a product of a social contract (whether hypothetical or not); the state is an instrument of social regulation by means of deliberative parliamentarian procedures; the usage of language is a matter of convention (and therefore may be changed as recommended by philosophy); jurisprudence is the expression of the idea of justice in terms of restrictions imposed on the realisation of people's interests; economy is formed by the labour of "rational" independent individuals and corrected by the system of equally rational protection and regulation. Politology can always find a purpose with which a political establishment has been created. In its view, the whole society is structured in a way that

So far, so good. Let us connive at certain discrepancies between scientific descriptions of society and our own personal experience as that of citizens, voters, consumers - as that of those who really live within the political sphere. Instead of questioning science's results, I will take a look at the role it plays in society: what is science doing while conducting its research? What are the ends and the means of its activity?

To stick to its own terms, science is striving for the realisation of its ideal, for achieving the absolute knowledge; that is, the state in which all the things and events of the world may be grasped and retained as known in the one act of consciousness. Since this ideal is a part of the very constitution of science, the accomplishing of this task is undoubtedly possible, which is the same as to say that this is a technical task. Therefore, science must be engaged in the improvement of its methodology and in perfecting the techniques of investigation.

Given this self-description, how should we perceive science's strong factual orientation to self-application, advisory practice, and even to the production of desired results such as someone's successful elections, increase in the consumption of certain goods or the promotion of intellectual values -- from the idea of open society to new Internet browsers? We are, as "natural" politologists, to conclude that science is engaged in the general production of consciousness, which is universal in terms of the constitution of society and which takes the form of hired labour in terms of each scientist's work. Each scientist finds himself at the service of the industry of consciousness which supplies and multiplies its patterns and clichés to be implanted into each head by means of specific ideological methods. This industry works in the same terms of sound reason and well-grounded judgement as those which have been used in the self-description of science.

However "rational" its terms might be, this "produced consciousness" is not based on the personal act of understanding accomplished by an intellectual; what is produced, is rather "mass consciousness" and "mass culture" which require no intellectual effort either from their producers or from their consumers. In other words, society appears to be an automatically functioning machine, whose output is "massman", Homo Sovieticus, "a new anthropological type", etc.; the machine, which uses everyone who has not yet underwent socio-political "processing", as its material. In this sense, politology is an aggregate of real forces whose functioning is completely independent from the individual's thoughts, intentions and desires; by contrast, the social machine smelts any individual manifestation into the socially authorised phenomenon. Moreover, these forces are, by their nature, absolutely incomprehensible in terms used by institutionalised science. Rather, these terms themselves have been authorised, and this very act has resulted in science's entitlement to be an instrument in the hands of those forces.

This situation prompts me to be more attentive to the terms in which individuals, who reflect upon themselves (such people are usually called "intellectuals" in our time), describe what is going on in politics and society. They discover that between their cognition and cogitata, there lies something which does not allow for direct representation and can not be elucidated in terms of someone's intended actions. According to whose intention were the present social and cultural machines built up? What was supposed as the end of their functioning? If all the social institutions express, in their very structure, the ideas of Justice, Freedom, Equality, then on what grounds are they, here and there, being destroyed and why does this destruction enjoy absolute public consent? None of the present institutionalised sciences are of any help as to the solution of these questions. By contrast, everyone is capable of answering them given that he tries to do this personally (not socially), by means of his own convictions, reason and judgement.

Such self-determination can only take the form of a specifically organised existence, different from the work of the social machine, through personal efforts of understanding, unguaranteed as to their fruitfulness and importance for anyone else. An intellectual realises that not only production, but even transmission of his thought depends solely upon personal thinking -- upon his own in the case of production and upon the thought of a recipient in the case of transmission. Thus, the sphere of thought and creation appears to be the only one in society that requires personal decisions, actions, efforts and final responsibility for them. As the reverse of this situation, any action accomplished by someone in a personal and responsible way, receives the status of thought: to kill someone when it appears to be the only possible way to preserve one's dignity is regarded as a full-fledged act of philosophising. Finally, a thus described act appropriates the authentic notion of action, as opposed to the movements, motions, changes arbitrary as to their provenance. In other words, not every social phenomena may be described in terms of action: something may appear to be necessitated by those nearly natural forces and circumstances that enter one's life without asking any conscious admission from him; that is, by one's situation.

In order to be able to perform an action, it appears to be necessary to disengage oneself from the situation that can always spontaneously produce unexpected and unintended effects. "To disengage" means here "to be aware" of it, that is, to understand in one's own terms what is going on, to take a situation as allowing for certain meaning, to retain this meaning in the situation as something given, and to take responsibility for the resumption of this meaning in everything once performed. Thus, politology (or, in Mamardashvili's terms, social physics) gains a meaning of the really acting forces as something given (Gegebenheit) and their institutional products as something already accomplished (Faktizitä t). Let us proceed in the stated order and ask what phenomena thought discovers as its situation and what they come out to be in relation to an actor.

In his article, Consciousness and Civilisation (1984), Mamardashvili distinguishes two possible types of situations, namely the "normal" ones and the "situations with oddity". Western societies with a firmly established rule of law and institutions of civil society, and, respectively, Kafkian situations and societies ruled by state ideology, can serve as examples. The oddity of the second type of situations consists in the fact that they describe themselves in the terms originated in the situations of the first type. Both Herr K. and a humble Bü rger, about whom nobody is interested to write a novel, appeal to the court. Both of them claim that they seek justice. As a result, a Bü rger receives, for instance, reimbursement for his stolen car, while Herr K. does not even know of what crime he is accused. He finds no other way to defend himself than to persuade everyone that he has not committed any crimes in his whole life -- which is itself an absurd statement given the absence of legality; that is, of the criteria allowing for a definition of crime.

I would claim that what makes a difference between these two linguistically equivalent situations is consciousness. While conducting his action, a Bü rger implies that one who has stolen his car, has performed an action and, therefore, is responsible for its consequences. Moreover, he implies that this status of an action is socially accepted, that is, there exist certain social institutions which are based on the assumption that any citizen is entitled to responsibly act and, therefore, is subject to the laws which appear to be a political manifestation of one's responsibility. By contrast, Herr K. shows by his conduct the complete non-understanding of what he is going to do as well as of what his situation is. He is brought to court, and he goes there without asking why, where, and for what purpose. Let us consider the constitution of both situations.

"Normal" social situations are those formed according to the following two principles: "I think, I am, I am able to" (a reformulated Descartes' cogito sum), and "there exist certain intelligible objects in the world that play a role of conditions which allow for endowing the personal acts of thought and responsibility with meaning" (Kant's Ideen der Vernunft understood in the context of his writings on history and politics). These principles affirm, first, that a responsible political action is possible and, second, that such an action is disposed within the primary intelligibility as to its meaning and consequences and, therefore, allows for its moral, judicial, aesthetic or any other evaluation. To introduce Mamardashvili's term, these two conditions determine the state of civilisation.

Since thought, which I have already shown as the necessary ground for an action, has no guarantees as to its continuation, and since the fact that someone has accomplished the act of thought (or an action in its authentic sense), does not determine the next one, there is a need in something which would "support" the personal efforts of people to think for themselves and, by virtue of their being social institutions, would convert actions into political ones.

By contrast, the situations with oddity can only be understood in terms of ideological consciousness, of that consciousness whose contents do not require any effort, activity and responsibility to exist. The contents of such consciousness have been simply acquired from somewhere else -- whether they were intendedly implanted through the system of education, mass-media, etc. or were occasionally picked up from common sense, tradition, etc. Strictly speaking, there is no consciousness in these situations, its existence is only supposed on the basis of the fact that people keep expressing something in their speech, conduct, and the way of life.

These signs of consciousness appear to be the only required: "в пределе, при этом исчезает необходимость в том, чтобы у людей вообще были какие-то убеждения [ultimately, the necessity for people to have any convictions at all, disappears]". Only that what matters are signs which allow the putting anyone into the work of the social machine. In this lay out, people can only be represented as a human mass completely lacking resistance and pliant to any impact. As the reverse, the mass-like anyone takes his situation as a "natural" one since it is hardly possible to discover a result of the accomplished positive action in something which is simply given, for a individual who never dared to take a step on his own. This impossibility to recognise the established social institutions as a result of the work of consciousness was perfectly described by Ortega y Gasset:

To sum up, either we have institutionalised civil society and the rule of law that allow for the possibility of political action as I have defined it, or we have a political situation in terms of which political action is impossible due to the fact that all activity is privatised by political forces which are independent from and incommensurable with human dimensions.

However, the political situation (whether a civilised one or that with oddity) does not determine an actor who finds himself within it. Rather, the situation turns out to be something given with which his actions are necessarily correlated. The modes and the measure of such correlation remains under one's own control: one may follow the circumstances in the same way as Herr K. did, and one may equally distinguish himself from it. In both cases, a situation appears to be the bulk of positive conditions in terms of which the actor's reflection and consciousness are already working. Since this work is present in the situation, it necessarily allows for the possibility of understanding social connections through discovering a dimension of their original intendedness. Once the social things may reveal their character of intendedness, they may be recognised as the places of the previously accomplished meaningful actions and, finally, to become a starting point and guideline for one's own way.

To further elucidate the difference between the described types of political situations and to endow my fine references to responsibility and one's personal efforts with philosophical meaning (i.e. with that of philosophy of doctrines and systems), I need to introduce Mamardashvili's metatheoretical move in the description of consciousness. Metatheoretical notions which I intend to elaborate in the next chapter, will re-acquire their existential sense as the pragmatic axioms of political action in the final part of my work.

Since we have successfully reached politics and sociality, which were said to be the subject-matter of my work, and reached them so that both, society and my philosophical interest in it, retained their own positions and meaning, let us proceed with the yet unjustified claim made in the end of the previous chapter. I claimed that, as it followed from Mamardashvili's analysis, the real difference (that is, the difference, which we, as those living among the political things, experience) between the civilised social situation and that with oddity consists in the fact that consciousness functions differently in each of them. The question which will introduce the notion of the metatheory of consciousness and which will lead my description through this chapter, is how are we to understand consciousness in order to make sense of that claim? To narrow the realm of possible answers, I shall start with the demonstration that the usual understanding of consciousness is of no help as to the clarification of the difference we are interested in.

"К сознанию можно подходить как не осознанно, так и осознанно [Consciousness may be approached either in a conscious or in a non-conscious way]". The non-conscious approach to consciousness (otherwise called a theory of psychic processes) takes it as a process of cognition in the broadest sense, including recognition of the already known and of the new; memory; imagination; and other psychic activities. Under this approach, consciousness may be analysed with regard to its possible modifications, but these very modifications will differ from each other only with regard to the objects they primarily deal with: whenever we enter our past, we remember; whenever we build up non-existent objects, we imagine them; whenever we deal with the present things, we learn them. In each of these cases, we do basically the same: we are conscious of something, and this something is much more important than consciousness, which appears to be simply an ability to grasp this something, and which is automatically known in the measure in which we are conscious of an object. Similarly, a theory of signification would study consciousness as an evident in itself ability of signification, and will be primarily interested in the signs and their organisation. Finally, a theory of whatever related to the human affairs, would study this "whatever" in a way that it would involve (better to say, omit) consciousness as a transparent entity which only provides an access to the theory's authentic subject-matter.

Evidently, a thus understood consciousness does not add anything to the situation we are to clarify. We can claim neither that people in the situations with oddity are not conscious of what they are doing and of what is going on (that is, we are not in the position to claim that they are mentally deficient), nor that the objects of their consciousness are different -- in the example I set up in the previous chapter, both Herr K. and Herr Bü rger, went to the same institution, and had the equivalent linguistic explications of their actions.

Let us suppose that the difference lies not in the courts to which they appealed, and not in the word (with its correlative meaning) which they both pronounced with respect to their actions, but in that how they interpreted their actions for themselves. Only these interpretations can bring the difference we are looking for, and it is these very interpretations that are indiscernible for any theory which, by its nature, is itself an interpretation of a given number of facts. In other words, to build up two different interpretations for two similar facts is as inconceivable in terms of theory, as it is absurd to attribute "intrinsic" interpretations to the facts themselves. By acting in the first way, we commit a logical fallacy, and by doing the second thing, we demonstrate our complete ignorance as to the meaning of theoretical terminology. To sum up, there is accepted only one conscious entity in terms of theory, and this entity is theory itself. Moreover, theory perfectly knows what it is doing when it is conscious of something.

The conclusion is evident. Insofar as one is interested in "working with consciousness", as opposed to the theoretical "work of consciousness" (the necessity for such a work I have already formulated through demonstration of the paradoxes that occur in the analysis of the political), one has to introduce the notions and related terminology which would allow for retaining consciousness in the objects -- or, which is the same as to say, for understanding consciousness as a form that continuously interprets itself. It does not matter what name one gives to this work; in other words, it was a matter of fashion that Mamardashvili and Piatigorsky called it "metatheory", and that related terminology acquired, in this way, a status of "metaterms".

The first of these metaterms, "the sphere of consciousness", makes it possible to avoid the usual endowing consciousness with an owner -- whether with subject or with object; it frees consciousness from its being necessarily someone's consciousness or the consciousness of something. Someone or something can only appear in the sphere of consciousness -- it may equally be a person engaged in the solving a problem, or a problem he tries to resolve. The sphere of consciousness, in this sense, is a situation in which "someone's consciousness" and "the consciousness of something" may find themselves, once they are interested in discovering their situation. Thus, on the one hand, "the sphere of consciousness" appears to be "a concept of a higher rank of pragmatization". On the other hand, it may be represented as a historico-philosophically indifferent abstraction from the concepts invented for the sake of historico-philosophical descriptions. In this sense, Mamardashvili's "classical and non-classical ideals of rationality", Sergeev's "analytically differentiated and aesthetically non-differentiated continua of consciousness", and Foucault's "Renaissance, classical and modern epistemes" are the historically situated exemplifications of "the sphere of consciousness":

In the previous chapter, I introduced the notion of the classical ideal of rationality only in order to clarify the construction of modern science with regard to which this ideal comes out merely as a set of "metaphysical assumptions" (that for this modern science are almost equivalent with the unconscious ones). Actually, what Mamardashvili calls the classical ideal of rationality was such an understanding of consciousness which happened to be for Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant the only one allowing for a sufficient description of everything. These philosophers found it necessary to introduce a bulk of notions that would make the very act of philosophising possible. These are the concepts of the "omnipotent" self-transparent consciousness, as opposed to the empirical one, the strict distinction between consciousness and non-consciousness (in Descartes' terms, between res cogitans and res extensa), and the principle of harmonious correlation between these two. Thus, within the terms of the classical ideal of rationality, consciousness took the form of "an universal divine module of observation". Under the metatheoretical approach to consciousness, the notion of the sphere of consciousness is to take the same operational functions (given all the aforementioned restrictions as to its content).

In fact (and this claim anticipates my future descriptions of metaterms), all the metatheoretical notions are intended to grasp and describe the operational side of consciousness. Insofar as it is possible to introduce "the sphere of consciousness" through "an idealised pragmatic situation" in which someone who has posed a question discovers a moment or place when or where this question had not yet been posed by him, the sphere of consciousness appears to be the realm where consciousness' "output" operates, or, which is the same as to say, where the products of consciousness are automatically or mechanically functioning. In this way, the sphere of consciousness includes the phenomena which were traditionally regarded as "unconscious" (in terms of Freud) or as "anonymous, automatic and spontaneous" (in terms of phenomenology and existentialism). However, the operationality endowed with the status of the condition under which consciousness may only be understood, is complemented by the same status of pure action (event, "happening") as a transcendental characteristic of consciousness. Only under these two conditions can all the "dark" sedimentations, experiences and reactions untransparent to their subject, feelings and convictions deprived of their object, etc., can legitimately inhabit the sphere of consciousness, that is, enjoy their status of the facts of consciousness together with those which had been entitled to such a status already by Fichte.

There are four other metaterms that I am to introduce. These are the state of consciousness coupled with the text of consciousness, and the structure of consciousness accompanied by the fact of consciousness. To start with the first two representatives of this zoo, the state of consciousness formally and the text of consciousness with regard to the content, bring the sphere of consciousness into the bond with subject. Insofar as someone gets into the sphere of consciousness, the state of his psychological mechanism -- as correlated with consciousness -- may be called "the state of consciousness". One's (it does not matter whose) psychological mechanism pragmatically receives a possibility to be considered in terms of consciousness: the consideration of consciousness starts from a certain situation, and the closest surroundings of consciousness are (if not always, then for the most part) related to one' psychological mechanism.

Further, the state of consciousness can not in principle be directly oriented to a particular content. However, it may be conceived as a possibility of a content; in this sense, as a form that lets any content to be. It is the metaterm "the text of consciousness" that is intended to mark this very circumstance: text is the content of consciousness in the measure in which it is read by consciousness. In these terms, reading of the text of consciousness is the state of consciousness, although with the following remark. Insofar as the state of consciousness is not to be filled with any particular content, it can equal only to the reading of such a text of consciousness which emerges in the very act of reading. In other words, "текст -- это некоторая длительность содержания, ориентированная на некоторое состояние сознания. [Text is a duration of content which is oriented to a state of consciousness.]".

By contrast, the fact of consciousness and the structure of consciousness are the operators primarily related to the content, to that of what consciousness is conscious. To pragmatically elucidate the difference, the authors suggest the following situation: several people express the same idea. Metatheoretically, there were read texts of consciousness which are equal as the facts of consciousness. However, there is yet no necessity to stipulate a structure of consciousness here:

These facts are discrete; that is they are equivalent, but distinct facts. They are at the moment when they have been accomplished, but there is no ground to suppose that they are not at any other. As far as a fact of consciousness comprises certain articulated complexity, it may be regarded as a structure of consciousness. Besides, the structure of consciousness implies its distractedness from a particular state of consciousness: the facts of consciousness are structured, but they can not be structured within and from the state of accomplished consciousness. One who claims that he is conscious within a certain structure, appears to be within an absolutely different structure of consciousness. In this way, the notion of the structure of consciousness allows for a sort of "objective" description of that what was claimed not to be an object. Again, to pragmatically illustrate the notion of the structure of consciousness, I would propose Mamardashvili's example:

To sum up, the described metatheoretical operators form the terminological apparatus, or, the metalanguage of consciousness. It is to be distinguished from the "primary metalanguage" which consciousness itself possesses. Consciousness as a functioning entity comprises certain "metapropositions" about itself as the elements of its functioning. These meta-elements of consciousness are not to be interpreted as consciousness' awareness of itself, rather they put consciousness into work by virtue of their being the means to establish connection between a pragmatic situation of a conscious being and his consciousness. The "secondary metalanguage" may or may not call these elements "pragmemas". However, this does not imply that the secondary metalanguage used by the metatheory of consciousness is based on, or is a product, development, explication of the primary metalanguage. Metatheory is a construction produced in the course of the work with consciousness, and the primary metalanguage is occasionally used as the material of this construction. Therefore, the primary and the secondary metalanguages of consciousness are to be distinguished topologically rather than genetically (in the sense that it is the places (instances) of their inclusion in consciousness that differ).

In this sense, the secondary metalanguage appears to be only a means for description of consciousness, while language in general can demonstrate no particular relation to consciousness at all. Although it contains certain areas where consciousness is supposedly present (such as self-referent constructions like "I think that", "I mean that"), these areas are regarded as the occasional manifestations of consciousness rather then indication of an intimate relation between language and consciousness. By contrast, "the natural language" is defined by the authors as a homeplace for the outputs of consciousness, for its mechanically produced work-outs; in other words, as a realm which consciousness once entered and which it finally left. In this sense, text is related to consciousness (and may even be endowed with the status of a metaterm) only in the measure in which it is read by consciousness; as such, it does not appear to be a place for consciousness.

Therefore, the symbol (considered in its relation to consciousness), for whose sake this extensive and sometimes painful introduction of the basic notions of metatheory was undertaken, is under no condition to be understood linguistically. By contrast, its consideration requires that the symbol should first of all be distinguished from the sign and, therefore, taken out of the plane of language whose purely signatory character has never been questioned by science and was rarely doubted by philosophy.

Thus, the symbol is not a sign at man's disposal, a sign correlated with a certain signified. The point is that the sign is disposed on the plane of knowledge, while the symbol can be only understood. To clarify this statement, let us closer consider the subject-matter of semiotics. It is signs and their systems whose study is ultimately related to that of man. Semiotics considers man as a signatory being. Once it took this assumption, what it considers is only a signatory being. Whatever this being is doing, it operates with signs that are found by him as a pre-established system. In this sense, this system may even be regarded as the artificial complement to the natural psychological apparatus each human being possesses. The system of signs comprises (meaning that what is comprised, may be derived) everything that exists (meaning, again, that all existing may be signified). What is derived from signs, is knowledge; and since knowledge is, by its definition, the knowledge of objects (of the signified, in terms of semiotics), operations with signs may well be reduced to operations with objects. However, this reduction holds only under the condition that the very procedure of derivation, the only point where a conscious being (as opposed to a signatory one) can enter the system of signs, remains unthematized. In this sense,

Language, understood as a means of communication, is organised in the same way: to fluently (that is, automatically) speak a language, it appears to be necessary to equal the signifier with the signified and to "naturalise" this connection (naturalisation is synonymous with the elimination of the participation of consciousness in the establishment of this connection). Consequently, the sign, viewed from the side of consciousness, is to be defined as " [anything] minus consciousness".

The establishment of a sign as a sign is a result of understanding. For instance, one can see a flickering lamp simply as a winking lamp. In order to perceive it as a sign, it is necessary to understand at a certain moment that something (it may be someone's desire, need, etc.) makes it flicker. However, once a connection is established, a sign enters the realm of knowledge; that is, it no longer requires for its existence the act of understanding. By contrast, symbols may only be understood. In this sense, they represent the formations of consciousness and results in a way that these are not concretely defined (the symbol is not a sign of a definite fact of consciousness, not a multiplication of the accomplished -- to take an example, the meaning of wisdom is not firmly and forever attached to a snake). Therefore, to operate a symbol, it is necessary to re-establish the situation in which both a "sign" (that is, a word, thing, smell -- whatever which may be used as a matter of symbol) and a "denotatum" (that is, the products of consciousness) were created, to "recollect", re-enter the situation of understanding. In this way,

These things do not serve as a means to reproduce the interconnections of objects (to form the body of knowledge); rather, they define for individuals the conditions and regularities of such knowledge. In this sense, they may induce understanding, which happens "as a result of the fact, that "I" appears in the situation of the understanding [of them]". As such, symbols are the "places" of understanding that form a thing-like connection between the contents of consciousness and one's existence. By virtue of their being immersed, on the one hand, into the personal experiences of an individual and, on the other hand, into a structure of consciousness, symbols form the topology of one's experienced coincidences of these two levels, the path which the personal events of consciousness took. In each case, they retain the situation of the happened consciousness, and, as related to this situation and its meaning, may be called pragmemas; that is, the fulcra of orientation according to which a person's motions within each set of his particular circumstances are directed.

Pragmemas are that what makes the difference between two our Herren. To finally describe this difference, I need one more round in which I will introduce the notions of metatheory as the meaningful entities and formulate Mamardashvili's pragmatic axiomatics.

As my work reaches its last part, we have three personages, namely philosophy with her necessarily twofold character uniting her situatedness and her self-coherent status within the body of knowledge and culture; sociality and politics as the composition of working entities (forces) and their theoretical reflection; and the metatheoretically analysed consciousness (that is, consciousness dismantled up to the symbols as its primary units). In this chapter, I will philosophically bring the symbols of consciousness into the realm of politics. Since philosophy is to be retained as a compound, my consideration will build up a somewhat strange, but in terms of my work exhaustive, notion of "physical metaphysics". To make sense of this term and eventually of my whole work, I have first to demonstrate the transcendental status of metatheoretical notions and second to draw up the pragmatic axiomatics that would comprise the physical constructive entities (hyper-pragmemas) and the deliberately assessed principles allowing for the description of their products. In this sense, my last chapter may be regarded as an extensive interpretation of Mamardashvili's concise definition:

The transcendental status of metatheoretical notions. What can happen to the symbol as it is brought from the metatheoretical analysis of consciousness into the political realm? I would claim that it either appears to be a pragmema or becomes the ideological sign (quasi-symbol). As a pragmema, the symbol retains its productive status with regard to the meaning; as an ideological sign, the symbol acquires the reductive status in the measure in which it appears to be correlated with a pseudo-structure of consciousness.

"Есть один чрезвычайно интересный феномен, повсеместно наблюдаемый в современной цивилизации: "недостаток символизма"[There is one particularly interesting phenomenon which can be observed everywhere in modern civilisation, namely "the lack of symbolism"]. Symbols are to be rationalised; that is, to be transferred into the plane of knowledge which was shown to be the skill of operating with signs. In this way, symbols are perceived as the signs of objects, as a means to signify the unconscious (in psychoanalysis), "the real interests" (in Marxism) or "savage life" (in anthropology). As a result, we receive the various systems of ideology which are, in fact, the systems of interconnected things internalised in consciousness according to certain rules of this internalisation that have been established once and forever by Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss or by somebody else. From the metatheoretical point of view, we recognise in these ideologies the insistence on a certain pseudo-structure of consciousness: on the pseudo-structure of "I" in psychoanalysis, or that of "language - life" in anthropology.

The same procedure of rationalisation can be conducted towards any philosophical notion. In this sense, had my description of the metatheoretical notions, as it is accomplished in the previous chapter, been left without a further demonstration of my understanding of them, it could be regarded as the rationalised arrangement of the products of Mamardashvili and Piatigorsky's intellectual work. This could be well called "a textbook on the metatheory of consciousness" about which Mamardashvili would say (as he said about philosophical textbooks in general): "Я абсолютно не понимаю, что там написано. Ну не могу этого понять, виноват [I absolutely don't understand what is written there. Just can't understand, pardon me]".

Thus, understanding appears to be necessary if one intends, in general, to avoid converting thought into knowledge, and in particular, converting the constitutive elements of the political into the politically constituted science. However, the understanding of metatheoretical notions requires that they should be taken in the transcendental sense which, in its turn, demands to unfold the real philosophising underlying them; that is, to eventually conduct my own act of philosophising. Let us decipher this sentence.

To understand something transcendentally means to impose a ban on the operation of substituting a concept for objects which one can find in the experience. Since there is nothing besides experience, to take a concept trancendentally is to take it as an empty one; that is, as a symbol. In this sense, transcendentalism (in one's understanding) implies a necessary description of the conditioned character of understanding everything which unconditionally (or automatically for us, who understand) goes on. As such, this "everything going on" is mysterious. As related to one's understanding, this mystery opens up the possibility "to pass over the abyss of ignorance"; that is, to understand -- clearly and distinctly (if Descartes' terminology is preferred) or formally (if the Kantian one is favoured) -- that there are things which it is impossible to understand. Evidently, understanding as "passing over the abyss of ignorance" is the personally experienced presence of mystery; that is, this understanding is that of "real philosophy". Therefore, philosophy which we would find as the pre-established one, simply does not exist (as that endowed with meaning). Thus, by virtue of conducting understanding, we have lost that with which we started. In the attempt to find some meaning of systematically represented philosophy, we have unfolded our own (real) one.

However, once it is the form that was discovered as actual in our understanding, we are now to be ruled by it, precisely, by the presumption of a philosopher's intelligence as the formal rule of thinking. In this way, I presume that while writing their book, Mamardashvili and Piatigorsky were guided by understanding (meaning) and not by graphomania. Whence I legitimately conclude to the fact of their real philosophy:

To sum up, the notions of metatheory turned out to be the symbols for us, and we, through our understanding, brought these symbols back into the philosophising of our authors. In this way, their philosophy turned out to be "the psychological topology of [their own] way" or their real physical metaphysics. A careful eye could find a hint at this circumstance already in the initial claim made in Symbol and Consciousness: "нам очень хотелось понять: нечто может рассматриваться только как символ или оно также может быть символом? [we wanted to understand: can something be considered only as a symbol, or can it also be a symbol?]". Thus, the symbols happened to be symbols, and appeared to be arranged (as pragmemas) within one's personal way. We are to state that there is a symbolic order in real philosophy, and to finally ask:

Axiomatics assessed and thought through. "The world" mentioned in the question is to be understood as the political realm, and the question is to be addressed to physical metaphysics. While answering this question, physical metaphysics will demonstrate its understanding of the way the political reality (within which it works) is functioning.

The answer is unexpectedly simple: generally, order exists in the world due to the actuality of hyper-pragmemas which act both in the actions of people and in the activity of philosophers; that is, due to the constitutive political pragmatics. They are the hyper-pragmemas in the measure in which they trans-gress one's particular situation and appear to be actual for condition humaine; in the measure in which they endow the physical situation, where they can be grasped working, with meaning; in the measure in which they add to the social physics the metaphysical flavour taken from beyond. There may be distinguished three of them -- the hyper-pragmemas of the person, transcendence, and humanity.

The person represents the pragmatically grasped ground. As the answer to the question "on what grounds does an actor determine his acting?" is visibly provided by his persona, the invisible person may ultimately be adduced as the ground for human actions. The clearness and recognizability of persona presupposes in the public the accomplished procedure of induction from someone's usual actions to his stable character which is vizualized in a mask. By contrast, the intellegibility of the person requires the accomplished procedure of reduction. As all the vizible -- national, cultural, psychological -- grounds of people's actions are rejected, the personal self-determination is to be thought of as the only intelligible ground of the action. In other words, the meaningful action (that is, the action which does not refer to higher instances for its understanding) can only be personally structured. Accordingly, whenever a person does not provide sufficient grounds for activity (whenever the action is not autonomous), its meaning dissolves and disappears in the physical dynamics of sociality, nationality, primitivity or peculiarity of a given culture.

The hyper-pragmema of transcendence reveals its work whenever it is stated: "нет такого основания в природе, которое самодействовало бы и порождало своим действием в человеке человеческое. [there are no such grounds in the nature which would function and through this functioning produce the human in the humanity.]" For person to become a person, it is necessary to step beyond itself, to transcende its given (natural) situation. To be able to give a law to itself, a person acquires its freedom by cancelling out all the present grounds. By virtue of transcending the regularity of natural mutation, a person receives a possibility to establish its own (eigentlich) order in the world.

While order is established, in its possibility, in the transcending, it exists, in its actuality, in the humanity. Humanity as the abode of order indicates that the intelligible singleness of order requires the multitude of the accomplished understandings of the one. Order exists only in the measure in which the ordered discretely maintain its existence, and therefore, in the measure in which there is the state where everyone is entitled to use one's understanding on his own -- the state of cosmopolitismus, to refer to its Kantian definition. Order is retained in its being with the help of the civilized institutions, and remains in the memory of culture as the assamblage of the classical courageous souls.

These three hyper-pragmemas are the basic constructive units of the physical metaphysics. As I have obliquely described and implicitly assessed them, I am in the position to define the person, transcendence, and humanity as the pragmatic axioms. To complete the motion of our understanding, let us draw up the pragmatic axiomatics as the set of principles and assumptions that are to be taken by those who intend to systematically represent sociality.

The principles of social analysis are based on the assumption of "the physical point of view", which Mamardashvili summarised as follows: "если мы в ходе событий, случается только то, что должно было случиться [if we are in the course of events, there happens only that which must have happened]", the thought itself participates in the directing the course of events. Therefore, the formal principles of the physical description must allow for the explication of the basic assumption; that is, on the basis of these principles, social physics must be shown as deprived of the pre-determined character of its development and as comprised of possible diversities. I would present the following principles to satisfy the stated assumption.

The principle of N+1. If there is a given state of social things N, there must be possible at least one more allowing for the amplification of the certain characteristics of the first one.

The principle of the integral of effect. Successive social events can be explained in terms of cause and effect only when the cause (or the sum of causes) is equal to the effect.

The principle of the finitude of effect. If there is a given state of social things, there is always a different state which can not be directly reached (derived) from the first one.

The principle of pulsation. The consequence of two successive states of social things may only be formed through the destruction of the previous and the construction of the next from the zero point.

Thus, my consideration of the axiomatics of politics' acting and that of the political action, ends up with the twofold statement: the orientative work of hyper-pragmemas within one's situation makes it possible to meaningfully act, while the description which would follow the listed principles, would be able to render the physical character of the pragmatically ruled sociality. Pragmemas build up the axiomatics as the number of the known and assessed beginnings and ends of social physics, while the principles of its correct description pave the way for the pragmatic understanding of physics, and form the axiomatics thought through the theoretizing of their lemmas and corollaries.

The way of my understanding Mamardashvili's philosophy for the explication of which I have used so many words, may finally be restated in few questions that I have asked and (hopefully) answered in my work. I asked first, for what is philosophy in the diversity of everything which is not she? In my analysis, philosophy appeared to be for the sake of orientation by the articulated in her work conditions allowing for the diversity of everything. My second question was, from what does philosophy elicit herself as a sort of reaction and from what does that which evokes her activity come? Negatively, philosophy extracts herself from the work of social physics which does not need any orientation in the circle of its activity and which is absolutely satisfied with the theoretical reflection of itself. Positively, philosophy is induced to reveal her own project by the anonymity of the already accomplished. Third, I inquired, through what must philosophy pass in order to conceptually prove her orientative status? It was the form of the metatheory of consciousness that could be content only with symbols and not with signs in its consideration of the orientative fulcra. Fourth, I was curious as to in what does philosophy conduct her orientation? It appeared that she is doing her work within the topology laid down by real philosophy, which transcends the atopia of the plane of language, knowledge, and rationalisation; and that she is conducting her orientation in terms of pragmatic axiomatics.

Let us now ask the last question: so what? This time, the question is to be related not to Mamardashvili's philosophy, but to my understanding of her. What accumulation do my initial "under-mindings" receive in the course of the work? This may be summarised under two rubrics: philosophy and the historical constitution of knowledge, and philosophy and the human nature.

For Mamardashvili, the classical philosophy as the transcendental explication of the conditions of thought and cognition, was disposed within the body of knowledge (constituted, in its turn, by science which is occupied with its objective reality) in the way that she was imposed on science as a producer of its "metaphysical assumptions". To take Kant as an example, philosophy appeared to be the system of knowledge built up on the basis of the complete application of reason the conditions of which are articulated in the critical part of philosophy. By contrast, modernity is described by Mamardashvili only negatively, against the background of the classics as the non-classical epoch. In this description, modernity is clear in terms of the problems it comprises, but it is vague as to where and by what entities they are recognised and stated. We can learn from Mamardashvili that philosophy is to understand moral actions and the actions conducted in the civilised political situation by a conscious person, but there is no ethics and no political science (at least, in the sense that he does not ask how they are possible) in modernity. Modern science appears in Mamardashvili's description to be a classical phenomenon which is only to be non-classically complemented. All the non-classical phenomena which occasionally emerge in science, is immediately converted by Mamardashvili into the real philosophy of Freud, Marx, Einstein. Generally, science simply keeps making mistakes and slipping into objectivism; that is, it shows itself as deprived of the historical character. To sum up, Mamardashvili seems to omit the consideration of the historicity of knowledge.

The second group of what is problematic for me, is related to the conceptual co-existence of philosophy and human nature. If I am to designate the basic theme of Mamardashvili's meditations, it would be consciousness insofar as it is understood as pure activity. If I am to describe his understanding of philosophy, a description would switch to the terms of personally conducted acts of thought. Pure activity as the essence of consciousness reveals its problematical character in the measure in which it appears to be the actuality of a personal strive to think and to authentically be. To take Mamardashvili's own terminology, there is too much of culture in philosophy (as many cultures as there are philosophers), and there is no civilisation: there exist thinkers (Descartes, Kant, Proust) and the institutionalised philosophy is annihilated. Thus, the notion of real philosophy and that of consciousness are problematic in the measure in which the question "what is human being, whose nature grows towards thought and intends to reflect upon itself in the metatheoretical concepts?" is not posed.

As my work has resulted in the articulation of these problems, it remains to hope that they will challenge the tranquillity of my future philosophical otia.

Merab Mamardashvili was born on September 15, 1930 in the Georgian town of Gori (more famous as Stalin's place of birth). His father, an officer, was soon accepted to the Military and Political Academy in Leningrad, so Mamardashvili spent his childhood there. Later, they moved, following the father's new appointments, to Kiev and then to Vinnitsa where Mamardashvili went to school. As the war began, he was sent back to Georgia where in 1949 he finished a high school with honours. In the same year he entered Moscow University from which he graduated a degree in philosophy five years later. On graduation, he continued scientific work at the university and received his kandidat degree in 1957. Later on, he worked in the editorial staffs of scientific magazines in both Moscow and Prague (1961 - 66). In 1970 he received his doctoral degree and until 1975 worked as a co-editor of the then only Russian magazine of philosophy, The Questions of Philosophy. After 1975, he occasionally lectured in Moscow and officially worked in a variety of institutions of the Academy of Sciences. He was a member of the Communist Party, held all the required degrees and had the necessary number of publications (which was determined by the question of how not to allow certain people to be published too much). At the same time, he was "the only person in this country who devoted himself to the public spontaneity of thought". In the beginning of 1980s he moved to Tbilisi although he regularly visited Moscow. Mamardashvili died in November, 1990.