DACHVARD

Merab Mamardashvili (1930–1990) was a Georgian-Soviet philosopher who lectured for forty years and published almost nothing in his own lifetime. He read Descartes, Kant and Proust as if they were urgent personal letters that had only just arrived. His students taped him; the books were transcribed afterwards. The voice on the tapes is unhurried, faintly amused, almost always smoking.

He was, on his own account, a Marxist who wanted Marx to mean what he had originally meant before the Soviet machine bolted everything down. In Moscow he belonged to the Methodological Circle around Ilyenkov, Zinoviev, and Schedrovitsky - the small circle of people inside the Soviet philosophical establishment for whom philosophy had not become a department of ideology. From 1980 he taught at Tbilisi State University; in the late 1980s he became one of the most uncomfortable public intellectuals in the late USSR - willing to oppose both the Soviet machine and the rising Georgian nationalism that succeeded it.

He died of a heart attack at Vnukovo Airport in Moscow on 25 November 1990, returning from one of those public addresses. He was sixty.

On the form

Mamardashvili did not write for publication; the form of his work is the spoken philosophical act. A lecture by Mamardashvili is a single complete movement of attention: he begins inside a passage of Descartes or Proust and works out, in real time, what is true in it, and the listener follows along the same act of thinking. The aphorisms here are extracted from the resulting transcripts - Russian and Georgian - and translated. They retain the quality of belonging to a longer breath. None of them were composed for a page.

The reader will find the aphorisms grouped by source: Cartesian Reflections, Kantian Variations, the Proust lectures (Psychological Topology of the Path), the late conversations on Russia and Georgia (1989), and a few essays. The original is given beneath each translation when toggled.