Culture infantilism and demonization of being (concerning clarification of M.K. Mamardashvili’s heroic art project)

In this article, the author analyzes the contraposition between infantile consciousness and «heroic art» used by Merab Mamardashvili. Examining the phenomenon of infantile consciousness, the author discovers a number of principles underlying it. Studying how these principles give rise to areas of absent life experience (from the side of thinking or from the side of feeling), the author indicates how another principle grows out of it — the «unknowability of being» or «demonization of being». Under such conditions, a person performs an evaluation procedure instead of stating the inconceivability of a situation and the self-determination procedure (the inconceivability of a situation is evaluated negatively and is fixed in thinking in this way). Using these conclusions, the author describes a situation in which «heroism» is understood as something alien to the meanings Mamardashvili endowed the «heroic art» idea with. The alienness shows itself in the way «heroism» is expressed as defense against the «unknowability of being». The author draws attention to the principle of ratio, important to Merab Mamardashvili, which consists in maintaining the final apodictic form between the two poles — the unknowable in sensory experience and the unknowable in thinking. With the help of this principle, the meaning of Mamardashvili’s statements about «heroic art» is clarified.

David I. Dubrovsky and Merab Mamardashvili: Adam’s Second Fall and the Advent of the Cyber-Leviathan

In his speech “The European Responsibility,” the Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili summarizes his utopia of a fulfilled humanity by presenting it as an integration of two main traditions: the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian ones. In contrast, David Dubrovsky launches a new perspective for present and future human evolution: the cyber-superman, i.e. the perfect merging of human mind and digital brain—or the bio-digital interface. “Intelligence” here is not just an artificial by-product of a highly organized technological structure, but the reproduction of mental operations through the techno-replication of the bio-brain as material substrate: the Dubrovskyan avatar. In the present article, I focus on Dubrovsky’s and Mamardashvili’s anthropological paradigms, and their relationship to the phenomena of cyberbeing and cyberculture. I examine the phenomenon of cyberbeing as a “built-in” feature of a bio-electronic, transhuman ontology that impacts and transforms personhood into “cyborghood” in the context of an interactive digital framework of fictional transcendences, body-deconstruction and bio-technological interplays. My aim is to develop a critical approach to Dubrovsky’s cybernetic anthropology and avatar-theory, along with its meaning and implications for our world-epoch, in contrast to Mamardashvili’s ontology, which proves essentially incompatible with the moment of technological singularity—i.e. with the creation of a transhuman bio-digital avatar as envisioned and prophesized by Dubrovsky.

The Filmmaker's Philosopher

Known as the 'Georgian Socrates' of Soviet philosophy, Merab Mamardashvili was a defining personality of the late-Soviet intelligentsia. In the 1970s and 1980s, he taught required courses in philosophy at Russia's two leading film schools, helping to educate a generation of internationally prolific directors. Exploring Mamardashvili's extensive philosophical output, as well as a range of recent Russian films, Alyssa DeBlasio reveals the intellectual affinities amongst directors of the Mamardashvili generation - including Alexander Sokurov, Andrey Zvyagintsev and Alexei Balabanov. This multidisciplinary study offers an innovative way to think about film, philosophy and the philosophical potential of the moving image.