Inexpressibility as a Сondition: the Transcendentality in the Philosophy of M. Mamardashvili and L. Wittgenstein

Abstract

Merab Mamardashvili repeatedly mentions Ludwig Wittgenstein in his writ­ings. But even when there are no direct references, there are recognizable echoes of his Austrian colleague in his reflections. This article shows the close­ness of their philosophical approaches and determines in what sense both thinkers can be attributed to the tradition of philosophical transcendentalism. In particular, we will show in what sense the Wittgensteinian critique of the idea that consciousness is “put forward” to the world appears in Mamardashvili.
According to Wittgenstein, the subject does not belong to the world, but to the boundary that forms the world. We find a similar idea in Mamardashvili: when we “speak of consciousness and not of anything else, we speak of such things for which we cannot show (substitute) their empirical and finite number of operations controllable equivalents”. Wittgenstein, for his part, compares consciousness with the eye, which is unable to see itself. Mamardashvili calls the same phenomenon “minimum-transcensus”. “Minimum-transcensus” cannot be found within experience itself, “put forward” within that which constitutes the objectivity and objective manifestation of our experience, because it is on the border of the empirical.