Abstract
In this paper it is discussed how Mamardashvili analyzed Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past not as a literary text, but as a documentation of one’s self-constitution. A person’s life can be viewed as a path towards truth. Proust’s novel brought evidence and vivid descriptions of moments of truth and understanding that Mamardashvili used to lay out his topology of path, which a human being must stay on to maintain existential identity with itself and preserve wholeness of being. Proust’s novel was written with a presence of intense passion in every act of thinking, which attracted Mamardashvili as a material, to show how phenomenological procedures have to be applied to understand consciousness as a state of being. For Mamardashvili, Proust’s novel was a formation novel, a coming-of-age in thinking and self-awareness novel, and he used it as an instrument to access the truth.
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Notes
- 1.
I want to point out a very interesting juncture between Mamardashvili and Heidegger and also French symbolism. Mamardashvili said the following in an interview in 1990 about Heidegger, “He had a talent to feel the real life of philosophical notions and it was more poetic than philosophical. He was returning philosophical thinking that went too far into abstractness to its primordial vital sense and to its place in the life constituting process. In this sense he did what was done by symbolism, first and foremost French symbolism, at the beginning of the twentieth century.” (Kruglikov, p.61).
- 2.
I cannot agree with Elisa Pontini’s conclusion that “Even if art is not, to repeat, a privileged instrument to access the truth; still the work of art is the sensible expression of that original, ever personal act of genius that sets in motion the conditions for meaning to appear.” (Pontini, p. 177) Art for Proust, as for Mamardashvili, was a source of becoming an origin of one’s own act, of oneself. Mamardashvili underlined the necessity of a creative act as a mechanism, through which we can access our hidden individual core. Art is a place where quest for identity turns inward and we can descend into the deep well of our soul to find the truth. A work of art becomes a scene where our conscious self can find out the beginning of the path to itself. Mamardashvili pointed to Hamlet who was enacting a play to find out what was happening around him. He also mentioned Greek tragedy where characters work through circumstances, through existential states to become masters of their own destiny.
References
Kruglikov, Vitim, ed. 1994. Kongenialnost Mysli; o Filosofe Merabe Mamardashvili, Progress. Moscow (in Russian).
Mamardashvili, Merab. 1995. Lectures on Proust (psychological topology of the path). Moscow: Ad Marginem (in Russian).
Mamardashvili, Merab, and Alexander Piatigorsky. 2009. Symbol and consciousness. Moscow: Progress Tradition Publishers (in Russian).
Pontini, Elisa. 2006. The aesthetic import of the act of knowledge and its European roots in Merab Mamardashvili. In Studies in east European thought, 161–178. Dordrecht: Springer.
Regnier, Daniel. 2006. Consciousness and conscience: Mamardashvili on the common point of departure for epistemological and moral reflection. In Studies in east European thought, 141–160. Dordrecht: Springer.
Zweerde, van der Evert. 2006. Philosophy in the act: The socio-political relevance of Mamardashvili’s philosophizing. In Studies in east European thought, 179–203. Dordrecht: Springer.
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Stafecka, M. (2014). Novel as a Path: Mamardashvili’s Lectures on Proust. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Phenomenology of Space and Time. Analecta Husserliana, vol 117. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02039-6_18
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