Abstract

Merab Mamardashvili’s philosophy can be defined as the philosophy of the transcendent event. An event is at once extremely concrete and extremely abstract. It occurs in an act of a special kind: an autonomous act which is not the realization of any pattern of transcendental historicity, is not attached to any teleology, that is, its meaning does not consist in the realization of a goal. It is, plainly speaking, purposeless and therefore indeterminate. However, this is not a variety of actionism, not an outburst of absurdity subverting all order. An act turns out to be the realization of the “ontological abstraction of order” by means of a symbol actualized by the very event of the act. The article examines various aspects of the event from the aesthetic to the meta-historical.