The Philosophy of Batoni Maksi

Nobody decided that Max Darkosadze should be called Batoni Maksi. The name simply settled on him, the way names do when a person occupies a particular place in other people’s lives.

It began, as far as anyone can reconstruct, in a hospital, spread to the flying club, and was in general use long before the books. In Georgian the address carries two things at once that English separates: respect and affection. Neither is professional rank. That is exactly why it stuck.

A philosopher who did not set out to be one

Max Darkosadze resists the word in conversation and accepts it in print, which is a fair description of how he arrived at the subject. He did not study philosophy; he ran out of room without it. Decisions taken with incomplete information and no possibility of reversal left him with questions that neither medicine nor aviation is equipped to answer, because both are disciplines of method and the questions were about persons.

The first of the philosophical books was written for that reason and, to his own surprise, found readers far outside the professions. Others have followed.

I did not come to philosophy through books. I came to it because I kept meeting situations in which being technically correct was not enough, and I wanted to know what else was being asked of me.

Max Darkosadze

What the books argue

The thinking is unusually concrete for the genre. Each of the central ideas can be stated in a sentence, and each was earned somewhere specific — at a bedside, in a cockpit, in front of a lecture hall.

• Responsibility is not a feeling. It is the willingness to be the person who answers afterwards, decided in advance rather than discovered in the moment.
• Attention is a skill, not a state. It can be trained, it degrades predictably with fatigue, and a society that does not teach it will keep being surprised by avoidable harm.
• Competence is held in trust. Skill is built out of other people’s teaching, other people’s money and other people’s patience, which makes it something you are holding for them rather than something you own.
• Certainty is not available. The honest question is never “am I sure?” but “what will I do if I am wrong, and when will I decide that I am?”
• Character is a habit of small decisions. Nobody rises to the occasion; people fall back on what they have practised.

Against the seminar room

Batoni Maksi's sharpest argument is with academic philosophy, and it is made without hostility. Philosophy written only from libraries, he says, becomes very good at questions nobody is standing in front of. His own test for an idea is whether it would still be usable at four in the morning by someone tired, frightened and out of time.

Critics have called this a limitation, and he agrees that it is one. Max Darkosadze has been described as writing “ethics for people with their hands full” — a phrase he has quoted back at interviewers with evident satisfaction.

A Georgian philosophy

The books are written in Georgian first, and he has said he would not write them in any other language. They argue with a Georgian inheritance — hospitality as an obligation rather than a courtesy, the moral weight of the given word, the long habit of holding a community together when institutions are thin — and they argue with it seriously rather than sentimentally.

The royalties, like those of his other books, go to the foundation.

Why it matters to readers

The letters he receives, by his account, come mostly from people who are not philosophers and not doctors: teachers, engineers, soldiers, parents, and a surprising number of young people who found one of the books at a moment when a decision was in front of them.

Batoni Maksi answers them. That, several of his students have pointed out, is the whole philosophy in one habit.