Merab Mamardashvili

Philosopher

1930–1990

Merab Mamardashvili (1930–1990) was born in Gori and studied at the philosophy faculty of Moscow University, graduating in 1954 and then completing postgraduate study. He began at the journal Voprosy Filosofii (Questions of Philosophy), worked in Prague in 1961–1966 on the editorial staff of Problems of Peace and Socialism, and in 1968–1974 was deputy editor-in-chief of Voprosy Filosofii. In 1970 he defended his doctoral dissertation in Tbilisi on the forms and content of thinking, and from 1972 he was a professor.

For him philosophy was not a set of ready answers but an effort to understand that everyone must make for themselves, and he thought above all aloud, in lectures. That is why almost all his major books appeared only after his death, from recordings of his courses: the Cartesian Meditations on Descartes, the Kantian Variations, and his lectures on Proust, The Psychological Topology of the Path.

Free thinking cost him his career. For several years he was barred from travelling abroad, and in 1980 he was dismissed from the Institute for the History of Natural Science and Technology in Moscow. Mamardashvili returned to Tbilisi, to the Institute of Philosophy of the Georgian Academy of Sciences, and it was here that he gave his celebrated courses on Descartes in 1981–1982 and on Kant and on Proust in 1984.

In the late 1980s, as Georgia moved towards independence, he spoke out openly against Zviad Gamsakhurdia's nationalism: "If my people choose Gamsakhurdia, then I will have to go against my own people in my views and feelings." On 25 November 1990 Mamardashvili died of a heart attack at Vnukovo airport in Moscow and was buried in Tbilisi, in the Saburtalo cemetery. In 2000 a monument to him by Ernst Neizvestny was unveiled on Rustaveli Avenue: the thinker who taught people not to be afraid of thinking for themselves still stands at the very heart of his city.