MERAB MAMARDASHVILI: PERCEPTION OF EUROPEAN IDENTITY – A ROAD TOWARDS SELF-AWARENESS

Abstract

European identity, essence of European society and nature of European culture: from this “starting point†Mamardashvili considered philosophy as one of the most significant factors of his own experience and thinking, for it was a philosophical practice of the individual experience of the man who “was awakening not in Europe but elsewhere – in a provincial country†where he was getting aware of his own self, his own country and culture.
The specter of the issues dealt with in this article rest upon the works by Mamardashvili dedicated to the European theme, especially his paper “European Responsibility†delivered in Barcelona in 1989, the full version of which was first published in the Proceedings of the conference dedicated to M. Mamardashvili’s 80th anniversary (see “European Responsibilityâ€, ed. T. Iremadze, Tbilisi, Nekeri, 2011).
Mamardashvili’s philosophical style revealed internal relation to the European philosophy; he was not accidentally called “Georgians’ Socrates†or “A Frenchman in Georgian [Soviet] philosophyâ€; he was almost the sole person in the thinking world saturated with the soviet ideology who utilized his own understanding/perception of the European identity for quite specific