Abstract
The paper discusses a few tensions “crucifying” the works and even
personality of the great Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashivili: East
and West; human being and thought, symbol and consciousness, infinity
and finiteness, similarity and differences. The observer can be involved
as the correlative counterpart of the totality: An observer opposed to
the totality externalizes an internal part outside. Thus the phenomena
of an observer and the totality turn out to converge to each other or to
be one and the same. In other words, the phenomenon of an observer
includes the singularity of the solipsistic Self, which (or “who”) is
the same as that of the totality. Furthermore, observation can be
thought as that primary and initial action underlain by the phenomenon
of an observer. That action of observation consists in the
externalization of the solipsistic Self outside as some external
reality. It is both a zero action and the singularity of the phenomenon
of action. The main conclusions are: Mamardashvili’s philosophy can be
thought both as the suffering effort to be a human being again and again
as well as the philosophical reflection on the genesis of thought from
itself by the same effort. Thus it can be recognized as a powerful
tension between signs anа symbol, between conscious structures and
consciousness, between the syncretism of the East and the discursiveness
of the West crucifying spiritually Georgia.