Die Freiheit hat keine Garantien. Merab Mamardashvili — Denken in Katastrophenzeiten

“History is the drama of freedom—there are no guarantees in it, no mechanism that advances it on its own. Every moment is surrounded by chaos. If one loses the tension of thought, one falls into the abyss—and this abyss is not somewhere else; it surrounds us now, at this very moment.” The Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili (1930–1990) articulated his thoughts at the end of the 1980s in a Soviet Union that still appeared stable to the outside world.

He described from within what totalitarian ideology does to consciousness—not as the effect of external apparatuses, but as a creeping self-abandonment of thought that outlasts totalitarianism and remains latent in every society. His message to the West was unmistakable: freedom is not an inheritance, but an effort—those who take freedom for granted are already standing on the edge of the abyss.

One of the most significant philosophers of the Soviet era, yet largely unknown in the West: This conference introduces Mamardashvili’s thought for the first time into our debates on ideology, social consciousness, and the conditions of freedom in the present.

An event organized by the ZfL in cooperation with the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb).

Fig. above: Ainars Brūvelis: Monument to Merab Mamardashvili by Ernst Neizvestny in Tbilisi, licence: CC BY-SA 3.0