M. K. Mamardashvili's Philosophy of Life and Its Implications for Psychology

The article focuses on some aspects of the philosophy of his life by M. K. Mamardashvili based on the material of his lectures in the 1980s. The similarities and differences between Mamardashvili's ideas and existential tradition in philosophy and psychology are analyzed, as well as their implications for personality psychology. Specifically article addresses such issues as differentiation of the two registers of life (conscious and register of automatic existence), the problem of determinism and laws of conscious existence, the problem of time and extracting the experience from the events and the problem of «assembling» the personality. In Mamardashvili's philosophy a new dimension of personality was opened up, which was merely reflected in the psychological personality theories of the twentieth century. It is associated with the level of conscious existence, transcending the causal laws of biological and social functioning of the individual. The «holding of an effort» acts as the key phenomenon in that level of existence, which corresponds to an act of the conscious self-determination and it evades the causal explanation.