Philosophical Freethinking in the USSR (Cases of Evald Ilyenkov and Merab Mamardashvili)

Abstract

The article deals with the phenomenon of philosophical freethinking in the USSR. It is shown that the emergence of freethinking was the result of many years of ideological and political control over philosophical discourse from the early 1930s to the early 1950s. For the generation that chose philosophy as their profession in the 1950s, the main manifestation of freethinking was the creative appeal to the philosophical heritage of Karl Marx, accompanied by attempts to separate the “genuine Marx” from other classics of the Marxist-Leninist philosophical doctrine and to find in Marx’s philosophy the key to understanding modern problems. A remarkable case of philosophical freethinking in the 1950—1970s was the romantic Marxism of Evald Ilyenkov, who was characterized by the desire to protect communist ideals and preserve Marxist dialectics in the face of the threat of the spreading influence of Western philosophy. Another example of freethinking was the philosophical work of Merab Mamardashvili. He began with the development of a Marxist philosophy of consciousness, thanks to which he managed to achieve professional recognition and intellectual independence, but later moved away from the philosophy of Marx and turned to understanding the work of other Western thinkers. The thinking of Descartes, Kant, and Proust for him symbolized a different philosophical homeland and ideals, which in the 1980s he was opposed to Soviet reality and Russian culture.