Abstract

The philosophy of Mamardashvili can be presented through the prism of his experience of living through Soviet history, which became a “beneficial vantage point”, and through his understanding, not just of deeply theoretical, but also existential Russian themes. His particular style—“the living through thought” in the presence of the other reflected a covert protest and spiritual opposition to the zombified masses and to history. In the analysis of his ideas, a special attention has been payed to the mediative—« intermittential space of the self » or the theory of symbols. In this article, an analysis of the symbolic theory of Mamardashvili and Pyatigorsky as well as a comparison of this theory and those developed by Ernst Cassirer, Aleksei Losev and Mikhail Lifshits is provided.