The Terror of Specificity: Regarding M. K. Mamardashvili’s Philosophy of the Act

This article highlights the key provisions of the concept of the act as an action unsupported by knowledge, presented in the works of M. K. Mamardashvili. The key points of this concept are the paradoxical idea of freedom as an absolute necessity, not determined from the outside, and the thesis of the incommensurability of the general nature of rules and specificity (uniqueness) of an act. The latter always implies an act of transcending, which takes a person beyond the bounds of the world and knowledge. This impossible act turns out to be inevitable due to the only reveals in a person’s movement of rising above himself as an individual, having a certain set of properties. Thus, a person discovers himself in the act of transcending as a unique destination. The philosophy in this context is not so much a form of knowledge, as the practice of formation of personality structures. Personal act finds here its ontological meaning. Act plays a role of an event-driven basis of the world as a meaningful whole. M. K. Mamardashvili’s Philosophy of the Act gains particular relevance in the current situation of information overload and uncertainty.