What’s the Common of Utopia? To Merab Mamardashvili’s Personal Utopia

Abstract

The concept of utopia faces several challenges. One of them is related to the lack of clarity as to how different views on what is desirable, may be compatible, whereas the very notion of utopia necessarily implies a certain communality. This problem, however, arises from a confusion between u-topia, a non-place, and eu-topia, a good place. If eutopia aspires to a picturing place which is “good”, for this or that reason, utopia may be seen as a no-place, which can be understood as a place other than given. Both of these understandings have their own shortcomings. If eutopia excludes multiplicity of perspectives of what is good by proposing only one vision of “good place”, in other words, welcomes singular without plural (Morris), utopia risks embracing plural without proposing any common ground for it to be (Kinna). This paper examines how a non-place can harbor common without reducing it to eu-topian elements, and we would like to do so by examining the concept of personal utopia of Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili (1930-1990), as opposed to social utopia (which, as we will argue, may be better understood as social eu-topia).