Professor Serhii KRYMSKY: Be, rather than have, everything!

The headlined slogan of spirituality formed by the well-known modern-day philosopher Erich Fromm has been confirmed by culture and the highly multifarious and predetermined roles of human activity—from the destiny of a Master, prophet, writer, or musician to the life story of a poet, preacher, or judge. Culture ensures that the subjects of these roles are able to stand above the gainful use of their professional capabilities. To prove this, many tend to cite the demonstrative and spiritual organization of life in religious communities, for example, in the area of Mount Athos, where money and money-based relations are completely excluded from everyday life.

On the basis of such precedents, pragmatic people whose job is to satisfy various requirements of the populace (first of all, in food) sometimes ask, not without a polemic fervor: “Why waste millions on the development of culture if the latter cannot feed people?” This really important question was the subject of a conversation between our correspondent Ihor Siundiukov and Professor Serhii KRYMSKY, a prominent Ukrainian philosopher, a regular contributor to and a friend of The Day, winner of the National Taras Shevchenko Prize of Ukraine. Here follows what the respected professor said.

BY MEANS OF CULTURE, HUMANS CAN MAKE THE ‘SWIMMING MOVEMENTS’ THAT PERMIT THEM TO SWIM OUT OF CRISIS SITUATIONS

Mr. Krymsky, in our tough and practical time a considerable part of our readers will consider it correct to make the following “concrete” statement: it is only natural and right to first raise the economy and keep people well-fed and only then to speak about culture. Is this a far-sighted viewpoint? What arguments can be given for and against this?

“Evidence in this problematic situation can only come from human history. Historical facts show us that if a human had only confined themselves to satisfying the current requirements of their stomach, they would not have discovered themselves in a new enchanted world of myths, dreams, fantasies, love feelings, and aspirations to heaven and beauty. Culture is also a process of production, namely, spiritual production. While material production turns out goods, spiritual production creates human properties.

“Interesting from this point of view is the archeological research of Lasco caves in the Alps, whose frescoes date back to 15,000-year-old events. The primeval inhabitants of these caves extracted ocher, i.e., ferric oxides, but this was necessary not for producing iron itself, the material that symbolized technical progress, but for making the red paint that was used in frescoes and for creating a world of mythological analogies between their body and the elements: to be like the sun, fire, day, and blood (symbol of life).

“In other words, the prospect of manufacturing iron implements that made it possible to maintain the individual economy and create an iron-age civilization turned out to be secondary with respect to satisfying esthetic requirements and the emergence of art and its human-forming functions.

“Culture reveals a boundless inner world of man, an ‘inside nature,’ to quote Goethe. By means of culture, humans can make the ‘swimming movements’ that permit them to swim out of crisis situations.

“It is known, for example, that in the 14th century AD humankind found itself in a grave crisis. Plague, the ‘black death,’ mowed down half the population of Europe, adversely affected agriculture, and causing a shortage of bread.

“But New Era people responded to those hardships with a cultural progress of unheard-of magnitude and depth.

That period saw the painting of such geniuses as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian, and Botticelli, and brought in a new humanistic outlook—faith in the divine powers of man. The statues of David, Samson, and St. George the Dragon Slayer are convincing proof of human titanic deeds. A wide network of universities was established in Rome, Bologna, and the Vatican.

“There come the people of ‘Magellanic blood,’ the heroic adventure-seekers who discovered new trade routes. A tremendous financial market of artworks emerges and still remains the most reliable way of saving and accumulating capital. Time is ‘expropriated’ from God and becomes the function of city towers’ clockworks. Banks create a new formula—‘time is money’—which becomes an ideological precondition for the capitalist formation.”

CULTURE GENERATES A CRITICAL MASS OF INNOVATIVE PEOPLE

“Culture and its system of education were and still are an active factor of the Renaissance. Culture generates a critical mass of innovative people capable of overcoming the crisis: like a horse that knows the way in a storm, they know where to invest their capital and direct their activities. And no schemes or projects can rival this kind of activity.”

And how can this qualitatively new spiritual picture of the world be projected on Ukraine?

“A similar picture of riding out a crisis is discernible in the situation of Ukraine’s Ruin in 1658—1676, after the armed struggle led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky. That era showed that national problems cannot be solved by means of military cavalry attacks. The conditions of the formation of the Hetmanate as a subject of European history called for a socio-cultural reconsideration of the role and importance of armed struggle. This revealed a dual nature of the national idea which required state-building as well as exposure of the spiritual instruments of national revival, an organic unity of military virtues and spiritual moral values, as demanded by the practice and exploits of knighthood.

“Accordingly, the Ruin-era Ukraine saw the proliferation of the idea of the Word as a ‘spiritual sword,’ of which Lazar Baranovych wrote in his sermons Sword Spiritual.

“On the other hand, the publication of the Ukrainian translation of Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered in Kyiv triggers the propaganda of the ideology of chivalry, which brings forth extensive literature—from the works of Ioanykii Haliatovsky, essays by Antonii Radyvilovsky, and Cossack chronicles to the poems of Dmytro Tuptalo.

“The search for a way out of the Ruin encouraged a grandiose project of Petro Mohyla, Feofan Prokopovych, Meletii Smotrytsky, Kasiian Sakovych, and other Ukrainian thinkers. This project called for a synthesis of Western European and Eastern Slavic cultures, the adoption of ‘Latin learnedness’ in education as a way of gaining access to world experience, and the establishment of Kyiv Mohyla Academy as Ukraine’s national intellectual center.

“As part of this project, Ukraine adopted the fundamental system of baroque, an international style of the development of European culture. The importance of this style was that, according to Dmytro Chyzhevsky, it corresponded with many traits of Ukrainian mentality.

“And although this style laid claim to being universal in civilization, this pretension in Europe resulted in a limited Counter-Reformation, a second wave of scholasticism that deformed the Ancient Greek and Roman concept of man. In Ukraine, conversely, this concept was confirmed by the national liberation struggle, which elevated man as a hero, national and spiritual leader, and all-strata character. Ukrainian society thus created a special type of personality usually referred to as the ‘baroque people.’

“They were people of a dramatic destiny and of a heroic adventure that bridges the gap between dream and reality. These people were vested with an ability to rise above the monotonous daily routine to the exalted ideals.

“To quote Mykola Hohol [Nikolai Gogol], these people ‘measured distances by the hearing range of a shot” (e.g. ‘to ride one or two shots away’); all of them wanted to be the actors in, not the spectators of, the world drama. Tellingly, this country saw at the time the popularity of the panegyrical engravings of these ‘baroque people’ with Latin captions ‘plus et ultra’ (more and higher).”

CULTURE BECAME A POWERFUL FACTOR OF UKRAINE’S NATIONAL PROGRESS

You can perhaps give some concrete names that embodied this highly brilliant type of personality?

“This type of people was represented by, for example, Ivan Mazepa, Petro Mohyla, Petro Sahaidachny, Ivan Vyhovsky, Danylo Apostol, Colonel Miklashevsky, and many others. These people of the ‘Mazepa baroque’ era symbolized transformation of the Cossack upper crust into the ruling class of the Hetman State. They displayed an aspiration to be rich and a transition from the propaganda of ‘holy poverty’ to the Ancient Roman idea of the ‘golden mean’ and divine providence in the value-related business success.

“Ukraine develops the mass-scale art of the national school of baroque-style engravings (O. and L. Tarasevych, Ivan Mihura, and H. Levytsky), which, contrary to the Western European interpretation of baroque subjects on the basis of the scenes of death, executions, and pessimism, portrays the world as a flowery garden of life and promotes ontological optimism. The idea of beauty is being promoted as an ontological guarantee of the existence of God. In the 18th century Ukraine also sees the birth of musical hymnography (the art of composing hymns).”

And that was not just a qualitatively new image of man—the emergence of this kind of people had quite an essential effect on the historical process, in both the political and economic dimensions…

“These sociocultural achievements of baroque-era Ukraine not only helped ride out the Ruin crisis but also contributed to the Ukrainian people’s struggle for independence—the independence whose enemies sought an alternative in attacking the factors that promoted national liberation (i.e. the factors of culture, science, art, and exalted spiritual values).

“Culture thus became a colossal, powerful factor of the Ukrainian people’s national progress. The point is that culture is a creative and stimulating activity that not only charges people with its pragmatic potential in the field of education, tourism, all kinds of festivals, etc., but also, as a result of personal self-assertion, characterizes a person’s subjectivity, the intimate mechanisms of turning outer social laws into inner imperatives, thus contributing to the emergence of laws without the attributes of punishment.”

THE FREEDOM OF CHOOSING A WAY AND CULTURE

But the significance of culture is not limited even to all the aforesaid. It is really impossible to ‘cap’ the role of culture in the life of a society—there is always a feeling that one has failed to embrace something…

“It is very important that culture creates the multifaceted pictures of people’s social life experience and positions itself as an instrument for building their life on the basis of the previous generations’ experience. Culture shapes the freedom of choosing a way in the crisis situations of a destiny.

“For example, Schillerian plots in literature show that any alliance of the elite with villains (in spite the seemingly beneficial, albeit short-lived, nature of such alliances) will always end up in treason and nefarious schemes—moreover, without any personal benefit for the traitors. They only derive pleasure from doing harm. And Shakespeare’s tragic plays (for example, King Lear) demonstrate that power is beset with various, sometimes mortal, dangers.

“It is for good reason that archaic-era chieftains wore ‘death amulets.’ For, before they began to rule the roost, they were put on a tall tree and all the folks began to shake the tree—he only obtained the right to rule if he did not fall down.

“Or take, for example, Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe, which shows readers a list of items salvaged from the shipwreck—they are the means of survival in an emergency. As a matter of fact, the entire culture can be regarded as a ‘list of salvaged items.’

“Naturally, culture does not guarantee the moral restructuring of people but has the advantage of being able to convincingly motivate a human—the latter should make a humanistic choice and exist decently, braving the temptations of pragmatic values. Culture allows a human to weigh themselves on ‘Job’s balance,’ the balance of faith in justice. An individual who weighs themselves on these scales will at least cast doubt on their sinful intentions in pursuit of profit when they see the stern eyes of St. Paul on a famous fresco in Kyiv’s St. Sophia Cathedral. And even if they do not become the way they should be, they will remain the way they can be.”

But can we speak in this context about the omnipotence of culture, its boundless and exceptional potential in the life of a society?

“Naturally, culture is not a panacea, not a guarantee for riding out crisis situations, but it is a discovery, a prospect, an entreaty, and a reproach that deprives an individual of moral comfort in case of a sinful behavior.”

PROGRESS OF THE SPIRIT AND PROGRESS OF THE ECONOMY: AN UNOBVIOUS LINK

“It does not follow from this, of course, that culture is an alternative to economic activity. For instance, Petro Mohyla, who was Ukraine’s spiritual leader in the 17th century and the author of a project of our country’s civilized future, preached in the spirit of the reformatory ideas of combining ‘spiritual’ and ‘private’ capital and restricting asceticism by forming a festive mood of the soul. In his famous Trebnyk prayer book, which was a household book for the Ukrainian Orthodoxy, he legitimized all the Ukrainian feasts that are celebrated even now.

“It becomes clear from this angle why the Contract House in Kyiv, where worldwide bread prices were set, was also a concert hall in which Franz Liszt used to play his Ukraine-inspired compositions. As is known, music serves to boost the individual’s creative activity.

“For this reason, too, the Kyiv town hall, which adhered to Magdeburg Law in Ukraine’s foreign trade, permanently funded a symphony orchestra so that it could play during the festive rituals of the city’s guilds of craftsmen. The following jocular note about this orchestra’s musicians was found in an archive: ‘Leibovych beats the cymbals and the double-bass plays the violin.’

“The aforesaid does not rule out that culture itself may turn into business, as is the case with mass culture. The point is that culture breaks the inevitable subjectivity of man, which is very important for commercial accounting because it energizes the individual’s activities, and allows them to manipulate cultural values in both negative and positive terms.

“It would be proper to cite the following episode. A US company in a multistoried building faced a problem of the timely distribution of its employees at the beginning of a workday: there were long lines to the elevators, which disrupted the schedule. So the board of directors resolved to install additional elevators, but the cost of work proved so high that it constrained the budget. Searching for a decision, the management opted for an unexpected idea suggested by a group of designers. They suggested dropping the costly construction and, instead, installing a lot of mirrors on the building’s lower-floor halls. The idea was that female employees would be surely stopping in front of their mirrored image to spruce up a little. This would allow the lines to thin out.”

Do you think the current state of culture can make us look optimistically into the future?

“The subjectivity of the cultural perception of time can initiate all kinds of unexpected positive decisions. One should also remember that culture comprises centuries-old formulas, such as ‘first there was action’ or ‘knowledge is power,’ and a well-considered application of them involves the spirit of judicious wisdom into pragmatic activity, which runs counter to any aggressiveness or trivial approaches.

“As long ago as the 5th and 6th centuries BC, when asked if one could find just one word that expressed the positive meaning of all philosophies and religions, China’s spiritual oracle Confucius said: ‘There is a word like this. It is reciprocity.’ This also became a key word for Pope John Paul II in his last encyclical on creating a ‘civilization of love,’ a lifetime dream of all the people on Earth.”