Vilen HORSKY: A state headed by thinkers is only an old illusion

I was born in Kharkiv. Since his youth, my father took an active part in the revolutionary movement. In the early 1930s, as a young specialist, he was sent on a business trip to Ford's factories - this was the way they trained technical personnel for the young Soviet state starting on the road to industrialization. After a year of training, he came back to work first as a leading engineer in the Kharkiv Tractor Factory and later at a bicycle factory in Moscow. In 1936 he was repressed by the state for having been in the United States. He died in 1938. Since our family had stayed in Kharkiv, my mother and I were not affected by the purges.

Philosophy is a conscious choice made by myself. I graduated from the Philosophy Department of Kyiv State University. After my father was rehabilitated in the Khrushchev period, I was able to enroll in the Institute of Philosophy, where I spent almost all of my adult life, moving up from a junior to a supervisory research fellow. There I wrote my master's and doctoral theses and published my books. During my early years at the Institute, I focused mostly on interpreting methodological aspects of the history of philosophy. Later I wrote books on the philosophy of art and science. I completed my methodological phase by publishing the book, The Historical and Philosophical Interpretation of Text. I organized about ten conferences on the historical and philosophical analysis of Kyiv Rus culture and published two books on the subject, Historical Survey of Philosophical Thought in Kyiv Rus: XI-XII centuries and Saints of Kyiv Rus. My last book, The History of Ukrainian Philosophy, is a product of my teaching at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, where I have been working since 1992.

Q.: What do you think philosophy should do today?

A.: Unlike other normal scholars who solve the problems of their sciences, all philosophers ever do is try to find out what philosophy really does. On the one hand, for millennia philosophy has been trying to comprehend the limited grounds for people's existence - and in this sense, it is absolutely unchanged, stable. On the other hand, these grounds actualize totally different aspects at each stage of human evolution. I believe that today philosophy in general, and, no doubt, our philosophy in particular, are going through one of their crucial periods. For the first time in human history, Hamlet's question,  " to be or not to be",  is become pressing not just for individuals, nations, or states, but for all humanity.

Q.: In Soviet times, philosophy was a very utilitarian science - in fact, it acted as a substitute for religion, giving people a new  "symbol of faith".  In present-day society, even universally accepted human values have become very vague and controversial notions. Resorting to philosophy has turned into a burdensome, incomprehensible convention: people do not expect anything from philosophy, they do not want to turn to it and do not understand why on earth they need it. Could you convince an average layman that philosophy in Ukraine is not a mere toy for a clan of scientists, not entertainment for a narrow circle of specialists who have shut themselves off in philosophy?

A.: Nowadays, nobody in their daily lives can feel totally comfortable without trying to find the real sense of life. This is the question that professional philosophy tries to answer. All people engage in philosophical discussions, even old men sitting on benches near their homes. However, the problem of our society is that we have gone through an ideological crisis, the collapse of the communist mythology. Yet, a society cannot live without faith, without myth. Now our society is in drastic need of an idea that would unite all of us. This search for an idea cannot be successful without turning to philosophy. Myth is something everyone believes in. Without myth, there is no flag, no state symbols, no sacred objects. A myth, however, is only one link in the structure of culture, and it provides us with an object of faith. Another essential component of culture is critical thinking. The danger of the current situation in Ukraine is in the fact that against the backdrop of abandoning the old myth, we observe interaction and intense struggle of local myths (both in social and regional terms), each one of which claims to be the national myth. This lends an aggressive character to the situation: the mythological conscience is trying not only to fill in a niche within the limits of which it should be, but also to go beyond those limits and replace the zone of critical thinking.

It is possible to exemplify this situation of a myth's aggressiveness. Let's imagine  walking up to the Verkhovna Rada building in Pechersk, on top of which is flying a yellow-and-blue flag, a symbol of the independent Ukrainian state; and a little lower, on the pediment, is a state emblem of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Next to the building is Rastrelli's magnificent baroque palace, which is reviving the symbols of the Russian Empire's majesty; opposite it is a burial site with workers and peasants who perished in a Bolshevik-led revolt during the revolution.

In general, collections of symbols representing different mythologies occur everywhere in the world. The problem, though, is that all those myths, whose symbols I just named, not simply represent different periods of our history, but they live today - there are people united under the yellow-and-blue flag along with people living under the Soviet Ukrainian state emblem, and the imperial myth also has its followers. This is the situation of local myths clashing and fighting with one another, and while doing so, they try to occupy the vacant position of the national myth, a lost idea that was the object of everyone's faith. This is an extremely complicated and acute peculiarity of the present day, and any attempt to resolve it rationally must be based not only on mythological conscience, but also on theoretical and critical thinking. And it is philosophy that represents critical thinking in this search.

Q.: Whose fault is it, society's or the government's, that now philosophers have found themselves in the poorest social category?

A.: The government's. Seriously speaking, all drastic changes that completed the decay of the last empire were not caused by a wave of mass protests against those shameful shortages that our society experienced in Soviet times. The impetus for all those changes came not from the provinces that had been leading a much poorer way of life, but from the center - from Moscow and Kyiv, where the changes were initiated not by janitors who were paid pennies for their hard work, but rather by the intelligentsia. It was a protest against the society that deprived people of the right to make the best of their capabilities, in favor of a system whereby the government would perform different functions with regard to philosophers and intellectuals. However, it does not perform those functions since our country is run by the people who were trained by the former power and who do not know how to run a country any differently.

Q.: According to my observation, our contemporary   pseudo-bourgeois  environment has evolved a rather bizarre style: children of well-off parents often aspire to get university degrees in philosophy.

A.: I am not really sure how  bourgeois this is. At least my experience with the real  bourgeois  world shows that there is no such fad there. At all American universities I have visited, my meetings with colleagues from philosophy departments invariably started with the American professors griping that they live in a country that does not understand anything about philosophy, does not want philosophy, and has an extremely pragmatic lifestyle. A specialist in ethics told me once that he survives exclusively on teaching medical ethics courses to medical students and reading special lectures to prison personnel on the ethics of guard-inmate relationships. But as far as theoretical philosophy is concerned, excuse my bluntness, but they simply could not care less about it, and I did not notice any great social attention to philosophy there in general. Philosophy is a tradition of Slavic culture and spirituality, of which we should be aware and which should not be rejected, since this is what western civilization badly lacks.

Q.: Could you name the most topical philosopher today?

A.: Plato. The European philosophic tradition in general, and ours in particular, are both still based on him to this day. Incidentally, this is the most fruitful tradition that has experienced the most bans and persecutions of all kinds. For Plato was concerned with the same philosophical problems that we are concerned with today.

Q.: Can any philosophic idea or school today accomplish in Ukraine what Nietzsche and Shopenhauer's ideas accomplished in Nazi Germany?

A.: Nietzsche and Shopenhauer should not be accused of the way their ideas were politically interpreted in Nazi Germany. There is no straightforward connection between philosophy and politics. If we turn to our tradition, we will see ideas grounded in Shopenhauer and Nietzsche in the very different concepts of Dmytro Dontsov with his integral nationalism, Vyacheslav Lypynsky, and Mykola Khvyliovy with his communist and Bolshevik ideals.

Q.: Can a wide social interest in communist philosophic ideas be reanimated today?

A.: I think not.

Q.: What philosophic idea or concept do you find annoying?

A.: If we speak carefully and with reservations, this is an accurate description of my attitude to French post-modernists. A German colleague of mine, recalling the Third Reich period, once paraphrased one well-known hero of that time,  " When I hear about post-modernism, I reach for my gun."

Q.: So you do not share the popular thesis that we live in a post-modern world?

A.: I do share it, but only in the conventional sense in which the history of culture can be divided into three global stages - pre-modern, modern, and post-modern.

Q.: What kind of future do you see for humanity?

A.: The future of humanity is in the activization of interpersonal relationships on the global scale, where everybody takes their part in a polyphonic choir - it is OK if a part is barely audible, but if it disappears, all of humanity will feel the loss.