Vilen Horsky on himself:
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.







