Over a hundred years ago Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that previously the philosophers had something to say; now they speak about something. This inference has more to do with our times than it did with the age of decadence. It is thus even more pleasing to one’s mind to state that at the turn of the third millennium we are witness to a new book called Philosophy as a Road of Humanity and Hope (Kyiv, Kurs Publishers, 2000; 308 pp.). A tangible philosophic work in the truest sense of the word book, by Serhiy B. Krymsky, Ph.D. in philosophy and member of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Professor Krymsky is known to every philosopher in Ukraine and elsewhere in the post-Soviet states with his papers and articles dealing with a variety of philosophic and cultural problems. He is also very popular as a lecturer at the National Academy’s Humanitarian Educational Center, gathering packed audiences — and the same happens at all the other institutions of higher learning he visits.
The threads of profoundly humane concepts run through all his publications and lectures. It is only natural that he should define his own philosophy as the road of humanity and hope. To him, man is not an abstract individual who can comprehend or act in any other manner. He regards every human being as part and parcel of his or her culture, as its carrier, translator, and in the end as its creator.
We live in a world of culture. It is through this world and only with its aid that we can perceive two other worlds, those of the empirical reality surrounding us and the deeply rooted primordial one present in each and everyone of us and revealed through us for the rest of the world to see.
This world of culture is an alternative challenge to the abyss of primordial Chaos, being thus a universal link, a mediator between us and two spheres of being present before and within us. Through it they acquire a humanly compatible value and contents. This world of culture is shown by Krymsky to consist in the Value Sensate Universe.
The book is kept in a style making the narrative easily understandable to broad intellectual reading circles. I will broach only several subjects dealt with by the philosopher, which I consider especially important from the perspective of Weltanschauung and which are resolved in a markedly topical manner.
The Value Sensate Universe, this initial category of Krymsky’s philosophical discourse, manifests itself through certain models, such as an antique cosmos, it being a balanced self-sufficient form of existence, or as a Hebrew model of the world in the form of a Golem moving toward the goal set by God.
The very mode of existence of any given historical universe innately contains a kind of dynamic controversy, “a certain alternative between the actual existence and a multitude of new opportunities verging on an abyss as an inexhaustible and increasing potential.” Thus the universe under study proves to contain a quite definite nucleus of values and contents and a large peripheral borderland with the characteristic “lowering of the ratings of realities, their growing imbalance, uncertainty, and groundlessness.”
Ukrainian history offers a vivid analog of such connotation in the form of a city ruled by a prince (e.g., Kyiv) as compared to the Cossack borderland quickly turning into the dyke pole [wild field, Ukraine’s version of the wild prairie], beyond which stretched “unknown lands” allegedly inhabited by dragons, dog-like people, and other strange creatures. While the central spheres of the Universe can be approached in terms of truth and probability, the adjacent ones can only be described in enigmatic and esoteric terms.
This model appears equally valid for all fields of human endeavor and cognition. In particular, relying on it, we can try to look at the historical road traveled by mankind and its experience at a different angle. I mean the sensuous-human and metahistorical dimensions of history.
We are accustomed to history as a current of certain interrelated events caused by socioeconomic, political, religious, and other factors. However, we overlook the presence of certain invariable uniform structures. The latter turn out to be firmly connected with human existence in general and with that of each individual in particular.
One such structure is formed by cultural archetypes. The latter are a certain matrix spiritual construction and image-bearing ideas permeating all human history and preconditioning standard approaches and solutions to the specific problems arising among people. These structures include the Truth-Good-Beauty Triad which is interpreted in its own way by each epoch, while thematically passing through the massif of history. In this context, archetypes are outside of time — rather, they are extratemporal and omnipresent, akin to eternity, thus embracing the past, present, and future. Every great step forward always relies on past experiences and on the realization of potentialities. In developing this assumption, one could infer that historical archetypes must be hierarchical by nature: the general human layer, followed by the stadial and typological ones (the latter being most vividly manifested via the East-West dichotomy), and further by the regional-civilization, and finally the national layer.
Given this approach, the sociocultural process is revealed in its unity of the possible and what actually exists, that which is sure to happen and that which might happen, determined by the objective logic of occurrences and one’s free subjective will. This assumption relates to Gottfried Leibnitz who regarded the world as the interplay of opportunities and supplementary opportunities, in which man as a monad reveals the inner potential of his ego.
Seeing human history and the modern world — which is becoming increasingly globalized — in such a dynamic state, which is being actualized and is stepping back in this free play of opportunities (so as to reveal itself anew sometime in the future), is an extremely difficult task. Prof. Krymsky does not pretend to have solved this at sufficient length and depth. However, his very methodological approach to the book opens new horizons of cultural-historical learning. It appears that “history is not only an exposure of what comes to pass, but also an assertion of that which is being stored. Were history to be reproduced as a picture of that which is stored, it would turn out fundamentally different from the historical scenarios found in the textbooks.”
History preserves something most important in the life of every man. Thus, “fundamental moral dictates like the Ten Commandments permeate the process of civilization in form as well as essence.” A civilization process always does what can be described as winding round the all-penetrating fundamental values that, like the terrestrial axis, penetrate the entire massif of history.” It means that everything we know as the gold reserve of culture provides the perspective of eternity. This perspective (Krymsky points out correctly) symbolizes metahistory — in other words, showing history at that angle at which it emerges as a storage facility of its forms, rather than emphasizing their inexorable passage.
Thus, progress is connected with the transformation of current realities from the angle of past unrealized opportunities, while the past, challenged by practice, acquires the privilege of the eternal present. This “makes it possible to assess history under the signature of metahistory. Such assessment stipulates the singling out of civilization invariables, its principal values that assert man in his aspiration for what is endless.”
We have among us a true, original thinker, his mind unclouded by any schemes or classifications. He can not only inform us about something, but also about a great many things, yet his style is markedly concise, laconic, and simultaneously metaphorically eloquent, governed by [a determination to] reflect the essence of understanding of the stated fundamental problems of philosophical Weltanschauung. His is a subject having the greatest and most enigmatic meaning for man: personality, the structure and improvement of its existence and destiny; the highest general human values as the support of human existence in this daily world and in the sociocultural passage of time, plus a great many other things.
