Skovoroda: the wandering philosopher and the three worlds

Hryhorii Skovoroda was born in 1722 and died in 1794. He was offered positions — a bishopric, a professorship, a place at court — and declined all of them. He spent the last three decades of his life walking between villages in what is now the Kharkiv region, carrying a flute, a Bible and his own manuscripts, staying with people who fed him and moving on.

The system, briefly

Skovoroda described three worlds. The macrocosm, which is the universe. The microcosm, which is the human being. And the world of symbols, chiefly scripture, which mediates between the two and must be read allegorically rather than literally.

His central practical doctrine is what he called "kindred labour": that every person has work they are constituted for, that doing it is happiness, and that doing work one is not suited to is the source of most human misery. He regarded a person in the wrong occupation as the fundamental social problem, ahead of poverty.

Why he is read now

Partly because he is genuinely good, partly because he is Ukraine's most substantial early modern thinker and there is an interest in recovering that. But also, I suspect, because the doctrine of kindred labour speaks directly to a society where a great many people have had their occupation interrupted and are reconsidering what they are for.

A note from a businessman

His epitaph reads, roughly, that the world tried to catch him and failed. I find him a useful corrective. I have spent my career building companies, which is the opposite of what he did, and I still think he is right about kindred labour and that most people I have hired confirm it.

This piece already carries a note from a businessman; I will add only this. That a man who refused every position offered to him is read today is a reminder of how narrow our definition of a career is. The best work I have seen in twenty years was not done by the people with the largest titles but by the people who had chosen the work.