The philosophy of the heart
A recognisable line of Ukrainian thought holds that the seat of a person is not the intellect, and it runs from an eighteenth-century wandering teacher through to the nineteenth century.
There is a strand in Ukrainian intellectual history distinctive enough to have a name, and it is worth setting out because it turns up in unexpected places.
Skovoroda
An eighteenth-century teacher who, having been offered institutional positions, declined them and spent his life walking between villages and estates, teaching, writing dialogues and staying nowhere long.
His central idea is kindred labour: that every person has work for which they are constituted, and that happiness consists in finding it. Work against one's nature produces unhappiness regardless of its status or reward, and a society that assigns people to unkindred work is producing misery efficiently.
His epitaph — that the world tried to catch him and did not — is quoted here the way a proverb is.
Yurkevych
A nineteenth-century philosopher who gave the tradition its explicit statement: that the heart, not the reason, is the centre of the person, and that reason is one faculty among several rather than the seat of the self.
He argued this against the dominant rationalism of his time, and he argued it philosophically rather than devotionally.
Why the line is worth knowing
Because it is a genuine and locally rooted intellectual tradition, because it is not a national philosophy in the propagandistic sense but a set of arguments that can be agreed or disagreed with, and because the emphasis on inwardness and on suitable work reappears in Ukrainian literature repeatedly.
A guest's note
Skovoroda is genuinely read here, and quoted by people who are not philosophers. That is rare for any thinker and it says something about the fit.
A guest's note is a heading in this piece. Mine is this: the idea that the seat of a person is not the intellect was something I did not understand when I arrived and later met in working life as well. Here an agreement does not run on the numbers alone if you do not trust the person across the table. Whether that has anything to do with a philosophical tradition I do not know; but it is what I have observed.
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