The Symbolic Worldview of Hryhorii Skovoroda: the Path Through the Ages

Abstract

The essence of H. Skovoroda's conception has been revealed about the “world of symbols” as a form of combination of two types of existence belonging to different levels of reality – “matter” and “form”. Skovoroda's symbolism does not simply mean the replacement of the reality of the phenomenon by its sign. The fundamental difference is that the sign and significance are not equivalent, of the same order. A symbol by its very nature is a way of combining "visible" and “invisible” nature, in which a person, as a corporeal being, is able to achieve an understanding of supersensible, transcendent reality. Human as a microcosm is not a real self-sufficiency, it has significance only to the extent that it is included in the universal form of lawfulness and orderliness. The function of the symbolic world is to raise the individual existence of a person to the level of universal significance, to reveal the person the hidden essence of things. Skovoroda, as a representative of the Neoplatonic tradition in Ukrainian philosophical thought, striving to the disclosure of the general in the particular, in connection with the universal, manifests this connection not by the means of science, but through a system of sensory images that construct a situation of communication, which includes a certain code, a hidden message. Each of these images has a purpose of the reconstruction of the inner world of a person (not mere transmission of factual information). The imperative “know yourself”, calling for communication of a person with him/her-self, encourages a person to change individual set of codes, and, therefore, his/her inner world. This is the “transition” of a person to its own personality, to a human in him/her. The functionality of symbols depends on keeping in the attention their paradoxical nature: a combination of “empty appearance” and true significance of existence. “Visible nature” is not real being, because it is not an active element in the world. Due to the paradoxical nature of the symbol, the world of symbols is a system of binary oppositions. Correct understanding of the significance of symbols means perceiving their meaning as exactly the opposite, constantly remembering the polar inversion of truth and illusion. The most profound and essentially unique feature of Skovoroda's symbolism is the construction of not only a philosophical concept, but his own life as a symbolic philosophical work. His refusal of action aimed at pragmatic calculation of common sense is a philosophical challenge to the rationality of the Modern time, the opposition of the “heart” as a center of the supreme values to the “rational egoism” and an impersonal social order.