Theses of the Speech by Larysa Dovha at the Presentation of the 5th Volume of the European Dictionary of Philosophies: The Ukrainian Context. Lexicon of Untranslatables
I. The publication of the 5th volume of the European Dictionary of Philosophies (EDP), as indeed the publication of all five volumes, is a significant event for the entire community of Ukrainian humanities scholars and, more broadly, for contemporary Ukrainian culture. First, it demonstrates that contemporary Ukrainian philosophers (and thus Ukrainian philosophy itself) are perceived in Europe as being at the forefront of new trends and developments, and therefore deserve wide international attention and respect. Second, the 5th, Ukrainian volume bears witness to another important development: Ukrainian philosophical scholarship has finally emerged from its “object” status and its unconditional dependence on Western philosophy, and now loudly asserts its own subjectivity — the fact that we are capable not only of developing ideas initiated by others or serving as the object of someone else’s influence, but also of setting a new vector of development ourselves and showing others how philosophical thinking can (and should) be developed in non-standard ways.
II. The EDP is about translation and untranslatability. Untranslatability does not arise from a lack of words, but from the fact that every culture is filled with its own unique meanings. Translation, above all, is the transfer of meanings from one culture into the context of another. Wherever intercultural dialogue is concerned, it is primarily a matter of translation — the transfer of meanings — and of the ability or inability of representatives of one culture to accept, recognise, and understand the other, and to find a place for that other within the context of their own culture (or, more broadly, their own lifeworld). The EDP tells a long and fascinating story of how philosophers moved from an awareness of the impossibility of such “acceptance” to demonstrating the ways in which it can be realised. It has been a long and truly breakthrough journey. Ukrainian translators of sacred texts in the early modern period wrestled with the question of how translation should be carried out: whether it was more important to adhere literally to lexical equivalents or to focus on preserving the meaning. They chose meaning. Today’s translators, authors, and editors of the EDP show how difficult it is to capture meaning behind words. They trace the path from lexeme to word — to concept — to sense, and demonstrate how these concepts and meanings literally play hide-and-seek with us, constantly acquiring new nuances, hiding behind the “unrecognised other,” and demanding that we bring in contexts in order to find what we are looking for. This is an engaging intellectual game, and at the same time an extraordinarily useful endeavour for the development of philosophical culture and for understanding both oneself and the other within it.
III. Finally, there is one more point I very much want to make — namely, what the 5th volume of the Dictionary has meant for Ukrainian humanities scholarship. The work on the historical connotations of concepts, on how their meanings have changed over time (in fact, the first serious publication in Ukraine in the field of the history of concepts specific to Ukrainian philosophical language) has allowed us to look at our own past in a new way. It has become clear that it is difficult to translate not only between different languages, but also from our own ancient language into modern Ukrainian. The issue is not merely obsolete words that now require explanation, but the fact that philosophical concepts familiar to us once sounded exactly the same as they do today, yet carried meanings that are very unfamiliar to contemporary discourse. Translation within a single language is also a translation between different layers of culture. It is the recognition of ourselves in the past, but slightly different. It is the search for something important yet lost (for example, the secularisation of language, as a result of which meanings associated with the sacred world and certain truths of faith have been lost). At the same time, it is a process of “cleansing” philosophical language from extraneous, alien elements — those that have not taken root and that destroy the native meanings of national culture.
It is difficult to say which concept from the 5th volume is currently the most important or weighty in the consciousness of contemporary Ukrainians or in contemporary philosophical discourse. Each of them is filled with profound meaning in its own significant way. In the context of the full-scale war, in which a neighbouring aggressor is attempting to erase Ukrainians as a nation from the face of the earth, to subjugate us and deprive us of our language and memory, particular resonance is gained by such concepts as “freedom/volya”, “language”, “truth/istyna”, “good and the good”. The article on “freedom” was written in 2022 by the late Professor Leonid Ushkalov and, unfortunately, should today be disseminated in all possible media. For it speaks of the fact that freedom is the core concept that defines Ukrainian consciousness, culture, and identity. One sometimes hears that freedom is our key value, and that Ukrainians do not spare even their lives to defend it. This is true. However, Professor Ushkalov convincingly shows that freedom is so deeply embedded in our “DNA” that it is not merely a value: it is the only possible mode of our existence. Without freedom, just as without water or air, we simply cease to be. This is a powerful message that reaches far beyond the needs of purely academic philosophical discourse.
The same applies to the concept of language. The writing of this article became a particularly interesting, almost detective-like story. When work on the article “language” began, it turned out that philosophers, who are not accustomed to reading texts other than strictly philosophical ones, had concluded that Ukrainian was practically absent from philosophical discourse until the beginning of the 19th century (in the early modern period, purely philosophical texts were conventionally written in Latin). Historians of the language, of course, protested in surprise: how could that be, when legal texts and translations of the Holy Scriptures written in Old Ukrainian (Ruthenian) have been known since at least the 16th century? Do these texts not deal with the very same concepts of freedom, truth, justice, good and the good, and much else that, in the secular age, becomes the subject of philosophical speculation? Researchers of early modern Ukrainian preaching also had to intervene in the dispute. It turned out that not only are the relevant concepts used there, but they are also interpreted and illustrated with examples of translation between several languages: Church Slavonic, Latin, Ukrainian (“in our language, in Ruthenian”), and sometimes Greek and Polish as well. Thus, work on the article “language” not only enriched our knowledge of the history of Ukrainian philosophical vocabulary, but also became a platform for a productive meeting of scholars from different fields (philosophers, cultural scholars, historians, and linguists) who had previously hardly interacted, each working within their own scientific domain. This meeting proved extremely necessary and fruitful. We thank the editors of the EDP for making it possible.
Much more could undoubtedly be said about the work on the articles for the 5th volume of the EDP, for each article is a separate, fascinating research journey full of discoveries and surprises. Most importantly, it marks the beginning of work on a Ukrainian “history of philosophical concepts” — a field that has not yet become a distinct direction in Ukrainian historico-philosophical studies, yet without which it is now impossible to imagine the writing of a truly contemporary, thoughtful, and balanced history of Ukrainian philosophy. Such a history would be written through the prism of awareness of its own subjectivity — a history in which we, the present generation, would meet those “us” who lived in the past and would be able to understand one another.
I thank everyone involved in the creation of this unique publication — for the fact that it exists and for the honour and joy I had in contributing to the work on individual articles.