Speech by Illia Davydenko at the Presentation of the 5th Volume of the European Dictionary of Philosophies: The Ukrainian Context. Lexicon of Untranslatables
Yuri Shevelov — perhaps the greatest critic of provincialism in the entire history of Ukrainian intellectual culture — described various, sometimes unexpected, forms in which provincialism can manifest itself.
In my view, one of the most dangerous of these forms is provincialism in self-understanding — a constant presumption of inferiority, of one’s own “otherness” or “not-quite-rightness” in comparison with distant or closer others. It is precisely this presumption that for a long time prevailed (and sometimes still persists) in Ukrainian humanities scholarship and, in particular, in philosophy.
The reasons for this prevalence in philosophy can be reconstructed in different ways. Undoubtedly, a significant role was played by the Soviet-era view of Ukrainian philosophy as a remote periphery of global philosophical processes — a periphery that belonged only in the curious context of the “philosophy of the peoples of the USSR.” Partially, one can also see here the consequences of a widespread 20th-century approach that evaluated Ukrainian philosophy through the prism of models drawn from modern philosophical traditions (which were usually interpreted as the standard of how philosophy as such functions), and then noted its failure to meet those models (see, for example, the introduction to Dmytro Chyzhevsky’s Outlines of the History of Philosophy in Ukraine).
Whatever the reasons may have been, this self-perception of inferiority created numerous problems. In particular, it provided the ideological foundation for practical attitudes such as “don’t dream,” “don’t strive,” “we are small, what can be expected of us” — attitudes that became a curse for Ukrainian academic philosophy in the 20th century, especially in its second half and in the Ukrainian SSR.
How could this painful complex of inferiority, which significantly affected the life of the professional community, be overcome? What was needed was youth, energy, and — most importantly — ambition. Ambition for something greater, more interesting, more global. For something that would force one to develop. In short, ambition for large-scale projects. Indeed, one of the greatest projects of the last thirty years that has helped the Ukrainian philosophical community to look at itself and its own capabilities in a new way is the European Dictionary of Philosophies and its Ukrainian edition.
In my conviction, the culture and spirit of the Dictionary, as described by Oleh Khoma in his article “The Relevance of the Dictionary in the Ukrainian Context,” is not only about professionalism, technological precision, and the pursuit of authenticity in research. It is also, and above all, an example of ambition for something greater than what we, as a community, had grown accustomed to. This ambition found its expression — and at the same time its confirmation — both in the role played by Ukrainian scholars in the intellectual development of the original French project and in the determination with which Ukrainian researchers undertook the realisation of the Ukrainian edition of the Dictionary. It is this ambitious character of the EDP that has probably been one of the main factors behind its influence on us, the youngest generation of the contemporary Ukrainian philosophical community.
At the same time, this spread of ambition for something greater than one is used to — an ambition that requires one to develop and to work selflessly, first and foremost on oneself and with oneself — has influenced not only us. As I said at the first presentation of the 5th volume, the Ukrainian edition of the EDP is a transgenerational project. If one opens page 395 of the 5th volume and looks at the list of specialists involved in the work on the Dictionary, one will see the names of representatives of all four generations of scholars who currently make up the Ukrainian philosophical community. It is precisely thanks to this that the breakthrough in self-understanding mentioned above — provoked, among other things, by work on the EDP — has begun to change the professional community as a whole, exerting its influence on every one of its generations.
This makes the Ukrainian edition of the Dictionary one of the most important projects of the Ukrainian philosophical community over the past three decades. Among its other effects, it has become a reliable vaccine against inferiority-driven provincialism in self-understanding, teaching us once again to believe in ourselves and to dream.
I am convinced that the changes initiated and strengthened by the Dictionary will only continue to develop in the future.
I am deeply grateful to all the creators of the original EDP and its Ukrainian edition. It was an honour for me to take part in this work!