Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722 – 1794) was a philosopher of Ukrainian Cossack origin. He was a poet, a teacher, and a composer of liturgical music. His significant influence on his contemporaries and succeeding generations and his way of life were universally regarded as Socratic, and he was often called a “Socrates”. Skovoroda’s work contributed to the cultural heritage of both modern-day Ukraine and Russia, both countries claiming him as a native son,” – declares Wikipedia. First, about Moscow’s claims. John Fizer wrote: “In their quest to underscore the Skovoroda-Socrates affinity, the Russians claimed the “discovery” of a lost work by Skovoroda in which he expressed his desire to be a Russian Socrates. In it, it was alleged, he wrote: “Hallowed be Thy name in the thought and intentions of Thy servant who has intended with his mind and desired with his will to be a Socrates in Russia.” But a linguistic analysis of this work and its comparison with Skovoroda’s authentic works proves it to be a crude forgery…”
Second, about similarity with Socrates: “The Ukrainian references to Skovoroda as the Ukrainian Socrates have been motivated by a different set of reasons. His itinerant and mendicant existence, his preoccupation with teaching and preaching ethical norms of behavior, and his dialogical mode of writing evoke similarities with Socrates. This was well summed up by Dmytro Chyzhevsky: “The ethical pathos of Skovoroda reminds us of Socrates but not only of Socrates since he himself [Skovoroda] refers with equal reverence to Epicurus and Protagoras. His pathos resembles the ethical mood of moral philosophers of antiquity in general. “His life,” Chyzhevsky continues, “is somewhat reminiscent of Socrates’ life, but his ethical views … have little in common with Socrates’ ethical intellectualism. Skovoroda’s ethics follows the path of Plotinus and the Church Fathers.”
In his Apology, Socrates stated: “The simple truth is, O Athenians, that I have nothing to do with physical speculation,” namely, whether the basic matter of all elements is water, fire, air, or what have you. Socrates shifted the immovable foundation from the facts of the world to the facts of the human psyche. On this score Skovoroda’s and Socrates’ attentions indeed converge…
How does Skovoroda’s “philosophy of the heart” relate to Socrates’ “philosophy of the soul”? If we substitute the term “heart” with the term “soul,” as Skovoroda himself often does, the surface affinity between their systems becomes striking…
In his Narkiss, Skovoroda, like Socrates in the Euthydemus, urges his interlocutor to care only about one thing: “Know thyself, listen to thyself, look into thyself.”^ Self-knowledge is the basis of all other knowledge. To this extent Skovoroda emulates Socrates. But, unlike Socrates, along with the cognition of one’s soul Skovoroda derides the body, perceiving the soul and the body antithetically and presenting them correspondingly as truth and illusion, as beauty and dirt. Such derision of the body was inconceivable not only to Socrates, but also to most Ionic Greeks. In the Gorgias and Charmides, Socrates defends the importance of both. Sofrosyne of the soul, he maintains, helps to keep the body in good health. To use the modern term, Socrates upholds the psychosomatic compatibility of the body and the soul…
Another essential component of Skovoroda’s epistemology that sets him apart from Socrates is his insistence upon faith as a principal source and guarantor of genuine knowledge. In the first conversation of Skovoroda’s Narkiss, the protagonist Luka is told by Drub (“Friend,” namely, Skovoroda) that “faith despises appearances and relies upon what, in the emptiness, is the head, power, and foundation and never dies.” Luka asks Druh: “why did you speak about faith and now speak about an eye?”’ Druh replies: “‘A genuine eye and faith are one and the same…. because a genuine person has a genuine eye that, by bypassing appearance, sees under it [something] new and rests upon it. That is why it is called faith. To believe and to rely upon something, as on a firm foundation, all that is one and the same thing. Translating this dialogical exchange into a formal definition, Skovoroda asserts that the validity of anything as true is independent of observation and the adequation between perceptual evidence and inductive judgment. Hence, as a basically idealistic theory of knowledge it is much closer to the Neoplatonist philosophy of Plotinus than to Socrates’ rationalistic philosophy.
An attentive reading of Skovoroda’s dialogues leads us to conclude that his philosophy is highly eclectic, drawing upon a great many ancient philosophers (among them Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Plutarch, Plotinus, and Seneca) and, judging by his frequent references to the Church Fathers, upon their writings as well. Yet, despite such an assortment of often mutually exclusive sources, his philosophy is remarkably coherent… If we were to correlate Skovoroda with a single Greek philosopher, in matters of nature and the structure of all reality it would have to be Plotinus…” (John Fizer, Skovoroda’s and Socrates’ Concepts of Self-Cognition: A Comparative View)
“Gardariki, Ukraine” e-book has more example of Moscow’s forgery of historic documents to appropriate Ukrainian legacy.
