Manifesto of the Ukrainian school of archetype
We stand at the gates of an important epoch, a time of ferment, when spirit moves forward in a leap, transcends its previous shape and takes on a new one. All the mass of previous representations, concepts, and bonds linking our world together are dissolving and collapsing like a dream picture. A new phase of the spirit is preparing itself Philosophy especially has to welcome its appearance and acknowledge it, while others, who oppose it impotently, cling to the past.
So Hegel wrote in his “Jena Lectures” (1806), when Europe, under the influence of the ideas of the French Revolution (1789-1894) and the armies of the Emperor Napoleon, was freed from centuries-old feudal foundations. Millennial monarchies collapsed, new nation-states were born, the spirit of free enterprise, creativity, initiative, the new spirit of bourgeois man took on visible forms.
Two hundred years have passed. And now Europe, having accumulated the experience of inverse Modernity and Postmodern development, is approaching the next – metamodern phase of the spirit. It does not yet have a single leader, there are no armies and there is no holistic worldview, but there are two answers to the challenges of the modern era that scientists and researchers offer to humanity: innovative and traditional.
The innovative answer claims that a new era of posthuman man, the era of artificial intelligence, total digitalization, artificial environment and artificial bodies. The era of the complete triumph of Reason, when the last archaic remnants of the unconscious disappear before the light of science.
The traditional answer objects: the person should not go forward, towards infinite progress, but turn back – to the new Middle Ages, to tradition. The main difference between a person and a machine is the presence of the unconscious. Therefore, long live the myths, archetypes and symbols! Long live the traditions, no matter how barbaric they are. We want to be people, not machines.
The first approach can be called purely rational, logical, or Logos. The second is irrational, or Mythos. But man is not the Logos and not Mythos. The dream of reason gives rise to monsters and the whole history of mankind and especially the tragic twentieth century has proved this. But even without sleep, without symbols, fairy tales, legends and myths, man cannot live. What to do: rush at full steam into the bright, constantly changing posthuman Future, or, conversely, in the desire to remain human, to turn to the motionless Past?
Reasonable thinking with its support in rigid frozen categories cannot answer this question. Only the dialectical mind is able to combine opposites: number and word, innovations and traditions, Logos and Mythos and offer humanity a new worldview paradigm, on the basis of which the main problems of our time could be solved.
The essence of this paradigm is that the classical, enlightened Logos with its tendency towards infinite progress should be mythologized, and the traditional Mythos enlightened and logged. Such an oncoming movement – the Logos to Mythos, and Mythos to the Logos means, in the words of Hegel, the deepening of the Spirit into oneself. Concretizing this idea, we can say that the time has come for a new understanding of man and his history – a new anthropology, about which one of the French luminaries of the archetypal Gilbert Duran wrote. The origins of human history lie not in external factors (demographic – as representatives of the Russian school of cliodynamics see, cosmic – as Lev Gumilyov believed, material – as Marxism asserted, etc.), but in the Spirit and in its depths. Therefore, the study of the collective unconscious is absolutely necessary for such an understanding. But the Spirit is not only the darkness of the unconscious, it is also the light of the Idea. And this light illuminates and guides the path of history. Such is the dialectic of the Spirit – a combination of Light and Darkness, an archetype and concept, Mythos and Logos. All ideas, as J. Durand wrote, are based on archetypes and therefore the image of human development is not a direct infinite progress and not a closed natural cycle, but a quantum similar spiral that combines both, and which can serve as an illustration of sustainable development.
So, what are the challenges facing the Ukrainian school of archetypes?
- To propose new ideas and concepts for solving public administration problems and to show on which archetypes these solutions are based.
- Explain social phenomena from the perspective of the dialectical mind: to see tradition as innovation, and tradition as innovation.
- Feel free to look into the future, but do not forget the past. Believe in a man and his Spirit, who can do anything. Remember Hegel’s covenant: “Man, because he is Spirit, can and must consider himself worthy of everything that is most sublime. He cen never overestimate the greatness and power of his spirit. And if he has this faith, nothing will be so recalcitrant and hard as not to reveal itself to him” (Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1).