Idea of relationship between human mind and feelings in the context of Ukrainian cordocentrism: historical retrospectives

Abstract

The article analyzes the evolution of the idea of human mind and feelings correlation in the history of Ukrainian philosophical thought from pre-Christian times till modern times. It is proved that this idea has a long tradition in the history of Ukrainian culture and its components – religion, philosophy, science, art. In historical sequence, the views of the great Ukrainian thinkers of different historical epochs on the problem of mind and feelings correlation in the integral human nature, their role in the cognition of the world are set forth. According to the researchers, from ancient pre-Christian times, the ancestor Ukrainians were interested in the vital issues of their own being, which they associated primarily with the notions of spirit and soul, which for Ukrainians were always «sacred» and identified with the heart as the centre of the spiritual life of a person occupying the world of his feelings, experiences, thoughts and faith. The image of the heart is central in the ancient monuments of oral folk art, which points to their cordocentric problematics, which is manifested in emotionality, sincerity, benevolence, mercy, and the like. The ideological concept for Ukrainians, from the times of KievanRus to our days, is cordocentrism, which represents the Ukrainian spiritual tradition and fulfils the function of a mental dominant. In KievanRus with the birth of philosophical thought (I.Kyivskyi, V. Monomakh, F. Pecherskyi), within the Christian faith there is a tendency that a special role in the cognition of the Divine essence was given to the heart. In Holy Scripture (the Bible), there are 851 references to the heart as one of the central images in the Old Testament texts.The concept of the heart, which takes its origins in the religious worldview of Ukrainian-Rus people from the times of KievanRus, gradually transformed into a «philosophy of the heart», becoming its distinctive feature that expressed the originality and uniqueness of the Ukrainian cultural tradition and its spiritual history. «Philosophy of the heart» as a doctrine in its ontological, theoretical and moral and ethical aspects is most fully expounded in the heritage of the outstanding Ukrainian thinkers G. Skovoroda, P. Yurkevych, T. Shevchenko, N. Gogol. A modern philosophy of human-centrism has been created on the basis of the philosophy of cordocentrism as a strategic direction of the humanization of society, in which one of the central places is child-centric education - the leading direction of the national education reform in Ukraine.