On the void between reason and heart

In yesterday's edition of "Vecherka" there was my interview with Natalya Leonidovna Chubikina about the problem of waste and rubbish tips, which surround big cities in loops of smoke. Now almost everyone knows that the problem of pollution is one of the most impending. If we continue living as we do now, the generations to come won't have any space left to exist - our surroundings will become our displacement. On top of that, from what our space agencies tell us, we even managed to pollute in space. News report - "Our orbit is slowly becoming a dump for space waste, where sooner or later an area for satellites will cease to exist". But space there's lots of...

This problem bothers me also in a more general sense: the fact of the matter is, that people can't find harmony in their relationship with the environment, because they cannot find harmony within themselves. This is where philosophy begins. People throw out into nature everything that they have collected in their souls.

Animals stay in balance with their natural surroundings because this balance emerges on its own. If one species becomes too aggressive, it kills off the basis for it's own existence and dies off. If one pollutes the environment so much, then it needs to find a new area of habitation. But they're all already taken. There's nowhere else to go. There's no one else to blame but oneself.

Thanks to reason a person received the opportunity to organise life in a generous and lavish fashion. However the life of his reason hasn't found balance with the life of his heart. This is where the absence of harmony comes from. In the person's self, as well as in his relationship with others.

In the 19th century in Russia there lived a remarkable philosopher Pamfil Danilovich Urkevitch. In 1860 he published a book called "The heart and its meaning in the spiritual life of man as based on the word of God". In this work Pamfil Danilovich demonstrated that reason is the highest ability of spiritual life, but the root of spiritual life remains to be the heart. It is on the spiritual abilities of the heart that the moral pride of man is founded on.

Thus when we're following the tendencies of modern life and think that all problems (ours and those of others) can be solved by reason or science alone, we're wrong. A being in disharmony cannot bring anything into the world apart from its own disharmony. This is exactly what it brings. It suffers and brings.

One must say that Russian intelligentsia led by Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky attacked Urkevitch, without even attempting to understand what he was saying. All this despite the fact that he was a professor of Moscow university. But the west-focused Russian intelligentsia always preferred to follow fashionable trends and theories, rather than free thought.

If Urkevitch was heard, then our relation to one another and to the environment would have been slightly different. The West also didn't hear a great scientist and deeply religious man Blaise Pascal and his “The heart has reasons that reason cannot know". "A thinking reed" (a man according to Pascal) became a tyrant. He threw life on earth under the feet of his comforts, but with that he failed to find spiritual happiness.

A Russian version of this article can be found here.