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South Slavs, philosophy of

DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-N003-1
DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-N003-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 29, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/overview/south-slavs-philosophy-of/v-1

2. Non-academic philosophy in the vernacular

At the end of the eighteenth century, the first philosophical works began to appear in as yet unstandardized South Slav vernaculars. These were works of non-academic philosophy, either popularizing philosophical ideas or presenting them in verse form. Dositej Obradović, a defrocked Serbian Orthodox monk who had attended philosophy lectures at the universities of Halle and Leipzig, was one of the first to popularize the ideas of Enlightenment. But the most original work in the vernacular was a philosophical epic in six cantos, Luča Mikrokosma (The Ray of Microcosm) (1845), by Petar Petrović Njegoš, Bishop-Prince of Montenegro. The epic presents a thoroughly dualistic metaphysics and a rather unorthodox cosmogony. To the duality of matter and spirit corresponds the duality of good and evil (although the source of evil is not located exclusively in the matter). The world of light borders on the world of darkness – Hades – which as a sun has its own globe of darkness. God created the heavens, the realm of light, by a stroke of shining light which destroyed the reigning realm of darkness. Satan, a duke of angels, rejected this view of the creation and rebelled against God in the name of the equality of all spirits. Upon his defeat, he was thrown into Hades while Adam (who repented of his association with Satan) and his progeny were settled on Earth, a half-way house between the heavens and Hades. Caged in the body, the human soul is governed by the conflicting laws of good and evil, and is thus condemned to the realm of tears and suffering. Both in its epic style and its pessimistic dualism, this metaphysical poem is unique in South Slav literature and philosophy.

Throughout the nineteenth century, liberal political ideas were disseminated through political pamphlets and popular encyclopedias such as Vladimir Jovanović’s incomplete Politički rečnik (Political dictionary) published in Novi Sad, then in Austro-Hungary. Svetozar Marković, a socialist journalist, popularized socialist political ideas (mainly drawn from the works of Chernyshevski and Pisarev) through his newspapers and pamphlets published in Serbia. The future king of Serbia, Petar Karađorđević, while still in exile, published his (now standard) translation of Mill’s On Liberty.

Božidar Knežević, a poor secondary school teacher, was educated at Beograd, where in 1898 he published his visionary treatise Principi istorije (Principles of history). Since everything that exists, he argued, exists only in history, history takes over the fields of other sciences and offers the highest human understanding. In addition, history binds all peoples and leads to their reconciliation and overall harmony. Knežević’s optimism and belief in the progress of the human mind is tempered with his belief that the total quantity of time available to the living is limited: human civilization and even human life is thus bound to disappear. Proportion, he boldly states, is the telos of history. As both nature and humans strive after this ideal, proportion is used to explain the nature of truth, reason, good, progress, beauty, justice and freedom. Once elements achieve proportion and balance with each other, ‘they live simultaneously’ in a great organic whole in which one can ultimately arrive at ‘complete morality, freedom, justice and truth’. Whereas academic philosophers repudiated this system as incoherent, many Serb avant garde poets and writers found in it a congenial vision of the universe in which everything, including poetry and beauty, had its own rightful place in a world striving after proportion.

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Citing this article:
Lazovic, Zivan and Aleksandar Pavkovic. Non-academic philosophy in the vernacular. South Slavs, philosophy of, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-N003-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/overview/south-slavs-philosophy-of/v-1/sections/non-academic-philosophy-in-the-vernacular.
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