VIRTUE ETHICS IN VASYL STUS’S EPISTOLARY DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article provides an overview of Vasyl Stus’ ethical ideas in the context of increasing interest in the aretological line of ethics in the philosophical discourse of the second half of the 20th – early 21st centuries. The author accentuates the relevance of philosophical reflection on the understanding of ethical self-realization in the works, letters and diaries of Ukrainian writers of the 20th century during the Russian-Ukrainian war, considers correspondence as a specific media and reconstructs the poet’s virtue ethics based the material of his letters to friends and relatives in the 1960s-1980-s. The primary goal of the article is to identify the principles of virtue ethics in Vasyl Stus’ epistolary discourse. The author points out the similarity of’ poet’s ethical directions to the line of virtue ethics in the philosophical discourse of the second half of the 20th century. The Vasyl Stus’ ethical discourse is a discourse of moralistic, and the center of the ethical issues of his epistolary is the idea of moral self-improvement. Poet considers the path of improvement as a path to virtues and proceeds from the ontological primacy of virtue. His letters to friends and relatives testify that the criterion of moral truth for him is the true subject, not true principles. The feature of Vasyl Stus’s ethics is the orientation to patterns of behavior and cultural ingrained understanding of positive moral qualities of a person. The culmination of his virtue ethics are the letters to his son. The poet’s epistolary presents the restoration of the connection between the ethical and anthropological directions of cognition of human existence. The category of good is not primary for Vasyl Stus, but there is a noticeable echo of his ideas and proposals of Alasdair MacIntyre. An important place in his ethics of virtues belongs to considerations about dignity as a reference point for moral self-development and to the author’s concepts with which he characterizes the essence of ethical self-realization of the individual.