Arvydas Sliogeris, professor of Vilnius University, is one of the most productive philosophers in Lithuania. In the period of the Soviet regime his intellectual activities proceeded as if under cover and were known mostly in restricted academic circles, where traditionally there circulated free thought and where opposition convictions prevailed. Therefore, when Lithuania regained independence, the accumulated intellectual energy of philosophers, directed against totalitarian ideologies and their philosophical sources, erupted in full force. However the feeling of the restriction and the sense of the imaginary opponent remained, and revealed itself in the frenzied style of his works, — the frenzy, which is intensified by the incomparable rhetorical virtuosity of the professor. The books of Sliogeris emerged one after another, ascending in eloquence and expressiveness. No wonder that the specific philosophical subjects in these essays acquired political, cultural and social significance.

In his first works Sliogeris investigates and interprets the classics of Western philosophical tradition, particular attention being given to the founders of modern thought, to the hermeneutic trend in philosophy: S. Kierkegaard, F. Nietzsche, E. Husserl, M. Heidegger, K. Jaspers, etc. In the course of time he takes over their subjects, begins to interpret them in his own way, and manifests his own more or less original outlook. Having spent much of his life in translating and interpreting eminent Western philosophers Sliogeris remained himself in the orbit of their thought and continued the same problematic. On the other hand, having formed his own standpoint, he frequently opposed these philosophers, now and then criticizing the same points, which he traced out in his own works. Thus his way of thought and relation with the classics sometimes seems paradoxical.

In his first work — zmogaus pasaulis ir egzistencinis mistymas (The Human World and the Existential Thought, Vilnius: Mintis, 1985) — Sliogeris introduced significant new perspectives on today’s Lithuanian philosophy, which predominated over the ideological attitude to philosophy and the hegemony of Marxist methodology. This critical monograph was followed by other works in which Sliogeris laid out his own original considerations on the ontological and existential subjects: Daiktas ir menas: Du meno kurinio ontologijos etiudai (Thing and Art: Two Sketches on the Ontology of Art Work, Vilnius: Mintis, 1988); Butis ir pasaulis: Tyliojo gyvenimo fragmentai (Being and World: Fragments of the Silent Life, Vilnius: Mintis, 1990); Post scriptum: Is filosofiniu rankrascio" (Post Script: From Philosophical Diaries, Vilnius: Regnum fondas, 1992); Sietuvos: Eseistikos rinktine (The Pools: Selection of Essays, Vilnius: Mintis, 1992); Konservatoriaus ispazintys: 1988-1994 mety tekstai (Confessions of a Conservative: The Texts of 1988-1994, Vilnius: Pradai, 1995); Transcendencijos tyla: pamatiniai filosofijos klausimai (The Silence of Transcendence: Fundamental Philosophical Questions, Vilnius: Pradai, 1996).

Undoubtedly significant influence was exerted upon him by his voluminous translations into Lithuanian of the philosophical classics: G.W.F. Hegel’s Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Geschichte, Phanomenologie des Geistes, A. Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille and Vorstellung, F. Nietzsche’s Goetzen-Damerung, K. Marx’s and M. Heidegger’s selected works, etc.

The texts of Sliogeris are distinguished by their impressive stylistic expressiveness, flowing language and intensive emotional charge. The emotional charge of Sliogeris’s texts virulently involves the mind of the reader in its problematic, and force one to experience the enigmatic question of being.

The specific feature of his works is a concentric movement of thought which revolves around the same subject, that most significant and perhaps traditional philosophic question of being. The abstract ontological concept of being, especially in recent works of Sliogeris, gains features of an independent self-existing and self-substantiated thing. His philosophy, because of its attraction to the concrete manifestations of being and because of the emotional and ethical attitudes toward it, can be called a theology of the thing.

The predominant emotion in the text of Sliogeris is that of anxiety — the great anxiety because of the destiny of the human being and of the being of the thing, which stands behind human life and together with it. This emotion — like the Heideggerian Sorge — covers all the subjects which the philosopher reflects upon in terms of the fundamental question of being, and marks these subjects with an especially temperamental "existential" style and dramatic coloring. Questioning being is the most serious questioning — the postmodern play on meanings does not fit there. This seriousness demonstrates the principal modernistic standpoint of Sliogeris, i.e. his faithfulness to the tradition of philosophy and to the inherited humanistic values of Western civilization; at times in debates the philosopher revealed himself to be a decided Europocentrist. This faithfulness to the classics and the efforts of philosopher to reconstruct the values of human life stands in strong reaction against the postmodern trends of thought, which now gains strength in Lithuanian philosophical and cultural discourses. The non-authentic "rewriting" of texts, epistemological and ethical relativism, the concept of simulacrum, etc., are characterized by Sliogeris as signs of a parasitic mind, and but a simulation of life.

The essential subjects of Sliogeris include the ontology of being, the existential situation of the human in the world, its relation with the natural and cultural-social surroundings and reflections on the value systems of Western civilization.

Being generally disposed against metaphysical speculations, Sliogeris nevertheless uses metaphysical concepts. The concept "transcendental" in Sliogeris is one of the most enigmatic. Difficulties in its comprehension arise because of contradictions between its traditional idealistic and theological connotations and the new meaning which it gains in the works of Sliogeris.

By this concept one usually means the realm beyond our experiences and understanding, the realm beyond the world of phenomena. But for the Sliogeris such a concept as the being beyond the world is senseless, because there is no reality beyond reality. "The Sky is empty" proclaims this philosopher in a somewhat in Nietzschean way. The world of Sliogeris is non-paradigmatic, it is pure immanence, the being of things. Nevertheless he supplements this monistic concept of being by dichotomic perspectives and divides it into the realm of thought and the realm of thing, deriving the first from the second. The idealistic ontological dualism gains reverse meaning: the being of the thing is real, and the idea or thought by itself is empty. The realm of culture as a media of human speculative activities is not self-contained, but is potentially deceptive and for the philosopher is always under suspicion.

Separation of the rational self and the self-contained thing can be traced back to the Kantian epistemological dualism of intellectually apprehensible phenomenon and Ding an sich. In a more general way such a standpoint is a characteristic feature of romantic hermeneutics. However Sliogeris emphasizes the subjective or human causes of this dichotomy: the splitting of the monistic being comes not from the objective ontological grounds, but from the human mind as a result of the abstract linguistic description of the world (compare Kantian reasoning on the constructive activities of the intellect, which works out the intelligible world-view by its apparatus of categories). Abstract thought and the veil of words hides reality and leaves aside the true nature of the world.

The Romantic hermeneutic dichotomy in the works of Sliogeris gains new conceptual traits and linguistic emphasis: language, especially that consisting of abstract concepts, separates us from reality, deceives us and depicts all the world in anthropomorphic meanings so that the ontological problematic shifts to the epistemological. Further, as a coherent consequence, it becomes similar to the traditional Romantic controversy: nature vs. culture. This distinction involves a corresponding ethical attitude, which reveals itself as a reasoning on the human obligation to the being/thing, on the authentic human relation with its natural surroundings, etc. The linguistic description of the world, asserts Sliogeris, which distorts and hides reality, creates the specific anthropological realm, consisting of the artificial cultural signs and meanings. This anthropocentric attitude toward human surroundings compels us to forget the being of the thing, to be alienated in the world and to live an inauthentic life (compare the Heideggerian forgetfulness of being). The self-contained activities of the human being, especially intellectual conceptualizations, thus are interpreted as a betrayal of the natural world, and this assertion somehow resembles Nietzschean ethics — the attempts to establish an imperative of faithfulness to Nature and its laws.

Thus the dichotomy of thinking and the thing comes not from ontological grounds, but is generated by epistemological structures: the paradigm is the consequence of speculative thought. The linguistic screen that covers the true nature of the thing and hides reality is, in essence, the cause of the human’s alienation in the world. So culture, which stands here as an antithesis to the transcendent realm of the thing, reveals itself as the more or less illusionary projection of the human mind. This non-real being in the world is hard to overcome because the reason of illusion and the subject of its overcoming is the same, namely, human subjectivity. (Such a way of thought resembles the Hindu epistemology of maya; in the Buddhist and Hindu soteriology the individual is himself responsible for the "correction" of the illusionary world view, which is distorted by its intellectual creative activities). The epistemological structures coherently carry on the practical ethical assumptions, insisting on the human’s fidelity to non-conceptual reality, respect for natural surroundings, and the evaluation of the simple forms of life and of life values in general.

The ethical contraposition of artificial human cultural symbolism and the realm of reality reveal a notorious concept of Sliogeris: "hominism". By hominism he points out the inauthentic, anonymous and uniform sphere of life, which the human being founds for its existence, and the aggressive, destructive and consuming human attitude toward the world. The hoministic mind is inclined to extol its abstract ideas and anthropocentric meanings over natural life values. The hoministic mind is essentially technological in its abstract speculative activities and in life practice. The ultimate achievement of hominism is the totalitarian ideologies and, corresponding to these, socio-political systems which destroy humanistic values.

This conception can be easily supplemented by the contrasting term it implies, namely, humanism. The latter term has different meanings in various contexts of Sliogeris, but in general it can be interpreted in an ordinary way as a fidelity to human values. By hominism he indicates human cognitive and existential insufficiency, narrow-mindedness, a conceited position in the world and an attitude of consumerism. It is an essentially anthropocentric position, when the human being imposes his own significance on all the things of the world and looks on them from the point of view of his own interests. Hominism flourishes especially in cultural intellectual fields as an inclination of the human being to rationalize in a systematic way everything in the world, imposing abstract hoministic meanings on reality and thus negating the mysterious nature and transcendental being of the thing. Hominism is an inauthentic mode of existence, where the reality of life is substituted by empty conceptions, abstract ideas and so on. Based on grounds that lack life, hominism generates universal and anonymous forms of life, a cosmopolitan culture as a favorable "nutrient medium" for uniformed, impersonal and inauthentic human individuals. The hoministic disposition uproots the individual from his natural surroundings, leaves him rootless in the world and revokes the sense of responsibility and of other humanistic values.

The being of the thing is defined by what is significant to man. However, when the being of the thing is identified with the human meaning, one usually forgets that the thing exists in itself and for itself on the other, objective side of the being. Knowledge — the Great Anonym — destroys the thing by reducing it to causal relations, human meanings, definitions and functions. The true sense of the thing is its senselessness, proclaims Sliogeris.

In the search for the authentic non-hoministic being Sliogeris looks to rural life, the ethics of the simple peasant, which has no inclination to invent something new in this world or to attach importance to his own individual existence: the peasant directly grasps the perfection of being, has a natural sense of responsibility and devotion to his native soil and is faithful to the being of the thing.

So the peasant, the representative of the Chthonic ("pagan") metaculture, is the alternative to the hoministic mode of life. Hominism and humanism, as said above, are opposite attitudes and value systems. Nevertheless by no means can the romantic idealized peasant ethics be identified with the universal ethics of humanism. Therefore the dichotomy of hominism vs. humanism lost its symmetry, and signifies the versatile mind of philosophers in their efforts to save and reconcile the universal values of Western culture with the archetype of the "natural man" and its "native soil" ethics.

The metaphysics of thing and the romantic appreciation of natural/native human surroundings brings to the discourse of the philosopher the original neologism—the conception of "philotophy" (phylotopos). By this concept — which signifies the love for the (native) place — Sliogeris means the existential situation of the human being, where the axiological-ethical system of values gains ontological meaning. The authenticity of human life can be realized in the philotophical dimension: the human rooting in his native place renders his life ontologically substantiated, his relation with the world harmonious and his ethics full of sense. Thus, looking for the philotophical structures of existence Sliogeris tries to resist the relativism of truth and values which prevails in the late-modern and postmodern culture, and to overcome the human’s alienation in the world.

Philotophy sets a positive relation of protection and wardship of the world. The being of thing can reveal itself only to the attentive and sensitive consciousness and only in a quick sudden flash, "as a fish in the depths of a pool". One can know the thing only by intuitive sight which pierces through the veil of the hoministic meanings and linguistic constructions. In this way the cognitive activities of the human gain aesthetic and even mystical sense.

Woman stands closer to the natural world — she is naturally inclined to maintain life and to protect its different manifestations. Her relation with the world is more direct, not complicated by conceptual mediators. "Woman has no soul" paradoxically announces the philosopher, i.e. she is not inclined to raise abstract concepts above the reality of world. Man is inclined to spawn empty ideas as a restless fish, whereas woman on the contrary takes care of real life which she herself delivers. Her attitude to the world is more authentic and real, as in the case of a peasant. A woman’s life is somehow similar to the being of a thing, and the duty of the true philosopher is to take care of both of them. In some sense woman transcends the world of man and is distinguished in holiness. Fidelity to being or protection of the thing (e.g., of the natural surroundings) is in essence the knightly obligation of the true philosopher, just as man’s duty is to protect woman.

The exaltation of the concrete, unique and proximate being or being-at-hand is shifted into the political and national problematics. Sliogeris in all his works comes out as the consistent and rigorous critic of totalitarian ideologies and political systems. Totalitarian ideology is the practical manifestation of the Great Anonym, knowledge. Unique and distinctive national cultures, rooted in their natural environs, must be protected and defended against the destructive powers of a global civilization, which unifies and melts all the forms of different cultures and traditions into the one homogenous mess of hoministic meanings, where the ruthless power of knowledge predominates. Thus the philosophical thought of Sliogeris, which resembles the romanticism of an Herderian type, becomes involved in the realm of post-modern post-colonial problematics.

The true philosopher reveals himself as a knight of being, of the thing. Where the philosophic concept of being gains, at last there is the more concrete meaning — the meaning of life. Philosophers are the protectors of a life which is more than futile metaphysical abstractions and the constructs of the gnostic-technological mind.

The hominist or the gnostic investigator is a rapist of being; the philotopher is its faithful and loving protector. The controversy between the hominist and the philotopher signifies two types of mind — the technological and the mythological. The technological mind demythologizes and dehumanizes the world; the mythological mind tries to save the being of the thing, especially the sacred meaning of life. The insights of philosophers have some Manicheian traits of the internecine struggle between the powers of good and evil; their vision of the destiny of humanistic culture is somehow eschatological. The dominant rhetoric of anxiety can be interpreted also in the context of contemporary ecological problematic.

Laying stress on the transcendence of the natural, discussing the concepts of hominism and philotophy, advertising the ethics of the life, etc., the philosophical thought of Sliogeris takes up significant ecological and ethical subjects, which in his works supplement each other. Putting aside political and public activities Sliogeris nevertheless is an influential and authoritative thinker in Lithuania. His influence is manifest in two ways. On the one hand, Sliogeris presents to the Lithuanian audience the essentials of modern Western philosophy and introduces its prominent authors and problematics, thereby enriching the national tradition of philosophy. On the other hand, he acts as an arbiter and moderator in the cultural events of Lithuania, reflecting upon them from the critical point of view of the philosopher.

1. A. Sliogeris, Butis ir pasaulis: Tyliojo gyvenimo fragmentai (Vilnius, 1990), p. 291.

2. Ibid., p. 291.

3. A. Sliogeris, Daiktas ir menas: Du meno kurinio ontologijos etiudai (Vilnius, 1988), p. 49.

4. A. Sliogeris, Konservatoriaus ispazintys: 1988 - 1994 mety tekstai (Vilnius, 1995), p. 224.

5. A. Sliogeris, Butis ir pasaulis: Tyliojo gyvenimo fragmentai, p. 561.

6. Ibid., p. 292.

7. Ibid., p. 441.

8. Ibid., p. 453.

9. Ibid.

10. A. Sliogeris, Sietuvos: Eseistikos rinktine (Vilnius, 1992), p. 311.