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Psychologists", "The Mind behind the Teachings of Plato and the Experience
according to the Teachings of Kant "," Reading about the Upbringing ", etc., her
raised questions about the essence of man as a cultural being, the laws of this
essence in the general context of being.

In his research P. Yurkevich came to the conclusions, which are fully
consistent with contemporary culturological concepts. Thus, in the work "Idea" P.
Yurkevich expressed the opinion that the activity and efficiency of the person

himself, the human spirit with his aesthetic, moral and religious traditions is an
indication that the spiritual essence can be the source of existence only as "divine
and intelligent". After all, if in nature the principles of passivity and mechanics (by

the last Yurkevich means above all "indifference to his own work"), then it could
not give birth to all the wealth of the spiritual life of man. "In order to enter into
the realm of genuine, essential reality, we have one of two: either to recognize all

the riches of our spiritual life in the ghostly, in the truth not existing, or to agree
that the world, which develops our spiritual life with its riches, is not so material,
not so lifeless and heartless, as is depicted in a mechanical worldview. The first
assumption will remain a meaningless word until we are able to reduce to simple

physiological phenomena or - even lower - to the general laws of mechanics all the
various forms and phenomena of thinking, the will and feelings in man and the

whole business of civilization in humanity”. This position of the Ukrainian
philosopher is fully consistent with the modern understanding of cultural genome,
according to which the cultural semantic space is formed by the same principles (or
"ideas"), as the natural, material.

An outstanding Ukrainian thinker, philologist and ethnosologist Oleksandr
Potebnia (1835-1891) developed an issue raised by the German philosopher and
linguist Humboldt on the correlation between language and thinking. He stressed

the connection between language and culture, interpreted language as a mechanism
of thinking. According to Potebnia, every act of speech is a creative process in
which the truth is not repeated, but a new one is born.

The creator of the language is the people. However, first of all, the language,
according to O. Potebnia, predetermines the national specificity of the people, or
"nationality". Hence, Potebnia substantiates the right of every nation to self-

development. As a word, it is impossible to formulate an absolute notion or
meaning that would exclude the possibility of another representation, so the
impossibility of the existence of a single, all-embracing people.
O. Potebnia distinguished the notion of nation, considering the formation of

a national phenomenon more ancient than the emergence of the idea of nationality,
which he dated the beginning of the XIX century. According to Potebnia, the idea
of nationality is not an attribute of the people, but arises as the attempt of

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