Profesorius Eugenijus Meškauskas: asmenybė ir veikla

ENProfessor Eugenijus Meškauskas (1909-1997) worked at Vilnius University in 1940-1994. A teacher, scholar, dean, vice-rector, and head of department, he represented an outstanding personality in academia. While holding all these offices he distinguished himself for his striking independence, non-bureaucratic attitude, responsibility, humane character, and personal charm. Professor's lectures would attract to classrooms not only regular students ot post-graduates but also many drop-ins. E. Meškauskas lived and worked in the complex years of occupation and totalitarian regime when a free and authentic thought uttered publicly was persecuted. Knowing that he was closely watched by dogmatists and governmental institutions, Professor behaved very cautiously and responsibly, simultaneously remaining faithful to the ideals and principles of his youth, his humanist beliefs and attitudes of his conscience. Within the limits allowed by the office held by him, Professor tried to do something good for people, his country, university and education. He protected students and teachers persecuted by the occupational regime, supported reforms advanced by the university rector with the purpose of making the most important institution of higher education in Lithuania more Lithuanian, or getting rid of non-qualified, incompetent teachers sent from Moscow in order to replace them with Lithuanians, or reducing the number of groups in which the language of instruction was Russian. E. Meškauskas accomplished a huge task in the area of Philosophy Department post-graduate studies by training a national cadre in philosophy not only for his own but also other higher schools of Lithuania. In this way the old Alma Mater of Vilnius started to recover its honourable traditions: the range of research subjects widened, the number of organised scientific conferences increased, Problemos, a modern (Western, to a degree) philosophical journal, was launched into being.With the number of Philosophy Department members increased, another academic unit for studies and research, Department of Philosophy History and Logic, was created. At last, the Faculty of Philosophy was restored. In this way, owing to the efforts made by head of Philosophy Department and his colleagues definite structural prerequisites and creative forces for the development of philosophy were created in Lithuania even before the restitution of Lithuania's statehood. In the present study, former students and colleagues of Professor E. Meškauskas, drawing upon their experience of academic work and non-official interaction with Professor, give a picture of his pedagogical, academic, and administrative activities, focusing on distinctive qualities of his personality and his interminable efforts not to yield to the diktat of occupational Soviet authorities, totalitarian control, and dogmatism. As early as in his youth in inter-war Lithuania E. Meškauskas, still a student of law at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, grasped independently K. Marx' views, appraising them critically in the context of history of philosophy, just like all other philosophical theories. Upon emergence of an unfavourable geopolitical situation in Lithuania and the failure of K. Marx's socialist forecast to be corroborated in practice, E. Meškauskas' views on Marxism changed markedly. From K. Marx he adopted only the very method of putting forward and solving problems emerging in practice in a scientific way. In other words, E. Meškauskas reduced Marxism, and at the same time philosophy, to a general methodology of science, criticising from this particular standpoint the Soviet Marxism adapted with the purpose of protecting totalitarianism and Russian imperialism. As a philosopher, E. Meškauskas inquired into the problems of gnoseology, materialism, detetminism, development, telations between philosophy and special sciences.However it must be noted that E. Meškauskas cautiously avoided writing, so his legacy does not contain many written texts. His greatest influence was produced by his lectures which he delivered in a very creative manner, avoiding repetition; and also by giving theoretical reports at the Philosophy Depattment sittings or scientific conferences. Throughout the thirty years in the office of head of Philosophy Department at Vilnius University Professor developed independent, scientific, and creative thinking in students and post-graduates, forming a unique school for the ttaining of a national cadre of philosophy teachets and scholars. Based on independence, honesty, rationality and criticism, E. Meškauskas' attitude represented the internal stimulus of his behaviour which allowed him to stay long at the university - avoiding open conflicts with governmental institutions - and achieve positive results in the academic sphere. Professor trained a considerable number of originally-thinking teachers and scholars who independently chose their research subjects among philosophical trends developed in the Western world, avoiding in this way dogmatism and contributing actively to the development of critical stance towards contemporary reality. Surely, both E. Meškauskas and Philosophy Department headed by him would often experience acute criticism from dogmatists and ideological supervisors. However Professor, a profound expert in Marxism, was able to prove that he was right and to protect his colleagues. He did not limit himself exclusively with philosophy, taking an active part in the considerations of research projects promoted by representatives of other humanities, especially historians, and also in dissertation defences and discussions.