Ukraine and the way forward for post-heroic Europe

Ukrainians’ heroic defence of their homeland has raised the query of whether or not different European nations would possess an identical dedication within the occasion of Russian aggression.

Doubts about this have been conveyed by the German thinker Jürgen Habermas, who two months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine printed an article arguing that though Europeans admire Ukrainians’ resolve and braveness, they can not absolutely empathize with them. This was as a result of Europeans possess what Habermas known as a ‘post-heroic mentality’. It’s an echo of an argument he made a very long time in the past when he wrote that ‘Enlightenment morality does away with sacrifice’.

In a purely rational universe, the place equally rational brokers meet one another to deliberate and search compromises, there is no such thing as a want for battle, battle, risk-taking, heroic deeds, radical choices and excessive, life-and-death conditions. Because of this it’s so troublesome for a lot of within the West to rise to the decision of accountability and absolutely respect the broader that means of Ukraine’s sacrifice. Certainly, does Europe even possess an enough vocabulary to seize the essence of sacrifice?

Many within the West grew to become complacent after the autumn of the Berlin Wall and Francis Fukuyama’s declaration that the top of historical past had been reached. Western elites noticed liberal democracy because the unrivalled pinnacle of human growth, the final cease within the march of progress; accordingly, historical past and politics have been abolished in favour of economics, commerce, worldwide legislation and summary morality. No existential choices or sacrifices wanted to be made anymore. On this post-historical period, individuals didn’t have to domesticate any ‘traditional’ virtues, not to mention braveness. In any case, why on earth would you want braveness on this post-historical paradise?

The impression can come up that Europe sees itself as a giant secure house the place one solely meets like-minded liberals, or not less than respectful opponents, who aspire to search out frequent floor and ultimately discover consensus. On this image of social actuality, politics and historical past not solely grow to be out of date, however the that means of freedom invariably adjustments – it turns into disentangled from accountability.

Freedom turns into purely detrimental – don’t contact me, don’t intervene, steer clear of me, I’m pursuing my very own pursuits, and nobody can inform me something. In Lithuania, and lots of different European international locations, it’s nonetheless very troublesome to speak about conscription – individuals consider that another person will sacrifice themselves for his or her homeland in instances of disaster. Why ought to it’s me? How can the state presume that it has the correct to take me out of my life, and to ‘ruin my career’?

Ukraine’s present to Europe

The prevalence of this selfish worldview confirms that we’re dropping the sense of optimistic freedom – not freedom from, however freedom to, freedom to do one thing significant, to take care of this frequent world of ours, to behave responsibly, to construct and creatively undertaking our future. I argue that that is Ukraine’s present to all of us at present: a novel probability to grow to be historic and accountable brokers as soon as once more, to rise to the decision of accountability, to grow to be engaged actors as a substitute of passive and frightened spectators, and even worse: detached shoppers.

On this context, it’s value returning to the ethical and political philosophy of two seminal thinkers of the 20 th century: Hannah Arendt and Jan Patočka.

Arendt is understood for her try and retrieve an authentic idea of politics, one which stemmed from the Greek idea of the polis. A singular type of political life developed by historical Athenians, it centred round lively participation on the a part of the citizenry within the every day affairs of the town. Athenians created an area of look the place they may meet as equals and focus on with one another and undertaking their frequent future. The general public house was a site the place speech and persuasion reigned supreme, somewhat than violence and manipulation. Athens even paid its residents to participate in political life and sit on the juries.

They not solely held elections and consistently rotated residents by numerous places of work, but additionally established the precept of lottery, displaying a stage of belief unimaginable at present (everybody may grow to be a Justice of the Peace). Rotation and lottery have been expressive of Aristotle’s concept that democracy is a regime the place ‘all citizens rule and are ruled in turn’. On account of this emphasis on lively participation and direct engagement, residents developed a robust sense of civic accountability for the world they inhabited. They understood themselves as half of a bigger complete, to which they made a major contribution.

Whenever you perceive your self as half of a bigger complete, self-transcendence turns into a key existential orientation. You aren’t caught in your non-public life with its slender pursuits and wishes, however consistently reaching ahead in a gesture of care and solidarity. As Pericles says in his well-known Funeral Oration: ‘We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics minds his own business – we say that he has no business here at all.’

Hannah Arendt and political braveness

In politics, the moral notion of self-transcendence interprets into braveness and willingness to self-sacrifice. Accordingly, for Arendt, braveness turns into crucial political advantage: ‘Whoever entered the political realm had first to be ready to risk his life, and too great a love for life obstructed freedom, was a sure sign of slavishness.’ Political accountability requires us to transcend our non-public pursuits for the sake of the frequent world.

In genuine politics, concern for the destiny of the world takes priority over satisfaction of organic, financial or shopper wants. It takes braveness to go away the protecting safety of 1’s non-public sphere and to dedicate oneself to the affairs of the town, exposing oneself to the sunshine of publicity and judgmental gaze of others, together with one’s adversaries.

That’s the reason, as Arendt writes: ‘Courage liberates men from their worry about life for the freedom of the world. Courage is indispensable because in politics not life but the world is at stake.’ This strict distinction between life and world, the place life is known as non-public and organic, and world as intersubjective and cultural-political, is analogous to Arendt’s distinction between non-public and public. Arendt says that for a real citizen, the destiny of the world is extra vital than private achieve or particular person happiness. She takes inspiration from Machiavelli, who, she writes, ‘was more interested in Florence than in salvation of his soul’.

Public happiness vs. particular person happiness

This type of political self-transcendence provides beginning to a peculiar feeling that Arendt, following the American Founding Fathers, characterised as ‘public happiness’. For political actors, participation in public affairs isn’t a burden or a nuisance, however a type of enjoyment which they know can’t be skilled besides in public with others. Public happiness, once more, refers to one thing that can not be diminished or assimilated to particular person happiness. This raises the query for us at present: can we acknowledge this notion of ‘public happiness’?

At this time we have a tendency to pay attention completely on the wants of personal life and neglect the world and the general public. Arendt associates privateness with work, bodily survival and the satisfaction of fundamental wants, and publicity with freedom, motion, speech and solidarity. Within the public realm, we emerge as distinctive individuals who, confronted with totally different views on the identical world, consistently take a look at ourselves and thus kind our distinctive worldviews. This side will be defined by the ontological class of plurality – a recognition that the world is inhabited by totally different individuals who convey their very own distinctive viewpoints to the desk.

As Arendt writes: the general public curiosity is ‘the common good because it is localised in the world which we have in common without owning it’. In different phrases, the world isn’t given solely to me, my mates and comrades, however is created and sustained by a mess of people that, by the range of standpoints, set up the world as a standard house of look. This imaginative and prescient of politics is nourished not solely by plurality, but additionally by natality – a human capability to create one thing fully new and surprising.

Recreating a public house

At this time, many individuals in Europe don’t really feel like residents, as plural and natal beings. Up to date life is constructed on the primacy of economics, work, profession and leisure. Social media and algorithmic governance alienate us from one another, from strangers, and in the end from ourselves. For most individuals, public participation boils right down to clicking the like or hate button on social media and, at most, casting a poll each 4 or 5 years. We’ve grow to be passive spectators at finest, and apathetic, detached people at worst.

That’s why at present we must always attempt to retrieve the materiality of the general public house (be it city halls, councils, or public discussions) – to recreate public house as an area of look.

The net world lacks this factor of direct, eye-to-eye engagement with one’s friends that’s attribute of a human dialog. Direct engagement, particularly if nourished by a willingness to pay attention, is a civilising apply that permits for nuances to spring up within the means of dialog and ultimately mitigate one’s ideological fervour. On-line tweeting and commenting, alternatively, tends to erase the presence of actual humanity, and subsequently sharpens the tribal lens by which we view phrases on screens. However the best way to recreate this materials facet of the general public house beneath current circumstances? That’s in fact an open query.

The sacrifice of Jan Patočka

Jan Patočka was a thinker who not solely wrote in regards to the that means of sacrifice within the technological age, however himself embodied the morality of sacrifice. In 1977, on the finish of his life, Patočka grew to become a spokesperson of the Constitution 77 dissident motion in Czechoslovakia. When Václav Havel approached him to think about accomplish that, Patočka hesitated due to his superior age and failing well being. However ultimately he dared to just accept the problem. He took a number one function within the motion and, inside a few months, printed two vital texts within the underground highlighting and explaining the Constitution’s ethical goals and broader religious that means.

The texts put ethical ideas, particularly human rights, forward of political calculations, and thus offered a normative, ethical dimension that was lacking within the official manifesto of the Constitution. They strengthened the resolve of the dissidents, but additionally intensified the regime’s assaults on Patočka. He was repeatedly interrogated. After the final interrogation, which lasted about twelve hours, his well being deteriorated quickly, and he died a number of days later. Since then, Czech dissidents have assigned a martyrological connotation to Patocka’s demise, decoding it as a sacrifice for freedom and better ideas.

Patočka’s personal actions embody a uncommon incidence in mental life when the phrases and deeds of an mental coincide. Rhetoric turns into empty if not backed up and corroborated by expertise and concrete actions. As Patočka wrote in a type of Charta texts: ‘Our people have once more become aware that there are things for which it is worthwhile to suffer, that the things for which we might have to suffer are those which make life worthwhile, and that without them all our arts, literature, and culture become mere trades leading only from the desk to the pay office and back.’

What mattered to Patočka was the truth that the technological (or as he known as it, the ‘technoscientific’) worldview prevents us from acknowledging and appreciating the ethical that means of self-sacrifice. From a technological, financial or scientific viewpoint, sacrifice is barely the utilization of assets. That’s why there’s a lot cynicism at present within the West relating to Ukraine. Ukrainians are robbed of subjectivity, regarded solely as statistics, small items in a geopolitical chessboard. Ukrainian troopers and residents are seen as assets, a standing reserve of power subsequent to tanks and weapons.

The solidarity of the shaken

On this context, it turns into very troublesome to generate what Patočka calls ‘the solidarity of the shaken’, that means the solidarity of co-sufferers who discover themselves within the frequent scenario of fragility and vulnerability, an amazing and tragic encounter with evil and oppression. Such solidarity is missing when individuals and nations care solely about themselves. That’s why Patočka and Arendt have been so important of the notion of sovereignty – it creates an phantasm of self-sufficiency, self-mastery and whole management. It could solely result in nationwide egoism and harmful goals of growth. Arendt overtly claims that true freedom can solely be skilled beneath the circumstances of ‘non-sovereignty’, or plurality.

Regardless of all of the horrors of Russia’s battle on Ukraine, it has nonetheless not shaken Europe existentially. And a part of the blame goes to know-how once more, particularly to world media and social media. Whenever you see battle footage within the information, it turns into routinised, one piece of reports amongst many others. Regularly we grow to be de-sensitised, ambivalent, and eventually detached.

Indifference: it’s an important moral time period. When formulating his idea of sacrifice, Patočka says that sacrifice is a return of non-indifference, a way that there are increased and decrease issues in life. Know-how, against this, makes us consider that there’s solely pure immanence, pure horizontality, the place nothing actually issues, the place the whole lot is relative. The place, in Peter Pomerantsev’s formulation, ‘nothing is true and everything is possible’.

Ukrainians embody braveness, sacrifice and perception in sure ideas. They provide us uncommon an opportunity to get up, to be shaken out of our cosy, snug, recurring worldview, what Patočka typically known as ‘everydayness’, typically ‘bondage to life’. Ukrainians give us an opportunity to make the leap from the shallow anonymity and tedium to genuine human existence, the place we start to care about one thing extra, one thing that surpasses and overcomes our enslavement to materials issues and consumption.

Europe, the knight and the bourgeois

Intellectuals have a really clear obligation at present: to hearken to Ukrainians, to Ukrainian voices. They must be heard as loudly as potential, and we have to perceive what they’re telling us. That’s why I wish to finish by quoting the thinker Volodymyr Yermolenko. Writing in Eurozine, Yermolenko argues that there are two hearts of Europe, two totally different ethics or moralities:

One is the ethics of the agora. It presumes an ethics of change. Within the agora, we give away one thing to get greater than we had. We change items, objects, concepts, tales and experiences. The agora is a positive-sum recreation: everybody wins, though some attempt to win greater than others. The opposite moral system is that of agon. Agon is a battlefield. We enter agon to not change, however to struggle. We dream of successful however are additionally ready to lose – together with to lose ourselves, even within the literal sense of dying for a fantastic trigger. This isn’t the logic of a positive-sum recreation; there will be no ‘win-win’, as a result of one of many sides will definitely lose.

There’s a palpable disequilibrium between these two ethics at present. The ethics of agon, the ethics of braveness and sacrifice – that is what Europeans want to recollect at present, and to provide it ample weight and consideration. Not being afraid to query the ‘post-heroic’ mentality that presently prevails in Europe. The way forward for Europe depends upon the readiness to be brave.

 

An earlier model of this text was first printed in Voxeurop. It’s primarily based on a lecture given at a convention organised by the Lithuanian cultural assessment Kulturos Barai along with New Jap Europe and Eurozine in Vilnius in October 2024.