Philosophers on the Russian Aggression in Ukraine

Some philosophers believe that, since true philosophy is eternal, it should always remain axiologically and politically neutral, and to be a true philosopher is to stay beyond every political, social, or ethical positions. If this were philosophy, then - to paraphrase Hegel - so much the worse for philosophy. Philosophy that is unable to make judgments in the face of war and the suffering and death of real, living, thinking and feeling human beings, is merely a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. Theoretical and practical reasoning are nothing without the power of judgment. This was the guiding prinsiple of the editor and authors of Philosophers on the Russian Aggression in Ukraine, published in 2023 by Verlag Traugott Bautz GmbH.

This book is a collection of nine essays written by philosophers from various European countries, who are trying to use their philosophical power of judgment and applying it to the still ongoing war in Ukraine. The book symbolically opens with two poems, both exhorting the world to turn its gaze to Ukraine. And, indeed, all the essays turned both my feelings and my thoughts to Ukraine. They include not only theoretical reflections but also many personal and very emotional tales, e.g., descriptions of conversations with people who have experienced the war, with Russians who feel guilty that their country unleashed the war, descriptions of the personal experience of journalists, etc. This book is rich with a diverse range of emotions and feelings, presented as direct and authentic reactions to the war. These reactions include a sense of disorientation and a loss of grounding, feelings of shame, and a broad spectrum of fears - fear of death, fear of losing one's current life, fear of losing one's identity, and fear of disappearing.

However, the authors also grapple with the challenge of conceptually capturing the ongoing flux of events, a task that proves more challenging because thinking and reflection can only engage with the past. As Hegel astutely observed: "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk" (Hegel 1952, p.7). Consequently, any simplifications I will highlight in my review can be attributed to this inherent difficulty. In terms of their conceptual content, these essays primarily explore themes of identity - both personal and social - and freedom - both moral and political. They delve into reflections on pluralistic ontology, celebrating the diversity of identities and values. They also introduce a new philosophy of history, asserting that history is neither singular nor linear, and, most importantly, the effects of history are difficult to9 project, because there exists no predetermined telos of human history. Finally, these essays provide a profound understanding of freedom and its intricate connections to identity.

The first essay Living without Ground, written bei Natalia Artemenko, consists of two parts, differing not only in the date of writing, but also in character. It appears as though the duration of the war has prompted a shift from a purely theoretical academic stance to one that is explicitly engaged. In the first part, written in the spring of 2022, the author establishes a connection between the prevailing situation in Russia and the general state of the postmodern world. However, I find these analyses to be overly generalized in their association of the phenomena of "living without ground" with Kant's Enlightenment project. They fail to elucidate why Russia, which seemingly undergoes modernist and postmodernist changes at a slower pace than other European countries, initiated a war, rather than, for instance, France, England, or Germany. I believe that, for example, the technique and technology criticized by the author as "capable of giving out pseudo-facts, that which is beyond the truth, thereby constructing reality" is itself neither bad nor good. Instead, it is the people who employ these tools for both positive and negative purposes. Such indiscriminate criticism of all products of the Enlightenment was one of Heidegger's mistakes, and I believe that, living a hundred years later, we should not repeat the same mistake.

The second part of the essay, which was written in the spring of 2023 under the influence of the author's experiences and not only the speculative musings of twentieth-century cultural critics, itself already reveals the error in thinking presented in the first part. The attitude of the Russian woman, who asks "Why don't we protest?" indicates that it is not at all true that "in times of post-truth, it is nearly impossible to identify the truth". The words of the elderly lady indicate that it is very easy to distinguish truth from lies and good from evil, even or perhaps precisely, because one is not an intelligent teacher. S. says to the author, "I was ashamed, so ashamed!" This women is able to distinguish what is right from what is wrong thanks to the moral compass that gives us our feeling. What is revealed here, though perhaps without the author's reflective consciousness, that what we really need as an answer for such events as the Russian aggression in Ukraine is not anti-Enlightenment sentiment, but the initiation of a new Emotional Enlightenment. Kant's project opened up many different paths, not limited to the one taken by Heidegger and followed by many twentieth-century critics of Western culture. Familiar to historians of philosophy, censorship for 100 years is showing us that maybe it is time to look for the solutions via other paths. One of these paths runs through the philosophiy of Max Scheler (Scheler 1916) and Nicolai Hartmann (Hartmann 1926), who show the importance of feelings in objective contact with values, and who supplemented Kant's ethics with this perspective.

The essay A Jounalist's Gaze by Helena Cazaereck also draws its most valuable content from the personal and emotional experiences of the author, among others. It commences with a vived recounting of personal memories. Cazaereck recalls her train journey from Warsaw to Kiev, during which she was confronted with individuals asserting. "You jounalists come here to make money, and this is a war to hell". She elaborates on the meticulous document checks at the border, heightened due to the Russian stamp in her passport. The narrative unfolds with the poignant story of Ira, a 50-year-old individual who joined the army. Ukraine was attacked by Russia, but the biggest enemy during the war is always the fear: the fear of death, but also the fear of losing one's identity or disappearing. If someone chose to join the army, it means that her fear of losing identity was bigger than the fear of death. From our choices and actions we learn what really matter for us.

This essay shows the relationship between freedom and identity. As the author rightly noted: "At the core of that identity lies the promise of freedom. And conversely, in fighting for freedom lies a promised identity". This interconnection means that any ban or prohibition can never solve the problem, but only postpone the need to solve it. And extreme prohibitions paradoxically create the potential for emancipation - as happened in Ukraine. Before the war, a great number of Ukrainians were pro-Russian. Today this is impossible. The boundary of what is possible in terms of taking away people's freedom and identity has been crossed. People who previously spoke Russian to each other all their lives are now trying to speak Ukrainian. The essay concludes with the reflection that war makes our images of reality even simpler than normal. The author sees her role, her identity, her response to the war in writing about the war - in her attempts at jounalistic, multifaceted descriptions of the complicated reality of the war - and so in the end her thoughts come full circle, and she goes back to the beginning, where she took that train to Kiev despite all the difficulties!

The essay I appreciate the most in the book is Zura Gvenetadze's Ontology of Insecurity during War. It is probably because the author uses her earlier reflections about the events that had taken place in Georgia. Gvenetadze tells us that situations of crises always reveal phenomena that, in normal times, remain hidden. The insecurity of our existence which is "hidden in the dark" is just a second side of such feelings like trust, "familiarity", or "being at home". "Being at home" is the kind of phenomenon that can potentially never be reflected upon in our lives because of what Edmund Husserl called the "natural attitude" (Husserl 1982, XIX). Until we lose it, we do not appreciate it. The war is one of Karl Jaspers' boundary situations (Jaspers 1922, pp.229-280), i.e., the situation when our "being at home" is shaken and devastated. To feel what it is like to be at home, it is necessary to be alienated from it. This feeling of loss of security is experienced by people who live in a country where their identity is undermined when criticized or considered foreign or bad. What is it like to feel that, for other people, you do not exist? Many Ukrainians before the war did not feel or reflect on their Ukrainianness. Many spoke Russian and identified themselves with Russian culture. For them, the war is that state of crises during which their deeply hidden identity suddenly surfaced. The war, even more clearly than all previous forms of violence and discrimination, made many people aware of their position, their history, and the political reality in which they live.

Just like in the first essay, here is talk of the ground that we need to have under our feet to really know who we are. However, it is not a simplistic critique of the Enlightenment, but a call for a pluralistic ontology. This essay is a wonderful plea for the pluralism of identity. Hannah Arendt, one of the greatest twentieth-century political thinkers said that plurality is the necessary condition for any political life and any community (Arendt 1958, p.7).

And this brings us to the subject of the next essay Towards an Ontology of the Caesura by Mikhail Minakov. This essay "posit[s] eight theses that range from fundamental questions raised by pluralistic ontology to the ontology of History and then to the interpretation of our Zeitgeist" (p.53). Minakov grasps humanness as a creative-destructive existence, as a possibility of a new beginning - to use Hannah Arendt's words (Arendt 1951, p.479; Arendt 1971, p.109). He also states that, for this reason, history should be concerned with being plural and that history is - as also Timothy Snyder claims (Snyder 2022) - a combination of continuities and caesuras. The author proposes to see the Russian-Ukrainian war as a new caesura in the history of the world. We are witnessing the end of the post-Soviet era which itself was spawned by the end of communism and the Cold War. We still do not know the out-come of all the resulting conflicts. The future is still unknown, which raises anxiety. But in the darkness, we can also find hope - to quote Rebecca Solnit - but only if there are some values that we want to pursue. It seems that what gives us hope for this new era, which starts with the Ukrainian Patriotic War, is precisely the beginning of new pluralistic ontology. Ukrainian resistance which starts from the Orange Revolution was called a revolution of dignity. The dignity referenced by Kant in his project of Enlightenment was, from the beginning, intricately linked to the diversity of personal identities. This suggests that the hope for the future lies in embracing and preserving a multitude of individual references to values.

In his War at the End of the End of History, Václav Nemec states that the Russian military aggression against Ukraine is a definitive mark of the end of Fukuyama's "the end of History". We cannot any longer think about history as one linear process of development with a defined and predictable end, which was supposed to be Western liberal democracy and welfare society. The author rightly points out that the West was "in some kind of cynical social contract" with Russia which was an "unwritten and unspoken agreement [...] [to] turn a blind eye" on the violence happening somewhere outside our own Western world. But Russia was never satisfied by the results of the Cold War and always treated this contract as temporary. It was only a matter of time before it would finally terminate this contract in a bloody way. The truth is that Putin began to do it gradually step by step while watching how much the West would allow him. "The new Russian-style 'world order' has been emerging for a long time" (p.68), which we can observe in their politics in Chechnya, Georgia, or Syria. It appears that Western politicians naively and - contrary to what history teaches - believed that the aggressor could be satisfied with a smaller bit. But the current Russian regime should rather be tried as a classic gangster blackmailer, and, so, we also share a large responsibility for everything that is happening in places such as Bucha. There is - as an author of this essay says - "a shadow of our guilt". But - as was claimed already by Karl Jaspers (Jaspers 1963) - the most responsible are those agents who have in their power the means of violence. In fact, there is so much we can learn from the philosophical reflections of, e.g., Karl Jaspers or his friend Hannah Arendt about WWII and its consequences, but for some reason we did not.

The author contends that the Western world could gain insights into Putin's plans for global dominance, including his proposed "final solutions" to the Ukrainian question, through information published by the Russian State Agency RIA Novosti. Unsurprisingly, these solutions bear an analogy to the Nazi "final solutions" for the Jewish Question. According to Timothy Snyder, a distinguished American historian specializing in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe, Russian ideologues like Alexander Dugin or Alexander Prochanov have essentially adapted Nazi ideas to suit Russian objectives. The war in Ukraine should be seen as a clash between modern barbarism and civilization, between dystopian totalitarian power and such values as freedom, democracy, and humanity. We are in a historical moment when everyone (in particular democratic Western countries associated with the EU and NATO) must decide where they stand.

Also, Martin Palous in his essay The Ukrainian Crisis and Us sends us back to philosophical reflections about WWII by evoking Hannah Arendt and her great analyses of totalitarianism. What we should learn from her is knowledge about the instruments and forms in which totalitarian rule was carried out so that we can act responsibly, i.e., to find an adequate response to the current manifestation of totalitarianism. Just as the author of the previous essay. Palous states that we could find all these totalitarian mechanisms and instruments already in Russian politics with regard to Georgia in 2008 and in the conflict in the Donbas in 2014. The current Russian state has all the features of the totalitarian system described by historians and philosophers alike: power in the hands of a dictator, surrounded by his loyal accomplices and isolatet by an ideological "cordon sanitary", army, police and secret components of the apparatus of the state in the hands of that dictator, total disregard for the independent judiciary, control over all media, and systematic brain washing of the Russian population, and also control over Russia's economy through gigantic enterprises in state hands or through a circle of oligarchs completely devotet to the dictator. Russia has also broken all rules of war and committed genocides. According to the author, this Russian regime differs, however, from the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century by a surprising change of the guiding ideology. Lenin's progressive communism was replaced by conservative tsarist traditions from before the 1917 revolution. To understand the possibility of such replacement, one should delve into Hannah Arendt's analyses of how totalitarian systems shape individuals who are incapable of independent thought, and thus susceptible to adopting any ideology (see: Arendt 1951, pp. 460-479; Arendt 2006). When discussing the condition of unthinking in her Life of the Mind, she writes "What people then get used to is less te content of the rules, a close examination of which would always lead them into perplexity, than the possession of rules under which to subsume particulars. [...] The more firmly men hold to the old code, the more eager will they be to assimilate themselves to the new one, which in practise means that the readiest to obey will be those who were the most respectable pillars of society, the least likely to indulge in thoughts [...]" (Arendt 1971, p. 177).

Just like the others, the essay ends with the recognition of the unpredictability of even the near future. The author cites one of the greatest twentieth-century Czech philosophers, Jan Patocka, and reminds us that it is the end of the belief, shared at least by central European countries, that the post-communist transformation can be seen as a central historical event of the twentieth century which led other European countries to dream of liberal democracy. Europe and the European Logos cease to be a center of the world.

The reference to totalitarianism is also present in the next essay. Ekaterina Shashlova and Katerina Stecenko in Overcoming Censorship invite us to consider war as one of the ways, alongside such tools as censorship and intimidation, for tyrants to retain power. Russian aggression against Ukraine should be seen as nothing other than just the continuation of Putin's tyranny, which can be defined like Alexander Dobrohotov defines, as "a forcefully imposed alliance between the leader and the people, nullifying the formal political institutions of the republic due to their perceived or actual impotence. Hand in hand with the development of tyranny emerges a new type of war with its particular legitimization". Under the watch of the whole world, Putin has been expanding his methods by breaking, and at the same time changing, the Russian law step by step. He illegally amended the Russian Constitution twice, in 2008 and in 2020, to enable himself to serve consecutive (third and fourth) terms as president. The change made in 2020 will allow him to run for the presidency again in 2024 and 2030. Additionally, in 2014 and 2022, he created amendments with regards to the inclusion of occupied Ukrainian territories within the Russian Federation. He passed, also gradually in response to the current situation, a series of laws against freedom of speech, to increase control over the political behavior of citizens. Since 2011, he has consistently fought against any political opposition and civic movements opposing his policies, depriving citizens of their right to be political subjects. He uses all the methods described already by Aristotle (in Politics, 5.1313 a-b), as the essay's authors rightly note (pp. 91-92), and well-known also in sociology and political science, like "the lopping off of outstanding men", "the destruction of the proud", and "the prevention of the formation of study-circles and other conference for debate" to regularly destroy the social capital of Russian citizens in order to increase his power over them.

But Shashlova and Stecenko's essay also describes the ways in which Russian citizens tried to "overcome" this growing censorship. They give us a wonderful prolegomenon to analyze what happens to philosophy and philosophical language in times of tyranny. I think that also Polish readers can find many analogies to the phenomena we had to deal with both in philosophy and in broadly understood cultural activity during the era of censorship in the People's Republic of Poland. We all know from Polish history such phenomena like using irony to criticize a tyrant's policy or adding obligatory chapters containing references to the officially binding ideology to all philosophical books. But one cannot forget that this culture of writing and speaking under tyranny has to be related to the culture of reading and listening, in which the recipient must know the code hidden within official messages. And here we can find some disadvantages of such creations, such as the fact that it may be incomprehensible to many people, and this is the situation in which such oppositional activity does not really threaten the tyrant's power. The analyses of the phenomena of such "overcoming-censorship" cultural creations has of course value in itself. But this essay is also important insofar as it shows that, in every country, no matter how tyranical, there are always people who hope for change and who are trying in some way to express their resistance, regardless of the issue of the effectiveness of their actions. They do what they think is right and possible in a situation that seems hopeless.

In his essay Aggression Regression: On the Persistent Anachronism of Putin's Dreams and Fears, Georgios Tsagdis also proposes that the Russian aggression on Ukraine itself is a continuation of a much broader and ongoing process, which was and still is ignored both by other countries and by most Russian people, busy with their daily affairs and concerns. He recalls Walter Benjamin's diagnosis from "Theses on the Philosophy of History" that the state of emergency is indeed not the exception but the rule. He rightly points out that the prelude to war in Ukraine which happened in 2008 in Georgia and in 2014 in Crimea was both well-known and too much overlooked. Public opinion was always shocked but only for a moment, and, as fast as it reacted, it also forgot and buried the problem under the carpet. Putin has consistently viewed the disintegration of the USSR as the most significant historical setback and sees the granting of autonomy to Ukraine as Lenin's greatest mistake. Regarding Crimea, the transfer of this region to the Ukrainian SSR was permissible within the Soviet framework. However, following the USSR's collapse, Putin deemed the ratification of this status as a crime.

Tsagdis talks about the "chimeric" reality into which Putin has returned Russia by building over decades a state inspired by the Soviet state apparatus. He rejected communism and replaced it with Orthodoxy as the principal ideology of control. So, the content that legitimizes his authoritarian apparatus is different, but the form of the apparatus is the same. It looks like many similar tendencies we can also observe in other parts of Central and Eastern Europe (like Poland, Slovakia, Hungary). The official declared values do not coincide with the realized values. In the Russian case, for instance, as Tsagdis noticed, we can observe this tedency in the fact that the Russian apparatus is based on "the international capitalist system that this apparatus purports to question". I found the term chimeric reality very useful and expressive and propose to use it more broadly, also outside of the context of Russian political reality, to describe each case of such glaring discrepancy between declared and realized values.

The author of this essay draws attention to three things that he considers most worrying with regards to the war in Ukraine: (1) the role of China, which not only benefits from the production and supply of equipment to Russia and cheap import of raw materials from Russia's isolated economy, but also in this way more and more effectively establishes itself as an alternative to the US dollar's financial dominance - and we have to remember that China, just the same as Russia, does not care about such a thing as human rights, (2) the role of the US, EU, and UK, which remain ambivalent: The elites of these countries have been observing Putin's violent, antidemocratic, and imperialist actions for a long time, and their current reaction can be seen as a temporary submission to public opinion, but they are still open to an agreement with Putin, (3) the aestetic spectacularization of the war, which made it unreal and therefore support the existence of the above-mentioned phenomenon of chimeric reality.

The last essay, written by Paul Willemarck and entitled Ukraine's Scourge, seems to give us more hope and, for this reason, is a good conclusion to the whole book. The author writes about the violence and draws our attention to the fact that violence can also been seen as a form of powerlessness. When the ruler loses authority and the obedience of his subjects, the only thing left for him is violence. French sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu noticed that those in power use physical violence only when the symbolic violence on which their power originally delivered, start to become insufficient. So, the war can be seen as a last resort against the loss of power. What kind of power? The power over minds. From this perpective, Putin's aggression against Ukraine can be considered as a sign of his weakness. He himself admits this and claims that he would prefer not to use violence. But he did, because he does not understand anything other than imperialism. For him, Ukraine's resistance is not a struggle for independence but a move to the side of Western imperialism. Putin is fighting against Ukraine but also against Russians who would have a different non-authoritarian vision of their country.

For this reason, this war is actually being fought on two fronts: the first a physical one, where real physical people are dying everyday - but all this means nothing to Putin because he has no respect for the lives of any people whether Ukrainians or Russians; and the second informational one, which really matters for him: It is a battle for souls, for the vision of society, the state, the world system as a whole. It is a war for basic values and the vision of political and social reality. On both fronts, it does not retreat from anything, all means are acceptable: genocide and torture, as well as propaganda, fake news, or post-truths. But, on this second and most important front for Putin, he is losing this war - at least in relation to the minds of Ukrainians. Before the invasion, Ukrainians were much more divided in their attitude towards Russia. Certainly, the process of distancing themselves from Russia, particularly among young Ukrainians, commenced during the Orange Revolution in 2004-2005. Nevertheless, it appears that the invasion on 24 February 2022 solidified this separation, making it increasingly difficult to find Russian allies within the minds of Ukrainians.

What philosophers can learn from this and many other similar stories ist that, among the consequences of aggression, we find not only destruction and suffering but also resistance, courage, and solidarity. Paul Willemarck contents, "Violence leaves traces. The traces left by the Stalinist terror are probably not unrelated to the furious resistance of the Ukrainians". Similarly, the trace left by Russian violence against Poland in our history are likely connected to the reaction of the Polish people to the war in Ukraine. Hence, Putin's information war is also largely aimed at Poland. However, what appears most crucial here is that the traces left by the current war will bear fruit in the future, and whatever emerges from them will not align with Putin's preferences. This war represents Ukraine's stance for values that clash with Putin's worldview - specifically, human dignity and the right to self-determination for every individual and community that embraces its distinct identity. If Ukrainians turn to the EU, it is not because, as Putin believes, they want to shift from one empire to another. Instead, it is because they believe in the possibility of a community of states where these values are repected.

Alicja Pietras