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Russia’s war against Ukraine, and especially Ukrainians’ heroic determination to defend their homeland, has sparked a lively interest in such concepts and phenomena as self-sacrifice, courage and political freedom. How can we explain this determination in the case of Ukrainians, and lack thereof in the case of Europeans? Does Europe possess an intellectual capacity and adequate vocabulary to capture the essence of sacrifice?
Certain doubts regarding this were conveyed by the famous German philosopher Jürgen Habermas who, in a text written 2 months after Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, argued that although Europeans admire Ukrainians’ resolve and courage, they cannot fully empathize with them because the former are in the grip of what he called “the post-heroic mentality”. It’s an echo of an argument Habermas made a long time ago when he wrote that “Enlightenment morality does away with sacrifice”.
In a purely rational universe where equally rational agents meet each other to deliberate and seek compromises, there is no need any more for conflict, struggle, risk-taking, heroic deeds, radical decisions and extreme, life-and-death situations. This is the reason why it is so difficult for many in the West to rise to the call of responsibility and fully appreciate the broader meaning of Ukraine’s sacrifice. What precludes the identification of the phenomenon of sacrifice and its moral-existential import? How can we explain the current misalignment between the political elites in Western Europe and Central-East Europe?
Many in the West have become complacent after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis Fukuyama’s declaration that the end of history was reached. The Western elites saw liberal democracy as the unrivalled pinnacle of human development, the last stop in the march of progress, and accordingly, history and politics were willingly abolished in favour of economics, trade, international law and abstract morality. No real decisions or sacrifices needed to be made anymore. In this post-historical era, people don’t even need to cultivate any “traditional” virtues anymore, especially courage – why on earth would you need courage in this post-historical paradise?
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The whole of Europe is seen as a big safe space where you only meet like-minded liberals, at most respectful opponents who listen to each other and aspire to find common ground and eventually seek consensus. In this picture of social reality, not only politics and history become obsolete, but the meaning of freedom invariably changes – it becomes disentangled from responsibility.
Freedom becomes purely negative – don’t touch me, don’t interfere, stay away from me, I am pursuing my own interests, and no one can tell me anything. This is the reason why in Lithuania, and many other European countries, it is still very difficult to talk about conscription – people believe that someone else will sacrifice for their homeland in times of crisis; why should it be me? How can the state presume that it has the right to take me out of my life, and to “ruin my career”?
The prevalence of this egocentric worldview confirms the fact that we are losing the sense of positive freedom – not freedom from, but freedom to, freedom to do something meaningful, to care for this common world of ours, to act responsibly, to build and creatively project our future. I believe that this is precisely Ukraine’s gift to all of us today: a unique chance to become historical and responsible agents once again, to rise up to the call of responsibility, to become engaged actors instead of passive and frightened spectators, or, worse, indifferent consumers.
In this context, it is worthwhile to return to the rich moral and political philosophy of two seminal thinkers of the 20th century: German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt and the Czech thinker Jan Patočka.
Arendt is known for her attempt to retrieve an original concept of politics, which stems from the Greek word polis that refers to a unique form of political life developed by ancient Athenians. It was a way of life that centred around daily active participation on the part of the citizenry in daily affairs of the city. Athenians created a space of appearance where they could meet as equals and discuss with each other, persuade one another and project their common future. The public space was a domain where speech and persuasion reigned supreme, rather than violence and manipulation. Athens even paid their citizens to take part in political life and sit on the juries.
They had not only elections and constant rotation of citizens through various offices, but also established the principle of lottery, which showed a massive trust in all ordinary citizens (everyone could become a magistrate), a level of trust unimaginable today. Rotation and lottery were expressive of Aristotle’s idea that democracy is a regime where “all citizens rule and are ruled in turn”. As a result of this emphasis on active participation and direct engagement in politics, citizens developed an acute sense of civic responsibility for the world which they inhabited. They understood themselves as part of a larger whole to which they made a quite significant contribution.
When you understand yourself as part of a larger whole, self-transcendence becomes a key existential orientation in your life. You are then reaching outwards, not being stuck in your private life with its narrow interests and wants, but constantly reaching forward in a gesture of care and solidarity with others. As Pericles says in his famous 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.”
In politics, the ethical notion of self-transcendence translates into courage and willingness to self-sacrifice. Accordingly, for Arendt, courage becomes the most important political virtue: “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.” (1) Political responsibility requires from us to transcend our private interests for the sake of the common world.
In authentic politics, concern for the fate of the world takes precedence over satisfaction of biological, economic or consumer needs. It takes courage to leave the protective security of one’s private sphere and to devote oneself to the affairs of the city, exposing oneself to the light of publicity and judgmental gaze of others, including one’s adversaries.
That’s why, 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.” (2) It’s a rather strict distinction between life and world, where life is understood as private and biological, and world as intersubjective and cultural-political. This distinction is very similar to another Arendtian distinction between private and public. Arendt says that for a true citizen, the fate of the world is more important than personal gain or individual happiness. She takes inspiration from Machiavelli, who, as she writes, “was more interested in Florence than in salvation of his soul”. (3)
This form of political self-transcendence gives birth to a very peculiar feeling that Arendt, following the American Founding Fathers, characterized as “public happiness”. For political actors, participation in public affairs is not a burden or a nuisance, but a form of enjoyment which they know cannot be experienced anywhere else except in public with others. Public happiness, again, refers to something that cannot be reduced or assimilated to individual happiness. This raises the question for us today: do we recognize this notion of “public happiness”? It seems to me that more or less everyone today feels merely individual happiness. This is a clear sign of our depoliticized mindset.
One of the deep problems today is that we tend to concentrate exclusively on the needs of private life and forget the world and the public. Arendt associates privacy with work, physical survival and satisfaction of basic needs, and publicity with freedom, action, speech and solidarity. In the public realm, we emerge as unique persons who, faced with different perspectives on the same world, constantly test ourselves and thus form our distinctive worldviews. This aspect can be explained by the ontological category of plurality – a recognition that the world is inhabited by different persons who bring their own unique viewpoints to the table.
As Arendt writes: the public interest is “the common good because it is localised in the world which we have in common without owning it.” (4) In other words, the world is not given only to me, my friends and comrades, but is rather created and sustained by a multitude of people who, through the diversity of standpoints, establish the world as a common space of appearance. This vision of politics is nourished not only by plurality, but also by natality – a human capacity to create something completely new and unexpected.
Today in the West, many people do not feel as citizens, as plural and natal beings. Contemporary life is built on the primacy of economics, work, career, and entertainment. The dominance of social media and algorithmic governance alienates us from each other, from strangers, and ultimately from ourselves. For most people, public participation boils down to clicking the like or hate button on social media, at most – casting a ballot every 4 or 5 years. We’ve become passive spectators at best, and apathetic, indifferent individuals at worst. That’s why I think that today we should try to retrieve the materiality of the public space (be it town halls, councils, public discussions or something of that sort) – to recreate a public space as a space of appearance.
Online world lacks this element of direct, eye-to-eye engagement with one’s peers that is characteristic of a human conversation. Direct engagement, especially if nourished by a willingness to listen, is a civilising practice that allows for nuances to spring up in the process of conversation and eventually mitigate one’s ideological fervour, whereas online tweeting and commenting tends to erase the presence of real humanity, and therefore sharpens the tribal lens through which we view words on screens. But how can we recapitulate this material side of a public space in present circumstances – that’s, of course, an open question.
Jan Patočka was a philosopher who not only wrote about the meaning of sacrifice in the technological age, but in fact himself embodies the morality of sacrifice. In 1977, at the end of his life, Patočka decided to take a risk and become a spokesperson of the famous Charter 77 dissident movement in Czechoslovakia. When Václav Havel approached him with this request, Patočka hesitated for a while because of his advanced age and failing health, but eventually he dared to accept the challenge. He took a leading role in the movement and, within a couple of months, published two important texts in the underground highlighting and explaining the Charter’s moral aims and broader spiritual meaning.
These texts put moral principles, especially human rights, ahead of political calculations, and thus provided a normative, moral dimension which was missing in the official manifesto. The circulation of these texts by Patočka in the underground further strengthened the resolve of the dissidents, but also intensified the regime’s attacks on Patočka. He was repeatedly interrogated, and after the last interrogation, which lasted about 12 hours, his health deteriorated rapidly, and he died a few days later. Since then, Czech dissidents and Charter fellows assigned a martyrological connotation to Patocka’s death, interpreting it as a sacrifice for freedom and higher principles.
In two influential Charta 77 texts, Patočka forcefully argues that there are certain things, certain principles or moral ideals worth dying for. His own actions embody a rare occurrence in intellectual life when the words and deeds of an intellectual in fact go together. High-sounding rhetoric becomes empty if it’s not backed up and corroborated by experience and concrete actions. As he writes in one of those 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 fact that the technological (or, has he called it, „technoscientific“) worldview prevents us from acknowledging and appreciating the moral meaning of self-sacrifice. From a technological, economic or scientific point of view, sacrifice is impossible – it is only utilization of resources. That’s why there’s so much cynicism today in the West regarding Ukraine: Ukrainians are robbed of subjectivity, regarded only as cogs, statistics, small pieces in a giant geopolitical chessboard. Ukrainian soldiers and citizens are seen as resources, a standing reserve of energy next to tanks and weapons.
In this context, it becomes very difficult to generate what Patočka calls “the solidarity of the shaken”, solidarity of co-sufferers who find themselves in the common situation of fragility and vulnerability, an overwhelming and tragic encounter with evil. Such solidarity is lacking when people and nations care only about themselves. That’s why Patočka and Arendt were so critical of the notion of sovereignty – it creates an illusion of self-sufficiency, self-mastery and total control. It can only lead to national egoism and dangerous dreams of expansion. Arendt openly claims that true freedom can only be experienced under the conditions of “non-sovereignty”, or plurality.
Unfortunately, despite all the horrors of Russia’s war on Ukraine, it has still not shaken Europe existentially. And part of the blame goes to technology again, especially to global media and social media, which is one of prime examples of contemporary technology. When you see war footage in the news, it becomes routiniseed, only one news piece among many other news, and gradually we become de-sensitised, ambiguous, and finally indifferent. Indifference: it’s a very important ethical term. When formulating his concept of sacrifice, Patočka says that sacrifice is a return of non-indifference, of a sense that there are higher and lower things in life.
Technology, by contrast, makes us believe that there is only pure immanence, pure horizontality, where nothing really matters, everything is relative, whereas Peter Pomerantsev famously said “nothing is true and everything is possible”. Ukrainians who embody courage, sacrifice and belief in certain principles give us a rare chance to wake up, to be shaken out of our cosy, comfortable, habitual worldview, what Patočka sometimes calls “everydayness”, sometimes “bondage to life”. Ukrainians give us a chance to make a leap from the shallow anonymity and boredom to a level of authentically human existence where we begin to care about something more, something that surpasses and overcomes our enslavement to material things and consumption.
I also strongly believe that we, intellectuals, have a very clear duty today: to listen to Ukrainians, to Ukrainian voices. They need to be heard as loudly as possible, and we need to understand what they are telling us. That’s why I want to end with two quotes by well-known Ukrainians. Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko argues that there are two hearts of Europe, two different ethics or moralities which are distinctive to Europe:
“One is the ethics of the agora. It presumes an ethics of exchange. In the agora, we give away something to get more than we had. We exchange goods, objects, ideas, stories and experiences. The agora is a positive-sum game: everyone wins, even though some try to win more than others.
The other ethical system is that of agon. Agon is a battlefield. We enter agon not to exchange, but to fight. We dream of winning but are also prepared to lose – including to lose ourselves, even in the literal sense of dying for a great cause. This is not the logic of a positive-sum game; there can be no “win-win”, because one of the sides will certainly lose.
Europe has built itself as a combination of agora and agon. It bears the image of both the knight and the bourgeois. Europe’s cultural legacy is unthinkable without the ethics of agon: whether it is medieval novels with their cult of chivalry and loyalty, or early modern dramas whose characters stand to die for their principles and passions. But Europe is also unthinkable without the culture of the agora, of conversation, compromise, of softness.”
Yermolenko rightly asserts that today’s Europe wants to practice exclusively the ethics of agora. There is a palpable disequilibrium between these two ethics today. The ethics of agon, the ethics of courage and sacrifice – this is what Europeans need to remember today, and to give it sufficient weight and consideration. Not being afraid of questioning the “post-heroic” mentality that defines Europe, as Habermas claims.
But I want to end with an optimistic note. The famous Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak writes in his latest book Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation: “Ukrainian history provides a foundation for a limited but defensible optimism. It’s not unique in that sense. Just think of David and Goliath, the Greco-Persian wars, the fall of fascism and communism, the stories of Frodo and Harry Potter. It doesn’t matter whether these stories are fictional or real. What matters is that they remind us that the devil – in the Bible or in history – is a pathetic creature. He can destroy, enslave and corrupt, but he cannot win.”
1) Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
2) Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future
3) Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment 1959-1975
4) Hannah Arendt, Public rights and private interests
This text is the transcription of the lecture Simas Čelutka gave at a conference organised by the Lithuanian cultural review Kulturos Barai and Eurozine in Vilnius, October 2024.
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