Ukraine and the future of post-heroic Europe

Ukrainians’ heroic defence of their homeland has raised the question of whether other European nations would possess a similar determination in the event of Russian aggression.

Doubts about this were conveyed by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who two months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine published an article arguing that although Europeans admire Ukrainians’ resolve and courage, they cannot fully empathize with them. This was because Europeans possess what Habermas called a ‘post-heroic mentality’. It’s an echo of an argument he 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 for conflict, struggle, risk-taking, heroic deeds, radical decisions and extreme, life-and-death situations. This is 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. Indeed, does Europe even possess an adequate vocabulary to capture the essence of sacrifice?

Many in the West became complacent after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis Fukuyama’s declaration that the end of history had been reached. Western elites saw liberal democracy as the unrivalled pinnacle of human development, the last stop in the march of progress; accordingly, history and politics were abolished in favour of economics, trade, international law and abstract morality. No existential decisions or sacrifices needed to be made anymore. In this post-historical era, people didn’t need to cultivate any ‘traditional’ virtues, let alone courage. After all, why on earth would you need courage in this post-historical paradise?

The Field of Mars at the Lychakiv Cemetery, Lviv. December 2023. Image: President Of Ukraine / Source: Wikimedia Commons

The impression can arise that Europe sees itself as a big safe space where one only meets like-minded liberals, or at least respectful opponents, who aspire to find common ground and eventually find consensus. In this picture of social reality, politics and history not only 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. In Lithuania, and many other European countries, it is still very difficult to talk about conscription – people believe that someone else will sacrifice themselves 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’?

Ukraine’s gift to Europe

The prevalence of this egocentric worldview confirms 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 argue that this is Ukraine’s gift to all of us today: a unique chance to become historical and responsible agents once again, to rise to the call of responsibility, to become engaged actors instead of passive and frightened spectators, or even worse: indifferent consumers.

In this context, it is worth returning to the moral and political philosophy of two seminal thinkers of the twentieth century: Hannah Arendt and Jan Patočka.

Arendt is known for her attempt to retrieve an original concept of politics, one that stemmed from the Greek concept of the polis. A unique form of political life developed by ancient Athenians, it centred around active participation on the part of the citizenry in the daily affairs of the city. Athenians created a space of appearance where they could meet as equals and discuss with each other 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 its citizens to take part in political life and sit on the juries.

They not only held elections and constantly rotated citizens through various offices, but also established the principle of lottery, showing a level of trust unimaginable today (everyone could become a magistrate). 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, citizens developed a strong sense of civic responsibility for the world they inhabited. They understood themselves as part of a larger whole, to which they made a significant contribution.

When you understand yourself as part of a larger whole, self-transcendence becomes a key existential orientation. You are not stuck in your private life with its narrow interests and desires, but constantly reaching forward in a gesture of care and solidarity. 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.’

Hannah Arendt and political courage

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.’ Political responsibility requires 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 is 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.’ This strict distinction between life and world, where life is understood as private and biological, and world as intersubjective and cultural-political, is analogous to Arendt’s 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, she writes, ‘was more interested in Florence than in salvation of his soul’.

Public happiness vs. individual happiness

This form of political self-transcendence gives birth to a 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 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’?

Today 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 the 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’. In other words, the world is not given only to me, my friends and comrades, but is 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.

Recreating a public space

Today, many people in Europe do not feel like citizens, as plural and natal beings. Contemporary life is built on the primacy of economics, work, career and entertainment. Social media and algorithmic governance alienate 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 and, 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 today we should try to retrieve the materiality of the public space (be it town halls, councils, or public discussions) – to recreate public space as a space of appearance.

The 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. Online tweeting and commenting, on the other hand, tends to erase the presence of real humanity, and therefore sharpens the tribal lens through which we view words on screens. But how to recreate this material side of the public space under present circumstances? That’s of course an open question.

The sacrifice of Jan Patočka

Jan Patočka was a philosopher who not only wrote about the meaning of sacrifice in the technological age, but himself embodied the morality of sacrifice. In 1977, at the end of his life, Patočka became a spokesperson of the Charter 77 dissident movement in Czechoslovakia. When Václav Havel approached him to consider do so, Patočka hesitated 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.

The texts put moral principles, especially human rights, ahead of political calculations, and thus provided a normative, moral dimension that was missing in the official manifesto of the Charter. They strengthened the resolve of the dissidents, but also intensified the regime’s attacks on Patočka. He was repeatedly interrogated. After the last interrogation, which lasted about twelve hours, his health deteriorated rapidly, and he died a few days later. Since then, Czech dissidents have assigned a martyrological connotation to Patocka’s death, interpreting it as a sacrifice for freedom and higher principles.

Patočka’s own actions embody a rare occurrence in intellectual life when the words and deeds of an intellectual coincide. Rhetoric becomes empty if not backed up and corroborated by experience and concrete actions. As Patočka wrote 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 as he called it, the ‘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 only the 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 statistics, small pieces in a geopolitical chessboard. Ukrainian soldiers and citizens are seen as resources, a standing reserve of energy next to tanks and weapons.

The solidarity of the shaken

In this context, it becomes very difficult to generate what Patočka calls ‘the solidarity of the shaken’, meaning the solidarity of co-sufferers who find themselves in the common situation of fragility and vulnerability, an overwhelming and tragic encounter with evil and oppression. 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.

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. When you see war footage in the news, it becomes routinised, one piece of news among many others. Gradually we become de-sensitised, ambivalent, 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, 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, where everything is relative. Where, in Peter Pomerantsev’s formulation, ‘nothing is true and everything is possible’.

Ukrainians embody courage, sacrifice and belief in certain principles. They give us rare a chance to wake up, to be shaken out of our cosy, comfortable, habitual worldview, what Patočka sometimes called ‘everydayness’, sometimes ‘bondage to life’. Ukrainians give us a chance to make the leap from the shallow anonymity and boredom to authentic human existence, where we begin to care about something more, something that surpasses and overcomes our enslavement to material things and consumption.

Europe, the knight and the bourgeois

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 by quoting the philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko. Writing in Eurozine, Yermolenko argues that there are two hearts of Europe, two different ethics or moralities:

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.

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 to question the ‘post-heroic’ mentality that currently prevails in Europe. The future of Europe depends on the readiness to be courageous.

An earlier version of this article was first published in Voxeurop. It is based on a lecture given at a conference organised by the Lithuanian cultural review Kulturos Barai together with New Eastern Europe and Eurozine in Vilnius in October 2024.