Opinion: Life, death, and social solidarity in dark times

The following lecture was delivered in March 2023 at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy as part of a benefit conference to raise funds to support public outreach at Kyiv Mohyla Academy.
The topic of my speech is: What is it like thinking in dark times? What does it mean? It is an echo of the podcast series I launched within our podcast, “Explaining Ukraine,” one of the most widely listened-to podcasts in English about Ukraine. The idea was to not stop thinking, even during dark times.
When I shared this idea with Marci Shore, a professor at Yale University, she asked: “Does it refer to Hannah Arendt’s book ‘Men in Dark Times?’” I said: “Yeah, I hadn’t thought about this.” But there is indeed a reference: a parallel between our time and Arendt’s reflections.
For me, the idea of light is very interesting and important, and the idea of darkness as well. I do think that different epochs and times have certain relations to light and darkness. Some eras, like the Renaissance, Enlightenment, or the second half of the 20th century, were infused with the idea of light, transparency, and open space – an open perspective that brings everything to light. We have this notion that light is the norm, and darkness is a deviation.
But there are other epochs, like the Baroque period in the 17th century or Romanticism in the 19th century, in which reflection starts from the opposite idea. It starts from the idea that darkness is our norm and light is an exception. Light rarely appears and can disappear quickly, so we should cherish it.
One metaphor for this is found in Baroque painting: the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, Rembrandt, van Honthorst, and Georges de La Tour. There is something in the emotion of this chiaroscuro: light emerging from and contrasting sharply with darkness. It is not just a painting technique; it carries an emotion that light is a rarity, a deficit. We actually start with the darkness, and inside the darkness, we start thinking.
This kind of thinking arises during difficult times. We understand how challenging the 16th and 17th centuries were for Europe, the early 19th century, or even the early 20th century in Europe, where we could also doubt that light is the norm.
My first book in Ukrainian, for example, was dedicated to Walter Benjamin. I knew there was something in Benjamin that went beyond the interpretation of him that was popular at the time. That interpretation was very postmodernist: “Let’s look at Walter Benjamin as a sort of first deconstructionist, Derrida before Derrida.” I thought this was wrong because Benjamin was, for me, a Baroque thinker, a thinker of chiaroscuro, where truth is a deficit, a rarity, a kind of enlightenment through darkness.
This is important, and we should not overlook it because many influential thinkers start thinking in dark times. We should probably think of Descartes as a Baroque philosopher who says: “Look, we are in darkness, deceived by an evil genius, a bad spirit who plays with us.” We don’t know the right path, so we must invent a method to get out of this place. Suddenly, we realize that Descartes’ rationalist philosophy is actually more existential than we used to think.
I think something is happening in Ukraine right now that we should pay attention to: this experience of facing a war, the fragility of life, and death, which is painful but might be the origin of thinking, literature, poetry, and art. The poetry now produced by Ukrainian poets is incredible. Writers like Serhii Zhadan, Halyna Kruk, Kateryna Kalytko, Kateryna Babkina, Julia Musakovska, Pavlo Korobchuk, and Svitlana Povalyaeva give us very strong poetry. This is more than poetry; it’s strong literature. It’s more than just words. It’s existential.
I hope the current epoch will give us an impetus for new thinking, reflection, and philosophy. I keep thinking about the basic concepts of philosophy. I hope this period will produce something new in Ukrainian philosophy, and maybe it already is.
I also believe this time of war shows how important ideas are. I agree with Tim Snyder, who repeatedly says one cause of this war is bad ideas. I think we underestimate how bad ideas can kill people and how morally bad ideas can kill people. They are not innocent; they are not just words.
For example, the idea that Russia is an empire that needs to expand, that Ukraine is a non-existent state, that the history of Ukraine is the history of Russia – these are bad ideas made by bad historians. But when bad history turns into ideology, it turns into a weapon. Once you say Ukraine does not exist or does not have a right to exist, the next step is to eliminate the idea of Ukraine and all the people who hold it. This is a direct step to genocide, which is happening right now. I think ideas play a big role in our lives and history. Ideas persist and go beyond the material reality of our daily existence, and we should be very attentive to ideas.
There has been a devaluation of ideas in recent decades, both in Eastern Europe and the Western world. This may have something to do with postmodernism, or at least with the relativization of ideas, the thought that ideas are interchangeable. I think this is profoundly wrong, and we should pay attention to the power of ideas.
For this lecture, I have been thinking about how the current situation leads us to rethink many things. I will try to share some thoughts about words and concepts that I have been rethinking since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
First, we need to rethink our idea of life. Life has become banal, particularly during peaceful times.
But during war, when you face death and when death is no longer an abstract word, you understand how fragile life, society, our physical bodies, and culture are, how everything can be undone quickly, and how those who believe in the inevitable progress of history are wrong.
Seeing this is key. Of course, war is an absolute evil. But when you have no choice but to face war, death, and destruction, you realize how you can cherish life in a new way, how you can value living beings in a new way.
One example is the attention Ukrainians now pay to the life of each person, and not just living people. There is an enormous amount of ritual around our dead soldiers. This change dates to as early as EuroMaidan. When a village buries its dead, every resident lines the streets for the procession. When famous people or heroes are killed, social networks talk about them. Recently, a prominent young Ukrainian soldier, known as DaVinci, died, and all of Ukraine talked about it. Life is fragile, but it’s cherished.
I recently returned from Nikopol, a town six kilometers from Russian troops, near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest in Europe, which is occupied by the Russians. I met a woman named Olena, who takes care of a shelter for 250 pets despite regular shelling by the Russian army and the threat of a major nuclear disaster. We see over and over again how people care in these difficult times, and I think that’s important.
Another reflection on life is that life as a biological fact is not full if it is not filled with meaning, with values like freedom.
As the famous Ukrainian paramedic Tyra, who spent a lot of time in Russian captivity, recently said: “Life without freedom doesn’t matter.” This brings us back to the old idea of dignity. If we go back to the idea of dignity in Roman times, we understand that dignity is the continuation of life beyond life. It’s something non-material, something that goes beyond biology but is cherished no less than – or even more than – biological life.
One story Ukraine is discussing is that of a Ukrainian soldier, a prisoner of war, who was told by Russian soldiers to dig his own grave and remove the Ukrainian symbols from his uniform. He refused, said, “Glory to Ukraine,” and was shot on the spot. This dignity – the refusal to surrender identity even in the face of death – is something incredible. This is when the word dignity becomes very practical and material.
The second idea we need to rethink is death. Death is not a metaphor; it is not just a word. It was almost sick to see how the word death became popular in the 20th century. We talked about the death of culture, the death of modernity, the death of idealism, the death of metaphysics, and in all this, we played with the word death. It became less scary, something far away with which we could play.
But for Ukrainians, death is not an abstract word: it’s a physical death, a real death, a void when your loved ones die, when your husbands die, when your children die, when your friends die.
The third concept we need to consider is evil – not just evil in the abstract or philosophical sense, such as Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil, which has been validated by the current war, but something beyond that. The evil we are confronting in Ukraine is repetitive. It’s an evil that has gone unpunished, unjudged, and uncondemned.
This impunity forms a vicious cycle, granting evil the power to assert itself as a new norm. In such cases, those committing these atrocities begin to see themselves not as killers, but as judges – an insidious reversal of justice. This mentality is rooted in Russian history and the Soviet legacy, where figures like Putin inherit a tradition of unchecked violence by the KGB, committing atrocities without trial or accountability.
The fourth idea that we need to take seriously is the notion that society is very important. We probably entered a period in developed democracies in which we have the illusion that we can all do it by ourselves. We are living increasingly in an atomistic society, where we believe that an individual can do everything. We don’t need other people. Even if you’re playing music, you don’t need other players or other instruments, you can do everything on your computer. You can play video games by yourself; you can do everything by yourself. This is an illusion.
Society may be less visible, but we all depend on our societies, we all depend on other people. We are wearing clothes, which other people made. We are reading books, which other people have written. We are using goods, which other people have produced. And if you remove that, if you remove this society, we will be helpless, we will not even be Robinson Crusoe, because we will not have those habits of survival. I think we tend to forget about this in this age of atomization. War actually brings you back to this notion that we can cherish our individual freedoms, we can cherish our individualities, but we are all connected to a wider network. And we will not survive without this network. And this network will not survive without us.
So, one of the lessons that we Ukrainians have learned from this war is that we will not survive without our society and our society will not survive without us, without our individual responsibility. We are all so intertwined, and I think this idea gives you simultaneously a sense of responsibility and modesty. You understand that your effort, however important it might be, is just a drop in the ocean. And if there are no other drops, there is no ocean.
The final point I want to make in this lecture is kind of connected with the first idea I mentioned. This war is of course a question of humanity. But at the same time, it’s a question of going beyond humanity. It’s also a war which leads us to think about life in wider terms. Humans are not the only ones suffering from this war. Animals are suffering, ecosystems are suffering. In many aspects, what Russia is doing is not only a genocide but also an ecocide. Look at how they set fire to Ukrainian fields, how they destroy our ecosystems in the South, which are so important for global food. We travel through Ukraine and we see these fields in which harvests were not collected because of the Russian invasion. We understand how long this supply chain is. And from the fact that the harvest was not collected last year, we realize that there are people all around the world who may face hunger or famine.
This means we need to see the planet as a single organism in which everything depends on everything else, and in which, when we think about ethics of life, we should think beyond humans. That doesn’t mean we should devalue humans, but we should understand that maybe one of the key ethical revolutions of the 21st century will be a revolution in which we extend the idea of dignity from humans to other living beings, to nature as such.
I think Ukrainians have an implicit understanding of this idea, due to the impact of colonization and modernization. Death and famine were the result of Soviet colonization and industrial policy in the 1930s, for example. And it’s clear that we are suffering from Russia’s colonial aspirations and destructive technology today. So, I do think that the Ukrainian experience, including our experience of this war, can help us rethink our relation to nature as well.
Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published as part of a special issue of “Studia Philosophica Estonica” entitled “Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War.” A copy of the original article can be found here.
The opinions expressed in the op-ed section are those of the authors and do not purport to reflect the views of the Kyiv Independent.