Timothy Snyder: Freedom as a Value and a Task – a Talk in Kyiv | UkraineWorld Podcast

This is a high privilege for us and and big honor and big joy to welcome team Snyder in the space of pen Ukraine please give Tim a huge round of applause so I would like to start our conversation with the question of freedom and I know you’re writing your

New book I had a little possibility to look into it a little bit and uh you you are reflecting about freedom for for quite a long time you wrote uh already a book about this road on freedom but now this is yet another book and I remember we we met last year

In Kiev and we discussed it a little bit and uh you said to me and this is also present in this book that freedom is a value is the highest value it’s maybe a meta value it’s a value above other values and I try to challenge you on

That uh by saying that when freedom is unsupported by other values like solidarity or fraternity or Brotherhood or sisterhoods security then it can also lead to bad things and maybe currently in some societies maybe in Western societies as well sometimes in Ukrainian societies we see how Freedom we need it

Goes into extreme when Freedom means I can do whatever I want or Freedom means that we build a society of neoliberalism where everybody got his or her freedom but it’s not compensated by solidarity or distribution of goods or something else then it will also not not very good

So why do you think Freedom has certain priority over other values so well first of all thank you thank you all for being here that’s a it’s a great pleasure to be in in Kiev with you and to have this chance to to speak about this book

Um as as valojis says this is a book that I’m that I’m writing and my method of writing has been to um to to carry it with me everywhere and um because I’ve with the philosophy I it’s nice of alludu to say that I’m becoming a philosopher but one of the

Things that I’ve understood about maybe not about philosophy but about philosophers is that in general they need to talk to other people more than they maybe do usually and and so I’ve I I I’ve been I’ve tried to be dialogic about about this book and as Villages says we actually spend a

Good deal of time talking about the same manuscript a year ago so turning to the question the I’m starting from the premise that when people use the word freedom in English they don’t really mean anything by it so it’s we’re in a slightly tricky place because we’re speaking English now and you know

Ukrainian has faboda and volia and if we were talking about and volia we would already be having a different conversation but my premise is that in the English language freedom is an essentially empty word that it’s used it’s used a great deal that has a good deal of emotional and political

Significance but is essentially undefined and so where I’m starting is with the definition of freedom which is a partial answer to this question so um I believe there’s a correct answer to the question what is freedom and that the correct answer is not doing whatever you want to do or following your impulses

I believe that freedom um freedom is a meta-value because there are real values in the world and here I’m not very far from certain tendencies in Ukrainian dissident thought for example in the 1970s or 1980s I’m a moral realist I think there are real values in the world

I think that Honesty loyalty generosity are real maybe not the same way as a rock is real but no less real than Iraq so I take it that these things are and we can we can discuss this but I’m I’m telling you my priors so one of my priors is that is

That ethical values or virtues to use the better word are are real things and that the reason why so that so therefore freedom is not a value like other values freedom is a value because it’s the thing that allows us to make decisions among the other values so if

If loyalty is good and honesty is good can we agree that so then loyalty and honesty are good but they don’t always go together right so for example as you get older when people say you look great but it takes on a different significance it’s shifting from honesty to loyalty but

But it’s not both right and so with in a friendship sometimes you’re loyal and sometimes you’re honest but you’re thinking about if you’re free you’re thinking about which one and in which combination right so it’s good to be merciful but it’s also good to be consistent but if you’re consistent you’re not

Being merciful and if you’re merciful you’re not being consistent and so on and so forth and so so I am like following my teacher leslacovski I’m a moral pluralist not a nihilist or a relativist but a pluralist in the sense that I think all these things are real

But if they don’t automatically go together and so then freedom is that state or capacity or ability in which we’re able to try to make them go together or try to make the right choices or make a certain set of choices which as we make them over time make us the people that

We that we are so in other words my notion of freedom is is not negative it’s not about the absence of barriers my notion of freedom is positive it’s about the presence of values the Quest for values the ability to combine values but it’s positive then in a second sense

So if freedom is if you’re if you believe in negative freedom you know Volo just questions set up a kind of straw man about negative Freedom you know isn’t Freedom just doing what you want um if you believe in negative Freedom then you can say I’m free so long as

There’s no barrier there’s no government there’s no barrier there’s nothing in my way I’m free and that’s very simple and very elegant but it’s I think indefensible in a lot of ways including politically as as you suggest but and one of the ways one of the ways that negative freedom is both elegant

And indefensible is that it allows you not to ask any questions about what it means to be human if freedom is just the absence of barriers and not the Fulfillment of your your potential then you don’t have to ask what a person is right but the moment

That freedom is positive in terms of values then it’d be also becomes positive I believe in terms of institutions because if Freedom it’s no now I’m going to make a move if freedom is about the ability to combine values these are not things which we which we

Automatically are able to do these are things that we learn to do these are things that babies learn to do small children learn to do and they learn to do them better or worse in different kinds of circumstances so I mean just to take the very radical

Example if you just leave a baby alone it’s a horrible thought right but if you just leave a baby alone if you follow the logic of negative Freedom you put no barriers in front of that baby you just let that baby do what at once

That baby is not it’s it’s not going to survive but it’s not going to become free in any meaningful sense so if we start from that radical example and we take less radical examples we can see that to to become a kind of creature who can be free

We need help right we need structural help we need the help of other people and if that’s true that means that in order for for us to become free we need various kinds of structures which I’ll stop the answer now but in the book this

Is the body of the book is about these structures which I which I call the forms of freedom and these forms in the have have names which are very similar to some of the values which fellow just named the the the forms of freedom in the book are um sovereignty unpredictability Mobility

Factuality and and in solidarity so I’m I’m agreeing in a way with the like I’m agreeing with the critique but I treat it as a critique of the of the kind of Freedom which I’m trying to treat as not really Freedom at all I think you’re now going into this line

Of thought which is maybe I’m wrong but correct me if I’m wrong which goes back to Eddie from which goes back to isai Berlin and with there actually juxtaposition between negative freedom and positive freedom and remembering Eric Fromm who’s saying that it’s not enough to be free from it’s it’s a it’s

Very important to be free Freedom too something freedom in order to do something right and I think this is a a very critical very important point for Ukraine because Ukraine has a long tradition of kind of anti-tyrannical culture anti-tyrannical politics I would Define Ukrainian political cultures essentially anti-tyrannical and Republican against

The Imperial political culture but that’s poses for us a question because sometimes it seems that we are very great at Freedom from but we are not very great at Freedom too but at the same time if you’re going and and this leads me to a question the

Desire Berlin asked that if you’re going too much with this idea of freedom too positive Freedom then you end up in thinking that well freedom is actually a necessity freedom is something that I really feel inside myself and when I really feel this inside myself I choose values that

That are you know represent my Essence basically and then you you risking end up in in a thought that freedom means necessity right and I remember our Soviet times when we learned these phrase and our parents learn this phrase and it’s it’s it’s like it’s so much deep in the minds of

People when uh they quote a distorted quote of angles which means freedom is necessity uh freedom is a weird necessity and and I think this is this is horrible because if people start thinking in that way that is also kind of a it’s it’s an Aurelia orwellian thought you know when

You’re you’re actually saying that P not you but Ann Gilson and Lanyon and others they’re saying that peace and is war good is evil um freedom is necessity etc etc so why I’m saying that I I I do think that this negative freedom is is very important so without this negative

Freedom without this freedom from we actually don’t get Freedom too what do you think so The the justification for freedom from is freedom too in in my in my view so the these like these these walls here are not bad because these walls are holding up a roof and creating a structure which allows us to have a conversation so these walls in this setting are enabling

Us to do something you could even say these walls are liberating us to do something if these walls weren’t here the ceiling would fall down and it would be a very different discussion which you know given rocket attacks and Kiev is not an entirely theoretical Point

Um the uh but if the doors are locked and we were all trapped inside we would suddenly think about the walls in a different way so the walls themselves are not good or bad the walls it’s it’s the intention behind the wall and in this situation and the reason why I’m

Saying that is that the the the freedom I’m trying to make the point that freedom from these walls isn’t enough right like it’s important for this conversation that that door is open and that anyone who really doesn’t like our conversation can leave right freedom I will take it on my on my thing

So it’s only about me but freedom from us right so the freedom to leave this building is important but the but that that’s all that only matters because there’s a person who has purposes right so there’s a person who has purposes in this room and the purposes LED that person to come here

Right and if we lock them in that would be bad uh but only because they’re a person with purposes right so the freedom it doesn’t a wall like on an earth without people a wall a prison wouldn’t be a bad thing right an Earth on an earth without

People a dungeon wouldn’t be a bad thing it’s it’s it’s the it’s the people that mean that we need to have freedom from and so that for me what that means is that logically freedom from is an element of Freedom too so one of the things which allows us to become Who We

Are is the absence of torture and oppression and so on but it’s necessary but not sufficient so to take a more serious example still uh when um when one of my colleagues book a history of the concentration camps he writes he writes an anecdote of an American nurse who arrives

Or maybe it may have been a British nurse at Bergen Belson I forget but it was there was a nurse arrives at a concentration camp and it’s been liberated right that’s the word we use liberated the Concentration Camp has been liberated and she arrives and she looks around at

The people in the camp and she says she writes in her diary Liberation is not the word right and why is Liberation not the word because these people are still dying they’re physically dying in front of her and of course they’re still traumatized and as a nurse she’s looking at them in terms

Of their bodies and not just the abstract state so the doors have been opened like in principle there there are no more barriers but she says and I believe correctly they’re not free right they’re not liberated and this so This raises the question then of what it takes to make a

Former concentration camp inmate free and I think that’s a much larger question and of course one that people in Ukraine are thinking about as as well right if if you and this is why I like the Ukrainian word which doesn’t really exist in other languages um deoccupied right

Like because if you say that I was thinking about this a year ago when we talked I think I was already I think I had already written it in or was about to like in in in yahid where they put all of the population of the village

Into the school basement and held them when yahidne was when it was deoccupied those people were allowed out of the cellar they were no longer in the cellar but they weren’t they weren’t free right so like if you say the word liberated I understand people sometimes do and I get

It but when I when I visited there and I looked at the school and I thought about the fact that those kids can’t go to that school again right if your kids can’t go to school in some sense they’re not free right and so then I agree that

You have to have this thing called negative freedom but only because positive freedom is the right account of freedom if you see what I mean like the the we can’t have the barriers and the oppression the torture be because we’re people and it’s actually I mean Ukrainian examples

Have actually helped me think think this through um and at this level and at some other levels that maybe we’ll we’ll talk about um but I mean for me it’s true that like the the Ukrainian tradition of being against the state is historically very interesting right as a historian I find

It interesting because it has actually it has two levels because there’s the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth which is really all about negative freedom because it’s about it’s about Nobles trying to prevent the state from doing anything to them which by the way it tells you a lot about the historical

Origins of the idea of negative Freedom the reason why people like negative freedom is that if negative freedom is for me because I already have I already have serfs or slaves right or wives or whatever it might be I have I am oppressing people and therefore I don’t want the state to

Stop me from doing that right so that’s basically with a slight exaggeration that’s basically the Polish you know volnosed like charterisky or rajivil or whatever has 10 000 Ukrainian surfs and negative but Freedom means that this there’s no state to stop him owning the serfs right like that’s a

Negative account of freedom in the United States it’s the same thing by the way it the origin of the idea of negative freedom is I have slaves and I don’t want the state to stop me from having those slaves right so negative Freedom makes a lot of sense

Historically if you are a slave owner in Ancient Rome or a slave owner in Georgia or if you own surfs in 17th century Ukraine it makes a lot of sense historically that account but it has you know it has it has it has this inherent it has this inherent problem okay where

Was I going with this no now I’ve forgotten where I was going with this um what am I answering oh so but oh so so in Ukraine you have that tradition right there’s the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth Freedom means I am you know I am I am I’m an oligarch or

As I said at the time um I’m a magnet right I’m an oligarch and I’m against the state and then you have the Rebellion against that you have the Cossacks against that and that’s like negative Freedom against negative Freedom right and so the cost of when you look at the Cossack Rebellion it’s

Like it’s I mean again I’m simplifying somewhat but it’s like some ukrainians who like one version of negative Freedom against other ukrainians who like another version of negative Freedom right it’s like the ukrainians who want double negative Freedom against the ones who want single negative freedom and so

There’s a lot to work out here historically but in in the 21st century I mean since maidan but especially during this war I’ve actually been struck by how and I’ll be interested to see what you say but in my conversations with various kinds of people including soldiers and

People who’ve lost their houses and people whose Villages were just were recently deoccupied when they talk about Freedom it’s always been without exception it’s been Freedom too in some way in some way I have yet to meet anyone who says like now that the Russians are

Gone I’m free like it’s always more like the Russians got in the way of my future or something like that so it’s it’s so in that sense Ukraine has been helped like Ukraine has been encouraging me contemporary Ukraine to think along these lines it’s very interesting that

Um we are probably in a in a very interesting moment when your people like you great intellectuals from the Western world are looking at Eastern Europe for inspiration and that’s something that we see with Tony Judd that’s something we see with Timothy Schneider that’s something we see with Timothy Garten Ash that’s

Something we see with Mercy Shore Etc and uh correct me if I’m wrong but I think that if we look at the way how the post were post second world war intellectual tradition in the West Was developing it was primarily focused on on the idea how to uh construct a society in which

Totalitarianism will not be possible I can read like postmodernism thought of French philosophers from Sartor to derida in this way and in in in in some aspect you can say that these actually led to certain um moral relativism right because when you’re saying that your own own goal is

To deconstruct power structures and say that you know we are living in a society which oppresses US and all we need to do is to put down the suppression and the more we we do actually the goal is to have um kind of a relativized moral environment when the negative freedom is

A key thing and then you can do whatever you want in in in in in in literature in in music in in arts Etc whereas Eastern European thinkers starting from uh starting from patochka and maybe dissidence Czech czechoslovak dissidence and then Ukraine and dissidents who are really

Under understood it in the west a few days ago we were talking about again about fossils tools right and the anniversary of his death so these people were saying exactly what she was saying that there are values that are real and I will never go away

From this value right so it’s not like this postmodern culture okay I believe in this but I can also believe in this and this and this and Anything Goes do you see that inspiration that comes from Eastern Europe I appreciate that question for many reasons and one of them is that it

Allows me to go back and answer some things in your last question which I didn’t which I didn’t answer it’s it I think it’s pretty important for me that I’m an East europeanist for another reason which refers to your last question which is that I’ve spent a

Lot of time thinking about Marx and and Marxism so um I I won’t you know talk about what I’ve written about Marxism but I spent a lot of time thinking about Marxism and I I end up in this book arguing something which is against the grain

Which is that Marxism is not in fact an account of positive freedom that it’s actually an account of it’s actually a negative account of negative Freedom so I make I shamelessly make a dialectical move and I put libertarianism and Marxism on the same side and my version of freedom on the other

Side and the rationale for that is this that um the Marx’s view of Freedom was something like we have a we all have an essentially similar Human Nature and the problem is that private property has crept into our society and then we’re born into a world in which there

Was always already private property and Society is structured by ownership and so on and so forth and that affects everything but what’s the solution so the solution is remove the private property I believe that’s an essentially negative account of freedom because Marx is actually quite weak about how we would live if we

Were free he is very weak on what are the good things we would do if we were free people right his account of what Liberation would be is very abstract and and general not not plural at all so I am in my book making the move of saying

That the people who say that private property is the solution to everything and the people who say that private property is the problem with everything are actually on the same side um and that they’re and that they’re wrong for the same fundamental reason they’re not actually enemies dialectically they’re on the same side

Um and what and and so I make a lot of comparisons which I’m sure my American readers will find very entertaining between the late Soviet Union and 21st century United States um as I try to as I try to flesh out this comparison but this is an important

Point because in Village’s last question the idea was that like the problem with positive freedom is that positive Freedom means that you know you you become aware of necessity and that’s true in an account like Marx’s where there’s only one bad thing property right but if you’re a pluralist

Then you believe there are many many bad things there are many bad things not not just not just one and you can’t you can’t get rid of all of them and this is relevant to Isaiah Tizer Berlin too you know the way that Isaiah Berlin got read was

That there was a hard choice to be made between positive freedom and negative freedom and we had to choose negative freedom because positive freedom in the in the Marxist version is going to lead to a situation where where everyone is the state is going to make us all aspire to be the same

But um my view is that that’s that Marxism is actually negative freedom but in opposition to that reading of Berlin my reading of Berlin is different and it may be different you know I may be wrong but it doesn’t matter because when you’re a philosopher I’ve learned you

Can just do whatever you want with tradition um the that but my Arena Berlin is that it’s not it’s not a tragic situation like your job is not to say I have to make a tragic choice between one thing and the other your job is to say freedom is

Positive and let’s try to pack as many good things into that account of Freedom as we can right so when he when Berlin’s admiration of the romantics was that the romantics understood that there were many good things and they didn’t all fit together into one good thing

And I’m taking that and I’m getting close to your question I’m taking that as a not nihilist view right so you can be a nihilist and you can say there are many there are many things and you know you can choose that one and I can choose this one I’m saying there

Are many good things and I believe that’s what Berlin thought as well but it’s certainly what Lesha kowakovsky thought right and so I’m I’m conceding you know I’m conceding your point obviously uh who is my teacher at Oxford it’s certainly what Leicester kulkowski thought he thought there were many good

He there are many good things but you can’t reconcile them all in in into one good thing and Marcy sure my wife has actually written about this in much with much greater subtlety than than I could I could manage but um I volodia’s premise that there’s an East European tradition of this is

Exactly correct and in the book I’m explicitly following it so I in the second chapter about unpredictability I’m going with hovel and patochka and the idea that what’s human is our unpre our capacity to unpredictably combine various kinds of of values but this is only interesting because the values

Really are values right their virtues they really they really are good and the final point I wanted to make here while I’m being dialectical which I will be um is that I think a lot of the way the PO a lot of the way that the post-modernism ends up being is actually

A form of negative freedom right that if I say you know where I think where it ends up leading you is in a in a in a kind of like dark libertarian Direction where you say like I’m not really sure what’s good so I just want nothing to be in my way

Um or you know you you get a new position where you say I I’m uncomfortable in a general way with the world and the problem is for example the patriarchy right and I’m you know I can be I’m I am very sympathetic to many feminist critiques of where we are but

The moment you say the problem is the patriarchy I think you’re in a negative Freedom terrain because then you’re imagining that all I have to do is remove one thing for example the patriarchy and then you know we’ll be free because the one bad thing has been taken away and then the

Good things will come out so I’m trying to avoid every single account which says you just have to remove the one thing and I’m trying to start from the kind of humble you know as you say East European um view that there are many good things they’re not all glamorous right they’re

Small they’re not necessarily that interesting into themselves but that’s where you start you start with the many the many good things that’s very interesting and your idea of plurality of values because as we discussed last year it seems that we were kind of a going parallel directions because

This is precisely my reading of ideologies that I think that ideologies major European ideologies liberalism socialism nationalism were born from actually the slogan of French Revolution Freedom equality and fraternity and each of them by absolutizing one of these values went very radical and here we can therefore I’m asking this first question

To which you already responded what if Freedom goes radical but let me just ask the final question and then I will term turn the floor to to our guests because there are so many people and so many I think Reflections and and ideas what you’re describing in 21st century

America you’re describing in this book and you compare with the late Soviet Union with Brezhnev era and you call it natalitarianism so it’s totalitarianism which was which had faith in one value and then was disenchanted disappointed about this value right and then it had no faith in any value at all

Uh do you think that ukrainians struggle right now and you you TR you travel to Ukraine you travel to various places now you were in the south uh last year you were in the North do you think that it is precisely the Ukrainian struggle is a struggle against rationalism because

We see Russia as actually having denialism as its major ideology The Cult of Destruction but at the same time it’s also kind of a injection of something new and important to the Western World in which you see this notalitarianism cynicism uh skepticism about everything uh raining so I’m

I’m going to make a I’m going to make a point with with words here in but I think it works in Ukrainian too the I do a lot in the book with the idea of normalization so normalization in the sense the Czech word so after the Warsaw Pact invasion of

1968 when the checks were basic the czechoslovaks were basically repressing themselves that period was known as normalization and in in in the normalization had this terrible deadening effect because it was no longer ideology so taking your point about ideology it’s now a post ideological moment no one actually believes in Marxism anymore

The the dissidents don’t believe in it but also the party doesn’t believe in it nobody believes in it and so what’s normal then is this kind of everyday nihilism right so and and hovel writes hovel writes a wonderful play about this you know Java worked in a brewery

And he then wrote a he wrote a one act no maybe two act I forget but he wrote a simple play called audience to character play called audience in which the there’s a dissident and there’s the brewmaster and the dissidents working in the brewery and the brewmaster is friends with the local

Secret policeman and of course the brewmaster has to write reports on the dissident but the brewmaster doesn’t like to write and so he brings the dissident in and they have some beers together and the brewmaster says you know why don’t you write the reports on yourself like that will be easier for

All of us because you’re a writer you’re a good writer you know what you’re doing anyway and I don’t like to write so what wouldn’t it just be more efficient if you wrote the reports about yourself and of course it it is more efficient right

Um and in the play not in reality but in the play the dissident does write the reports on himself and then the the key sentence from the play which people remember is everything is so like once he does that he he’s he’s he’s he’s lost the thing

That he still had right which was his dignity right he lost he lost another kind of normality so a lot a lot hangs and what you think is normal right so velodi was nice enough to mention that I was just in the South I was in a

I was in a in a village where all every single every single Hut was destroyed every single house was destroyed um and I happened to be talking to apani Pani Maria and panimaria was living in this this little tiny metal thing you know donated by

Him not the swedes or maybe the U.N I’m not sure but a little tiny metal hut and you know she won she wanted me to see what it looked like inside and like inside she had everything you know beautifully arranged like everything was geometrical you know the rugs and the

Bed spreads and everything was in a square it was all quadratic it looked like Ukrainian futurism which I didn’t say to her I mean but but like everything was in neat order and like she and you know so I walked out and she said you know she said you know she said

Right and so and by by there when she says normal she means like everything’s good right like everything is good like everything is the way that it should be not just the way that it is but the way that it should be right it’s like those two different senses of the word normal

That normal is just the way things are or that normal is the way that things should be right a lot hangs on that on that on that distinction right and so in I’m taking that normalization period or that the late Soviet period more broadly speaking as a as an example of

One value becoming no values and what happens then where you have this kind of you know sociological conformism where people are alert to power and they’re very good at reading signals and changing and adapting but they’re not no one is pretending that what they’re adapting to is a norm in the sense of

What really should be it’s just a way of being in the world and so yeah I am very concerned that we are like that too you know that the West can be like that too that if our version of an ideology is that if you’re just an entrepreneur everything will be okay

Right or if you know if you just believe in Freedom in the sense that we talked you talked about at the beginning like freedom in the negative sense everything will be okay if you believe something like that your value commitment will very quickly become a zero value

Commitment and you do like you can see this empirically in like if you look at attitude towards attitudes up towards Putin in the United States where it’s the P it’s the it’s the people who are like anything goes you know like nothing really matters it’s all about

Power they they like Putin you know it’s not that there’s an idea there for most of them it’s just like it’s just it’s it’s the absence of an idea and then if you look at the Republicans who really don’t like Putin um those are the Republicans you know

Who I I may disagree with them about their values but those are the Republicans who have some kind of value commitment and then they for them it’s like clear okay this is not the right thing I mean one could wish that there are more of them

Um but for the for for them it’s like it’s clear that they don’t like the notalitarianism right so by notalitarianism I just mean it’s a very simple thing just going from one value to zero values which is a kind of historical observation right like what comes after one value is is zero values

It could be um out of nickname to refer to another East European who have figures in this book who did his best writing in prison one of the things he wrote in prison was the people you have to watch out for are the ones who believe in one thing

Or zero things those are the two dangerous classes of people and what I’m trying to observe is that the people who believe in one thing are dangerous and they believe in one thing and then they’re also dangerous when they believe in zero things and yes so when I look at Russia it’s like

I mean there are many explanations of what of what happened in Russia and I don’t want to say there’s only one explanation but you can say that they went from one value to zero values twice over right that like they the transition to cat the transition to Communism

Nobody believed it and then their version of capitalism was also impossible to believe in and it went bad very quickly right and so you have this kind of dub this double historical push towards nihilism which leads you to this kind of exuberant you know self-contradictory you know Pride where

The thing that they’re competing on is who is the better nihilist right um who like who is like more consistent at being the most snide or who does the best job at making all values seem senseless right like yesterday Putin in a couple of sentences managed to claim that

Ukraine was a Nazi State and that it was run by the Jews and that that’s normal because Jews are usually responsible for Nazism right so like basically like some of the lowest things that you can say like some of the worst things that you can say but just kind of tossed out

There you know and then like the rest of us have to deal with it and cling it up but it’s like that’s the art like the art is to take everybody else’s values and turn those values into problems for for other people and then when I mean

There’s a lot to say about what the Russians are thinking when they’re when they’re fighting this war but I mean my sense is that it’s a kind of it’s a kind their mode is competitive hopelessness so like of course there are no values of course nothing is true of course might makes

Right but we’re better at that than you are right we’re better at that we’re we’re authentic because we’re the ones who accept that there’s no truth no values right and and um you know they are good at that many of them but what’s then what’s enraging about Ukraine is is not

Accepting the premise so if you know if the premise is nothing’s true nothing is of value then my community is better than your community because I say so right I mean there’s no truth there’s no vow there’s but my hopelessness is better than yours because it’s mine right

Um and so that’s what I mean by competitive hopelessness but what if you reject the premise like what if you say well actually like things aren’t perfect but this democracy thing seem to have in Ukraine it’s not perfect it’s not great you know but it’s better than what you

You know it’s it and then you know the Civil Society thing we have it’s kind of messy but you know it does its job and actually we sort of believe that we’re making things better and that then becomes infuriating and I mean there are of course other things going on but at a

Philosophical level I think that’s not an incorrect portrait of the Russian Ukrainian confrontation I think one of the reasons they’re furious at you is that you don’t accept the premise you don’t accept that it’s about it’s about competitive hopelessness um and I think and and that’s and the

Thing they want to beat into you is that like you should be hopeless like we’re going to teach you to be hopeless and that’s when they say like you have to learn to love Russia which seems so crazy I think that’s what they mean is

You have to learn to be hopeless and and be one of us in the sense of being hopeless thank you for these strong words so Ukrainian Ukrainian idea is to is to have a hope despite hopelessness right we remember so questions remarks ideas please raise your hands and go ahead on and then

Thanks so much for taking the time to come to Ukraine oh sorry um my name is Aaron wendland I’m vice president for international Affairs at the Key of school of economics and I’m professor of public philosophy at the Key of school of Economics as well

So as a philosopher I’m going to try and have a little dialogue here with you and maybe apply the criticism you applied to Marx to yourself of course I appreciate that a talk is different than writing dos capital or these various books but you had I hope so because he never

Finished yeah of course yes um I was just curious I suppose what is your positive account of Freedom or rather what is positive freedom to you so it just it was a bit unclear to me what your positive vision is particularly given that you said it’s a condition of possibility for negative

Freedom so positive freedom is is sort of first or prior it needs to it’s a condition of possibility for negative Freedom so it comes first what is that positive vision for you um and maybe you can just unpack that a little bit and maybe just one quick

Comment I was surprised that there was no reference to Joseph Roz and the morality of freedom because he seems to share a lot of your commitments moral pluralism perfectionism as uh something like liberal perfectionism uh is the idea he kind of works on in the morality of

Freedom so this is just more a comment than a question but I was surprised he didn’t come up let’s take several questions so much for for your work for your inspiration and for your support uh my first I’m Andre koloko from International Ukraine and also developing this project Ukraine world

So my first question very quick and very brief you was talking about the reality of values and you said that values are so real like rock do you mean by Rock the real Rock like Led Zeppelin and deep purple right and but the real the real question is when we are talking about

Freedom it’s always not always but very often is related to the uncertainty to a existence of different and various options with the not right but the necessity to select to to choose and to develop your own judgment on this on that and on with the building of your own

Policies scenarios and so on but how could we cultivate the freedom politically and globally in this situation when most people most people will vote rather for certainty for security for predictability how political leaders should act and should win and and should build their policies among Within These context

Not only in particular countries but when we are talking about it’s it’s not polite maybe but there is a term Global tiles for example who will vote for for security for some people in Ukraine also who will vote for security and in the United States and and so on thanks so much

Ukraine and the translator of Timothy Snyder I guess you know the guy I would like to get back once more to Russia not because I want to because I have to I believe in a sense the question of Russia is more important than the question of Ukraine because it

Is more or less clear what we want Ukraine to be after the war we know the goals we know the challenges we know the threats the big question is what would Russia face after the war seemed to me maybe I am wrong but I got an impression from some of your

Interviews and articles that you believe in Democratic liberal Russia in its current internationally recognizing borders it could be liberalized and democratized meaning chichina is still inside Tatar stand s still inside the question is do you believe that Russia in these borders is not an Empire or could not be not an

Empire or to make it to dimperialize Russia we have to disintegrate it or help it to disintegrate further thank you so I’m going to take the I’m going to take the questions in in reverse order because what I have to say about the second question is going to Bear directly on the first

Question and the third question is the one that I have to work hard to turn into a philosophical question because I’m in Phil I’m in philosopher mode not geopolitician mode so the the the empire in colonialism figure very heavily in this book and not just Russian Empire and Russian colonialism also European

And American because I’m concerned here with trying to elucidate an idea of freedom which is not in fact exploitative so most I think I think it’s fair to say that pretty much all the ideas of Freedom which have seemed commonsensical have been in some way in fact exploitative

And so here I will take on you know a lot of the late 20th century feminist African-American post-colonial and other critiques I think it’s right that we don’t have an idea of freedom yet which is not exploitative and historically speaking this has a great deal to do with Empire so in this work

Russia the Russian war in Ukraine figures as a colonial war in the in the kind of sense that Franz Fanon thought of colonial wars namely that it has to do with not seeing other people as being fully human not seeing their bodies as being human

The way that your body is human and by and by the way it’s hard just it’s interesting it’s hard to stress this enough in a philosophical conversation which is part of the problem this book is very much about bodies it’s very much about the development of

Bodies and this goes to the I’m skipping ahead now a bit to the second question but when you when we when you ask me like about voting and political leaders and so on I take the point but I’m concerned here primarily about how we would ideally create

Free people to start out with which is why the first chapter is about child development so I’m not I’m not starting Child Development early childhood education it starts with birth the first event in this book is birth because I we have this problem that when we start thinking about Freedom we we

Start thinking about I mean I’m gonna make fun a little bit now but we start thinking about an adult and that adult is usually male and that adult male usually has property and it’s the 19th century and it’s the British Empire and and you’ve got all that going for you

But you don’t you never ask two questions you never ask how you got to the British Empire and what that did to other people but you also never ask how you got to adulthood and how you became the kind of person who could stand there alone and be free

Because I believe that you can stand there alone and be free but that it takes a huge amount of work to get there so this is all kind of so I’m just starting in a different place I’m starting I’m starting with how you would create a free person and I’m trying to

Apply 20th and 21st century um scientific knowledge about things which may seem to be unrelated like for example childhood development there’s a lot of this book is based on what we now know about early childhood development and what children need because these like and it does bear directly on your

Question despite appearances because freedom and security should work together if you can create secure conditions for people when they’re very young it’s easier for them to take risks and evaluate risks right but if you if people don’t get certain things when they’re young they’re much more likely to think of

Freedom as something you trade for security which I think logically by the way is is wrong I think that’s one of the traps I think I think freedom and security are actually they go together 99 times out of a hundred it’s a very rare situation when they don’t go

Together and I think the idea that you have to trade freedom for security is basically a con generally freedom and security go together they generally go together but that that claim is going to make more sense if we start thinking about freedom from the point of view of

You know of of of a body developing and learning and becoming over the course of a life anyway so in in an Empire um in an Empire or an expanding Empire or a colonial Empire again staying very conceptual about this I don’t see the other people as being fully he

Right and and since I don’t see them as bullying being fully human it’s very easy for me to fall into a trap where I the Russian soldier or I the Russian citizen am not really being treated as fully human either and so to answer your question very briefly I’m

Not going to get into like what I think is going to happen to you know English at you um or you know but but or to the buddhiyats that’s because I just think that’s a different seminar but what I do think is that Russia really has to lose

Um if only if like all you care about is the people inside the Russian Federation and we forget about everything else ukrainians the rule of law stopping a War in China these are all very important things but even if we don’t care about those things and all we

Care about is citizens of the Russian Federation what we need what we would wish for them is decisive defeat and the reason why why that’s true now this is all in Road done Freedom which fellow jakani mentioned but the way that European colonial empires do become something better

Is by losing worse right and that’s true of all of them and or almost all and the nice thing about it is that they forget it after it happens so you know the the Brit like if you look at the whole European Union Story the European Union story is about how

Unlike the okay how many European Union citizens have I got here got some Italians yeah I mean the whole European Union story is unlike the Americans we know that war is bad and therefore we traded coal and steel and there and therefore you know we you

Know this that the other thing which is complete nonsense right the Europeans European Empires kept fighting Imperial Wars until they lost them and then you know like you lost yours in Ethiopia also in Stalingrad you know tens of thousands of Italians died at Stalingrad so everybody forgets

Um but you know the Germans lost theirs over Ukraine um that the Dutch lost theirs in Indonesia right out the second world war the French in in Southeast Asia and Algeria and then once they lose their Imperial War then they make as the you know famously de Gaulle then you make

The choice for Europe right and then once you make the choice for Europe you forget about all the Imperial Wars they never happened we’ve always been nice Europeans and unlike the Americans we don’t fight Wars the and uh yeah um and yeah so and and so and and and I I

Don’t say that’s I mean I I I believe that your opinion is a beautiful thing it lacks it lacks a certain amount of self-awareness and the self-awareness it lacks is a problem in the Russell Ukrainian War because if you follow the line of reasoning which I just gave then if

You’re European you think oh it’s natural that Russia is fighting a war it’s not surprising we all did this too until quite recently and it would be good if they lost not only for Ukrainian for us but for them right it’d be good for the Russians

If they lost which is not a point which I see Europeans making often enough and the reason they don’t make it often enough is because they don’t remember how good it was for them that they lost right um like look at Journal like you know the I I live some of the time

In Austria It’s a Wonderful it’s a wonderful wonderful wonderful country and it owes everything everything to defeat right not and this is important not peace but defeat right not peace but defeat and what was brought to Vienna in 1945 was not peace it was defeat

And so I mean not going into the details of what happens to Russia because I my view about this is that nobody knows and it’s not it’s fundamentally not Ukraine’s problem and it’s also fundamentally not America’s problem I mean we Americans have this idea that which I find as a non-diplomat hilarious that

Our Russian policy actually sometimes has consequences in Russia which are what we want which as far as I can tell has not been true since the mid-1980s I mean there’s not I don’t think there’s a moment where we have had a Russian policy which actually like led to the

Thing happening in Russia that we wanted to right I mean the Russians throw this propaganda to us all the time about how we wanted to destroy the Soviet Union and we did it and this is part of this like myth of American like American omnipotence

Which is just crazy I mean we tried like hell to keep the Soviet Union together as ukrainians will remember right like President Bush coming to Kiev right we were trying like hell to keep the Soviet Union together all the way through December 1991 like the correspondent we have the the

Correspondence of the presidential archives has been released I mean we’re writing letters the president is writing letters in December of 1991 we are trying to hold the Soviet Union together and we failed and basically at every move every moment since then we’ve had Russia policy and it’s never succeeded

Right we and so the idea that like we can now decide okay we’re gonna like we’re going to help Ukraine win the war but we’re also going to make sure Russia doesn’t fall apart you know like that’s we can’t do that right like we just don’t have that kind of power and nobody

Does right nobody does uh so so anyway like I I my view is that you know Russia started this terrible war and it’s gonna have consequences in Russia and the Russians will in their Russian way they will figure it out they will figure it out and then they

Will forget they lost the war in Ukraine that’s the one thing I’m sure of I mean they’ll lose and then they’ll forget that they lost which if you’re a European like you like you know like you know that you’re good at that right I mean we’re all so good

Um you know I don’t want to talk the Americans down um but uh but anyway so going on to the second sorry so that was my answer to the to Russia I mean but I would also say I would question the premise a little bit because I think it’s actually very important that

Ukrainians think about what kind of Ukraine should come after the war um and that’s another thing which the second world war teaches that the people who are in the resistance uh the not like the non-communist resistance at least all across Europe none of them said just like you like no

Ukrainian as far as I know says we’re fighting for February of 22. like everything was great in February of 22 right nobody’s fighting to get back to February of 22. just like in the second world war nobody was fighting for September 1939 like there were no banners which said like like before the

War you know everyone understood there were big problems before the war and so yeah the war has to be a chance where you think about how things would be how things would be better okay um on the second question and about on on on on on rock and roll okay so uh

All right so um at the end of the second world war and this is going to be my answer to the first question too so I hope it doesn’t I hope it works um at the end of the second at the end of the second world war the Soviets win

But there’s no legal settlement after the invasion of Prague after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 one of brezhnev’s preoccupations and this goes with the general scheme of normalization was that he wanted legal affirmation of the post-war settlement he wanted the Americans the Europeans to accept the

1945 settlement and as a result of that desire we had something called the Helsinki final act in 1975 in which we you know the Americans Canadians the Europeans Soviet Union we agreed to start some Arms Control negotiations we agreed on some other things um and then there were two or three

Paragraphs about human rights which were sort of trivial like it’s just a few sentences and all they do is they say the signatories affirm some agreements which they already assigned right okay so Brezhnev once a predictable world right this is what he wants he wants geopolitically for us to accept

That the bolts are part of the Soviet Union the Polish borders are legitimate all this stuff and we accept it you know we say okay the borders are there in exchange we just want you to talk about arms control and by the way a few senses about human rights

So president wants the whole world to be predictable right but what do people do with those two or three paragraphs about human rights so people in Ukraine and uh and in Russia and in the bolts and in uh Slovakia Czechoslovakia Poland they take these two paragraphs about human rights

And they say oh well these are now part of the law on the land and we’re going to treat them as though they’re normal in the sense of like what’s really good and true like we’re going to pretend that like that the state actually believes in its own laws and we’re going

To pretend that human rights are real and that becomes the basis for a one basis anyway for the Ukrainian Helsinki group um for for Charter 77 further committee the workers defense Committee in Poland it becomes a basis for Russian human rights activity which is going on already

And and the idea of freedom that these people have is precisely about improv unpredictability right like their version of freedom is you know like matanovic you know I want to live a normal Ukrainian life where normal means the thing I feel like doing right now

Because I’m a like I want to sing and I want to sing in Ukraine I just want to have like my ordinary life as a human you know hovel talks about affirming your values but they’re like they’re very it’s like panimaria like Norman though which is like the little things

In your life that you actually believe in that’s Freedom right but it’s all unpredictable and human it’s and uh and so this desire for predictability leads to unpredictability but okay but how though so Havel goes into public life in during a trial in 1977. the only reason hovel ever becomes

President and this becomes famous and is is that he he decides to stick up for a rock and roll band called the plastic people of the universe okay so the plastic people the universe was a Czech rock and roll band they started out as a cover band for The Velvet Underground in 1968.

And like all rock and roll bands in normalized Czechoslovakia they were surveilled on the logic that rock and roll was unpredictable and it brought in values which was true so they were they were prosecuted and Java went to their trial and he decided okay I’m going to stand up for these

People because he understood that their music was bringing authentic values into the world he wasn’t he didn’t particularly like rock and roll himself but he thought rock and roll music unpredictable human authentic true I’ll stand up for it so he stands up for it science Charter 77 gets in prisons becomes the vatslav

Havel who then figures as an East European thinker in my book essentially but what had to happen for all that to happen Okay so the plastic people the universe are called the plastic people the universe okay but because this is a little complicated okay the plastic people of the universe

Are called the plastic people because of of a of a song by Frank Zappa which is called the plastic people and the plot the song the plastic people which has very interesting lyrics about Freedom his last line of it is go home check yourself you think we’re talking about somebody else

But it’s like it’s about like plastic is like you can you know plastic is Conformity right but like you have to be your own person so this check band named itself after the song the plastic people but the song the plastic people only exists um because of another song called Louie

Louie which I don’t know if you’ve heard but like every American has heard it every American is the one that goes Okay yeah right that would be cool so so um so that that song was uh was was made Popular by an American rock and roll band called The Kingsmen but it only existed because it was written by an African-American called Richard Berry who wrote it on a roll of

Toilet paper in a club in Los Angeles um which is an example of like how rock and roll came to be like it’s all about it’s about black music meeting white people basically but Richard Berry wrote that song because at the club in Los Angeles there was a Cuban band

Master a Cha-Cha band Master called Rene Tuesday and he was playing a song which was called um I think was called la loca la loca Cha-Cha and that had the rift So Richard Berry plagiarized that riff put in his song Louie Louie okay but Renee Jose the Cuban band master was only in America because there was a hurricane in Cuba okay and maybe that hurricane was caused by a butterfly now where am I going with this because these things which like look

Like big history in retrospect like human rights they contain an ironic angle the president was actually aiming for predictability and he got an idea of freedom what about which is unpredictability but also like all the things that went into that situation where hovel becomes the famous hovel you

Have to like go back to America and rock and roll and black people and like all kinds of all kinds of unpredictable combinations and this goes to what I think positive freedom is okay so positive freedom is a world in which like you can make up a

Song in like some bathroom in Los Angeles and halfway across the world somebody’s going to stand up in a courtroom to defend a band right positive freedom is is is freedom in which we are combining lots of different values in unpredictable ways it’s a positive Freedom means that each

Of us is different but not just in a cliched way that like we’re different now but we’re different because we’ve had the chance over the course of a life to learn how to recognize and identify and combine values so that sometimes we get to a point where we might do

Something extraordinary most of the time will be will be pretty boring but at some moment we might do something extraordinary and think we had to do it because because we were free so I don’t have a vision of positive Freedom like it can’t be so simple it can’t be like

One thing it’s because positive Freedom means because there’s like a geometry where things don’t all add up like the values don’t all add up but what you know we can make it we can make it as easy as possible for us all to be positively free but when we do

That that means that each of us will combine values in a different way and we’ll get into situations which are not predictable and which are interesting and those non-predictable interesting situations are what make us humans with with character now obviously so another thing that hovel was obsessed with was

The coming of the computer and the politics which would make a digitalized politics which would make us predictable he was writing the 1975 about this so like long before it actually happened but this has now happened and one of the things that I’m working against with is the digitalization of everything and the

Fact that we’re now we are in fact living you know in a big machine the internet which is aimed at making us predictable so as my colleague Daniel markovitz at Yale who’s a great thinker pointed out when I was working on this project a few years ago the traditionally the central

Category of Freedom has been rationality and I’m trying to replace rationality with unpredictability I’m putting unpredictability where rationality used to be next time we will invite team Schneider to make a lecture about rock and roll and by the way in this space we combine music poetry and philosophy all the time so

Next questions remarks good evening my name is I’m a writer and also now uh I’m an officer of Ukrainian Army and my question is uh I feel like we have like sort of discussion with some people in Western Society whether this war is so-called war of Putin or whether all the Russians are

Responsible for what’s going on and I feel like most ukrainians think that Russians are responsible those who actively support this war and even those who possibly support it and especially those who take part in the war but ironically everybody knows that Putin is a dictator and dictatorship

Means that people have no freedom in that country and if they don’t have freedom which what Russians say they say we don’t have freedom this is not up to us to decide it’s not our fault so if they are not free you can easily think that probably they cannot bear responsibility for the

Situation and if it is so you can easily justify any kind of side in the world so I do believe they are responsible but help me with arguments thank you [Applause] Alia Chandra a letter in Chief you’re my Don Press thank you for everything that you do for Ukraine

Um so you said that freedom is the ultimate value where everything all other values can flourish and in Ukraine we feel like the territory of Freedom has been expanding especially since you’re my Dawn it’s been freedom is um also a great value for most ukrainians now it hasn’t always been

This way but it has come to be this way recently but we see that in other societies and Russia freedom is not the ultimate value and most people are okay with being unfree and supporting a dictator and somehow there is not this value and in your book and tyranny you also stress that

Um there may come a point in the Democracy where Freedom stops being the ultimate value and democracy starts to decline so I would like to ask um what happens in societies for freedom to start becoming the ultimate value and what happens and societies where it doesn’t become that value where people

Do not uphold the necessity of freedom But my question will be for me as a citizen of Ukraine what do you think on the west Collective West should do more of now in order to make Ukraine win faster Creator director of the Ukrainian Institute um you’re saying unpredictable but you don’t say spontaneous

Is it different how is it different and for me spontaneous means creative and this is how it’s connected to the essence of humankind so just develop on this I have philosophical education so I’m also in the mood okay um so when you um when you answer questions

You try to think of a way that they’re all like deeply connected and uh and and are about the same question um which is a little hard in this in this last round of questions there’s a there’s a common element though that I’m going to mention before I try to answer them specifically

Which has to which is which is the body so again I’ve had a hard time in the book it’s easier um but it I find it it’s interesting that in a philosophical conversation it’s kind of hard to get to the body and how important the body is

In like the things that allow us to be spontaneous have to do with things that we’ve done before with our bodies so like we are we can be spontaneous but it doesn’t come out of nowhere it comes out of practices and like the various things that we learn how to do

I maybe ironically but like those things allow us to make these jumps into spontaneity the of the the two the the four thinkers who are the most important in this book or the thought the five are Franz Fanon who I mentioned and then who have come up and then two who I

Haven’t mentioned but Simone Vey and Annette Stein and um edit Stein made the very important point that the create she said the creation of capacity belongs to Freedom so like we can only do the things that we know how we know how to do so I’m very sympathetic to unpredictability um

And the reason why I’m lean on unpredictability rather than spontaneity which would you know which is a more familiar term from like aren’t and but the reason I’m on unpredictability is because of this world that we’re in where I believe that a primary way that we are that we are prepared for

Oppression is that we are made predictable so we are the the the data that machines have about us allows the algorithms not it’s not just that we’re classified it’s that we’re we’re eroded right so if if I’m known to be a middle-aged American you know white male or whatever of a certain income

Class the algorithms work on me in a certain way to kind of make me more like the lowest common denominator of those people right and so I’m because I I believe that in the book I call this predictification so I make up a word um that there’s like this predictifying

Power out there in the world not just that we’re predictable that that we’re made more predictable and so that’s why I’m saying unpredictability I’m not really trying to oppose spontaneity which is a word that I like my hesitation my only hesitation about it would be that that we have to Pro we

Have to prepare for spontaneity right that like the kids who get and so in the book one of the ways the book is structured is it goes over the course of a life and so you know the the kids who are able to get more security and and

Predictability at a certain age are more able to be spontaneous or unpredictable later on right just because of the kinds of creatures we are and so if we care about unpredictability or spontaneity then we have to build in certain things earlier on which is like why a lot of

Like a lot of my freedom talk in this book is actually about small children for this reason and birth for that matter and the conditions around the conditions around birth but there’s no there’s no really strong reason why I’m not talking about spontaneity and philosophers often say like they say

What you say and I you know I I I I agree um the the um this Bears a little bit on what’s happening in the what’s happening in the war and you know what it what it means to to live and die right because I you know if we’re talking about these

Like if we’re going to be serious about these subjects I think we have to if it works you know if the argument works it also has to work on the battlefield or else it’s not true right if it’s not true during a war it’s also not true in

Peace time you know we can’t just do philosophy that works in peace time right because then it’s not philosophy we can’t I mean we can’t do philosophy that only works when you’re already an adult and you have property like it has to work from birth onwards right or else

It’s not really that’s kind of like I may I may fail in a very grandiose way here but my premise is that it has to work and like it has to work for all of life and so this isn’t quite answering your question but it Bears on a little bit

When people like look at this war from a certain angle they say like okay well X number of Russians have died and why number of Russian why number of ukrainians have died and let’s count that up together and like and then okay Z number of people have died and that’s

Bad to a factor of C and of course it’s I mean it’s that it is bad that people have died but there’s also the question of what people were doing and why right up to the moment that they die because we’re all you know we are all

Going to die and so what like what angle what trajectory were they on why were they putting their lives at risk or was their life was their life being put at risk for them you know the things that they were were they dying for something in a way which

Was meaningful for them you can’t die for something when you die you’re dead but were you putting your life at risk for something that had meaning for you as an individual or were you just kind of being born along on a collective flow that you never really knew how to resist

And I’m not saying that all Russians are one way and all ukrainians are another way in this but I’m saying it this makes it I think this makes a great deal of difference which isn’t always seen so it’s not like I’m not happy if if Russians are killed because they

Could not find it in themselves to be somewhere else than they were but I do think it matters I mean I think like I think it matters whether they were free or not just as I think it matters where the ukrainians were were free or not up to the last moment I do

Think differently about you know like I’m sure you know more about like too many people I know right but I think differently about it when I have some sense of like what they thought they were doing right when I have some sense like yeah they were in this and

They didn’t they didn’t choose the war they didn’t choose the overall situation but they had some sense and I think differently about it when it’s a situation of irresponsibility where you know or like totally responsibility where the premise is we can’t do anything about it so in your question there’s this tricky

Relationship between an absolute situation and an empirical situation because it’s never the case that we bear zero responsibility right there’s always a little bit of responsibility and when you confuse not you’re not doing this but like I think the error is you confuse one confuses a situation where empirically there isn’t

That much room for Choice with the absolute situation of no responsibility and you know so so the thinkers that I’m relying on here all of whom had some experience with prison and you know bad things they tend to take the view and and patochka is a good example of this that you should

Always be exercising the muscle of taking more responsibility than it seems reasonable to take like that’s the way you should be pushing yourself like that’s the kind of like that’s the exercise like those are the muscles that you’re building up because when you do that then you might see a chance to do

Something that you wouldn’t otherwise have seen and so if you if you get if you get if you if you say it’s a dictatorship and nobody’s free then you’re not exercising those muscles right you’re just saying okay well that this is just the way life is and then

You’re kind of giving up so my my view is that you have one has to say that Russians have some responsibility because the moment we say that no human that any human could have no responsibility we’re kind of giving up the whole show right um and it you know it’s true that some

Countries are Freer than other countries right but it’s never the case that you don’t have any responsibility and and so and the and and the and the and the way that the like the moral argument the empirical argument worked together is that if you accept the moral position that you can

Have zero responsibility that also affects the world right that affects the world and always in a bad way right so you know in the US the people who think like we know it’s like they’re conspiracies and like we don’t it doesn’t really matter what we think it always moves into negative

Direction right so I hope I hope that helps to supply you with with an argument I mean this this is actually the problem that a lot of East European thinkers were very much concerned with I mean precisely the Ukrainian dissidents in the 70s like they’re and you can

Expect everyone to be like them but you know they were trying to say oh I’m going to exercise a little bit not a whole lot but a little bit of responsibility I’m going to make a list of people who were sent to the gulag that’s what I’m going to do and that you

Push in that direction you push in that direction so that’s that’s as good as close as I can come to to an answer I mean I think it’s wrong like there are a lot of courageous Russians who have taken a lot of risks and not every Ukrainian has taken a lot of risks

Right there are definitely courageous Russians who have taken risks yes there are and um so one can’t say that like all Russians by virtue of being Russians are like this because the moment you do that you’re saying there are humans out there who can’t take responsibility and

The moment you say there are humans out there who can’t take responsibility we’re all we’re all giving up right so my view is that you have to say Russians have to take some responsibility we should all be taking a little bit more responsibility than we are and that applies that applies to

That applies to everyone okay so I’m I’ve got left um so Freedom responsibility freedom and responsibility by the way like for me go together right like here’s something that I’ve observed about this war with ukrainians and Russians um because I’ve I mean I so I’m in a different position

Than most of you here right I that you may have noticed this too ukrainians generally feel guilty well like that you’re like a lot of Ukraine so maybe this hasn’t been your experience but that they think I could have done more right right like I’m driving a van but like I

Could have driven my van one more time to have some for you know I’m in the I’m in the army that my buddy died or I’m in the Army but I could have joined six months before right um like most Ukraine I mean I know a

Certain kind of you know but these but most people I know who are on the Ukrainian side let’s put it that way they feel guilty in that sense like they feel like okay like I’m doing the things I should be doing but really I should be doing more and that guilt comes from

Responsibility like that’s responsibility right so when you’re free you’re always going to end up feeling a little bit bad because you’re never going to be a hundred percent fulfilling all of your value commitments and every everything you do even if you’re doing the right thing it’s also going to be in some

Measure the wrong thing right because like you know you maybe you’re even if you’re a soldier it’s possible that your talents would be better spent doing something else right like there’s there’s no thing you can do which is a hundred percent the right thing and what

I’ve noticed in this war just as an observation is that ukrainians tend to feel guilty in this sense like I I’ve you know I could be doing something I could be doing more like I know some ukrainians who are doing like um I do an amazing amazing things and the ones who

Are doing amazing amazing things like they tell me like they feel bad about this so this is what I mean whereas on the Russian side and on the people who are on the Russian side nobody seems to feel guilty right like that’s a that’s a really striking thing and by the way I’m

Stealing this up I mean I I’m not going to say who I have this observation from because but this is not an original observation for me but on the Russian side nobody seems to feel guilty and even like when you’re talking to Russians who are against the war

Somehow the discussion often ends up being about how it’s like not really their fault and like they don’t really feel bad about it and not this is a this for me is really an important signal of freedom because I think if you’re free you end up feeling guilty a lot right

Because that like because responsibility and freedom go together because if you’re free you know like there are a bunch of good things I could be doing I I really believe they’re good things no matter what I’m doing I haven’t done them all right whereas if you’re not free if you

Think like well it’s like all part of some larger conspiracy and like or it’s all part of some larger structure why do I feel that why do I feel bad you know why should I ever feel bad in that situation and so like the one of the weird things about this war

And I’m waiting for somebody to write this up because I’m not the first person to say this other people have observed this but one of the weird things about this war is like you talk to ukrainians I’m like they’re always feeling bad about the things they could be doing and

You talk to Russians and they’re like but you know you know like even like the ones who understand everything somehow you end up with a statement about how like they don’t really feel bad they don’t really feel bad like it’s not really my responsibility you know it’s

Not and that’s like that goes somewhere deep into your question I think that if people are are using their minds to explain how it’s not how they’re actually the victim right if they’re using their minds to say how like they’re not bearing responsibility because they’re the

Victim I mean people are in fact victims I mean all kinds of ways but if the way you’re using your mind is to say I don’t bear responsibly because I have the victim you can get really good at that right they’re like in some incredibly smart people

Not just Russians but I mean I have to admit lately in my life the people who do this who make me crazy have been often Russians lately but like who are very smart and they but they find a way to like tell the story in such a way

That like magically at the end they’re the victim and and you have to be and so it has to do with like habits of mind and it goes back to like my like the the kind of love the way I love spontaneity is that I like I want to love it from a

Distance you know I want to like I want to think about all the things that you have to do to be spontaneous right like you make a good decision to do a good thing but it’s partly because the habits of mind where you think like okay I’m

Like if I do this then I won’t be doing that you know like the habit of like trying to take responsibility is really deeply connected to freedom and so I’m not it’s like this isn’t exactly answer your question but it’s I think it Bears on it in some important

Way like the people who feel bad when they’re doing good things are the free people and the people who feel okay about themselves even when they’re doing nothing or they’re doing bad things like they’re not free and that’s not a standard kind of Freedom like it goes back to the

Negative because you could say like the people who have no conscience they’re free right but for me that’s like negative Freedom all over again you know like it’s rip it you rip out the conscience and then and then and then you’re free okay I’m dodging somebody’s question um da who haven’t I answered

It’s honest question weapons weapons weapons weapons [Applause] and Allah this is Alice question I think about oh sorry yeah yeah so it’s been like it’s been it’s been fun to be a philosopher because it goes oh this is about Roz so I haven’t I have to confess I haven’t

Read Joseph Ross in like 25 years and I read it a little bit of Joseph because my friend and colleague Daniel markovitz’s dissertation was partly about Joseph Ross and so I when I was reading his dissertation I went and read some of his references to Roz I am not

Like their my philosophical education is sort of spotty and all over the place you know and like the the tradition that I’m working in here as you figured out is is a kind of sinuous East European one and I’m mostly resisting the the Anglo-Saxons or like riffing off of them

But you’re there’s certainly parts of the Anglo-Saxon nutrition that I could be paying more attention to and I remember really admiring so I’m going to go back and like I remember like thinking he was sort of the best of the people I was reading so I’m gonna

Share your premises I gotta so in that case I gotta go back because then like all the reviews are going to be like Snyder didn’t cite Joseph Fraz I’m like obviously so I’m going to uh thank you I’m gonna make sure to make sure to have a look

But one of the nice things about being about like being a philosopher like when you’re not really a philosopher is that you can um is that you can say like I believe some things are right and wrong right so like I’m actually trying to give a correct account of freedom

And so I I and I I can say that I think that the reason people the people end up being unfree is because they’re working on off bad ideas so I mean I believe that the question that the question that the discussion that velodi and I are having is not just

A principle discussion it’s also a politically causal discussion that I really do believe that a lot of the reasons we’re not free is that we are working with the wrong ideas and you can have you can have then and I would agree with it as a historian you could have then a

Discussion about like what historical structures lead people to the wrong ideas or you can even have a you know a genealogical discussion about where the ideas come from but I think the wrong ideas have causal Force so with like the book isn’t the book is about America

Mainly and I think it has causal force that Americans think that freedom is negative I think that has I think the fact that we think that freedom is negative makes it basically impossible for us to be free because if you believe that freedom is negative then you will

Ignore or defy or oppose a lot of the structures that you that you actually need to become a free Society now is that your question or is there something about it that I’ve missed yeah yeah okay that’s right I think that’s an empirical question but I think there’s

Like I mean so okay then I’ll be I’ll try to be more of a historian then like so it’s a good I mean I didn’t answer the question about the Rocks because I had my cool riff about rock and roll which was kind of meant you know to show how

Values are both real but also communicable in an unpredictable way so like I think that like stories like this have a history like the the historical story that I would tell would have to do with successful resistance against against um imperfect systems right so like the oligarchical pluralism that

Kind of predictably arose from your 1991 starting point was better in some ways than what the Russians ended up with because nobody you know like oligarchical pluralism is not great but it’s better than oligarchical you know monism and it enabled a certain kind of pluralism and swapping of Clan power and

So on which bought bought some generational time and then there were moments um 2001 2004 2005 is another 2013 2014 is another where in some sense people taking action was successful and so the there was a discuss I mean this I don’t know why you’re asking me this question

When it’s like a room full of Ukrainian philosophers who were actually taking part in the events I’m describing um including volodia but the but but the it’s both the success and the nature of the commitment that counts because it matters I mean it matters that um that the the votes were recounted in

January 2005. it matters that Yanukovych led the country it matters that you know that ukrainians stayed and fought in February 2022 you know it’s it’s the it’s the decision the commitment but it’s also the success and so if you look at like compare the trajectory to Russia like fewer people

Try and there’s less success and so historically speaking there’s a different there’s a different pattern but I might also like to think that it’s um that this thing called civil society which we’re now like taking part in and it’s like luxurious situation we have where we get to talk

To each other you know that this Civil Society like it’s it can be described in a sociological way but it does have it also has a kind of metaphysical side to it right so I mean Adam mcnik and hovel before hovel died they had this they had

A they had a long conversation about what was missing from politics and they said something which was like totally incomprehensible to all Western readers um they said like they agreed like what’s missing is the metaphysics and by metaphysics they they meant um they meant what I’m calling normal

Right they meant an idea of the good right and so I like to think that this thing that we call Civil Society is not just like sociologically describable it actually enables the thing that I would like to describe in the book which is that combining of values you know like

In the questions there are different like I could you can one can feel you know different value commitments in the questions and in the answers and we’re all kind of combining them values and making new stuff up right so so to end with kolkowski who is my teacher who I

Think is unjustly neglected I think you know one of the great one of the great thinkers of the 20th century but in addition to being a a value pluralist in the in the good logical sense he also said a couple of of really a couple of

Of of of of of of of other things about value pluralism one of them was that in addition to the values that are that are out there we sometimes create new ones right so like when I say loyalty and honesty I’m not let’s those aren’t great challenges but there are values

Um there are values which maybe we kind of made up but then become real right um I mean solidarity for example I think is having a bit of a Renaissance that’s not new it’s an old Greek word it means you know density and being together but

There you can you can invent values and then those values can can become real and the other thing in this kind of bears it Bears a little bit on the War I don’t want to make it sound you know too dramatic or sentimental but um the other thing kolkowski said which

Is kind of interesting is that he said we one of the way one of the situations in which we create new values is when we do something good that no one could reasonably have asked us to do thank you thank you for this incredible talk thank you thank you

And I think it would not be exaggeration to say that Ukraine owes you so much and that thank you for all you’re doing for Ukraine I really joined Alice Wars here so please thank Tim for this as well [Applause] um foreign so we conclude on this and with this conversation

Uh we kind of start a new new type of events at Penn Ukraine and Ukraine world which I would call kind of a reflection Club and uh with team one year ago we’ve started a new podcast series which is called thinking in dark times so I

Invite you to listen to it and I thank you for team to coming and also encouraging us to make it not only podcasts but also live live meetings and we will continue here with our wonderful Italian colleagues just in a few minutes because we have a very important

Discussion maybe which will continue our discussion and the discussion is can democracies defend themselves so uh please stay on this event as well and again on a serious note let us remember let us let us remember ihor Kozlowski who passed away today and it is important that we launch this

Series of dialogues maybe this is kind of a very sad but important symbolic event as well thank you very much [Applause] foreign

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