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 subject I have chosen for myself is thinking about freedom in wartime Ukraine. The basis for this title is a conference I ran with some friends and colleagues in 2014, just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began — the first Russian invasion, in the spring of 2014. I brought people from North America and Europe to Kyiv and ran a conference called “Thinking Together.” Although that’s a very simple idea, I like to think it’s a useful one. And when I speak about philosophy in Ukraine, I won’t be explaining how philosophy might be applied to Ukraine. Instead, I will be thinking together with Ukrainians and others about what I take to be the central subject of this conflict, which is freedom.
That said, I’m very glad to be here with Margaret Atwood, my Ukrainian friends and colleagues Volodymyr Yermolenko and Mychailo Wynnyckyj, and philosophers. I understand that the general framework we’re supposed to talk about is: “What Good Is Philosophy?” I’m going to aim for something slightly different: namely, how we might think better, or how philosophy might be better, if we think together during this war.
My subject is freedom, and my method is going to be very simple. I’m going to begin with what philosophers or colleagues might call a speech act. I’m going to begin with an utterance of two words and think together with the person who uttered them. My subject is freedom, and I’m going to break it down into four parts: freedom and speech, freedom and risk, freedom and obligation, and freedom and security.
Isaac C. Flanagan
The two words are "президент тут," which means "the president is here." Those words were uttered by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Feb. 25, 2022, just as the full-scale invasion had begun, two days in. I want to use those words to talk about freedom — specifically, freedom and speech. I want to treat Zelensky’s act of stepping out of his office, going onto the street, and filming a selfie at the beginning of this invasion as a paradigmatic act of free speech. That might not be the first association people have, and if it’s not, I’m going to suggest it’s because of our bad habits: in politics, and perhaps even in philosophy, we tend to treat freedom of speech as an empty concept. We don’t pay attention to the substance of what’s said, the setting where something is said, or the semantics. How something is said seems to matter less. All that matters in our everyday portrayal of freedom of speech is the lack of restriction.
What I want to suggest is that this has it backward. The reason we care about the lack of restriction is because of the substance, the setting, and the semantics. The substance, setting, and semantics matter very much. And they matter very much because of the purpose of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech isn’t an empty concept, a reflexive concept, or a kind of habit. Freedom of speech has a purpose: to allow people to speak truth to power. That’s not an original observation of mine. There’s a tradition of this that goes back to Euripides, and it has been reinterpreted more recently by Foucault.
I want to suggest that when President Zelensky said, on Feb. 25, 2022, “I am here, the president is here,” he was, of course, speaking the truth. He was saying something true — he was in Kyiv at that moment. He was where he said he was, doing what he said he was doing. He was speaking the truth against a background of lies. One of the reasons he was there saying what he was saying was that, three days into the war, at a time when many thought the war was about to end, the Russians were claiming he’d already left Kyiv. Again, he was speaking the truth against a background of lies.
He was also speaking truth to power. Teams of assassins were nearby, probably in Kyiv itself. Tanks seemed to be on the way into the city. They’d gotten very close at that point. Bombs and missiles were falling. He was speaking truth to power. And this is an interesting third part of freedom of speech. The truth he was speaking was true because he made it true. It was true because of what he was doing with his body. What he was saying was risky, not just because it was true, but because it described a risky state of affairs. And because in the very act of speaking, he was taking a physical risk — a corporeal risk.
There’s another tradition of freedom of speech, I think closely related, associated with the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka and the Czech political thinker and dissident Václav Havel, which says that truth is something you assert, avow, or avouch. It may describe the external world, but it becomes true the moment you avow it, the moment you invest in it, the moment you associate it with your bodily existence. This notion of freedom of speech, I think, is the correct one. Freedom of speech has a purpose — to allow people to speak truth to power. Given that purpose, freedom of speech will involve, as Havel and Patočka suggest, a certain amount of risk. We can see the power of this notion of freedom of speech when we contrast it with our everyday way of talking about freedom of speech as a lack of restriction.
If we contrast Zelensky’s speech act with the kinds of things we usually put into our category of freedom of speech, we notice some important differences. We tend to worry about situations where powerful people speak untruths to maintain power. Against this background, that doesn’t seem so important. We often fret about free speech on campus, by which we mean something like people coming to campus to say the most annoying thing they can and then fleeing in their limousines. That doesn’t really seem central. It doesn’t seem to be what freedom of speech is truly about.
Daniil Ukhorskiy
It might be that de facto those sorts of things would have to be protected by any reasonable law. But actions like speaking untruths to maintain power or deliberately abusing the notion of free speech in the name of free speech have to be treated with suspicion rather than valorized. No one is showing valor when they provoke needless, mindless controversy in an entirely safe situation. No one is showing valor when they already hold power and lie to preserve or magnify that power. What should be valorized is the person who takes risks to speak truth to power.
The notion of the person here is important. I’ve been trying to say “freedom of speech” rather than “free speech,” and that is for a reason. I may have failed, I may have fallen into the cliché of saying “free speech,” but I think “free speech” is a cliché that leads us in the wrong direction because it suggests the thing that is free is speech, as opposed to the person.
It may seem like I’m splitting hairs, but I’m not. A huge percentage of the utterances we’re confronted with every day are produced or magnified by algorithms. They’re produced by entities that aren’t human and don’t have rights. It’s important that we organize our conversation around the freedom of speech by making sure the utterance is connected to a person. If it’s not connected to a person, if it’s just some digital agglomeration, it doesn’t have any rights. There’s no person connected to it. There is no truth because the algorithm doesn’t care about truth. It can’t be spoken to power because the algorithm has no attitude to power. Or, put more simply, there isn’t a speaker.
“Freedom of speech” is the right term because it implies the freedom of the speaker. That’s the crucial concept. The speaker, in Zelensky’s case and in others, displays freedom and embodies freedom by taking a risk. This leads me to the second category of freedom, or the second association with freedom, that I want to talk about: freedom and risk.
"Freedom and democracy have to be about taking risks."
Historian Timothy Snyder in Kyiv, Ukraine on Sep. 6, 2023. (Kostiantyn Huzenko/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)
So, we’re done for now with freedom and speech. Now, I would like to talk about freedom and risk. And as I do this, I want to recall my method. I’m staying with the two words spoken on Feb. 25, 2022, by President Zelensky: “The president is here,” президент тут. As I move forward, I’ll also slowly move into my own engagement with him about those words when we talked about them.
In order to think about freedom and risk, I want to step back from those two words, президент тут, and the setting in which Zelensky spoke them, and move into a more American setting to reflect on my thoughts and experiences in February 2022. In the weeks and days before the war, I felt isolated in my publicly recorded claim that Zelensky would remain in Kyiv. That was my view, and it was certainly a minority one. I felt strange saying it, the way you feel strange when everyone else is saying the opposite. But I said it, and it was broadcast on an important Sunday evening American television show, 60 Minutes. My claim that Zelensky would remain aired on 60 Minutes on Sunday, Feb. 20. Again, this was before he did remain and before he said those two words. This was five days before that. It was the Sunday.
On Monday, Feb. 21, the next day, I was sitting right where I am now, in my office at Yale, to take part remotely in the doctoral defense of a history student defending a dissertation in Lviv, in Western Ukraine, at the Ukrainian Catholic University. The student passed and then immediately joined the Ukrainian Territorial Defense.
On Tuesday, Feb. 22, I participated as a guest in a class taught by a Yale colleague who had convened security advisers from both the Trump and Obama administrations. Among other things, he asked them the same question that I had been asked: Would Zelensky stay if there were a Russian invasion of Ukraine? To my recollection, all of them said Zelensky would flee. They were very polite in their disagreement with me, but they said, “Zelensky is going to flee.”
This is the setting I want to recall. I guess I want to ask why we all thought that and what it says about us. There’s a simple answer to this, which is that Americans had just experienced a painful withdrawal from Afghanistan, and people tend to remember the last war. So, everyone was applying the analogy of Afghanistan to Ukraine. While I don’t want to discard that, I can’t help but notice that the notion Zelensky would flee, and the associated notion that Ukraine would fall, went well beyond the United States. It was broadly shared.
Alfonso Prat-Gay
There is something to the Afghanistan analogy, but I think something more fundamental was happening, which has to do with freedom and risk, or more broadly, with what freedom actually means. I think it has to do with something that, in my other writings — first, in "On Tyranny" and then in "The Road to Unfreedom" — I call the “politics of inevitability” after 1989.
That is the sense that sometimes goes under the name of “there is no alternative” or the “end of history.” The sense — the very powerful, very broadly shared sense — that all that was going to happen in the future was a kind of general convergence toward democracy and freedom. Underlying that analysis was the assumption that democracy and freedom are the results of larger forces. The larger forces people had in mind were usually capitalism or maybe American exceptionalism as an example for everyone. But some larger force was going to ensure freedom and democracy.
Now, this way of thinking about freedom and democracy has a lot of problems. It verges on being logically contradictory because, after all, if you’re living in a world of inevitability, it’s hard to imagine how you can be free. If you’re living in a world where everything is guided by larger forces, where are the people who rule? Where is democracy? How is that possible? More practically, this kind of passivity about democracy and freedom breeds bad habits. If you assume things are going to go your way, you don’t get in the habit of struggling, as Frederick Douglass said you must. You don’t develop the habit of struggling for the value of freedom or the value-laden system of democracy. Those muscles grow limp. Those reflexes die.
But the relevant consequence here, when we think of February 2022, is this: If you’ve gotten used to thinking that democracy and freedom are the result of larger forces, then what do you do when those forces are arrayed against you? This is a question that doesn’t apply only to a war in Ukraine. It also applies to an attempted coup, a financial crisis, a terrorist attack — any number of things. If you think your freedom and democracy depend on larger forces, and then you meet a shock where it turns out that the larger forces aren’t going your way, what do you do? What can you do? You run. That’s all you’ve got left. You run.
Jakub Parusinski
I think the fundamental reason why — and I say this with shame, but also in the hope that recognizing it will help us — so many people in North America and Europe assumed Zelensky would run is that’s what they would have done. Because, from their point of view, if they had been in Kyiv, they would have thought the larger forces were against them. What else is there? Democracy, freedom — the results of objective forces? Suddenly, the objective forces are turned against us. You run. What else are you going to do? But he didn’t run. He stayed. He chose to remain on Feb. 22. The two words, “The president is here” — президент тут — he uttered three days after the invasion. He’s remained in Kyiv ever since, and he and many others who behaved similarly have led a Ukrainian resistance that involves not only the Ukrainian state but also Ukrainian civil society.
Looking upon this from the outside, I think it’s fair to say we have been divided into the astonished and the cynical. People who are not somehow impressed by this are those who like Putin or subjugation or being lied to. They’re living in a cynical, nihilistic world. Essentially, they’re behaving as if nothing happened. If Zelensky remaining in Kyiv doesn’t make an impression on them, it’s because nothing could. They’re living their political life in a land of cynicism or nihilism.
Then there are the astonished. I’m struck by this. The astonishment comes with uncertainty about how to characterize what Zelensky has done. People know it’s impressive and know that, for them, it was unexpected, but they’re not sure how to describe it. People who are astonished seem to me to be those who still have some kind of value commitment to freedom, but they’re unsure how to characterize freedom as a matter of taking risks, which is what this behavior demonstrates. It shows that freedom can’t just be a matter of objective laws about our three-dimensional world. It has to involve a commitment to values, which then brings about a corporeal or bodily commitment.
Freedom and democracy have to be about taking risks. Not just any risk, not taking risks on purpose, not taking risks for the sake of it, but taking thoughtful risks. There’s always going to be this element in freedom and democracy. Larger forces may push this way or that way, but if you’re going to be a free person, you have to confront the larger forces, alter them, find exceptions to them, sublimate them, trick them, do something with them besides expecting they’re going to be on your side. You’re going to have to take some kind of risk.
This brings me to something I discussed with Zelensky, which seems to be an interesting but solvable problem for freedom. I’m going to characterize this as my third point, or my third concept: freedom and obligation. What I’m concerned with here is a situation in which it seems to you that a person is free, yet the person says there was nothing else they could have done.
On the one hand, when I spoke to Zelensky about all this, I had the impression I was talking to someone who was quite free. Even though we were behind checkpoints, behind sandbags, even though we were talking during an important battle, even though he had been working incessantly for months, he was relaxed. He seemed to be without complexes, open to talking about whatever. I told him I wanted to talk about philosophy, and he said, “Let’s do that.” Then we talked about philosophy for a couple of hours — for the better part of the afternoon. So, on one side, judging by his comportment, as far as one can judge, Zelensky seemed to be very much a free person.
On the other hand, when we talked about his decision to remain in Kyiv, and his explanation for it, he circled around the same point over and over again. He said, “I could not have done otherwise.” He said, “I would not have been myself had I left.” He said, “I would not have respected myself if I had left.” Here, we seem to have something of a paradox. I am going to call it the “Zelensky paradox.” How can someone who seems to be free feel as though there was nothing else they could have done?
I think there’s a way to resolve this little paradox, this Zelensky paradox. If we think about freedom in the right way — as a kind of pluralist engagement with values over the course of a life — this apparent paradox dissolves. If we imagine freedom as the highest value, because freedom is what allows us to engage with, choose among, and realize all the other values, and then if we think about our life in its stages, in the correct temporal order, as practice in making such choices, we remember these choices will involve subjective evaluations, unpredictable circumstances, and irreconcilable values. You can’t always get everything you want at the same time. You have to play tricks, try to combine, or do one thing now and another later. These choices are always going to involve imperfect outcomes, but imperfect outcomes are laden with values and have consequences. So, if we think about freedom this way, then we see freedom as this kind of pluralist engagement with a world of values that we can do because we’re free.
Now, if we remember that over time we change and that all decisions that we take are part of us as we make the next decision, then we could use an old-fashioned word and say that the person making these choices over time develops the thing that we could call ‘character.’ And depending on the type of character, a situation can then arise in which there really doesn’t seem to be a choice in the sense that it’s clear what the right thing to do would be. But the reason why it’s clear is because of the accumulation of free choices over the years. So, it’s precisely being a free person over time which generates that sensation at certain critical moments of life that there’s really only one thing that can be done. So, there’s the solution to the Zelensky paradox, which was worked out not only about, but during my conversation with Zelensky. But I’m trying to make a serious point here, and I hope I have made a serious point, about freedom and obligation. That freedom may involve the sense that there is one thing that one must do.
The final point that I want to make or the final issue area of freedom that I want to address is freedom and security. If I’m right in the way that I have been presenting freedom, then freedom is not something that you can really think about productively, think about as being brought about by larger forces. Freedom also doesn’t amount to just the absence of restraint. The absence of restraint is of course important, but the reason why you want the absence of restraint is so that you can become the person who exercises freedom, makes choices among values, and builds character. So, the restraint isn’t bad in and of itself. The restraint is bad, because it prevents you from becoming a free person.
Freedom is obviously not just doing what you want at a particular moment. It’s not a matter of impulse. It’s not a matter of yielding to impulse. It would be right to say that Zelenskyy was behaving freely when he remained in Kyiv, but I think it would be wrong to say that he was doing that because it’s what he wanted to do. It requires us to expansively abuse the sense of ‘want’, to say that that’s what he wanted to do. It’s what he believed he had to do, which is something a bit different.
Freedom in the way I’ve been discussing it has to be discussed in a particular moment, in a particular setting, because it’s meaningless without the particular circumstances. But it is also meaningless without the accumulation of experience in a particular person. It’s meaningless to think about freedom unless you know something about the accumulated choices that a person has made, which has built up a certain kind of character. The reason I’m stressing that is that I think a lot of the work today on freedom, or at least about decision-making in philosophy, involves hypothetical dilemmas where we’re abstracting away from the person and that person’s past. The assumption is that when you abstract away from those things, you’re generating a productive situation. I think it’s actually the opposite. I think that situation is unproductive. You’re stripping away the things you would actually need in order to be able to talk about freedom or, for that matter, about making a decision.
Freedom for a person, as you get better at it, as you get more practiced at it, ultimately involves choices among values; not necessarily negating values, but trying to affirm of many of them as you can and getting better at that, getting better at affirming multiple values, getting better at affirming as many of them as you can, even though you can’t affirm all of them. I want to suggest that this itself is an important point that relates to freedom and security: i.e., the freedom to develop and affirm multiple values requires a certain amount of security.
There is an American tendency, but not just an American, to imagine that you have to choose between one thing and another, between freedom and security. I think Americans have particularly been trained to see this as a conundrum since 9-11, but not only 9-11. The Cold War certainly had elements of this. The idea is that we're trained to think that there is a trade-off between freedom and security. I think this is just wrong. You don’t generally have to trade off freedom for security. I think generally when you trade off freedom, you get less secure. I’m also going to note that in America, we make the same mistake the converse way, namely, we think that you have to get rid of security to get freedom. We think: ‘Well we can’t have health insurance or whatever because that would make us less free.’ And that’s also a mistake, right?
What I want to say is that freedom and security, not always, but generally go together. I was struck by this point when it was made by President Zelensky when I was in Kyiv in September of 2022 when he gave a public address about the Ukrainian army driving Russian forces out. He characterized that as returning freedom and security to villages. If you think about it, it’s obvious. If you’re disassembling the torture chamber, the people around are not only freer but also more secure. So, when Zelensky and I talked about this, he said that the deprivation of freedom is insecurity. He also said that insecurity is the deprivation of freedom. And while I don’t think all these formulations are perfect, I do think they’re much closer to the truth than the affirmation that there’s a contradiction between freedom and security.
I’m not going to try to describe the dominant way these things are debated in Canada. I should say that certainly some of my arguments here have been influenced by a Canadian thinker, namely, Charles Taylor. But there is a basic American problem here that we think we have to trade freedom for security in the sense that when we’re in danger we have to think about freedom. But we also think we have to trade security for freedom in the sense that we think we need to give up on health or longer lives or the sense of everyday safety. We have to give up these things in order to be free. What I’m trying to say is that this is all a sad error. This is all a mistake. Freedom and security generally go together. It’s a shame if it takes a war to see these things, but sometimes war can help us to see more clearly or to think more clearly, which is my thesis here.
In conclusion, I have been talking about freedom in four connections. Freedom and speech, freedom and risk, freedom and obligation, and freedom and security. I have been arguing with the help of what I’ve learned from President Zelensky, but also from many others that freedom and speech go together. Freedom of speech has a purpose, which is to speak truth to power. And if we begin from that purpose, we’ll end up in a more sensible place in our discussions about freedom of speech. And the two words, президент тут, the President is here, helped me with that because it’s a paradigmatic example of speaking truth to power.
My second point had to do with freedom and risk. The notion here is that Freedom has to have some kind of non-material quality to it, whether you want to think of that as metaphysical or transcendental or whatever you choose. It has to have something that goes beyond being the end product of a larger structure or larger forces. If we adopt the view that freedom is simply an output of larger forces, then we are making what verges on being a logical mistake, but which is certainly a political and social mistake and runs the risk of making us less free.
I also addressed the apparent paradox of a person believing they’re obliged to something even when that person is free, which I called the Zelenskyy paradox. I resolved it by an account of what I think freedom is, namely, the higher value that allows us to choose among other values. But the resolution also lies the practice in choosing values which allows us to build a character and that character can face a set of circumstances in which it will be clear what we ought to do. But that’s an expression not of constraint; it’s actually a result of a life and freedom.
And finally, I addressed the non-tension between freedom and security. I tried to do all of this work on the basis of two words which were spoken by the Ukrainian President and to some extent on the basis of my conversation with him about those words and about the setting and about what he had had in mind at the time. But I’ve also noticed over the past year that this flavor of argument about freedom is very widely shared in Kyiv. The notion that freedom is, to use the philosophical term, ‘positive’, that freedom involves positive aims and not simply the negation of restrictions, is very broadly held in Ukraine. The notion that security and freedom go together also seems, in my anecdotal experience, to be very broadly held. One doesn’t want to draw solace from war, but one can draw solace from people’s ability to think and communicate and help others to think during a war.
So, what’s my answer to the question, ‘What good is philosophy?’ I’m not going to pretend to have an answer to that question. I am just going to suggest that it has been my experience that thinking along with the people who have had to undergo this war can help us do philosophy better, certainly with respect to a very important concept: freedom.
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.
