Volodymyr Yermolenko, ukrainian philosopher, journalist editor in chief of UkraineWorld.org, published Ukraine in Histories and Stories, from Holodomor to Maidan and Russian aggression to diversity in 2022 and together with his wife, Tetyana Ogarkova, Life on the Edge (La Vie à la lisière), éditions Gallimard, in 2026.

VY: Well, I think we are living in a situation where we have not only the process of disentangling language from reality, and here we have all this surrealist language that tyrants use, and that was initially described by Orwell in his double speak and all this on this concept, but we also have a new revolution where language really becomes to exist apart from human bodies. And of course, we had kind of a pre-feeling of that in 1960s, 1970s with all this idea of semiosphere and all the rest, but now it becomes much more present because, well, semiosphere is nice, but it’s still the world of the universe of science created by humans, while we are in an epoch right now of artificial intelligence where science are being created by non-humans, by the language models themselves. And I think in my formula, in this formula of Aristotle’s own Logan Ehron, what is more important is not even Logos, because we have Logos already, which is not human, but zone.

The idea that it is not only Logos, but the idea is that it comes from a living being, from zone, from a living being, which is not only mortal, but is aware of his or her mortality. It’s a human being like the Pascalian, Le Roseau qui Pense, which is aware of both its finitude and infinity, of both its fragility and eternity. And I think this is the most interesting, the most important.

And of course, this presumes, if it is a focus on zone, this presumes the empathy, the question of empathy, how empathic we can be in today’s world, which has become more and more violent and cruel. And it’s true that the language practises today are going away from empathy, are going away from this idea of humanity, are going away from this idea that language is a tool of friendship. Increasingly, we are in the conception that language is a tool of warfare.

And this is, again, the tyrants that promote it, that language is no longer a tool of friendship, a tool of love, but a tool of worship, a tool of aggression, a tool of basically killing and destroying, turning zone into Thanatos, turning zoe into Thanatos, life into death. And I think, therefore, we have this revolution in public speech where public speech becomes very aggressive, where, for example, stand-up comedy becomes very aggressive, where the blogging becomes very aggressive. We have the devaluation of empathy, and we have logos, which is serving not zoe, not life, but death.

And I think this is this Thanatic logos, which is very, very dangerous. 

VY: Well, I think that the war brings us back to a very obvious idea that we are not individuals. We are not atoms. We are personalities, of course, but not individuals.

We are not atoms. We are connected. We are connected with each other.

We are connected with other people. We are parts of the community, and we cannot survive without this community. And the paradox of today’s world is that we are living in the most interdependent world ever in human history, but at the same time, we are living with ideas that we are so much individual, we are so much independent from others, in a situation where, basically, we are so much dependent on others.

So never in history of humanity were we so much dependent on others, and never in history of humanity we had such an illusionary ideology that we are independent from each other, and that our major goal is self-expression, expression of the individuality. So I think it’s indeed very, very bad, very dangerous, and I think that collectivism is one of the big dangers of our lives, but also individualism, extreme individualism is also one of the big dangers of our lives. And it’s important to find a balance between the two.

We are part of communities, and therefore our task is to serve not only ourselves, but to serve other people, to serve our community. And I would say that in Ukraine it’s a very populous thought right now, and it’s the idea of sluzhinia, which is serving, serving others, but in a voluntary way, not as serves, but serving in a free way, okay? 

VY: Well, if you look at European culture, you will see that there are epochs where tragedy goes to the forefront, and there are epochs where it is forgotten, it is neglected.

And for example, we can say that 17th century, the century of the religious wars, the century of many civil wars, the century of the 30 year war in Europe was a century of big tragedies. And therefore you have Shakespeare, you have Racine, you have Cornell, you have Spanish theatre, all this thing. Well, if you go to the 18th century, you see how theatre was replaced with opera.

It’s very interesting that, for example, Voltaire was thinking of himself as a major drama writer, as a major tragedy writer, as a kind of an opponent to Cornell. Well, we don’t remember him as such, we remember him as pamphletist. Or philosopher.

So opera is not a tragedy. The task of the opera is to go beyond the action which is in the plot, action which is in the tragedy, to give you pleasure of music, right? When we go to the 19th century, we see coming back of tragedy, probably in a different form, in a form of major European novel, but it is also coming back of tragedy, right? Maybe we have the same, like in Ukrainian literature, for example, we have our major tragedy writer, drama writer, Alessia Ukrainka, who were creating in the end of the 19th century, and primarily the early 20th century. And I think she had this feeling that history goes over you, over our bodies and destroys us.

And tears us apart, and therefore her tragedies, which are unfortunately absolutely not known and underestimated in Europe. Maybe people will fix it soon. But it’s amazing how she saw it, right? And I think that fin de siècle is the epoch where again, this tragic element comes back.

I think indeed, if we take 20th century, the late 20th century, we had less and less feeling of that. Maybe it’s coming back. Maybe it’s coming back in cinema.

Like if we see the latest dramas, the latest TV series, even if it’s mythologising like Game of Thrones or this Breaking Bad, or for example, this movie, One Battle After Another, we see coming back of the recent Wuthering Heights based upon Emily Bronte. I think we see that coming back. And I think it’s good.

I think it’s good because, you know, tragedies never end up with a happy end because tragedy shows us that there is some big controversy inside our human nature and inside our society that are unresolved and cannot be resolved. That’s the sobering message of tragedy. I think there are two sobering messages is that first, and we say it in our book, that time is faster than we, and therefore we time during history when history is developing through our bodies.

And we are inside history. We are always late. We’re always late.

We always just follow the big events. Time is faster. We cannot accelerate our thoughts or our actions to be in time with time.

But the second message is that there is some big controversy inside our lives that are unresolvable and we need to be aware of them. So tragedy is against dialectics. Dialectics says that we can resolve the controversies, contradictions, and tragedy says we cannot.

And I think these two oppositions are very important. So you can say that, you know, Hollywood created this idea of happy end where there is no tragedy indeed. And maybe at least in art and culture, we are coming back to this.

We are coming back to this. And this is understandable because this is the life where we are living. But also tragedies is a time of heroes and heroes are those who challenge the stronger.

You cannot write a tragedy with the major character being an executioner. Executioner is anti-hero because executioner commits violence against the weaker and hero is challenging the stronger.So he has very big chances to die. But at the same time we cannot fight against evil if we do not have this tragic sentiment.

Because evil is impunity. Evil is the capacity to do violence without response, without justice. And this is what tyrants do.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)