PHILOSOPHER ANATOLII AKHUTIN: On the Emptiness of Words and the «Last Stronghold» of Humanity
Anatolii Akhutin / kyivdaily.com.ua
SHORT PROFILE
Name: Anatolii Akhutin
Date of Birth: September 11, 1940
Profession: Philosopher, specialist in the history of science, philosophy of science, history of philosophy, and cultural studies
Anatolii Akhutin is a unique figure in Ukrainian — and, more broadly, post-Soviet — philosophy. In 2014, he permanently left Russia, voluntarily and consciously choosing to tie his own fate to that of Ukraine, a country fighting for its independence and dignity. He described his move to Ukraine as a «flight from shame». Akhutin sees nihilism as the main threat to humanity’s existence — something that robs a person of what makes them human: dignity. In an exclusive interview with our publication, the philosopher shares his thoughts on the past and future of the world.
Huxley: One of your books is titled Turning Times. How would you characterize the main philosophical nerve of the current «turning point» in our time?
Anatolii Akhutin: My book is about pivotal times in European history. Today, we are living through a turning point on a global scale. Such times are commonly referred to as crises. The Greek word krisis originally means «judgment, decision». Right now, world history is experiencing such a decisive moment. And the unsettling part is that we don’t really understand who is judging us or by what laws.
I believe it is because humanity carries its judgment within itself. The verdict is being delivered by its own judgments and actions. The whole of world history — as Friedrich Schiller once put it — is a trial that has lasted for millennia. We are now at one of the climactic points of this process: we are being called to account, but we have no answers — and we are frantically trying to grasp what we might say in our own defense. This is the crisis of the «turning time», the decisive time.
In my view, the origins of this «turn» should be sought in the mid-19th century, when various specters began to haunt Europe and then the entire world. It wasn’t just Marx’s infamous «specter of communism». The British-German publicist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, for instance, included Aryan racism among these specters. And these specters managed to take shape.
One took shape in Russian communism, another — in German Nazism. And, of course, we must also name another, the most important specter, the one that brought us closest to the time of judgment — the specter of nihilism, which Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of. Not all countries of the world suffer from them to the same degree.
Having taken millions of lives and discredited themselves, the specters of communism and racism eventually dissipated into the air of history — but the specter that gave birth to them, nihilism, remained. Moreover, today, nihilism and the resistance to it are becoming total.
But when speaking of resistance, it’s important to ask: what exactly are we defending from nihilism? Because not everyone truly has something to defend… What precisely, and for what reason, should we resist? The will to power (to life), with which Nietzsche hoped to overcome nihilism, has turned out to be its very expression. Nihilism is such an extension of the will to power that it drives this will and power to the limit of negating life itself.
For me personally, the embodiment of such nihilism — hostile to any manifestation of living and full existence — is contemporary Russia. In the terrorist «operation» that Russia is conducting in Ukraine, it has reached the limit of destroying the human.
This is how it realizes its existence — by turning the living something into the dead nothing. I deliberately choose such extreme metaphors so that we may discern the essential features of the nihilistic «turn» that is now taking place in the world and threatens the very foundations of human existence.
Huxley: Can this «turning point» be imagined as a kind of boundary between cultural eras, whose main feature, in Lotman’s terminology, should be a «cultural explosion»?
A.A.: At this point, a philosopher should probably start by asking you a counterquestion: «What do we actually mean when we speak of culture?» Because this is a very complex concept. All the more so since, in «turning times», certain meanings cease to be fixed to familiar words in the way we’ve known.
All the words we’ve long been used to — «culture», «subject», «humanism» — all of them become empty. The meanings we were accustomed to no longer dwell within them — we still have yet to discover new ones. Let’s try to approach an answer to your question through analogy.
Take, for example, the turn of the 19th to the 20th century — the so-called Silver Age in Russia. Describing it as decadence is undoubtedly accurate. But what was the main tone of this cultural «explosion»? Nearly eschatological «premonitions and omens» — of a sharp turn, a crisis, a Last Judgment.
Alexander Blok wrote The Crisis of Humanism, and in the 1920s, Andrei Bely authored a whole series of pamphlets under the general title On the Pass. The word «crisis» appears in the title of each one: The Crisis of Consciousness, The Crisis of Thinking, The Crisis of Culture… In fact, this word was among the most frequently used in the 1920s and 1930s. Every era has its keyword. At the dawn of the Modern Age, for example, the most common word was «new», while the culture of the early 20th century, filled with a sharp sense of a radical shift, expressed it with the word «crisis».
One of the most powerful statements on the crisis of the era comes from Mandelstam: the century-beast has had its spine broken, and it will have to be mended with one’s own blood. The period of decadence, the period of «cultural boundary», came to an end. What followed was the real, non-calendar 20th century — a poem about it has no hero. The crisis nature of the coming era had already been deeply felt, as we can see, noticed by the sensitive ears of poets and philosophers. On the eve of his death (1938), Edmund Husserl spoke of the «Crisis of European Humanity».
But today, the judgment of history has acquired such depth and force that no past era offers images or definitions for it. In our hands are all the primordial forces of creation — and thus also of destruction — yet we have been poorly trained in responsibility. We have lost words — none of the previous concepts, theories, or frameworks can tell us anything about our time. We don’t know what will appear before us beyond its «turn». In fact, we don’t even know whether anything will appear at all.
The current historical situation feels almost eschatological as if there’s a foreboding sense of the possible end of the project called «Human» altogether. Culture realizes itself in historical time, but in the «end times», a «cultural explosion» becomes meaningless and impossible. The territory of culture has turned into some kind of refuge, and culture itself — into a secular religion.
The catastrophic nature of this turning point is such that culture seems to have fallen silent, to have lost its power of speech in the face of a total crisis. Yet everything that awaits us beyond this turning point is already happening here and now. In this sense, Russia’s war against Ukraine is not, for me, some accidental or isolated episode in history. It is the symbol and embodiment of the ultimate confrontation between nihilism and human dignity.
This is not just about the existence of the state of Ukraine but about the existence in the world of something truly worthy — something that is actually worth defending! When the semantic fabric of culture unravels, this «something» is not always easy to define in words. And if something does await us beyond the turn of history — as the outcome of a global judgment — then it will find its own understanding and choose the right words for itself.
For now, I can only speak of what, for me personally, is the «last stronghold» of humanity, for which it is worth going into battle against nihilism — and that is human dignity, the very thing Ukrainians stood for on the Maidan. For me, this is a fundamental concept, one of deep philosophical significance. And it is a civilizational concept because the dignity of the individual can be expanded to include the dignity of a people, the dignity of a sovereign state.
Dignity is the pillar on which civilization and culture still rest. After World War II, at the third session of the United Nations General Assembly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was published. The very first point states: «Human dignity is inviolable». Such a formulation had never existed before — neither in the American nor in the French declarations of human rights.
The idea of dignity as a universal value was not born instantly — it emerged from humanity’s confrontation with Nazism, racism, and Stalinist communism. The «century-beast» clearly demonstrated that when human dignity is broken, that’s it — there is no longer any reason for a person to live! Simply because the decisive part of them has been destroyed. That person no longer exists, even if they themselves haven’t noticed it. And if some kind of future still awaits us beyond this new historical turning point, then in my view, it can be born only from this point.
Why, do you think, did the Soviet secret police torture people? Certainly not to extract absurd confessions. The goal of state terror was to break the person, to crush the will to resist. To the generalized Russian nihilist, the very sense of another person’s self-worth is unacceptable — it is perceived as a threat in any form: whether in an individual, an entire people, or a neighboring state. As a result, the state turns into a machine for the destruction of human dignity.
If we rephrase Descartes’s famous expression, the formula of total nihilism might sound like this: «I destroy, therefore I am». When, in the 1990s, Russian villagers were allowed to establish private farms, their neighbors burned them down — in this way, Russian nihilism equalized everyone in irresponsibility and hopelessness.
It is this same nihilistic ressentiment, a vengeful inferiority complex, that fuels Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Russian militarized nihilism is total and chthonic — one cannot «negotiate with it reasonably», and this is precisely what the West fails to understand.
Huxley: Can we draw strength, images, and meaning from past cultures in the fight for human dignity?
A.A.: Absolutely. The struggle between Russia and Ukraine — isn’t it a biblical confrontation between David and Goliath? Yes, yes, there are many such parallels. Think of how tiny Greece stood up to the vast Persian Empire. Or take the struggle of the small state of Israel to exist in a hostile world that declared its goal to be Israel’s elimination.
Modern humanity didn’t emerge out of nowhere; it stands on an immense cultural foundation. Culture has left us countless clues that become especially important in moments of crisis. One only needs to recall Simone Weil, who spoke of the work of «rooting» the human being in the original sources of their spiritual attention, gathering the person, as it were, from the fragments of past cultures — from antiquity and Christianity to modern times. Weil spoke of the need for a non-possessive awareness of oneself and the world, of discipline of the soul, of open, unsentimental participation in human suffering.
At the dawn of our age, humanity was called to «adulthood», and time still demands that we «grow up». This isn’t about individualism, but rather about creating more mature forms of communication — both within individual societies and at the global level. This «adulthood» implies restoring the human in their dignity — through the conscious acceptance of responsibility, independence, and the ability to think broadly, to the point of seeing oneself from the outside. The cultures of the past can greatly assist us in this.
It’s not hard to see that I’m referring first and foremost to the Enlightenment. It has been widely criticized for its individualism, radical rationalism, and the political and social consequences tied to those ideas. But it’s pointless to talk about reviving or mourning the loss of a tradition simply because we cannot copy the past exactly as it was. However, the Enlightenment — with its cult of reason — demands from the individual exactly this: adult, responsible, mature, independent thinking. And that is something we would do well to learn.
There was a remarkable philosopher and scholar of religion in Ukraine, Ihor Anatoliyovych Kozlovskyi. He spent 700 days in a Russian torture prison. His imprisonment depleted his strength and ultimately led to his premature death, but it never broke his dignity. He had several concepts that are deeply important to me. Kozlovskyi spoke of war as a profound opportunity for a person to «grow up». This theme of a war-born «mature» consciousness turns out to be directly connected to the idea of Enlightenment.
Ihor Anatoliyovych developed the concept of «existential reason». This is a form of reason that, on the one hand, should be understood in the most serious Kantian sense but, on the other — is existential in the Heideggerian sense. At the same time, Kozlovskyi rejected Heidegger’s tendency toward semi-mystical flirtations with «blood and soil».
Let me digress briefly on Heidegger. For me, the Heidegger case is not only about his personal fall into Nazism (for which he undoubtedly bears responsibility). The difficulty lies in the fact that through Heidegger, European philosophy called itself into question. He didn’t bring Nazism into philosophy — rather, in his person, European philosophy entered Nazism (just as, in the person of Marx, it entered communism).
Heidegger is a towering philosopher; it’s hard to find a contemporary thinker who hasn’t been influenced by him in some way. His «existential ontology» didn’t just influence — it became part of the very foundation of modern philosophy. But Kozlovskyi’s «existential reason» is closer to the concept of «humanitarian reason» introduced by my teacher, Vladimir Bibler. Bibler proposed rethinking reason by shifting the emphasis from Cartesian-Kantian cognition to a dialogue of logical cultures («reasons»).
Seeing reason as an «existential» tool for understanding oneself and the world rearranges the relationship between logic, thinking, and ethics. «Turning times» are also a «turn of reason». If humanity is to survive, it may be thanks to the fact that it «grows up» and dares to make such a turn.
Huxley: You speak of dignity as an ontological core of human life. But where does it reside — in the individual, in culture? On what kind of «hard drive» is it recorded?
A.A.: There are existential phenomena that cannot be summoned from non-being by command. This also applies to human self-awareness. Probably, some inner transformation must take place within the person. In religion, philosophy, and art, there are certain value-based anchors, life buoys to which one can cling — but how and to what exactly one holds on is something each person must determine for themselves.
A «mature» consciousness means that no one else will make a responsible decision on your behalf. Moreover, it is you who decides whether or not you possess such a quality as human dignity. The problem is that outside of crisis situations, dignity has properties that are not very apparent or understandable to people.
It can only be revealed through the strength of resistance — and only when dignity is being violated. Crisis is always a test of dignity. It was faced by Christian martyrs, camp prisoners, and peoples defending their right to freedom and a distinct historical destiny.
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