Reckwitz on the Ukraine War: A World of Arctic Circles

Shortly before he committed suicide while fleeing, Walter Benjamin wrote his theses “On the Concept of History”.

He tells his progress-believing contemporaries that they shouldn't be surprised "that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century".

The sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has now applied this thought to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in Die Zeit.

Without mentioning Benjamin, he fits Putin's act of violence into a negative historical picture: "From a somewhat greater distance, the war in Ukraine is only the last blow that hits the western liberal optimism about progress."

The obvious objection is that after the Holocaust (in the words of Reckwitz: the "low point" of the "time of the world wars") no one believed in progress anyway.

But in his reconstruction of the recent past, Reckwitz makes it very plausible that the decades after 1945 were based on a hopeful hypothesis.

After World War II, a prosperity-based optimism about the future emerged, peaking when the Soviet Union disappeared.

Finally, in the early 1990s, it seemed for a very short time that human rights were about to spread to all corners of the world.

Farewell to the philosophy of history

The United States failed in its nation-building efforts in the Middle East.

It also became clear that democracy would not prevail in China with the establishment of market economy principles.

Reckwitz calls such tendencies, which stand in the way of the hypothesis of the development of a global society, “anomalies in the modernization paradigm”.

They also appear in Europe, where anti-liberal movements are strong in many countries.

So all over the world the opposite of what was expected has happened.

This is the specific dialectic of the Enlightenment of the last three decades.

Reckwitz therefore comes to the conclusion that the universal validity of the progress paradigm must be discarded.

This is fatal.

His essay is a swan song to the philosophy of history that Benjamin wanted to critically restitute at the moment of danger.

A historical in-depth analysis of failure, as envisaged by Critical Theory, does not occur to Reckwitz now that the course of the world is once again taking a dangerous turn.

The relativism inherent in this position can be found explicitly in the philosophy of the Kremlin thinker Alexander Dugin.

Dugin's worldview, as he formulated it in his book "Conflicts of the Future" in around 2014, is the "theory of the multipolar world".

The globe is to be divided into power centers.

This is also intended as an intellectual contradiction to the West:

pluralism of truths

Reckwitz also describes “a core multipolar world”.

It is worrying that Reckwitz confirms the intellectual disempowerment of the West.

The latter's "eternal validity" is questioned: "The West and liberal thinking are no longer the only game in town, but one conflict actor among others." In the West, the Ukraine war was encouraged not only by military but also by ideological weakness .

The philosophical renunciation of wanting to speak with reasons for everyone is the mistake.

Putin's policy is based on the postmodern assumption that there are several truths, i.e. one for the East, which can be further divided into Russian and Chinese, and so on.

Such a renunciation of truth through fragmentation ultimately means the sovereignty of interpretation of the stronger.

The sovereignty of weaker states is being refuted in practice.

This can only be countered with universalistic means, i.e. with the claim that a party, although particular, represents the general public, like the Ukraine today.

What is needed is not less, but more Eurocentrism.

One must also contradict Putin from a historical-philosophical point of view.

So that this doesn't just amount to global dominance, i.e. only reflects Russian chauvinism, the West must also look at itself.

His hitherto metaphysical untruth belongs to the truth to be regained.

I agree with Dugin here: So far, a minority has benefited from the achievements of civilization.

The promises of the French Revolution, which amounted to a world society based on solidarity, have not been realised.

In terms of history and philosophy, we experience the Russian revenge for the disappointment of the longing to achieve general prosperity through capitalism.

But that connects us with the people of the former Soviet Union:

Here, too, freedom and equality exist as mere values ​​or ideals, because they have no economic reality.

It's utopian and hopeless to remember.

But it is the truth.

Those who do without them will lose the fight against Putin.