Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Aaron James Wendland
This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series and the first post of a new series dedicated to the war in Ukraine. For this interview, Diana Popescu-Sarry spoke to Professor Aaron James Wendland. Aaron is currently a Vision Fellow in Public Philosophy at King’s College London and Vice President of International Affairs and Professor of Public Philosophy at the Kyiv School of Economics. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Aaron has spent considerable time in Kyiv and has published in Ukraine World and The Kyiv Independent, where he is currently the Head of Ideas. In March 2023 Aaron organised a benefit conference for the Ukraine academy, the proceedings of which were published in a special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica last month – featuring an interview by Aaron with Margaret Atwood as well as essays by Timothy Snyder, Volodymyr Yermolenko, Orysya Bila, Joshua Duclos, Jeff McMahan, and Jo Wolff to name but a few. Over the course of the next few weeks, Justice Everywhere will feature these contributions, as well as an interview with Orysya Bila about the value of teaching philosophy in wartime Ukraine.
Besides his work in Ukraine, Aaron has also published numerous pieces of public philosophy in The New York Times, The Toronto Star, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The Moscow Times and The New Statesman, where he edited the popular philosophy column Agora from 2018-2022. Aaron is currently working on editing The Cambridge Critical Guide to Being and Time for Cambridge University Press as well as being an Associate Producer at Ideas on CBC Radio, and the Co-director of the Centre for Philosophy and Art at King’s College, London.
Diana Popescu-Sarry (DP-S): Aaron, thank you so much for joining us at Justice Everywhere! On the blog we often talk about philosophers who chose to step out of the ivory tower, but we don’t often engage with how circumstances might force philosophers to step out of the ivory tower. You’ve led public philosophy initiatives before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, and witnessed philosophers in Ukraine being forced by circumstance to engage with changing political realities afterwards. How has the meaning and significance you personally attach to public engagement changed as a result of your work in Ukraine?
Aaron James Wendland (AJW): I was initially motivated to do public philosophy based on my impression of the academy in 2016-2017, just before I launched my Agora series in the New Statesman. At that time, I saw all these incredibly talented people doing all kinds of interesting work in philosophy, and then publishing their research in philosophy journals that were read by very few people. It just seemed that all this hard work was underutilized, and that the wider world could benefit from it. So, I pitched the New Statesman on establishing a new philosophy column.
Some of my early public philosophy simply involved sharing ideas developed in the academy with a wider audience. Learning, discovering, and thinking about new things is part of what it means to be a human being. Or rather, I reckon the pursuit of knowledge is valuable in its own right, and I thought it was important to share the latest developments in philosophy with intellectually curious readers beyond the confines of the academy. More importantly, I thought ideas developed in the academy could be of use to my fellow citizens and most of the articles in my New Statesman series took academic research and applied it to current events.
In short, the motivation behind my early public philosophy was to share academic insights with a wide audience and thereby provide my friends and colleagues outside the academy with the insight they may need to think through some challenging social, political, or cultural issues.
DP-S: Thank you, and now for the second part of the question: How did February 2022 change your views on the mission of academia in general, and in particular on how philosophy can respond (or fail to respond) to the lived reality of war?
AJW: Based on the public philosophy work I had been doing since 2016, a colleague in the Canadian press gave me the chance to travel to Kyiv in May of 2022 to cover the Russia-Ukraine conflict. At that time, I had to make a quick decision: Do I spend the summer doing academic research and writing a paper that only a handful of people will read, or do I go to Ukraine to report on this conflict with the hope of explaining what’s going on in Kyiv to people thousands of kilometres away? Perhaps unsurprisingly, I concluded that reporting on the Russia-Ukraine war was a more valuable use of my time at this moment in history than writing another academic article.
As you may imagine, traveling form Massey College at the University of Toronto to war-torn Ukraine in May of 2022 was very much stepping outside the academy! And needless to say, reporting on the Russia-Ukraine conflict was quite different than the previous work I had done.
As I said before, I believe there is excellent work being done in the academy, and I had been doing what I could to share it with a broader audience. But my civic engagement in Kyiv had less to do with the popularization or application of specific ideas developed within the academy and more to do with using the analytic, research, writing, and editorial skills I had developed over the course of my academic career to share information about a significant historical event with the Canadian public.
So the methods, motivation, and aims of my work in Ukraine were somewhat different than in my previous public philosophy. On the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, life in Canada went on as normal. And while Toronto is an ocean away from Kyiv and populated with hundreds of thousands of people who had previously fled, and thus probably want to forget, the horrors of war, I was uncomfortable with the thought of life going on as usual while a major nuclear power was invading its neighbour with 120 000 troops. So, I thought I could use my research and writing skills to share information about the Russia-Ukraine war with my fellow Canadians and thereby implicitly help the Ukrainians by keeping Moscow’s attack on Kyiv on the minds of people in an allied country.
DP-S: That’s fantastic because we usually think of philosophers outside the ivory tower as people who ask “What would Rawls say about this problem?” But of course, we are people with actual skills that could be employed to identify and communicate theoretical ideas that emerge on the ground.
AJW: Yeah, that’s right! In order to produce public philosophy, I had to develop the skill of writing for a broad audience, and there are some philosophical skills that make for good reporting or journalism. When reporting from a place like Ukraine, you need to think through problems in a clear and analytic way. You need to do research when you’re preparing a story. And since there are a lot of unknows and the situation can change quickly in a warzone, you need to both understand the immediate context and think quickly as the circumstances evolve. So there are all these philosophical skills that don’t have to do with a specific academic idea or a concrete philosophical problem but that could still be used to do something like report on the Russia-Ukraine war.
DP-S: Thank you. The next question is about your activity in Ukraine, specifically your efforts to protect and potentially rebuild Ukrainian civil society, which were very concrete efforts. You took up a position as Vice President of International Affairs and Professor of Public Philosophy that was specifically designed to help rebuild Ukraine, and organised a benefit conference for establishing a Centre for Civic Engagement at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy. What do you see as the main advantages (or disadvantages) of philosophical thinking and analytical skills for maintaining values, building institutions, and rebuilding civic society, as opposed to our frequent tendency in philosophy to just criticize existing norms and structures?
AJW: Life in Kyiv is very difficult and the Ukrainians face all kinds of challenges. Not only do they need to hold back the Russian army, but they also need to think about how to rebuild their infrastructure and reform their institutions to join the European Union. So, Ukrainians clearly need to train soldiers to defend their state, but they also need to train engineers and political scientists to help rebuild and reform their country. And since each of these is a monumental task, they require a lot of creative thinking and imagination.
This period of tumult and transition has undoubtedly forced Ukrainians to think about what Ukraine is and where it is heading in the future. Like a lot of Eastern European states in the early 1990s, Ukraine had an opportunity to think through its identity and reimagine itself. Since 1991, Ukraine vacillated between Russian authoritarianism and western democracy and this cultural and political struggle has been slowly evolving for 30 years. But with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, everything is wide open, and things are moving quicky.
Ukrainians can now do big things quickly, because they have to do them quickly. But doing things quickly requires thinking quickly. Ukrainians are constantly asking themselves: What are we going to do next? And how are we going to achieve x, y, or z? And I believe that philosophers, insofar as we are tasked with imagining new ideas and thinking creatively, can help Ukrainians think through these possibilities.
As a Canadian who spent a lot of time living in the UK and Eastern Europe, I also have some sense of where the Ukrainians are coming from and where they are heading. And as someone who is aware of the strengths and weakness in Canadian, British, and European institutions, I may be able to draw on my knowledge and experience in some small way to help the Ukrainians avoid some of our mistakes when they are designing and building new institutions of their own.
So, I reckon the job of a philosopher in Ukraine, apart from doing what you can to help people on the ground in concrete ways with various forms of aid, is to ask: What is the future of Ukraine going to look like? And to help Ukrainians imagine that.
DP-S: I’m going to ask an unplanned, spontaneous question, and it’s about your own interview with Margaret Atwood. What you shared just now made me think of the famous quote by Shelley: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” So in your interview with Atwood, was there friction between your view that philosophy is what helps us re-imagine political alternatives and her take as a writer of fiction about which is best suited for the task of imagining relevant political alternatives?
AJW: Hm, that’s an interesting question. Atwood was downplaying the power of poets and artists, and by extension, philosophers, to affect political change. There is a line in the interview where she says “The sword is mightier than the pen”, and suggests it all comes down to tanks. The politicians control tanks and they can send armies over borders. She then says she obviously has no such power but admits that what she does have is influence, something like cultural influence. She can shape ideas and help create a cultural narrative. Of course, cultural narratives have their own kind of power, but they are far more amorphous than Putin’s ability to send tanks and troops across the border into Ukraine. So on Atwood’s view, the power of the poet is much more indirect than that of the legislator.
For what it’s worth, I think Atwood’s view is also true of philosophy. We can help people think through ideas. And it is clear when you are on the ground in Ukraine that ideas matter a lot. People are willing to die for their idea of freedom. And in some ways, this war is the result of ideas Putin has about Ukrainian and Russian history. So, ideas have the power to kill people, and they have the power to motivate people and save people, but it can’t just be about ideas. You need air defense systems around Kyiv, and you need F-16 fighter jets and all the rest. I think that’s what Atwood was saying: ideas are powerful, but they’re not everything.
DP-S: Now back to the benefit conference and the special issue in Studia Philosophica Estonica based upon it. As the organizer of “What Good is Philosophy? – The Role of the Academy in a Time of Crisis”, how easy was it to foster international and interdisciplinary connections between philosophers, writers, and teachers? What were the main challenges, as well as the most rewarding moments of your collaboration?
AJW: The benefit conference was designed to raise funds for Ukrainian students and scholars who were doing all kinds of humanitarian work shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion began. Apart from trying to keep their university running, academics were giving public lectures on Ukrainian history to combat Russian propaganda. Students were cooking and bringing food to elderly people in the suburbs whose families had either fled or whose children were fighting. This type of civic engagement is essential when your country is under attack, but Ukrainian universities hadn’t exactly budgeted for things like housing and assisting wounded soldiers, and the benefit conference raised $50 000 to support all this public outreach.
As for the participants, we had a host of prominent writers, historians, and philosophers give talks, including Elizabeth Anderson, Margaret Atwood, Sally Haslanger, Jeff McMahan, Timothy Snyder, Philip Pettit, and Volodymyr Yermolenko, and it was clear that all of them thought that this was their chance to do something to support the Ukrainian cause and they were all keen to be involved. So, the only difficulties I encountered were related to the logistics of organizing a major benefit conference and I am sure it was rewarding for all involved to help generate support for Ukrainian academics in their time of need.
DP-S: As the organizer of the conference called “What Good is Philosophy?”, what is your ultimate answer to that question?
AJW: Ha! I could write a book on this topic, we’ve already touched upon some of the goods of philosophy such as the value of intellectual exploration or the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, as well as the extent to which philosophical ideas can be applied to current affairs – thereby allowing philosophers to provide a public service, beyond teaching and research. But maybe I can elaborate a bit on these themes.
When I was in Ukraine, there was a real interest in simply studying philosophy. There is a major war being fought on a 1500km front, and there are plenty of things to be stressed about in Kyiv. But students seemed genuinely eager to just sit and read philosophy and grapple with traditional philosophical questions for their own sake. Of course, the war raises all sorts of existential questions too, and some students were clearly turning to philosophy for answers.
This brings me to my second point: there is value in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, but philosophy can be used to help your fellow citizens understand the world. And this is what I am trying to do with my special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica on the Russia Ukraine war.
Each of my contributors have taken ideas they developed in an academic setting and applied them to the Russia-Ukraine context with the hope of clarifying and elucidating some of the key issues at stake in the conflict. Some have used just war theory to analyse the ethics of killing in the Russia-Ukraine war, whereas others have weighed into the debate over cancelling Russian culture, or they have explored the challenges to passivism and non-violence in feminist theory that have been posed by the Russia-Ukraine war. And collectively, my special issue on the Russia-Ukraine war is designed to enhance the moral, cultural, and political understanding of concerned citizens who have been witnessing the conflict unfold.
DP-S: Thank you! Finally, is there any question you would’ve liked me to ask which would have allowed you to better describe your experience with public philosophy in Ukraine?
AJW: You asked about the value of philosophy, generally. So, perhaps it is worth concluding with my thoughts on the nature and value of public philosophy specifically. As I see it, there are three types of public philosophy, and each has something distinct to offer.
First, there is public philosophy as the popularization of academic ideas. This involves taking ideas that are developed using the technical vocabulary of the academy and translating that vocabulary into a language the general public understands. And the value of this type of public philosophy is educational: popularisers can teach a wide variety of people about key ideas developed within the academy.
Second, there is public philosophy as the application of academic ideas to current affairs. This requires taking academic ideas and using them to analyse and elucidate important moral, cultural, and political issues. This type of applied public philosophy clearly has an educational value, but it does something more: it helps produce good citizens, by providing people with the insight they need to participate effectively in politics.
Third, public philosophy can be form of civic engagement. This requires taking your philosophical ideas seriously and acting upon them in the world, by using your principled philosophical commitments as the basis to get involved in social and political movements. This could entail using your philosophical commitment to a specific conception of freedom as the basis for protesting against an abortion ban or even signing up to fight against the Russin army. And in the case of public philosophy as civic engagement, the value is likely to coincide with the value of the social or political ideals that you are advancing.
In any event, this is how I see the nature and value of public philosophy. And between writing about the Russia-Ukraine conflict, fundraising for the Ukrainian academy, and working with Ukrainians to rebuild and reform their country, I suppose my work in Kyiv exemplifies my commitment to public philosophy, generally.
