THE PRESUMPTION OF FEAR AS A PROTECTIVE FACTOR: BETWEEN EMOTION AND HOPE

(A Philosophical-Anthropological Reflection on the Experience of a New Sensibility in Literature at the Beginning of the Full-Scale War)

Abstract

The study examines the pressing issues of individuals’ psychological self-perception and their philosophical and existential reappraisal of their place in the world under the conditions of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. This war has forced Ukrainians to make life-defining choices: whether to remain in their homes, relocate to safer regions within the country, or seek refuge abroad. The underlying emotion that shapes such decisions in extreme circumstances is fear. As a fundamental human emotion, fear profoundly influences behaviour and stimulates an intensive process of inner reflection aimed at preserving one’s sense of self, ensuring survival, sustaining hope, and finding reliable points of existential support.

The aim of this study is to provide an interdisciplinary analysis of fear as a conceptual and constitutive emotion of human behaviour, while also identifying and substantiating a viable counterforce to this basic affective response. Such an effective worldview-based antithesis is hope, understood as an existential of human existence. Hope not only alleviates inner tension in liminal situations but also enables individuals to discover new meanings of life within the altered architecture of the present and to project their existence, however tentatively, into the immediate future. As an existential category, hope thus functions as a sustaining emotion essential for human survival under extreme circumstances, particularly in the context of the twenty-first-century Russian–Ukrainian war.

The study draws upon the foundational ideas of psychoanalysts (most notably Sigmund Freud), philosophers (Serhii Krymskyi, Vakhtang Kebuladze, Gabriel Marcel, Paul Ricœur, Nazip Khamitov, among others), Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), and related theoretical approaches. These perspectives constitute the methodological framework for interpreting and decoding the “living text” of diaries and essays written by prominent Ukrainian authors during the first months of 2022 and collected in the anthology War 2022: Diaries. Essays. Poetry. The volume is further enriched by its poetry section, There Is No More Time Here. Read through the lens of the fundamental theoretical paradigms of human existence – including philosophical and literary phenomenology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, anthropology, as well as literary and literary-critical anthropology – these texts make it possible to explore, through the existential categories of fear and hope, what Vakhtang Kebuladze has termed the “multivalence of the concept of experience,” that is, the experience acquired and transformed through living the reality of war