Summer School in Humanities
in honour of Hannah Arendt
The Metaphysics of Action
The researcher as interpreter
Hartmut Rosa and Maximilian Priebe
on judgment, action and transformative research
The following conversation took place in Cérisy-la-Salle, the 2nd of September 2025, at the conference“Accélération, Résonance, Énergies Sociales” organised by Dietmar Wetzel and Corinne Pelluchon in honour of Hartmut Rosa.
It was prepared, transcribed, and later edited and appended with footnotes by Maximilian Priebe, who had a month before participated in the Summer School for transformative research in Uzhhorod, Ukraine.
- When I arrived in Uzhhorod, I was surprised to see that many of the school organisers and participants already knew your name. They told me later that quite a few philosophers in Ukraine study you at the moment, to better understand the transformation in Ukraine.
This is interesting, isn’t it? It’s part of how the idea came up to do this interview. I thought we could start by some key concepts, to revise them a bit, so to speak.
- Yes, let’s do that!
- So, I just read one of the chapters in your book on Acceleration again, the book that is now dating back 20 years (1). In there, you have a chapter on Paul Virilio, and on the role that war plays in accelerating societies (2).
Could you tell me a little bit more about it?
1- The mentioned study is Hartmut Rosa (2005): Beschleunigung. Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne.Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. It was translated into English by Jonathan Trejo-Mathys in 2013 as: Social Acceleration.
A New Theory of Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press
2 - Ibid.; the chapter therein is called „Macht, Krieg und Geschwindigkeit — Staat und Militär als institutionelle Schlüssel Akzeleratoren“,
pp. 311-331; respectively „Power, War and Speed – the State and the military as key institutional accelerators,
pp. 195-208.
- Of course, Virilio came some ten or twenty years before me. What he was thinking about was what he called the “dromocracy” (3). Basically, what he meant by that was the rule of speed. He was more about speed than acceleration, at least in terminology.
But upon me, his writings still had very a formative influence. For what he seemed to have in mind – if not in words, then at least in his general way of thinking – was a logic of acceleration. His claim was that in politics, and particularly in war, speed is absolutely essential. It’s actually true, when you think of, for example,infrastructures. Modern states built the roads and the railways for military purposes. So, at least, in the history of modernity, you could really speak with Virilio about this turn towards speed. It was different in the pre-modern past. In feudal ages you had fortresses, castles… . In that context it wasn’t necessarily speed; it was more about attack-power, but also about defence-power, about the power to not move, so to speak.
3 - The key text by Paul Virilio is Virilio, Paul (1977):
Vitesse et politique. Essai de dromologie. Paris: Ed. Galilée (L’espace critique), translated into English by Mark Polizzotti in 1986 as: Speed and politics.
An essay on dromology.
Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Only as soon as we tried to defend territories, it became absolutely essential to be fast. Even on the oceans, by the way: to be fast in sailing, etc. But, of course, today as well. To be fast with the airplanes, with soldiers and tanks. So, Virilio’s idea was that the logic of acceleration was driven by the military logic and by the logic of warfare. I, on the other hand, somehow contradicted that.
I mean, I still think Virilio’s ideas are true in many respects, even, by the way, up to the point that the Internet was invented as ARPANET by the military.
But I thought at the time – maybe I would have to rethink it, maybe we are not completely beyond it – that while it is true that politics and the logic of the military were accelerators up to the 20th century, in the 21st century (or around the turn), they could have rather become decelerators.
Because an army is such a slow thing to move,right? So, war can become actually almost a decelerator in some ways. You could see it, of course,in the Afghan wars, or in other cases, where the armies were too slow for the real course of events.
- Even in the Ukrainian war context itself. The Russian attack on Kyiv in 2022 failed because the Russian units were too slow.
- Exactly
- They were blocking themselves. Yet, when being in Ukraine, it really felt to me as if the war is currently again accelerating a societal transformation within the country.
- Yes, but I think that’s a different thing – which I would agree to, too. I mean, normally you get social institutions and a social life which both are very stable and only changing sluggishly, right? But in wartime, events can be so disruptive that, of course, you experience rapid transformation – or maybe let’s call it rapid change, sometimes turbulence – to an incredible amount that nothing else can really bring about. Except maybe something like the virus in a certain sense. I mean, Covid slowed down the world, but it also changed many aspects of it. But war can lead to extreme social transformation in a very short period of time. I would absolutely agree with that. And that means warfare or war can be a social accelerator.
Yet, what is different from the acceleration I meant is that what I had in mind is that in Western societies, in a capitalist society, acceleration is a kind of everyday endogenous process. The machine needs to speed up by itself in its proper way of functioning, in its proper institutional logic, while warfare is a disruption of that proper functioning and the proper institutional logic.
It’s a kind of external factor – like in Ukraine, right, the attack came from outside. It wasn’t the Ukrainian society itself which was driving the war-induced acceleration. Therefore, I would think of warfare as a kind of temporary acceleration of social change.
- And a condition that shouldn’t be constant either.
- Yes, it’s not a systemic logic. It’s not that the system requires speed.
It’s that the disruption of the system is speedy, so to speak.
- The concept that you are now most known for, both probably in Ukraine but also everywhere else, is resonance theory, which also already dates back ten years. In 2016, the book was published (4). And I wonder whether you could also say a little bit about how you conceive the relationship between change and resonance. Because it also seems to me that there always needs to be something that speaks to us, that we need to resonate with – in order to transform both ourselves and the society that we are living in.
4 - Hartmut Rosa (2016): Resonanz. Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Translated by James C.Wagner in 2019 as Resonance.
A sociology of the relationship to the world. Medford, Massachussets: Polity Press.
- Yes, that is the transformation I would have in mind. I mean, maybe we can put it the other way around. For me, resonance is a process which always has transformative consequences. It’s an encounter between two or several entities (who start to “resonate”); and by listening to and answering to the other, it necessarily involves an alterity which is not like myself. A difference is essential for resonance. And this contact with the other is only possible at the price of a transformation. I mean, for me, this is really an important point.
You know, there are two kinds of theories in social philosophy. Some are kind of identity theories which try to make the other like myself. For them, the other is essentially like I am myself. And that leads to a kind of “nostrification”(5) – to the idea that we can somehow get together… and maybe it even leads to conceptions of fusion or union or harmony. And then there are the other conceptions which are alterity-based. They say, no, there is irreconcilable difference. It’s not possible to really become like the other or be the other or even understand him or her.
So, we have these identity and alterity theories. And for me, resonance is exactly in the middle because it says: it is possible to bridge the gap, but only at the price of transformation. You will not be the same afterwards.
5 - When it comes to processes of non-hybrid acculturations, we might today even speak of “cultural appropriation.”
The term „nostrification“ expresses that point, for example, see Karl-Heinz Kohl (2003): Der Umgang mit IInnovationund Kreativität bei indigenen Völkern.
In: Oliver Krüger, Refika Sariönder und Annette Deschner (Hg.): Mythen derKreativität. Das Schöpferische zwischen Innovation und Hybris. Frankfurt am Main: Lembeck, S. 177–190, 187.
- In fact, at the summer school, they talked a lot about gap-ability, the ability to bridge gaps, to see gaps in the first place and then to bridge them – this seems to be resonating with your concept of resonance.
It might be one of the reasons why you are being read in Ukraine at the moment. But you wouldn’t say that you can resonate with an alterity that threatens you from the outside, for example, with the aggressor in the war, that would be difficult, wouldn’t it?
- Yes, that’s extremely difficult. I mean, that’s just difficult.
- Okay, let’s go back. There’s the bridge with the alterity.
- For me, there are two forms of encounter with the other. One is kind of resonant and it requires a kind of opening up to the other. And then there’s a different form of contact with the other, which leads to closure. This I call not resonance, but repulsion. So, if I hit you, for example,you clearly close. You don’t want to be touched in that form. And then you probably hit back, which means you want to somewhat either stop or hurt the other. This kind of repulsive encounter is the opposite of resonance. And I think for me, and maybe this is interesting from a Ukrainian perspective right now – or maybe it’s not, because it’s so clear what the situation is if you’re attacked by an enemy from the outside, but nevertheless – is that, I think, a conversation, or an argument between two people can explain the difference.
Because when we argue, once we are in total agreement, it’s not resonance. It might be nice, pleasant, but actually it’s boring. It gets really interesting if you have a different opinion. And then I might get really passionate and you might get passionate, too. And we might argue and I might even say, no, you’re wrong, that’s not right. But we’re still in resonance. We’re listening and responding. And actually, you can really see a transformation in our way of thinking, maybe because we somehow move to a new insight. That at least would be the hope.
But then there also might be a point where I don’t want to listen. Where I say, you know what, you’re an idiot. I don’t want to hear you anymore. Just go away, just piss off or something like that. And that’s the moment when it turns into repulsion. And I always thought of war as repulsion.
I mean, you have to be ready to kill the other and you feel that the other wants to kill you. That’s not a form of – I mean, resonance requires that you let yourself be touched by theother; and you certainly cannot let yourself be touched by a bomb or a grenade. So, I would say, on the battle field, there cannot be resonance with alterity. But that doesn’t necessarily mean – that would really be my hope! – that therefore you have to lock yourself away from everything, like from the whole cultural sphere or so, from the language, from everything that emanates from the other… I mean, it might be very difficult to be resonant in this way.
- In any case, the other is in a sense necessary for resonant transformations.
- Yes.
- A phrase that stuck with me after I came back, was by one of the PhD students from the school who works with war amputees, with the people who come back from the trenches and who lost limbs etc. The saying that “you need to lose something in order to recognize what is valuable to you” is something I have since heard several times again.
- Yes.
- And that, to me, seems to be also a form of alterity, of experiencing alterity.
- Yes, I mean, the problem is that our human mind and humanity, we are so kind of self-contradictory and ambivalent. I really find that in these terms – when you talk about the last realities of our lives, so to speak – it’s always the case that you can say something and it’s true, and the opposite is true, too. So, you really have to find the difference. But something that really struck, which is similar to what you said… When writing the resonance book, I said that to experience resonance, you need to have the right conditions. You need to have a “Resonanzraum”, a space that allows for resonance, right? And I really thought of things like a summer school as a place where you try to create the setting where people can really listen and answer and actually feel kind of secure. Because you only open up if you have trust in yourself – by the way, trust in the space and in the other! And then you might allow the other to touch you and transform you. And I still don’t think that that’s wrong.
But I must say, actually it was the war in Ukraine, I think, which made me rethink it, but also in Palestine, for example. Now I could really imagine that in a situation where there is war, there’s death and destruction around you, and you hear that single violin or you see that flower or that gesture, maybe in an enemy, right? That this might be a much deeper form of resonance, maybe a much more transformative experience. So, I think something is wrong with my claim that there necessarily has to be a safe sphere for resonance to happen, and I agree with you. I mean, I told the other day at our colloquium here about this colleague of mine who said she had all these disagreements with her father. They tried to sit down and reason. And they tried to become kind of friends again, and it was impossible until her father said, you know, I just got a diagnosis of cancer, I will only live a few more weeks, and – then it was possible. And I think war is somewhat similar. Because it brings you down to the existential last questions, right? And I really think the experience of vulnerability might be important there. It kind of blocks all the spheres of alienation and superficial resonances maybe to kind of opening up to existential forms of resonance.
- Nowhere was I exposed to so much poetry as in this one and a half or one week in Ukraine. Really every day we read poems. The entire school took place in a gallery, and so there were artworks surrounding us, and that was also deliberately chosen.
- That’s interesting.
- I want to come to a last key concept – today was actually a special day for all of us, because you presented a new key concept that you are from now on going to work on for the next few years: social energy. Can you say a little bit more about what you envision to do with it? And then we can perhaps talk about whether social energy is also – and in which sense – important for transformation.
- I think I probably have different things in mind there. My starting points were two recognitions. Basically, I thought of acceleration. I thought, well, what actually is the driving force behind it? Because when you need energy, you don’t just need physical energy, you somehow also need psychic energy. You know, my definition of modern society is a society that needs change, acceleration, growth and innovation in order to stabilize itself, to reproduce its structure. But then I thought, well, it’s not institutions and it’s not societies which accelerate and innovate. It’s us, the human subjects. So, where is this energy coming from? But also with resonance, I realized that it’s a process and that the process needs energy. I mean, this interplay of affection and self-efficacy,but you could also say of listening and answering, right? It’s a kind of – there’s an energy going back and forth. And then I thought, well, how could I as a sociologist think of this form of energy? And I realized that in sociology, we don’t have conceptions of this. We basically have analyses of dead societies. Classes or institutions or something. And actually, I could think that in a war situation where institutions also become kind of fragile and you don't know what the guaranteed forms of living will be tomorrow or whether they will still be there tomorrow – there it may be that the processual, the dynamic element of society becomes much more felt.
So, anyways, I realized we have a kind of dual energy crisis. We are running out of – or we have a problem with – the fossil energies, but also with the raw materials we extract. And at the same time, we have a kind of psychic energy crisis. There’s so much burnout. Not only in Western societies but rather in all modern societies, because it’s true for China, South Korea, Japan as well: Burnout rates are really at record levels. It’s frightening, right? Yet, I could actually assume, I mean, I don’t know, but I would really assume that maybe in Ukraine the burnout level is relatively low. And wouldn’t that be because the enemy comes from the outside? I mean, for us, the enemy very often is the inside. I’m too slow. I’m not innovative enough and whatever. When the real enemy attacks you, it might be different. But I don’t know. I want to be very careful with saying anything about Ukraine. I’m not there. And it’s certainly very harsh, and I’m not saying, of course, that they are having an easy life. The same is true for the past, too. Let’s think, for example, about Germany after the war, right, particularly about the women – because the men were either dead or they were in prison. So, it was mainly up to the women to do away the rubble. Can we really imagine it today? Maybe it’s similar in some areas of Ukraine right now. Perhaps then you simply suffer clearly and you might even die, but you don’t die of burnout. It’s something different.
- I tend to agree.
- But the main driving force behind my thinking on social energy – because you’re interested in transformation – stems from this realization that it seems as if, today, we’re totally incapable of transformation really. I mean, let’s say Germany, or the EU or so. We talk of doing something against the climate crisis and we don’t get anything done. We don’t even get the railway system repaired, do we? It’s a disaster. And it really seems like it’s too difficult for us. For many years now we’re running on tracks of global inequality. It’s not going away. Gender inequality, it’s not going away. Climate crisis, not going away. But also, the conflicts: the Gaza conflict, for example. It’s going on since 1948 and absolutely nothing changes. So, I think, why is that, that we are so completely incapable of really transforming ourselves?
- That is a question many people would like to ask you!
- My answer is: we need a conception of social energy, which is also political energy. And I think it’s not solely individual energy. Therefore, the talk of burnout might be a bit misleading. I really want to develop a conception which explains why and how sometimes real transformation ispossible. Because it’s – a movement, right? And the subjects clearly play a part in it. But it’s not just the energies of the subjects. There’s something circulating. Therefore, my key term is circulating social energy.
- You take it from Stephen Greenblatt, right?
- Yes. (6)
- But going beyond this concept that still needs to be developed, what in Ukraine we wanted to know, was the following: what does it take in a situation of war to channel the high level of social energy that exists in such a condition into something sustainable? Into self-determined structural change, for example? What can we do to the effect that we become the actors of the change, so that the societal transformation does not simply “happen” to us? So that the Ukrainian actors, those who are affected by the war, are able to actually transform this subsisting energy into a structural change that they themselves want to bring about?
6 - Mention is of Stephen J. Greenblatt (1990): Shakespearean negotiations. The circulation of social energy in Renaissance England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- My hunch is that maybe the problem is that we really think that we need to do it. I mean, the question always is, like you asked right now, what do we need to do?
- Yes.
- And my feeling is that sometimes this idea of “what do we do” – that it might rather be a hindrance to the unfolding of social energy. It’s a bit like in a summer school or in a colloquium. Of course you want to have really intense discussions. So, the question is, what do we do? But if you think, oh, we have to somehow change things – eat earlier, eat more, eat later, discuss longer, discuss shorter, or have another form of seating or whatever – such actions might make a difference to the setting, but in the main that’s not how you release social energy. Maybe it’s all more about “letting it happen”. It’s not by chance that I’ve written this book on “indisponibility” (Unverfügbarkeit) – “uncontrollability” in English. (7)
I find it quite instructive to compare it with a football team. You can have exactly the same team, and for one year or for a few weeks or months they are losing every game. And, of course, people ask, what do we do? But it’s not something you can do. And then the next couple of weeks or months, they all of a sudden win everything and you think it’s absolutely impossible to beat them. I find this so interesting. I would say this is kind of the same as with the difference in social energy. Because at one time they feel paralyzed and they think we do everything we can. Practice harder and harder, and yet it just doesn’t happen. But in times of crisis, in terms of institutional crisis – and I think of war as the most existential crisis you can have – the chances for transformation and maybe for the release of new energies are probably higher. It’s something which has been observed historically, too. In normal times at least, let’s take Western or bureaucratic societies – to be fair, the Eastern societies weren’t so different in that regard – we had institutions for everything. If you felt sick, go to this doctor. If the power is failing in your system, call this and that number, the power station, whatever it is. And if there’s a crime, call the police. But if there’s a real crisis, COVID was a bit like that – at least in the beginning – then people have to organize themselves, then you have to become creative. And this is really apoint where social energies are released and they can somewhat lead to joint action.
- So far, we have been using words like transformation and change without distinguishing between them. What can we do to differentiate more closely – what is transformation and what is change? Are there components to transforming as opposed to simply changing? I mean, we change all the time. Every morning we wake up and we are a little bit changed.
- Exactly, exactly. Change is kind of pervasive. Things change very often. So, as far as I’m concerned, I would really talk of transformation. My take is that we need a kind of perspectival dualism on this, as I call it. It’s a term by Nancy Fraser, but I use it a bit differently.(8) I rather talk of – you could call it society – but I call it a “social formation”.(9) It consists of kind of two elements or two layers. One is the structural, the institutional level, and the other is the cultural one. For me, a real transformation of the social formation or society would require a kind of simultaneous change of the institutional logic and the cultural state. Or the cultural setting, you could say. Because they go together. Certain institutions require a certain form of culture and culture means forms of subjectivity. It’s useful to think of culture in terms of what people are aspiring to.
- There seems to be a connection between your thinking on social formations and resonance. Because in the resonance concept, as we know it, it’s a lot about what we hope for, what we resonate with, what we dream of, what we desire. And that seems to me to be very closely linked to culture – so as to imply that to bring about cultural change actually means bringing about a change in what people are desiring, to recode the streams of desire.
- That’s exactly what I mean. And therefore, I think it’s not enough to change the institutional systems. I mean, when Western elites or the political left are thinking about changing society, they really often only think about changing the institutional system. Of course, they know that subjectivities and institutions are somehow tied together. And yes, it can be instructive to look at changes there. For example, right now, in Jena and Erfurt, we’re having a huge consortium researching the structural change of property. In current property structures, we do observe changes. Yet these are kind of supporting and sustaining the institutional system. We are living ina capitalist society, so the accumulation of capital is essential. Property has, incidentally, become too slow for the accumulation of capital. Because if you own something, you want to hold on to it, to keep it, to preserve it – there’s a kind of care element in it. And this element has in fact become too slow for the system! So, in light with the institutional logic that favours a mode of endogenously speeding up, we do see there’s now a tendency to not own things anymore, but to just use them. (10) This is clearly a change. But it’s not a transformation of the institutional setting, which still depends on acceleration, innovation, and growth. So, I talk of transformation when the institutional logic, the operative logic of the institutional system changes along with the forms of subjectivity. (11) Above those two logics, you see all forms of changes. Sometimes you see cultural changes in fashion waves, or so. But these would not be a transformation of the whole setting.
- Let’s still stick a little bit with this question whether a setting can be transformed by changes in the forms of subjectivity. In 2003, the essay, “Le retour de l’acteur” (12) by Alain Touraine was translated into Ukrainian. Until then, there was no word in Ukrainian for actor.
Only the term “diach (діяч)”, which described political cadres in Soviet nomenclature. (13) In order to carry across what Touraine wanted to say, the translators invented a new word: and that was “Dijevets (дієвець)”, which right now plays a major role in active civil society networks in Ukraine. (14) But it begs a new question: for are transformations really always effected by actors?
- You know, there is a term in sociology, which is quite useful. We have actually have given it up a bit in Jena, but we used it in a huge former project. It’s the old concept of path dependency. (15) It means that quite regularly, societies follow down a certain path. But in this path, there exist what we can call “points of bifurcation”. And I think that the people who are advocating this are probably right: it is in bifurcation points that it is really the time of the actors. It means society is at a point where it can go one way or the other. And I think people in Ukraine somewhat experienced this several times in recent years.
- Absolutely. The several revolutions: 2004, then the events of 2014, and subsequently the full-scale invasion. (16)
7 - Hartmut Rosa (2020): The uncontrollability of the world. Cambridge UK, Medford MA: Polity Press. Translated byJames C. Wagner from the German original, Rosa, Hartmut (2018): Unverfügbarkeit. Wien: Residenz Verlag (Unruhebewahren).
8 - See Nancy Fraser (2003): Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Recognition, Redistribution and Participation.In: Nancy Fraser und Axel Honneth (Hg.): Redistribution or recognition? A political-philosophical exchange. London,New York: Verso, S. 7–109, 60
9 - See also Hartmut Rosa (2020): Gesellschaftstheorie, intellektuelle Redlichkeit und das Problem der Formationsbegriffe, in Oberthür, Jörg; Rosa, Hartmut; Bohmann, Ulf; Gregor, Joris A.; Lorenz, Stephan; Scherschel, Karin et al. (Hg.) (2020): Gesellschaftstheorie. Stuttgart: UVK Verlag (UTB), pp. 223-232.
10 - See Rosa, Hartmut, Dyk, Silke van; Reitz, Tilman (Hg.) (2024): Nach dem Privateigentum? Güter, Infrastrukturenund Weltverhältnisse im Kapitalismus des 21. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main: Campus (Strukturwandel des Eigentums,
2). Examples of the change that is being referred could be the movement from owning music diskettes to simply streaming the music, from owning a car to leasing it, etc. In terms of the property logic, this can be described as the development from a “classic” capitalistic regime (in which private households own their property) to a “shareeconomy”, respectively to the so-called ‘platform-capitalism.’
See also Hartmut Rosa (2023): Property as a WorldRelation (Weltverhältnis). Reflections on the Structural Change of Possessive “Weltbeziehung” in Hollstein, Bettina;Rosa, Hartmut; Rüpke, Jörg (Hg.): “Weltbeziehung”. The study of our relationship to the world. Frankfurt: Campus
Verlag, pp. 19-35.
11 - See, for example, Rosa, Hartmut (2025): Transformation einer Sozialformation: Überlegungen zum Strukturwandeldes Eigentums. In: Berliner Journal für Soziologie 35 (1), S.
11–35.
12 - Touraine, Alain (1984): Le retour de l’acteur. Essai de sociologie. Paris: Fayard (Mouvements, 3)
13 - Деятель in Russian.
14 - See Ален Турен (2003): Повернення дієвця. Translated by О. Гуджен, О. Полемченко and Т. Шваб. Київ:Альтерпрес.
15 - See, for example, Rosa, Hartmut (2020): Pfadabhängigkeit, Bifurkationspunkte und die Rolle der Soziologie. Einsoziologischer Deutungsversuch der Corona-Krise. In: Berliner Journal für Soziologie 30 (2), S. 191–213.
16 - For an overview, see Serhii Plokhy (2023): The Russo-Ukrainian War. London: Allen Lane.
- Of course, these are points of bifurcation. And then that means it’s up for grabs almost, it could go one way or the other. Sometimes you see it with the smallest things. Even in the development of technologies, right? In cars, there were different forms of engines. In the beginning, it could have gone one way or the other. There, actors played an absolutely crucial role.
- Can I press you a little bit on this last part of the question?
What in a society can ensure that the formation and education of actors takes place? So that, when – or at best already before – bifurcation points emerge, people can learn how to become actors?
- This is really interesting. How can we become actors? You know what, I have the perfect answer.
- Yes?
- Yes! They should read my new book! That one is about agency. About being an actor and not an executor. (17)
- Exeutor – I am not exactly sure how to translate it. The German term you use is Vollziehender. It’s about “eine Handlung nicht nur zu vollziehen” – to not only execute behaviour – but to actually act.
17 - See Hartmut Rosa (2026): Situation und Konstellation. Vom Verschwinden des Spielraums. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Tobe translated as “Situation and Constellation. On the Disappearance of Human Agency” with Polity Press.
- Precisely. How to not be only an executant or an executor. The actor is the opposite of the executor. My claim is that there are two different forms of activity, you could say. One activity is really being an agent. And being an agent means you respond to a situation you find yourself in. And you act on your judgment. Questions you might ask when you judge are: what do you think is necessary in a given situation? What should we do? What do we want to do, as well? It depends on judgment, but also on experience, on the experiences you have made with the world, with others and so on.
- Acting always happens within a situation.
- Yes, in a concrete situation. And that’s agency. And the opposite of that would be to not actually use your judgment, but to only follow the rules or the algorithms or procedures. You can really see it in schools, for example. As a teacher, you can ask, what do you think? That kind of questioning develops agency. But you can also ask: what’s the right answer? The latter would only train you to be a good executor. And this difference is really crucial. Because if I ask you only about specific results, I mainly give you a quasi-mathematical question. And then your judgment, your opinion, your emotions, your situation will be totally irrelevant. If you brought in your own
emotions, in that case, that would actually be a kind of hindrance to coming up with the right answer.
- So, one could say that over the past decades, the Ukrainian context has moved from the context of a constellation, in which everyone was embedded in very fixed ways, to a context of situation.
- Yes.
- So, that now the possibility of agency is there, but people need to learn to enact their own judgment.
- Absolutely.
- There’s the necessity to learn how to judge.
- And you might see that there are social contexts where the development of judgment is somewhat impoverished, or is not there. I would say it’s clearly the case that in times of crisis, you have to become an agent. Because there is no reliable institution and no rule which you can follow. But this question: I think I want to start asking it. You know, the last chapter in my new book really says, for humans it’s normally impossible to always follow the rules. That’s probably true for Ukraine, as it is for Germany. In every company of social sphere there are acknowledged domains where all agents tacitly comply with the knowledge: if you follow the rules, you cannot do it – but I will make an exception. You say: the office is already closed, but I grant you something. This form which you're filling in is not the right form, but I accept it at this point. And so on. These kinds of small breaching of bureaucratic procedures – we do it all the time.
- So, what can we do to effectively learn judgment? What can we do to practice judgment, to learn how to judge well, and therefore to become actors? This doesn’t seem very intuitive and evident to me, how to learn to effectuate judgment.
- But it’s obvious. I mean, there’s only one way of learning judgment. You cannot learn it in schools or universities. You can only learn by doing. I’m really, I’m absolutely sure about this. It’s like when you drive a car. But the thing is, even when it’s about driving cars, or cooking, or even playing – you really see a shift in modern society from acting towards executing. We don’t drive,cook or even play anymore. It’s very strange – but this is a shift away from agency, away from acting on the basis of judgment and experience. We think that machines and rules are not biased, not corrupt, that they don’t make mistakes. And so, we let machines learn for us and execute their programmes; instead of acting ourselves. When you ask about what we can do – I would really say we have to develop the context for agency, from the children’s age onwards. You know, in the book I write about playing with Lego stones. I would say, well, think of what you give to your children and what you want them to do. Should they execute a certain plan – or should they become actors? Like in this school – what’s it called, this Anthroposophy school…
- Rudolf Steiner and so on?
- Exactly, Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy. They don’t give their children stupid toys. Actually, they have great play stuff!
- They do…
- And they don’t give the children things which look exactly like in reality, because they want them then to use their fantasy to become real actors.
- I remember my kindergarten.
- Yeah – I think it starts there, right? But also, with all the rules. Don’t make people always follow rules. I mean, this is really my passionate plea. A plea for Western societies, but also an answer to your question. We have to interact with each other on the assumption that the other uses judgment and not that he or she is merely following rules. This is really important. Let me make my point about this. If you were a professor in the past, grading papers was up to your judgment: it was you who had to decide whether it was a good or bad essay. But now students expect – or rather, the university expects you – to not use judgment, but to follow specific rules to answer specific sets of criteria. And I think this difference is absolutely crucial. So, if you ask, how do we create actors? I would really say by expecting from each other that the other is an actor using his and her judgment.
- So, it’s really just as Hannah Arendt also says, there’s this intricate relationship between judgment and action. (18)
- Absolutely.
- Now that we have these two terms, action and judgment, what can we as researchers actually do to have a role inside societal transformations? What is our role as researchers at universities in social transformation?
- I feel passionate about that – I really think we do have a role. For me, this is something I take from Charles Taylor. He says human beings are self-interpreting animals. (19) Reality, for us, is not just out there. The social reality we’re living in also depends on how we interpret it, how we understand it. For philosophers, that’s not a shocking idea. We are self-interpreting. But it’s not just that we have a reality and interpret it, by doing this we kind of create what is. What the way is we’re living, what a democracy is, what a state is, what a country is, what a nation is. It depends on our interpretation of it. So, the interpretations are constitutive of the social reality, at least to a part, and in modern society, it’s clear that social scientists, or the people in the humanities, are very, very important in this business of self-interpreting. And this is what we should do, I really claim. We ought to try to formulate interpretations of the society. As a social scientist, I do not produce knowledge, I produce self-interpretations, and this is what I call “best account”. (20) I try to tell people what I think, what I think on the basis of all the knowledge I have, but also on the basis of the dialogue I have with the people. ‘Like, here, this is the situation we’re in, we might have a problem here, how about finding a solution there.’
Now, I don’t sell this as knowledge.
- You are not the expert and you are not telling the others what to do.
- Exactly. It’s more like a dialogical offering. I’m paid to develop best accounts, best possible self-interpretations, and that means I’m given the time to look at all the resources, the materials, the statistics I can find, and then to judge. I think it’s important to what we call public sociology to also listen and draw on the knowledge that there is in the institutions of everyday life. Mothers and fathers and workers and sales people and entrepreneurs, they have different forms of knowledge, and the best account should develop the dialogue with them.
18 - See, for example, Hannah Arendt (1958):
The Human Condition. London: The University of Chicago Press, pp.321-325.
19 - See Charles Taylor (1985): Philosophical Papers. Volume 1: Human Agency and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 45-76.
20 - Rosa, Hartmut (2021): Best Account. Skizze einer systematischen Theorie der modernen Gesellschaft. In: AndreasReckwitz und Hartmut Rosa (Hg.): Spätmoderne in der Krise. Was leistet die Gesellschaftstheorie? Berlin: Suhrkamp,S. 153–252.
- So, in fact, your model of social transformation, if I could sum it up, would be that the social transformation happens not because the researchers develop it and then apply it to society, but that it’s more as if the societal transformation takes place all the time when actors judge and take each other as the judging actors. And that, in supporting these natural transformations, the role of the researchers is to be a guide – to be with and in the moments, to interpret, to judge, and then to give that back, to feed it back into the process.
- Yes, I mean, you make me think of something which I find very interesting, because sometimes I’m asked, what’s the difference between your personal opinion and your opinion as a researcher? And, well, I always honestly have to say: there is no difference. As a researcher, I try to give the best possible account, and of course, I don’t have a better or different account as a person.
- Would you say that is “transformative research” to do that? Is all research in that sense transformative?
- If it’s done in that sense, I would almost say so. Yes. But I would say – to pick up on what we said before – I am in a ‘situation’, but we are also always in the situation together. I mean in Ukraine, just as you said, this sense is probably currently very strong. ‘We now live in this war time. We are in this situation. So, let’s try to make sense of it. Where could we go? What are the possibilities? What are the problems?’
- That sounds like the social energy we talked about.
- Yes.
- Certainly, I rarely felt as much intensity as when I was exposed to the war context.
- This is interesting.
- Even very daily interactions felt charged with it: over-the-counter-interactions in a shop, encounters with people on the streets, people’s faces… it all felt more intense.
- But this is a kind of aporetic and almost… you know, I mean, if that’s true, and I could very well imagine it, and someone said something similar today, it should actually mean that we should have wars to have more social energy, and I mean, it’s kind of… it’s not what we wanted to say, but this is somewhat contradictory.
- We talked about it a lot during the summer school as well. You know, the famous saying by Heraclitus, that war is the father of all things. (21)
- Yes…
- And that’s a dangerous thought, too – does anyone really want to normatively subscribe to that sentence? But then, as it happens, and as we see that war transforms things, it’s quite difficult to negate it, too.
- Yes.
- It’s probably a task for our social energy project to wrap our heads around that.
- I mean, the resonance project was kind of driven by normative interests. Because I wanted to reestablish the alienation concept. And I thought, to actually make it a strong term again, I have to know what a non-alienated way of living is, and that’s how I came up with the idea that it must be a resonant way of living. While with the energy project, I don’t really have anything normative or ethical in mind. I just want to know what is the force driving the dynamic stabilization, right? So, for that project, it wouldn’t be so bad if we ended up explaining how wars in fact muster a lot of social energy.
- Let’s hope not –- or at least, this finding would in turn beg the question of what we can do.
- Yes, let’s go back to that question.
- Especially as researchers.
- Again, that’s what I try to spell out in my new book: I noticed that I’m really fascinated by the fact that we are always in situations, that we participate in them, while we somehow always only stand across constellations. The latter really seems to be something more static, something we cannot enter. And I would really think if you do social science in a more scientistic way, then you are kind of trying to be this outside observer. You only observe a constellation. So, for example, with statistics. What’s the relationship between A and B or so, between workers and employers, and soon. But I, as a kind of non-scientist, more as a humanist – humanistic in the sense of coming from the humanities, from a humanities-way of doing social science – I will feel I’m in the situation with you, with the people I write about. This is why I never want to tell others something. I just want to make sense of the life we share.
- The researcher as interpreter, if we want to say it like that.
- Yes.
- This actually brings me to a last thought, namely that to be an interpreter in English has two meanings, right? One, to translate.
21 - Fragment 83 (D 53): “Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς, καὶ τοὺς μὲν θεοὺς ἔδειξε τοὺς δὲἀνθρώπους, τοὺς μὲν δούλους ἐποίησε τοὺς δὲ ἐλευθέρους.“
– Translated by W.H.S. Jones as “War is the father of alland the king of all; some he has marked out to be gods and some to be men, some he has made slaves and some free.“See Heraclitus (around 500 BC): On the Universe. In: W.H.S. Jones (ed.) (1931): Hippocrates, Heracleitus. Nature of Man. Regimen in Health. Humours. Aphorisms. Regimen 1-3. Dreams. Heracleitus: On the Universe. CambridgeMassachusetts: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library, 150), S. 469–510, 485.
- Exactly.
- The other, to make sense of something for someone else, to translate a thought from one context to another.
- Yes.
- Do you see in this role of the translator an important factor in bringing about societal transformation?
- Actually, when you said that, my first feeling was No. Because – it’s not that I translate something alien to the people I talk to, right? But in a certain sense, it is true. Because what I really do – and that’s the phenomenological side of what I’m doing – is an attempt at translation. Let’s take resonance, for example: when I came up with this term, it was not about telling people something they never thought about or felt about, because everyone says, well, I know what you speak about, right? But they might say: until today, I didn’t have a language for that. And that’s where it becomes really interesting. I really think what I do is trying to give people a language for the experience they already have. You could call that a kind of interpretation in this dual sense.
- And in fact, it could help to transform.
- Of course!
- Because it gives those who want to judge and act the capacity to interpret their own behaviour …
- … and to think of it! I mean, with the resonance concept, that’s it really – I still have the hope that it’s something they can do. Because a lot of people, at least in Western context, but perhaps also in a country like Ukraine, a lot of people are frustrated with the way they live. You know, I always ask, why do people vote for Trump, or AfD or something. And I think, well, at the most basic level they don’t get from life what was promised to them. Then the question is: what don’t they get what they want to have? And the only language they have is: I want more money, I want better housing, something more, right – what I call the ‘triple A’: better availability, better accessibility, better attainability of things. (22) But maybe we can translate our frustration into a different key, and say: what I don’t get is resonance. Giving this yearning a language is certainly transformative…
- You actually brought about transformation: by offering a concept to someone who is now able to interpret their own behaviour.
- And their own yearnings, and maybe also their sense of frustration, I mean – that was the hope.
- That is what transformative research could do in Ukraine right now.
- Absolutely. So, I do think, in modern times, researchers do have an important role to play. But only if they become agents. This is very interesting – it really means the social researcher hasto be an agent, and not an executant. And for the sciences, this is interesting, too. Because, in the sciences we think that the researcher should not play a role: you don’t want to hear the researcher, you want to hear the result. Even in sociology, as in other sciences, you would say: my research has nothing to do with me, I simply followed the method and I present truth, facts which I found. And that doesn’t help much. Simply reading and gathering statistics about society doesn’t transform anything. So, the researcher has to make his voice heard. And that’s judgement – it’s exactly judgment! Of course, when I write, I think, I do exercise my capacity of judgement, I attempt to judge the situation. And I try to come up with conceptions of how it could be different.
- This capacity of judgment seems to be the theme that ties it all together. And perhaps it’s an encouraging note upon which to end.
- Yes, let’s end here. That was interesting! Thank you.
- Professor Rosa, thank you for the interview!
22 - Rosa, Hartmut (2019): Available, accessible, attainable. The mindset of growth and the resonance conception of the good life. In: Hartmut Rosa und Christoph Henning (Hg.):
The good life beyond growth. New perspectives. London,New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group (Routledge studies in ecological economics, 47), S. 39–53.
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