Taking the 20th century Czech philosopher Jan Patočka as an example, in this paper, the author would like to illustrate the problem of human freedom when dealing with two kinds of experiences: war and political violence, as exemplified by the totalitarian state. Indeed, it is possible to treat these two types of experiences as historical experiences of evil. What is at stake, then, is the juxtaposition of human freedom and evil. Given this context, the Czech thinker sought to answer the question: in such a situation, with which moral response can or should one reply? When experiencing evil, how can or should a person behave?

The aggression of Putin’s Russia towards Ukraine has posed a dramatic challenge to the noble doctrine of non-violence. In line with an argument made in the 1980s by anti-Soviet Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, war is not the opposite of peace; instead, violence is. Armed resistance, or warfare, is sometimes necessary to stop violence. According to Clausewitz, military aggression is insufficient to evoke a state of war; in its place, it is necessary to oppose aggression, i.e., actively mount a defense by the attacked party, thereby avoiding war requires not resisting the aggressor. However, the aggression against Ukraine broke two tenets of warfare: ius ad bellum and ius in bello. According to Michael Walzer’s typology, it is an unjust war waged by unjust methods, so resisting it, including militarily, amounts to waging a just war. According to Slavoj Žižek’s analysis, this establishes an ethically clear situation: evil is easily identifiable, and opposing it is an ethical duty. According to the philosopher Étienne Balibar, pacifism is not an option in such a situation.

This essay attempts to weigh in on the problem of evil in politics. The starting point follows the political reflections of B. Pascal and M. Montaigne. Here, the history of philosophy is used to conceptualize the problems of the present and, in fact, those that are enduring. Thinking about the sources of power and a state’s legitimacy proves to be a universal meditation on human destiny and freedom when challenged by existential threats.

This paper aims to equally pinpoint the philosophical origins of Martin Heidegger’s entry into the Nazi movement and the thinker’s subsequent break with political involvement. Heidegger’s path to and from National Socialism should be apprehended not only through the philosopher’s biography but, above all, within the broader framework of the process of the development of his understanding of politics as an area of being set apart and accommodated by Western metaphysics, which marks the fulfillment of the essence of metaphysics as a forgetting of being. Heidegger’s philosophy has been repeatedly diagnosed (cf., e.g., Löwith, Adorno) as deeply linked to the fascist worldview; the line of reasoning taken up in this paper insists, on the contrary, on the integrity of the ethical reasoning behind Heidegger’s work, which emphasizes, concerning politics, its character of exploiting being, in the same way as it uniformizes people and transforms them into a resource. The conclusion, therefore, reveals the profoundly anti-fascist overtones of Heidegger’s writings from 1936–1946 and, simultaneously, underscores a worrying indifference to Heidegger’s relationship to totalitarian and non-totalitarian political systems.

Proceeding from a metaphorical (figurative) account of the problem of evil, and based on Leszek Kołakowski’s selected thoughts, this paper’s considerations aim to deliberate on “evil in politics” in the spirit of the shortcomings and excesses of freedom: namely, the lure of autocratic and totalitarian power. At issue is how the bounds of freedom are anthropologically and politically transgressed at the expense (to the point of abolishing) the freedom of others.

In the article, I try to demonstrate that artistic photography which involves the use of technology of creating “shimmering, synthetic appearances” (K. Linker, “On Artificiality”) can become a medium for community art projects developed with people who are systemically excluded from view in the public sphere. Applying the method of iconographic analysis, I describe selected portrait photographs by Krzysztof Marchlak that feature images of people who belong to the Polish LGBTQ community. I draw in conclusion upon the artist’s large-format photographic panorama Paradiso, which I interpret as a socially engaged, “shimmering, synthetic appearance” of an artificial paradise for people expelled from the kingdom of binary gender oppositions.