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Classical Ethics and Postmodern Critique: Political Philosophy in Václav Havel and Jan Patočka

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Edward F. Findlay
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Extract

This article examines the ties between the work of Václav Havel and his dissident mentor Jan Patočka. Havel's political theory consists largely of an evocative, literary reformulation of a number of themes developed by Patočka, the student of Husserl and Heidegger generally recognized as the most significant Czech philosopher of the century. Insofar as Patočka's work continues to be ignored in the West, the intuitively appealing essays of Havel will themselves fail to be fully understood. This study offers an analysis of Havel's debt to Patočka, as well as an explication of the latter's political thought. With Patočka's phenomenological interpretation of ancient and contemporary thought, of Socrates and Heidegger, a bridge is built between the classical and the postmodern that seeks to ground ethics and politics without recourse to the foundationalism of metaphysical accounts of reality.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 61 , Issue 3 , Summer 1999 , pp. 403 - 438
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1999

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References

1 The late Isaiah Berlin, for example, noted in an interview that “there exists no Havelian doctrine nor Havelian work which could be definitively demarcated,” Lidaové Noviny (Prague), 15 November 1997.

2 Havel, Václav, “Transcending the Clash of Cultures: Democracy's Forgotten Dimension,” Journal of Democracy 6, no. 2 (04 1995): 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Havel, , “Politics and Conscience,” in Open Letters: Selected Prose 1965–1990, ed. Wilson, Paul (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), pp. 251–52.Google Scholar

4 See Husserl, Edmund, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. Carr, David (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 3–18Google Scholar; Heidegger, Martin, “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics,” in Basic Writings, ed. Krell, David Farrell (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), pp. 271–305Google Scholar; Patočka, Jan, “The Dangers of Technicization in Science according to E. Husserl and the Essence of Technology as Danger according to M. Heidegger,” in Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, ed. Kohák, Erazim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 327–39.Google Scholar

5 See Havel, , “Stories and Totalitarianism,” in Open Letters, pp. 328–50Google Scholar. “Every story,” he writes, “presupposes a plurality of truths, of logics” (p. 332).

6 See the discussion of the “predetermined roles” of, for example, the greengrocer in Havel, , “The Power of the Powerless,” Open Letters, p. 135Google Scholar. In “Politics and Conscience,” Havel more directly echoes Patočka on this point, speaking of “the question about socialism and capitalism!⃛ It seems to me that these thoroughly ideological and often semantically confused categories have long since been beside the point. The question is wholly other, deeper and equally relevant to all: whether we shall, by whatever means, succeed in ⃛ rehabilitating the personal experience of human beings as the initial measure of things, placing morality above politics and responsibility above our desires” (p. 263). In his Heretical Essays Patočka had reached similar conclusions: “Thus the real question concerning the individual is not at issue between liberalism and socialism, between democracy and totalitarianism, which for all their profound differences eqùally overlook all that is neither objective nor a role” (Patočka, , Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Kohák, [Chicago: Open Court, 1996], p. 115Google Scholar).

7 Patočka's own stress on these themes itself derives from his interpretation of Husserl. As Patočka reads him, Husserl felt that the characteristic European life, deriving from Greek philosophy, was a life of rationality and an attitude of responsibility—a free and responsible “life in truth.”

8 Havel, , “The Power of the Powerless,” in Open Letters, p. 153.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., p. 155.

10 Patočka, , “Filosofie výchovy” (A philosophy of education), in Péče o duši I: Soubor statí a přednášek o postavení dověka ve světě a v dějinách, Sv. 1, Sebrané Spisy Jana Patočky (Care for the Soul I: A collection of articles and lectures on the position of man in the world and in history, vol. 1, The Collected Works of Jan Patočka) (Prague: OIKUMENE Press, 1996), p. 435.Google Scholar

11 Havel, , “Politics and Conscience,” p. 265.Google Scholar

12 Havel, , “A Call for Sacrifice: The Co-responsibility of the West”, Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (03,04 1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 See Havel, , Letters to Olga, trans. Wilson, Paul (London, Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 270.Google Scholar

14 Lawler, Peter Augustine, “Havel on Political Responsibility,” The Political Science Reviewer 22 (1993): 20.Google Scholar

15 Lawler uses Havel's 1990 Address to Congress along with his dissident writings to argue that the Czech president, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, is most fundamentally a critic of modernity, with its rejection of higher truth and subjection of the political realm to the technical control of scientific method. The two dissidents, Lawler maintains, hope to replace the defects of modernity with a “reconstitution of moral and political life.” Political and personal responsibility can be reconstituted by first rejecting the impersonal and systematic solutions of modernity, and second by recognizing the grounding of our conscience in the context of an ordered whole and in the existence of a personal God (pp. 47–48). In that both thinkers are critics of modernity and open to “premodern myths” that articulated human responsibility better than the modern myth of objectivity, Lawler claims that Havel and Solzhenitsyn should be called postmodern (p. 23). This is Lawler's “postmodernism properly understood,” embodied in Havel and “based primarily in opposition to systemization and denial of differences,” beginning fundamentally with the difference between man and God. It is postmodernism with a religious core. Lawler argues that Havel's thinking points implicitly in that direction.

16 Lawler, Peter Augustine, “Havel's Postmodern View of Man in the Cosmos,” Perspectives on Political Science 26, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Havel's mention of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle and the Gaia Hypothesis, each as an example of how science is beginning to consider ideas beyond the limits of rigid scientism, is viewed by Lawler as verging on “pantheism” and is evidence that Havel has abandoned his earlier values and is now trying to “systemize” human life by anchoring it in the cosmos. Havel has betrayed the relationship of man to God by introducing relationships to entities besides God. And so, he writes, “we should dissent from the spirit of Havel's postmodern, cosmic anchoring.”

17 See Tucker, Aviezer, Fenomenologie a Politika: od J. Patočky k V. Havlovi (Phenomenology and politics: From J. Patočka to V. Havel), trans. Cabalková, Klára (Prague: Votobia, 1997)Google Scholar and Bayard, Caroline, “The Intellectual in the Post Modern Age,” Philosophy Today 34 (Winter 1990): 291–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Tucker makes the contention that, as a dissident, Havel was primarily a Heideggerean thinker, meaning that he was quasi-reactionary. He accuses Havel of being the type that “blamed all the evils of the world, existential, political, ecological, and economic on human rationality, science and objectivity” (p. 200). While Tucker appreciates Havel's ethical stance and in fact is strongly supportive of both Havel's and Patočka's humanist ethics, he is harshly critical of the Czech president for a perspective which leads, Tucker feels, in the other direction—a purported Heideggerean reactionary consciousness. Caroline Bayard, to the contrary, describes what she sees as Havel's postmodernism: primarily his clear rejection of “emancipatory narratives” and his appreciation for human plurality.

18 Hammer, Dean C., “Václav Havel's Construction of a Democratic Discourse: Politics in a Postmodern Age,” Philosophy Today 39 (Summer 1995): 119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Hammer's argument explores the politics of postmodern thought as expressed by Derrida, Foucault and others, and concludes that it lacks clarity on the question of the positive construction or consolidation of a political community based on postmodern principles. There is a “gap,” Hammer says, “between postmodernism and constructive political engagement” (Ibid., p. 123). In Havel's political writings, by contrast, there is a conscious effort to define a responsible human subject as one able to act politically, by which is meant not merely the politics of dissent and of critique, but also the construction of political community, discourse and, necessarily, institutions. So while Havel's explicit distrust of grand narratives and his belief in diversity over ideological dominance may be characteristics of leading postmodern discourse, Hammer believes, in contrast to Bayard, that they do not lead the Czech thinker in the same direction politically as other postmodern thinkers.

20 Eslhtain, Jean Bethke, “A Man for This Season: Václav Havel on Freedom and Responsibility,” Perspectives on Political Science 21, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 208.Google Scholar

21 Although Elshtain seems to express a postmodern preference in admiring Havel for the plurality and diversity in his writings, she nonetheless clearly recognizes the futility of trying to place the Czech president wholly within any one camp. She begins her comments with the warning that Havel's thought, though it is regularly appropriated by “various partisans representing entrenched positions of the sort Havel himself disdains,” does not in fact lend itself to those partisan views, either of religious or postmodernist temperament (Ibid., p. 207).

22 Elshtain notes that a “central fault line” in the Czech president's work is his “lively acceptance of paradox coupled with his rejection of fixed categories,”a stance that is generally seen as antifoundational. “Not so in Havel's case,” she writes (Ibid., pp. 209–210). Humans are rooted in a world that has as its background a transcendent or “higher” horizon of Being, a horizon against which our identities and responsibilities are formed. Elshtain clearly recognizes this element as central to Havel's thought: “His unabashed embrace of life is precisely an embrace of a post-Babelian world in which there are wondrous varieties of human ‘homes,’ identities, languages and particular possibilities, but there is as well a trans-particular world framing our fragile globe united perhaps only in its travail” (Ibid., p. 211).

23 Ibid., p. 208.

24 Ibid., p. 209.

25 Kohák, a Czech émigré and professor of philosophy at Boston University, emphasizes this point in his philosophical biography of Patočka. See his preface to Jan Patočka, p. xii. Kohák's translations into English of three book-length works and a number of shorter essays by Patočka currently make up the vast majority of the material by the Czech philosopher available in English. This is unfortunate for the student of political theory. While Kohák, a phenomenologist, chose to emphasize (and translate) Patočka's pure philosophy and de-emphasize his political writings, I am convinced of the value of the opposite approach. Thus a number of works particularly relevant to political philosophy are unavailable in English. There is also some disagreement as to the quality of the Kohák translations, although I find them to be quite adequate. In those cases where a work available in English is cited, the Kohák translation is used; translations of passages not available in English are my own.

26 One can recognize a similar, though perhaps unwitting, approach in Havel's work. See my discussion above on the tension between traditional, moral language and postmodern critique in Havel.

27 See Husserl, , Crisis of European Sciences and Heidegger, Martin, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, pp. 307–41Google Scholar. See also footnote 4, on Havel, above.

28 Patočka, , Body, Community, Language, World, trans. Kohák, (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1998), p. 52.Google Scholar

29 Patočka, , “Edmund Husserl's Philosophy of the Crisis of the Sciences and His Conception of a Phenomenology of the ‘Life-World,’” in Jan Patočka, p. 226.Google Scholar

30 Havel, , “The Power of the Powerless,” p. 138.Google Scholar

31 Patočka, , “Edmund Husserl's Philosophy of the Crisis,” p. 233.Google Scholar

32 Following Kohák, it is worth noting that the term “natural” world requires quotation marks because its meaning in English is ambiguous. The Czech equivalent, pňrozený svět, describes not the world of nature (pňrodní svět), but the intelligible world as a whole that appears to us naturally and prereflectively; this is the world of Husserl's “natural standpoint.” See also the explanation in Kohák, , “A Philosophical Biography,” in Jan Patočka, pp. 22–23.Google Scholar

33 Patočka follows Eugen Fink in his descriptive of “asubjective” phenomenology.

34 Patočka, , Body, Community, Language, World, p. 165Google Scholar. In this context, Patočka also makes use of a Husserlian concept that will be familiar to readers of Václav Havel: the concept of the horizon. On the relationship of the “horizon” to the “whole,” see Ibid., pp. 34–35. In Havel, see, for example, Letters to Olga, trans. Wilson, Paul (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), pp. 122–23.Google Scholar

35 Patočka, , Body, Community, Language, World, p. 166.Google Scholar

36 See Ibid., p. 79.

37 Ibid., p. 133.

38 See Patočka, Jan, “Heidegger,” trans. Findlay, Edward F., A Research Report of the Center for Theoretical Study, CTS–98–06 (Prague: CTS, 1998), p. 4.Google Scholar

39 Havel, , “Politics and Conscience,” pp. 250–51.Google Scholar

40 Ibid., p. 251.

41 Havel also contrasts the natural world with the world of modern scientific rationalism, symbolized by the offending smokestack. Though correct in implying that scientific rationalism discounts the significance of the “natural” world, his use of the concept becomes confused as it is applied to ecological concerns (e.g., the smokestack). Here it seems that Havel begins to confuse the phenomenological concept of the “natural” world with the idea of the world of nature. See footnote 32 above. In terms of the metaphysical confusion in Havel's language, compare Rorty, Richard, “The Seer of Prague,” The New Republic 205 (1 07 1995): 35Google Scholar. “It may be,” Rorty writes, “that Havel is simply using traditional (and inapposite) metaphysical language to describe groundless Patočkan hope.”

42 See Patočka's, essays “Masaryk's and Husserl's Conception of the Spiritual Crisis of European Humanity” and “The Dangers of Technicization in Science” in Jan Patočka, pp. 145–56 and 327–39.Google Scholar See also footnotes 3 and 4 above.

43 Patočka, Jan, “Negative Platonism,” in Jan Patočka, p. 181.Google Scholar

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid., p. 182.

46 Havel, , “The Power of the Powerless,” pp. 137, 133.Google Scholar

47 Patočka, , “Negative Platonism,” p. 195.Google Scholar

48 Ibid., p. 205.

49 Ibid.

50 See, e.g., Patočka, , “Two Senses of Reason and Nature in the German Enlightenment: A Herderian Study,” in Jan Patočka, pp. 157–74.Google Scholar

51 Patočka, , “The ‘Natural’ World and Phenomenology,” in Jan Patočka, p. 245Google Scholar. In addition to the use of technologies of power in warfare, Patočka also refers to the “mechanical model of human relations” in modern capitalism.

52 See Kohák, , “A Philosophical Biography,” in Jan Patočka, p. 61.Google Scholar

53 On the notion of movement toward the “good” as crucial to the meaning of the “good,” see Patočka, , Evropa a doba poevropská (Europe and the posteuropean age) (Prague: Lidové Noviny, 1992), pp. 72–73.Google Scholar

54 Patočka, , Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, p. 148.Google Scholar

55 Patočka, , Platon a Evropa (Plato and Europe), Samizdat Collections, Jan Patočka Archive, Center for Theoretical Studies, Prague, p. 69Google Scholar. While Living in Truth is the title of one of the collections of Havel's essays in English, two volumes of Patočka's works are being published in Czech under the title, Péče o duši (Care for the soul).

56 Patočka, , “Negative Platonism,” p. 192.Google Scholar

57 Ibid., p.193.

58 Havel, , “Post-Modernism: The Search for Universal Laws,” Vital Speeches of the Day 60: 20 (1 08 1994): 614.Google Scholar

59 Patočka, , Heretical Essays, p. 24.Google Scholar

60 Ibid., p. 39.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid., p. 77.

63 Patočka, , “Negative Platonism,” pp. 205–206.Google Scholar

64 Havel, Václav, “A Call for Sacrifice: The Co-responsibility of the West,” p. 4.Google Scholar

65 Patočka, ,“The Dangers of Technicization in Science,” in Jan Patočka, p. 336.Google Scholar

66 Ibid., p. 337.

67 Patočka, , Heretical Essays, pp. 108, 153.Google Scholar

68 Patočka, “Duchovní člověk a intelektuál” (The spiritual person and the intellectual), Samizdat Collections, Jan Patočka Archive, Center for Theoretical Studies, Prague.

69 Ibid., p. 13.

70 Paul Ricoeur, for example, calls passages from this essay “strange” and “frankly shocking,” in his preface to the French edition of the Heretical Essays. The preface is reprinted in the English edition cited above.

71 Patočka, , Heretical Essays, p. 127.Google Scholar

72 See Ibid., pp. 134–35. The phrase “solidarity of the shaken,” solidarita otřesených in Czech, is often alternately rendered as “solidarity of the shattered.” Although the experience referred to is indeed a fundamental one, shattering idols and naive beliefs, I consider the phrase “solidarity of the shattered” to be somewhat evocative of a camaraderie based on a shared sense of existentialist anomie, something to which the concept does not refer. The “shaking” implied in the Patočkan phrase is ultimately a positive one, thus I agree with the translation used by Kohák.

73 Ibid., pp. 116–17.

74 Havel, , “Politcs and Conscience,” p. 269.Google Scholar

75 Patočka, , Heretical Essays, p. 143.Google Scholar