(distant chatter)
- Good afternoon, we're ready to start our program today.
My name is Wendy Lower, I'm the John K. Roth
professor of History and the director
of the Center for Human Rights.
We're very pleased to have Prof. Marci Shore with us today,
she's the associate professor of European Cultural
and Intellectual History at Yale University.
She received her M.A. from the University of Toronto in 1996
and her PhD from Stanford University in 2001.
Before joining Yale's history department she was
a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University's
Harriman Institute, and assistant professor of history
and Jewish studies at Indiana University
and Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Visiting
Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at Yale.
She's the author of many publications, many books
and articles, I can't go into all of the titles today
but I just want to give you a couple of highlights:
The author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's
Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968,
Yale University Press, published in 2006.
C'est Milieu: Biography of Polish and Polish Jewish writers
drawn to Marxism in the 20th century.
Also the author of Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife
of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe,
which came out with Crown in 2013, that's a study
of the presence of communist and Nazi past.
It's described as "A shimmering literary examination
"of the ghost of communism.
"A haunting presence of Europe's past".
Also described as a "Heartbreaking portrayal
"of how history moves and what history means".
She translated Michal Glowinski's Holocaust memoir
The Black Seasons, which came out with
Northwestern University Press in 2005,
and currently at work on a book project entitled
Phenomenological Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe.
Many articles and essays (chuckles), I'll just
give you a couple of highlights; Czysto Babski:
A Women's Friendship in a Man's Revolution,
Engineering in the Age of Innocence: A Genealogy
of Discourse Inside the Czechoslovak Writer's Union,
'49-'67 in East European Politics and Societies,
another article entitled Children of the Revolution:
Communism, Zionism, and the Berman Brothers
in Jewish Social Studies, and an important piece,
very important piece in Kritika Conversing with Ghosts:
Jedwabne, Zydokomuna, and Totalitarianism".
Her intellectual histories and biographies
draw from numerous sources in French, German, Polish,
Russian, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian and Yiddish sources.
That's very impressive.
Her publications have garnered many awards, including;
she was the 2006 winner of the National Jewish Book Award,
the winner in 2007, this is for Caviar and Ashes,
of the Oskar Halecki Polish/East
Central European History Award, and co-winner in 2007
of the American Association for the Advancement
of Slavic Studies, Book Prize for Polish Studies.
Her work Taste of Ashes uses biography as a kind of
generational mixing and opens up these ambivalent spaces
among fathers, sons and daughters,
who are bound together as family,
but diverge in the politics of the day, under the weight
of Stalinism, communism and the struggle for democracy
and freedom, and the values that each passed down
but are realized in ways that often conflict.
How does one reconcile all that?
Shore's friend in Taste of Ashes, Costak,
part of the solidarity movement in Poland,
partner co-work with Adam Michnik and others,
who tried to bring down the repressive system
of Soviet communism in Poland, devoted their lives to that,
to the discrediting, defaming, dismantling
of the "Very system that their parents spent their
lives creating" parents, she tells us, contributed
to building something that became truly evil.
They knew at the end that their lives had been wasted,
"They lived too long", Costa stated.
"Admitting that everything good in me I have from my parents
"if I spend a dozen or so years of my life trying
"to pull down the system they pulled up, it was because
"of the values that my parents had taught me".
There have been studies of generational transmission
of Holocaust and genocide history, of how survivors
experience and shape the lives of their children,
experience the trauma and shape the lives
of their children and grandchildren.
We've seen this in the work that was actually presented here
in the Ath by Daniel Mendelsohn and Peter Balakian,
and there are many studies as well of the resonance
of Nazi history in post-war generations of young Germans.
But Shore's work reveals the moral ambiguities
and intimate struggles across generations
and shape relationships across revolutions.
I'm reminded of my own recent encounter with a young
Ukrainian man and his wife and child, refugees from Lugansk
who fled last summer to western Ukraine,
seeking freedom and a better future.
When they said their goodbyes to their parent in Lugansk,
who chose to remain with the separatists, who believed
in their past and future under Russia,
who were still wedded to a shred history
of the Soviet experiment for better or for worse.
This young man looked westward, saying goodbye to family
and did so in a bruised state, actually he was bruised,
he, on the eve of his departure he's been snatched at night
and beaten severely be separatist thugs.
Broken ribs and a swollen face, beaten by the thugs,
tortured by history and departing in shame
and anxious about his future and that of his children.
Today we're going to hear from Professor Shore,
her title of her talk is Civilization That Needs
Metaphysics': Existentialism and Dissent in Eastern Europe,
and she's gonna be looking at the philosophy
of the Dissident Movement, and we want
to welcome her now the the podium.
Thank you very much, Professor Shore.
(audience applause)
- Thank you Wendy for that kind introduction,
and thank you very much for the invitation.
I'm so happy to be some place where there's sun.
(audience laughs)
Can everyone hear me?
Is the microphone in good place?
Okay, excellent.
So I'm gonna take you back for a moment to 1989,
to Vaclavske namesti, to Wenceslas Square
to the Velvet Revolution.
When Vaclav Havel becomes the leader of the bloodless
fall of communism in what was then Czechoslovakia,
and the slogan of the revolution, The Truth Will Prevail.
Fast forward couple months to February 1990,
Vaclav Havel is now the first president of post-communist
Czechoslovakia, and he is at his--
in Washington, D.C. giving his first address
before both houses of the American Congress.
And in that speech, which some of you might remember,
I see Jonathan back there, I'm sure Jonathan remembers it
(chuckles) in that speech that Jonathan will remember,
in February 1990, Havel says to the american congressmen
and senators, "Consciousness precedes being,
"and not the other way around", that's the Marxist claim.
Now this was a moment when Americans absolutely
fall in love with Vaclav Havel, despite the fact
that nobody had any idea what he was talking about,
and that the chances that very many of those
congressmen or senators who were in the room
remember that moment in German ideology where
Marx and Engels explained that being precedes consciousness
is very doubtful.
One of the journalists who is there commenting that said,
"If I could talk like that I would run for God".
(audience laughs)
What Havel was responding to was the Marxist tradition
in which individual subjective consciousness
was fundamentally derivative of one's objective
material position in the socio-economic infrastructure.
And Havel injects to position to that was drawing on
a phenomenalogical turned existentialist
philosophical tradition, that rather than one's
material concrete position in the socio-economic structure
as the starting point, took as its starting point
human consciousness as a starting point
of epistemology on the source of meaning.
Phenomenology which I won't go into in too much detail
was largely about becoming self-conscious
about our own conscioussness, it's about interrogating
and examining the world as it is given to us, as it appears
to us, as it comes to us in our own experience.
Now, this problem with being in conscioussness
had already been for a while when Marx comes on the scene,
a big philosophical problem.
How do you get from conscioussness to being,
from mind to world, from subject to object,
from inner to outer, these are
all variations on the same problem.
Hannah Arendt, in a very beautiful essay, What Is
Existent Philosophy, What Is Existentialism,
talks about how when Kant comes along he tears apart
being and thought, being and conscioussness.
You know, Kant has this idea that, yes, the world exists
there's a real world independent of our conscioussness,
there's a "Ding an Sich", there's a thing in itself,
but we have no access to that,
we only have access to the world
as it appears in our conscioussness, and for Hannah Arendt
this was this moment of philosophical fatalism,
this moment of tearing apart
that connection between thought and world.
And she tributes to this that the melancholy
of moderned philosophy, a certain philosophy of despair.
And this is intimately connected with what is arguably
the great problem of modernity.
Not only according to Arendt, but also according
to Heidegger, and according to Kafka,
and according to Marx, people who are otherwise
very very different, which is alienation.
The problem of alienation.
And the epistemological problem of how you get
from mind to world, from being to conscioussness,
from subject to object, is one way
of understanding this problem of alienation.
And truth in modern philosophy was then understood
as how you can get that being in consciousness together.
How you can get subject and object to correspond,
how you can get thought and the world to correspond.
So Havel did not make up this slogan,
"The truth will prevail".
"The truth will prevail" was a favorite phrase
of Czechoslovakia's founding president, the philosopher
Tomas Masaryk, who himself adopted it from the 15th century
catholic reformer Jan Hus, who was a kind of
Martin Luther figure before Luther, and who was
burned at the stake in 1415 for his heretical beliefs.
But I wanna go back for a moment not to Hus,
but to Masaryk's friend of some six decades,
and that was Edmund Husserl who arguably begins this
phenomenalogical tradition on which Havel is drawing,
when he says "Consciousness precedes being".
Masaryk and Husserl first met in Leipzig,
and it's because of Masaryk that Husserl then goes on
to study with Franz Brentano in Vienna.
In any case, Husserl enters into this discussion
which is enlightenment discussion, and the enlightenment
arguably represented optimism
about the epistemological question.
And the epistemological question was
"How can we know the world?"
How can I know the world exists?
How do I know that this cup is really here,
and it's not just a projection of my conscioussness?
How can I cross this bridge from being
to conscioussness, from mind to world?
And the enlightenment brought us enlightenment optimism.
The possibility that we could know
the world through our own reason,
and this idea of epistemology, what can we know,
how can we know it, than comes to us
at least from Descartes.
This idea of how can we know the world.
And the problem of the epistemological problem
is the problem of the bridge.
How do we get from conscioussness to being,
from mind to world, from subject to object?
And before the enlightenment, god had been the bridge.
God guarantees correspondence between subject
and object, between being and conscioussness.
And one of the things you see, for those of you
who studied the enlightenment,
is that God is really really useful.
God serves simultaneously epistemological, anthological,
ethical functions, you can get rid of God,
but then you've got a big gap to fill.
It's very hard to find things
or something to fill in for God.
So Descartes kind of inaugurates this big
epistemological tradition in the enlightenment
by deciding he's gonna clear from his mind
everything he's not absolutely sure of.
He can't be sure that the cup really exists,
he can't be sure that his thoughts are true,
the only thing he can be sure of
is that he's thinking something,
and hence comes his famous "I think, therefor I am",
that's the only starting point.
But in the end Descartes too is forced to rely in God.
Otherwise, there's just no guarantee that you have
some kind of bridge between subject
and object, between mind and world.
And then Kant comes along, and Kant says, "Okay, yes.
"There is a real world, it does exist, there's a thing
"in itself, but we have no access to it,
"so let's just put that aside and stop talking about it
"and try to figure out the world as the purest assets,
"that's the only thing we have access to".
And Arendt blames Kant for this, and Husserl kind of
takes the Arendtian position,
that he can't bear the fatalism of it.
People who are Kantiants say that Kant was not
at all fatalistic, he was actually a kind of cheery guy
and he had lots of optimism about epistemology,
but Husserl just can't bear this kind
of contingent fatalism, he feels it as a kind of emptiness,
he wants certainty, he wants clarity and distinctiveness.
The clarity and distinctiveness is a phrase that comes
from Descartes that Husserl fetishises a bit,
(in German) Klarheit und Deutlichkeit, he's always
looking for clarity and distinctiveness.
The irony about this is that he was a terrible writer,
and was incapable of saying anything clearly himself.
(audience laughs)
In any case, Husserl, as Arendt describes it,
attempts to find this bridge between subject and object
through what Arendt calls the kind of detour,
through the intentionality of conscioussness.
And Husserl says that the thing about conscioussness,
the thing about mind, is that it's not like a box,
closed-in in of itself, it has a structure
which he calls intentional, intentionality.
And intentionality is not like, "I intend to do
"my homework tonight", or "I intend to go grocery shopping".
Intentionality is like this magnetic string, that kind of
reaches out from your conscioussness and grabs the world,
and connects subject to object through intentionality.
And the big move that Husserl makes, which is in fact
just a radicalization of the Kantian move,
which is you can't derive subject from object,
or object from subject in the beginning is the relationship.
You have to ground epistemology in the relationship
between subject and object.
Intentionality gives you that bridge, it gives you
that relationship between subject and object,
in the beginning is the relation.
In any case, it's an attempt to reorient epistemology
from being grounded in either one pole or the other pole,
from being grounded in either being our conscioussness
to the relationship between them.
And it focuses a lot on seeing, and how the world
appears to conscioussness, and as Husserl goes on
many of his students begin to feal that, you're not really
grounding right in the middle between subject and object,
that really everything is starting from conscioussness,
and I won't go into that debate,
'cause that will take us in another direction.
In any case, Husserl tries to think you to a point
where you are so wrapped up in being able to kind of
focus on and grab the objects of your conscioussness,
that you lose the desire to ask the question
about whether they have a mind independent existence.
Then Heidegger comes along.
So Husserl's move was saying that the relationship between
subject and object precedes the parts, the relationship
between conscioussness and being precedes the parts.
And then Heidegger comes along and he moves us
from an epistemology of relatedness
to an epistemology of embeddedness.
And what Heidegger says is that this whole question
about how can we know the world and does the world exist
presupposes somehow that there were some space
outside of the world from which we, as subjects,
as consciousness's mind, could look upon the world
and ask ourself the question "Does the world exist?"
And Heidegger says, "Well, this whole thing doesn't
"make any sense, because who can ask the question
"of whether or not the world exists,
"apart from human conscioussness?"
Which Heidegger reorients as being not
human conscioussness but (speaking German) "Da Sein",
which I won't go into.
But who can ask that question other than basically
the kind of beings that we are?
We're the only ones who can ask the question.
The cat can't ask the question,
The worm can't ask the question,
The hamster can't ask the question,
we're the only ones who ask the question.
And we are always already in the world,
(speaking German) "Immer schon in der Welt",
we're always already in the world, there's no place
outside of the world to which we can retreat,
to look on the world like an object.
It can never be an object to our subjectivity, 'cause
we're always already bound up in the world,
moving around in the world, involved in the world,
caring about the world, doing things in the world.
Now, once we're already in the world Heidegger says,
"There are then two ways we can be in the world,
we can be authentically or we can be inauthentic".
Most of the time, for Heidegger, we're inauthentic,
which means we're kind of fallen into the world,
into this kind of thoughtless conformity, where we just
kind of go along with what other people say and do,
and we don't ask ourselves deep existential questions.
And the big characteristic of being fallen into the world
and going along with the they-self, the conformic self,
the (speaking German) "Das Man selbst" is that
we don't confront our own mortality.
For Heidegger, the moment of being shaken into authenticity
comes when we recognize that we are preceding
inexorably, inevitably towards our own death.
That's what it mean, that's what the human condition is.
We are thrown into the world, and we are here
always moving towards our own death.
But we try to escape from knowledge of human finitude,
to hide from that knowledge through this conformity
and superficiality by which we kind of descend
into ambiguity and idle chatter and gossip
and other unimportant things.
But if we really face our true human condition
we are then kind of shaken into this state of angst,
this that of what Heidegger calls (speaking German)
"Unheimlichkeit" which doesn't really translate into English
it tends to translate as uncanniness, but what it really is,
is a feeling of not being at home in the world.
This feeling of not being at home in the world,
and this kind of terror that doesn't take an object.
Angst for Heidegger is not fear, because
fear takes an object, "I'm afraid of snakes"
or "I'm afraid of mountain climbing" there's an object,
it's transitive, whereas angst takes to object,
it's a fear that comes from nowhere,
it's a kind of state of existential terror.
The Yugoslav writer Danilo Kis the dissident Yugoslav writer
has this beautiful passage in one of his essays,
where he says: "The suffering was hideous, a kind
"of metaphysical fear and trembling.
"All of a sudden, with no visible exterior cause
"the defense mechanism that lets you live with
"the knowledge of human mortality goes to pieces,
"and a menacing lucidity comes over you.
"An absolute lucidity, I could call it."
That's in fact perhaps the best description of Heideggerian
angst that exists outside of Heidegger by Danielo Kis.
Kis was an anti-communist, and those
things might be related as well, we'll see in a few minutes.
In any case, in the 1930s the Nazis come to power.
Husserl is still in Freiburg,
where he is a Professor Emeritus.
Heidegger, who had been his star student, whom he
recommended to succeed him as the chair philosophy
at Freiburg becomes the Rector
of the University of Freiburg, and a Nazi.
And it's under Heidegger's reign as Rector
of the University of Freiburg that Husserl, that was
his Doktorvater and the person to whom his first
great book Sein und Zeit, being and time, is dedicated,
Husserl's cast out of the university,
like all professors of Jewish origin,
they're not allowed to enter the university premises.
So Husserl, now being an old man in what is now
the third Reich in Nazi Germany.
The Nazis come to power, various people try to get him
out of Germany, and he gets an invitation to Los Angeles,
I think to the university of Southern California,
he gets an invitation to Prague, Husserl in the end decides
he's not going to leave Germany.
What he does and how he responds to Hitler's
assumption of power was to go sit at his desk
and try harder and harder and more and more desperately
to clarify the phenomenological reduction, which is
his philosophical process of analyzing
the intentionalities of conscioussness,
which is so ridiculously technical and obscure,
I won't try to go into it now, I'm sure my own understanding
is limited and partial, and Husserl, who is obsessed
with clarity and distinctiveness was unable to articulate
in any clear way, I have yet to meet anyone
who feels like they have purely been able to perform
the phenomenalogical reduction, and achieve this clarity
in distinctiveness by which we analyze
the contents of our own conscioussness.
But Husserl was desperate to do this.
And so the Nazis come to power, and he goes to his desk
and he writes and writes and writes,
more and more desperately, because he truly believes that
that's the thing that's going to save Europe from barbarism.
If we could just understand that absolute truth is possible.
If we could just understand that there is a bridge
from subject to object, that there is a bridge
from being to conscioussness.
That would be the thing that would show us
the light of truth and would save us from barbarism.
In any case, Husserl gets an invitation to Prague
to give some lectures, which he as a Jew
can no longer give in Nazi Germany in 1935.
He then writes to his old friend Tomas Masaryk, and says:
"Yes, I dare to take up our old once natural conversation
"in pass over the four amenable distance and status,
"which European history has created between us.
"Allow me to write to you today as if you were still
"a university lecturer in Vienna.
"A young Czech philosopher, Doctor Jan Patocka,
"who won our favor two years ago, is spending the holidays
"with our family as a dear guest.
"As I hear there is a proposal in
"the newly formed philosophical circle of Prague
"to invite me for a guest lecture.
"Despite my age I would gladly come.
"For me there would also be the very welcome prospect
"Of possibly seeing you.
"May your old ideal of a national, ethical entity,
Da Sein, come true to the fullest.
"On this summit providence has placed you
"and chosen you as guardian angel.
"A single staatsvolk bound through love
"for a common homeland and through the unity
"of the fatherland's history, a staatsvolk
"not divided by the various languages,
"but rather mutually enriched and elevated
"by their participation in
"linguistically formed cultural achievements.
"May the republic, through such political ethical
"and noble end, become the foundation
"for the renewal of a European culture,
"direly endangered by Nationalisty Generousy."
Husserl does come to Prague, Masaryk is too ill
to see him, he doesn't survive much long afterwards,
and in Prague Husserl gives lectures that become the basis
for his famous and one of his final pieces of writing
The Crisis of the European Sciences.
And in those lectures Husserl says that
the enlightenment's great optimism it's faith
that reason would lead us to truth, had been embodied
in such works as Beethoven's Ode to Joy.
Now in 1935 Husserl told his audience, "We cannot
"even understand that piece of music,
"enlightenment reason has failed us.
"It has failed us because it was too thin,
"it was too superficial, it gave us a kind of
"positivist objectivism in which we try to understand
"the world on the model of the hard natural sciences.
"It essentially decapitated philosophy,
"because we forgot about the subject.
"We forgot about subjectivity in our rush
"to find truth in pure objectivity.
"There was a kind of Technisierung, a kind of technicisation
"that emptied the world of its meaning.
"The philosophies and the sciences in the larger sense
"of Wissenschaft have lost an understanding of subjectivity
"and they have therefor lost an understanding of meaning.
"Positivism has decapitated us, an indifferent", he says,
"turning away from the questions which
"are decisive for a general inhumanity.
Merely fact-minded sciences", he says,
"make for merely fact-minded people.
"In our vital need, this enlightenment science
"has nothing to say to us.
"It excludes on principal precisely the questions
"which man, given over in our unhappy times
"to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning.
"Questions of the meaning or meaninglessness
"of the whole of this human existence.
"Skepticism", he says, "about the possibility
"of metaphysics, actually represents
"the collapse of the belief in reason.
"Enlightenment reason has proven superficial.
"Because it has has proven superficial, it has left
"itself vulnerable to the forces of unreason,
"of irrationality, that have taken us
"into the reign of barbarism.
"If we wanna save Europe from barbarism
"we need a deeper, thicker reason.
"We need to ground our objective
"sciences in the deepest subjectivity."
With that desperate lament
Husserl proposes, or tries to articulate his own process
of the phenomenalogical reduction, which again, I won't
get into the technicalities, but it involves
beginning from human conscioussness, analyzing this
intentionalities which grab the world,
and beginning from a kind of human conscioussness
that is so deep and so interior that it is actually
curiously and paradoxically universal and transparent.
And this is what Havel calls the transcendental ego.
It's a kind of Aus-Havel, I mean, it's a kind of overcoming
your individual empirical ego, to this higher eye
that can be conscious about itself.
What it is you guys don't have to get,
that part that's a little technical.
He's the Obama figure, he's the Yes We Can,
yes we can get from mind to world
from being to conscioussness.
And for the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov,
Husserl's idea, his Yes I Can idea, was either
you can get there, either you can reach epistemological
clarity, you could reach absolute truth,
or it's the madhouse.
Or you're in barbarism, you're in barbarian lunacy.
There's no middle ground, the stakes are all or nothing.
Now at this time there was another route to truth
in European philosophy, so there is the route to truth
that kind of leads through Husserl and Heidegger
and begins with subjectivity,
and there's another route that leads through Hegel.
And Hegel is another attempt to overcome the problem
of the distance between subject and object,
and the historian Mary Glock writes very movingly
about the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs,
who later becomes a Marxist, about how in his youth
in his pre-Marxist youth this distance between
conscioussness and being, between subject and object,
is a distance he truly suffers over,
and he suffers over it until he finds Hegel.
And Hegel finds a different way of getting around
this problem and getting subject and object to connect.
And Hegel then begins his famous phenomenology of spirit,
from the point that the true is the whole,
Das Wahre ist das Ganze, the true is the whole,
the truth is the whole.
And so for Marxists like Lukacs to choose Marx,
they're really choosing Hegel, especially Lukacs.
And why this is so seductive is the seduction of wholeness,
of wholeness and totality, this idea that you can't
understand one thing until you understand the whole thing.
Because it's only the whole that
will bring everything together, that would get rid
of these gaping abysses, and these distances.
And Lukacs writes that in History and Class Conscioussness
shortly after he becomes a Marxist, at the end
of the first World War, "The premises of dialectical
"materialism is, it is not men's conscioussness
"that determines their existence,
"but on the contrary, their social existence
"that determines their conscioussness."
Again conscioussness is derivative,
you come to the point where conscioussness is derivative.
"The primacy of the category of totality",
Lukacs says, "Is the bare of the principal
"of the revolution in sciences".
Consciousness is derivative and you will not
resolve these problems of being in conscioussness
until you can see the whole, and until there's
a dialectical progression, which will get you
to an end of history in which eventually
all those gaping abysses and distances are overcome.
"The whole system of Marxism", Lukacs writes,
"Stands and falls with the principal that revolution
"is a product of a point of view, in which
"the category of totality is dominant".
Now, for many European and east European intellectuals,
the truth of Marxism, of communism, of Stalinism
was then proven subsequently in confrontation with Nazism.
From the point of view of the Czechs in particular,
the Poles say "The betrayal at Yalta", in English we say
"The appeasement at Munich", the Czechs always say
"The betrayal at Munich".
Western democracy sells out Czechoslovakia in Munich.
This is a story we should be thinking about
again this past year in particular.
Stalinist terror, a kind of striving for transparency,
becomes one attempt to overcome alienation.
In February 1948, after the Second World War,
there is a communist takeover of Czechoslovakia,
and the young philosopher Jan Patocka, who had
been studying with Husserl in the 1930s survives
the occupation in Bohemia, and is there for
the Stalinist revolution, or coop, depending on your
point of view, in February 1948.
And one of the things that's moving about Patocka's
reaction, as Stalinists take power in Czechoslovakia
in 1948, is he more or less reacts precisely
the way Husserl had in 1933.
He goes and sits at his desk,
and reads philosophy, and tries to clarify
where truth is, and where the problems are.
And one of the things I did last year in a Patocka archive
was I read through his diary,
and the serious philosophers who think through Patocka
say, "Well, there's nothing in his diary that he
"doesn't develop in a more sophisticated form later on".
But from a historical point of view, it's very interesting
to see what he's reading kind of day by day,
and what he's thinking about day by day.
So here you have Stalinist terror in Prague,
you have the end of the republic, the end of the democracy
and Patocka's sitting there, and he's rereading Marx
and he's rereading Hegel, and he is saying,
"but this is a misunderstanding, Marx misunderstands
"the problem of alienation".
Marx Is thinking about alienation as if the problem
is a lack of wholeness, and if we can just get
a point of view in which we're thinking about wholeness
we can overcome the problem of alienation,
and man can make himself whole, and we
can overcome that distance through revolution
and in dialectic pu-lcri-tion of history
of the distance between subject and object
between being and conscioussness.
And Patoscka's saying "It's a misunderstanding because
"the problem of alienation is not that man is not whole,
"the problem of alienation is that man is not himself."
And this is a very Heideggerian point of view.
It's not a problem of wholeness, it's a problem
of authenticity, inauthenticity
or something analogous to that.
The problem is that man is not himself,
and self alienation, the fact that man is not himself
and is not at home in the world, that hurt,
that ache that man wants to heal, can never be repaired.
It's part of the human condition, it is irreparable,
and therefor Marxism is doomed to failure.
Okay, I'm gonna fast forward.
I found these passages of the diary very moving.
I'm gonna fast forward you now to Stalin's death in '53,
and then Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956,
where intellectuals, Czech and Slovak intellectuals
then have to get together and have a discussion
about what Khrushchev has said about this exposure
of Stalinist excesses in the cult of personality.
And Czech writers are not ready for this,
and Czech intellectuals are not ready for this
and they get up there and say things like Stanislav Norman
says, he's like, "Listen, my generation, we grew up
"with Stalin's name, and my best friends they went
"to their deaths in the concentration camps
"with his name on their lips, and now you're telling me
"well no, I'm not going to apologize, I'm not ashamed.
And as the writers and the philosophers are forced then
to think their way out of Stalinism, they do that,
to make a long story short, through a confrontation
of the Hegelian-Marxist tradition
with the phenomenalogical existentialist tradition.
Where is truth?
Is it in the subject or the object, is it
in conscioussness in the world?
For Heidegger we each face our death alone,
we each die alone, death is radically individualizing,
our choice is then to take hold
of our existence as we face our own death.
Jean-Paul Sartre would interpret this as, "God is dead,
"and no compensation can be made for the loss.
"We are abandoned and we are forced to create ourselves.
"Absolute nothingness is absolute freedom".
And what existentialism would then inject
is a kind of radical decisionism in a philosophy of choice.
A choice to take hold of our own existence,
authentically or not.
I should add on the margins, that Sartre's path
from existentialism to Marxism was much more luxurious
than these philosophers like Karel Kosik,
who were coming from Marxism to existentialism,
because it's one thing to use your radical freedom
to opt for radical determinism, it's another thing
if you believe that the iron laws of history
were proceeding inexorably inevitably in a given direction
and then you start having doubts about whether or not
these iron laws of history were really so iron after all,
and perhaps there was a bit more room for individual agency
and subjectivity and personal choice,
well then you have blood on your hands.
Directly or indirectly.
You know, people like Kosík, who is arguably the most
important philosopher in Czechoslovakia
of revisionist Marxism, who was writing cheers to
the executions of the show trial victims in the 1950s.
So the discussion then, that happens in the 1960s
about revisionist Marxism, the important discussion,
the need most important discussion was how do you
delineate the realm of determinism from
the realm of responsibility, and where do you draw that line
between the force of history and historical laws
and wholeness and totality that is moving us towards
a resolution of all divisions and all conflict,
and the realm of human agency and subjectivity and choice.
And that was a discussion and that's probably most
interesting had by philosophers like Leszek Kolakowski
in Poland and Karel Kosik in Czechoslovakia.
And Kosik comes up with essentially a kind of, in his
post-Stalinist phase, Heideggerian reading
of the Marxist past, where he says, the thing is that.
it's not that history determines the individual
or the individual determines history.
It's that just like we are always already in the world,
we are always already in history.
We are embedded in history, therefore history is shaping us
but we are also shaping history, and there is
this continual dialogical interpenetration going on.
In 1967 Kosik writes a short essay for
the Writers' Union congress called Reason and Conscience,
in which he tells a tale of a certain religious reformer
which is obviously Jan Hus, although Kosik
doesn't use his name
and this theologian was advised while he was in prison
that when the ecclesiastical council comes to him,
the ecclesiastical council that will eventually
burn Jan Hus at the stake in 1415, but he is advised
while in prison that when the ecclesiastical council
comes to him should the council tell him that he only has
one eye, even though he knew he had two,
it was his duty to concede that the council was correct.
But the imprisoned theologian replied he knew by his
own reason that he had two eyes, and a denial
of reason was a betrayal of conscience.
And this was a reference to the Stalinist show trials,
and perhaps the most dramatic moment comes in 1952,
at the end of the Slansky trial, when Andre Simone,
whose real name was Otto Katz gets up there and gives
an elaborate self-denigrating final statement,
in which he demands for himself the highest punishment
that is taken almost verbatim
from Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon.
Koestler's book was inspired by
the Bukharin trial in Moscow in the 1930s.
It was too fantastic to be believed in Moscow in the 1930s.
Koestler exposes it in the interim, Simone spits it back out
15 years later in Prague, and they buy it and they hang him.
So again, Kosik goes back to Husserl's concepts
of reason of truth and clarity, and says, "Denial
"of reason is a betrayal of conscience", and the move
that revisionist Marxism goes through is to affirm
both historical determinism in some sense,
and individual responsibility,
that we are all participants in history, shaping and being
shaped by history, we are always already in history,
we are always already in the world, we are embedded.
I'm gonna now jump to post 1968 and the death of Marxism.
I would call 1968 in Eastern Europe the death of Marxism,
even though communism in practice continues
for another two decades, but Marxism as a serious vibrant
force in intellectual life is dead after 1968.
And the truth of Marxism depended upon this
Archimedean perspective provided by the end of history,
which is available as Heidegger says only when
the Owl of Minerva takes flight, the famous preface
to phenomenology of spirit, the Owl of Minerva
spreads her wings only with the falling of the dusk,
it's only in retrospect that you can see what it all means,
meaning is only retrospective.
And one of the people from that new generation
of philosophers who comes of age in 1968, during the events
of the Prague spring and the anti-Zionist campaign in Poland
was the young philosopher Krzysztof Michalski,
who after the collapse of the philosophy department
in the University of Warsaw following
the Anti-Zionist campaign, is sent to Prague
to write a dissipation with Jan Patocka.
And the question that Michalski is trying to ask is,
"Can there be meaning without wholeness?
"Does the understanding of something
"pre-suppose finding a unity,
"which one wants to understand?
"Or is it only when we are able to see
"in each fragment a part of the whole", as Hegel said
"That we can discover some meaning in
"the multi-variousness of the experienced world?"
And what brought the young philosopher Krzysztof Michalski,
who was born in 1948, and the much older philosopher
Jan Patochka, who was born in 1907 together,
was a shared understanding of Heidegger's
special meaning for Eastern Europe.
Heidegger was the antidote to the Hegelian bite.
He was the shared point of departure.
He was the thinker who provided the point of departure
for asking the questions that kept Michalski up at night,
who said "Yes, there can be meaning without totality
"without an Archimedean point outside of history
"and outside of one's self", because Heidegger was the one
who allowed us a philosophy of historical embeddedness,
in which we do not look on history from the outside,
but always from the inside, we were always already
bound up in history, thrown into the world,
thrown into life, open to the unknown that was life,
there was no place outside of history
to stand at a distance and contemplate it.
"Life and history", Michalski wrote, "Do not go on
"independently of our participation, like a carousel
"you can jump on or off at will".
The imperative was to resign from this illusory
conviction that there was some point of view
outside of time from which we could look
at our present and relativize it.
No, what we are living now possesses its own finality,
we are the co-creators of meaning in this time,
and so all meanings are fragile, are temporary,
are open to change, but for all that
no less deep and no real.
It was understandable that we long to disburden ourselves
of responsibility, and displace it on some firm foundation
we long for the world as a garden, orderly and secure.
But there was no such garden, because lurking
in every moment was the possibility of a border,
of a closing of the world as it was, and a new beginning,
a departing beyond the borders of what was found.
For Heidegger, for Patocka, for Michalski human finitude,
the fact that we are being towards death, the confrontation
with our own morality was the condition of all meaning.
Authenticity, living in truth, with facing being
towards death with our eyes wide open, it was
the more painful way to live, but the more truthful one.
Death is the key to authenticity, and I would argue
that in 20th century Eastern Europe
one had to give some meaning to death.
Patocka's essays in the philosophy of history, written at
the very end if his life were inspired by Michalski.
The most famous concept coming out of those essays
is something that Patocka calls
"The solidarity of the shaken".
And I'll quote you just one passage from one of these,
from the last essay, in which Patocka writes about
what draws together even people who were shooting
on one another who were on opposite sides during a war.
And he says, "That's the most profound discovery
"of the front line, is that life leans out into the night,
"into struggle and death, that it cannot do without
"this component of life, which from the point of view
"of the day appears as a mere non existence.
"The transformation of the meaning of life,
"which here trips on nothingness, on a boundary over which
"it cannot step, along which everything is transformed."
This is what Patocka calls "The solidarity of the shaken".
The solidarity of those who have confronted
their own mortality, who have descended to darkness,
who have been shaken to the core.
At Vaclav Havel's urging young Patocka becomes one of the
original three spokespeople for
the Human Rights Petition Charger 77, which is
released, or announced, on January first, 1977.
The secret police then come for Patocka,
as he had known they would.
He's interrogated brutally and he does not survive.
He dies in March 1977.
Shortly thereafter Krzysztof Michalski's book
on Heidegger is published in 1978 in Poland,
and he writes about how living in Poland in 1978,
Michalski felt as if Heidegger were like
the eyes in certain portraits that seem
to be gazing at you wherever you might be.
The philosopher who was able to disclose
the way of each step of my life, or yours.
Now, that same year, 1978, just after Patocka's death,
Vaclav Havel met Adam Michnik on a mountain called Snezka.
It was the first meeting between a small group
from Charter 77, including Vaclav Havel
and a small group from the Community of the Defense
of Workers in Poland including Adam Michnik.
A conversation that resulted in the fact that Adam Michnik,
who is the editor of the Samizdat underground journal
commissioned an essay from Havel.
That essay that Havel then went back to Prague
and wrote was to be called The Power of the Powerless,
and dedicated to the memory of Jan Patocka.
And that essay has as its protagonists,
its hero or its anti-hero, an ordinary green grocer,
a guy in the street.
And every morning that green grocer goes to his shop,
and he puts in the window, next to the carrots
and the onions this sign saying "Workers of the world Unite"
and Havel asks, why does he put that sign in the window?
Is it out of a sincere spontaneous desire to acquaint people
with his enthusiastic socialist conscioussness?
And Havel says no, he doesn't believe the sign,
moreover, the people walking by
who see the sign, don't believe the sign.
Moreover, even the communist regime
no longer believes the sign.
And everyone knows that everyone knows that nobody believes,
the regime knows that the people know and they know
that they know, everybody knows that everybody knows.
Nonetheless, everyone continues to hang up their signs,
and Havel says, "Well, why is that?"
Well, it's understandable, what else can the green grocer do
he's powerless, he's just an ordinary guy,
if he takes it down somebody could inform on him,
he could be harassed, he could be interrogated,
his children could be denied education, they could be
thrown out of the university, he could eventually
be detained or put in prison, it's profoundly
in his interest to hang the sign.
And Havel says, "Well how will all these things
"happen to the green grocer for taking down a sign
"that everyone knows nobody believes anyway?"
And Havel says, "Well, in fact, paradoxically,
"that sign is very important to the regime, and if one day
"all the green grocers were to take down their signs
"that would be the beginning of a revolution".
Because of that the green grocer
is not so powerless after all.
Because he is powerful he's also responsible,
and therefor guilty, for it's the green grocers
who allowed the game to go on in the first place.
Now, the green grocer is one illustration
of that great problem of modernity, alienation.
For Havel, the way to overcome alienation
is to live in truth, is to take down the sign.
Now we'll add here that Havel wasn't a Western liberal,
and he wasn't on the democratic populist representing
a good people against an evil regime.
On the contrary, he was very clear about his belief
that the people bore responsibility for that regime.
And the famous lines in The Power of the Powerless
are how the line between victim and oppressor
runs de facto through each person,
for everyone in his or her own ways,
both the victim and the supporter of the regime.
He said moreover that he saw that this communist system
was one instance of the general inability
of modern humanity to be master of its own situation,
and he saw no real evidence that Western democracy
could offer solutions, that were any more profound.
The death of Marxism in 1968
was symbolic of the death of grand narratives in general.
The phenomenalogical tradition more or less at this moment
as it develops in Western Europe and France in particular,
takes a kind of post-modernist post-structuralist route.
Post-modernism is really also errant
to the enlightenment tradition.
It's a critical sensibility, it's questioning through
the autonomous use of reason.
It's moment, most profoundly.
If modernism was all about the enlightenment argues,
and is replacing God, is finding a way to get to truth
through our own reason, the absence of God,
post-modernism is the moment when we
give up on replacing God, we say, "No, there's no God,
"there's no ersatz God, there's no transcendental
"signify, there's no overarching anything
"that holds the system together".
For Derrida, for instance, who was also very much
errant to the Husserlian-Heideggerian tradition,
there's no God, there's no replacement God,
there's no stable subject, there's no
stable meaning, there's no stable truth.
Now, I would argue here that this phenomenalogical
tradition takes a different path in Eastern Europe,
where there's a kind of resistance
to the Derridian Aporia, there's a resistance
to giving up on a stable subject,
on stable meaning, on stable truth.
There is a fear in Eastern Europe of nihilism,
which was, after 1968 in some sense seen as the most
threatening post-Marxist form of alienation,
a fear of giving up on the possibility
of meaning, of truth, of moral values.
There was a search for truth as a struggle against nihilism.
And for Havel's green grocer moreover, the anthological
reality of truth is proven in confrontation
by the anthological reality of lies.
So there might be epistemological confusion,
but there's not anthological confusion,
there might be a confusion about what we know
but there's not confusion about being itself.
There is, for Havel, such a distinction
between truth and lies, that's not merely
a kind of relativist matter of perspective.
There's something solid about that.
And Havel uses the word truth as if it were
a substantive, like your keys,
you could hold onto it and put it in your pocket.
Let me, then, just say a couple words
about the present day, 25 years later.
After the fall of communism.
The Polish theater director Krzysztof Chiszevski,
in reflecting upon the 25 years that have passed
since the fall of communism said last year that,
"The successful pursuit for individual freedom
"that 1989 had ushered us into, has left a bitter taste
"of alienation, of egoism and loneliness, as well as
"depression, the most common illness of liberal societies".
In one of their last conversations,
Adam Michnik said to Havel,
"Our civilization needs metaphysics,"
and Havel said to Michnik that he was still waiting
for the existential revolution that would be
a true revolution in values.
Michnik's friend, the philosopher Mar-chin Crewel,
who was one of the most active dissidents in solidarity
says that the crisis of the present moment is that
we have stopped asking ourselves
the metaphysical questions we used to ask ourselves
during the communist period.
We stopped asking ourselves questions like
"Where does evil come from?"
I'd like to make a quick argument in the end here
in my last five minutes, which I'm going to share with
a video that,
for many of these former dissidents, who are still living,
the Maidan last year in Ukraine was so poignant
and so moving because it was the return of Metaphysics.
It was the moment when politics transcended the political
and became the existential.
Now, remember in Prague in 1935 Husserl had
expressed admiration for that optimistic spirit
of learning during the enlightenment.
He said, "We possess an undying testimony to the spirit
"in the Glorious Ode to Joy of Schiller and Beethoven.
"It is only", Husserl said, "with painful feelings
"that we can understand this hymn today.
"A greater contrast with our present situation
"is unthinkable."
And before I give you my last couple thoughts,
I'm going to play a quick video for you on that note.
If I can figure out how to do it.
What's that you see is from Odessa, shortly after
the massacre of some hundred people on the Maidan in Kiev.
This is March, 2014.
(distant chatter)
(Beethoven Symphony No.9 Mvt. 4, "Presto")
♪ Freude, schoner Gotterfunken, ♪
♪ Tochter aus Elysium, ♪
♪ Wir betreten feuertrunken, ♪
♪ Himmlische, dein Heiligthum ♪
♪ Deine Zauber binden wieder ♪
♪ Was die Mode streng geteilt ♪
♪ Alle Menschen werden Bruder, ♪
♪ Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt ♪
♪ Deine Zauber binden wieder ♪
♪ Was die Mode streng geteilt ♪
♪ Alle Menschen werden Bruder, ♪
♪ Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt ♪
(cut to finale)
(audience applause)
- So last summer I was in Warsaw,
part of a discussion organized there
between myself and a Ukrainian historian, Slavko Hrzenjak,
and one of the questions asked us was, "what is
"the lesson of the Ukrainian revolution for the West?"
And I answered that question by telling a story
about the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski.
Leszek Kolakowski was a young Stalinist
turned revisionist Marxist, he was subsequently
one of the people who was thrown out of Warsaw university
in 1968, during the Anti-Zionist campaign
and went into immigration.
In the early 1970s, shortly after he left Poland he was
invited to Yale to give a series of lectures about Husserl.
And in those lectures Kolakowski said
that Husserl's project failed.
"Husserl tried harder than anybody else
"to find that bridge from being to conscioussness,
"from subject to object, from mind to world.
"He looked deeper, he tried harder, he pushed further.
"Nevertheless he failed as all attempts are bound to fail
'because there is no magical bridge
"between being an conscioussness.
"The problem of the bridge is insoluble.
"Nevertheless", Kolakowski said, and this is the essence
I would argue of the East European resistance to
the post-modernist German, the phenomenalogical tradition,
"Nevertheless our obligation is not to stop looking
"for that bridge, which we know can never be found.
"Because if you give up on the possibility
"of absolute truth, if you give up
"on epistemological clarity, you have given up on morality.
"Because epistemological questions are
"always already ethical questions."
And I ended the panel in Warsaw by saying, "Let that be
"the lesson of the Ukrainian revolution for the West".
Thank you.
(audience applause)
- [Wendy] Does this work?
Okay, thank you so much for that
really brilliant presentation,
and very powerfully delivered.
I'm speechless right now.
We have some time for questions, I know some students
have to go off to class, so you'll see some people
kind of scurrying out, so please don't take offense
to that, because of the class schedule,
but thank you very much for that,
I'm gonna open up the floor right now.
Have any questions?
Yeah.
- [Woman] Thank you, thank you for your talk.
I think it as wonderful, and exactly
very necessary, I think, at this point and time.
The final comment about the bridge, I find,
is also
very poignant, and for me at least
it seems that this bridge must be built, right?
So that's really the answer.
There is no bridge but it's something
that can be created through our own effort.
And for me also, to add another link to this
and I was wondering if what you think about this idea
of building the bridge or constructing the bridge
through the effort, so in other words
Husserl was not able to find it, existing
so maybe the answer is that it must be constantly
recreated or reconstructed , and to me there is
an interesting echo there with some of the recent work
that has been done, for instance in this country,
by Latina feminism so when you said,
when you start talking about the bridge
I immediately thought about the book called
The Bridge Which Is My Back, which was written by
Anzaldua, among others, and,
so what do you think about this idea?
That there is no bridge, and yet
it can come into existence.
- That we construct the bridge, that's an interesting idea.
I mean, I think for Husserl that was very much
a work of construction, it was to properly
be in the phenomenalogical attitude,
it was an intellectual exercise, and involved a lot of labor
and involved very rigorous description,
in some ways very visual description
of the contents of your conscioussness.
For Kolakowski, the essence of what I think a lot
of dissidents in Eastern Europe were trying to say,
that had been lost, which is one of the things
they were mourning during the 25th anniversary last year,
was you have to keep asking the big questions.
You can't become too cynical or too skeptical
or too hip, or too post-modern, or no longer believing
in truth, to ask the big questions.
You have to keep asking them even if, you know,
the questions like, where evil comes from?
Even if we know that it's not that
tomorrow we're gonna resolve that, but you have to keep
putting in the work of posing the questions,
because in one of the things Kolakowski says,
and Jan Patocka articulates very movingly in these
essays of the philosophy of history, is that the seeking
of meaning is in some sense the thing itself.
Even if we search for meaning in history,
even if there's no kind of pre-made meaning out there,
like a treasure chest for us to go get and find,
and say "Yes, we found it", the seeking is the thing itself
and you can't give up on that, you have to keep pushing.
You give up on that, and we've given up on ethics.
And so there's labor involved, and it is very much
a kind of, its' a philosophy of action,
a philosophy of labor in that sense, you're right.
- Thank you for the very rich talk this afternoon,
I kept on thinking about last night's lecture as well,
and Putin's efforts to shape conscioussness
in a broader sense, and so I wanted
to push you a little bit too to connect your talk,
you gave us this very rich history
of engaged intellectuals and philosophers, even when they
retreat to their studies during times of crisis,
to their ivory tower, they're still engaging
these big ideas, asking the questions, and so
what's happening today in Russia, in Ukraine
you listed up all these great stars that go up through
Havel and that, but who are the stars today?
Who are the people we should be listening to,
what are they talking about?
Are they continuing the search?
And how is Putin and the Russian state responding?
Do they take these ideas seriously?
What's the culture of the university system?
What's the response from the Russian's state?
Are they viewing these ideas as serious matters,
as threats as well, just to push it the current period.
- Okay, thank you for that.
There were actually several questions
in there, I've noticed.
One of the things that I personally found incredibly moving
was to see so many of my friends in Eastern Europe
who are significantly older than myself, who took part
in the dissident movement in the '70s and '80s
come out on behalf of Ukraine, and in a certain sense
when I saw people like Costa Gelbert, whom
Wendy quoted at the beginning an Adam Michnik in Kiev,
I felt like I saw them in better form,
than I have ever seen them before.
Like these are people who are in their
best form when the stakes are high.
In some sense they're unsuited to the banality
of the everyday, but they come into a state
of mobilized clarity when the stakes are high.
One of the things, to speak very very generally
and not blithely, but
I saw a huge split,
I was in Vienna last year, in understanding
between Western Europe and Eastern Europe,
and this division between Western Europe and Eastern Europe
that seemed to have been overcome by the expansion of the EU
and the success in economic transition
and by the Schengen passport, and all of a sudden
a revolution breaks up in the Maidan,
and it becomes palpable again, and it becomes
palpable in terms of understanding,
and in it's simplest most distilled form,
I would say and this was true for friends
from Montenegro, friends from Poland,
that East Europeans understood that anything is possible.
I felt like Western Europeans still had a sense
of the realm of the possible circumscribed.
You know, certain things just would never happen,
they would be irrational, it wouldn't make sense,
it would be self-destructive, our world couldn't
really go up in smoke the next day,
there's a certain kind of subliminal subconscious
inherited stability that there is boundary of the possible
and there're things outside of that.
I felt like my friends from Eastern Europe,
including the ones who are really too young to remember
the communist period, they just understood intuitively
that actually anything can happen.
Anything is possible, and I felt like that really is,
it brought into focus a division, that in some sense
I wasn't aware still existed, so starkly.
One thing I think for the people who were veterans
of solidarity in Poland,
for them the Maidan was that miracle
that they never thought they would
live to see a second time in their lifetime.
And they knew it was fragile, and they knew it's ephemeral,
and they knew it can't last because the overcoming
of all these divisions, generational and ethnic
and linguistic and political and right and left
and catholics and Marxists and all these,
that moment of overcoming is this kind of precious
fragile thing and it ends and then politics returns.
But they also knew that, and it's what Arendt calls
The Treasure of Revolution, The Lost Treasure of Revolution,
they knew that it's something most people never
experienced in their lifetime.
And there is all the discussion on the Maidan
about what subjectivity meant, what did it mean
to assert your subjectivity, what did it mean
that we are not an object, that we are subjects?
And Polish historian and friend of mine said,
"Woah, Marci, Subjectivity.
"I hadn't thought about that word
"since the days of solidarity", everyone was writing
about that during solidarity, it was not about
right and left, that we've overcome the political division
between right and left, it's about
asserting our subjectivity, it's about asserting our
moral agency, and that discussion had kind of been forgotten
and I think I that sense, the Maidan on the 25th
anniversary of 1989 reinvigorated those conversations.
About Putin I would also say, that it very much
returns to these issues in The Power of the Powerless about
epistemological confusion versus anthological confusion.
I think in some sense the most presumptive thing that was
said about Putin by any European politician, was when
Angela Merkel gets off the phone with him and then says
"Er lebt in einer anderen Welt" you know,
that he's living in another world.
Hannah Arendt, in her essay Truth and Politics from long ago
talks about old-fashioned lies, traditional lies
versus the kind of the totalitarian lies of modern politics.
And she has that description, that I think holds up today,
she sits there going "An old fashioned lie is a kind of tear
in the fabric of reality", reality has been ruptured
and the very careful observer can perceive the place
where reality has been torn, whereas the modern
political lie, that she saw under totalitarianism
was a complete reconstruction of reality, in such a way
that it was seamless, that now tear could be perceived
because there was no tear as such.
In fact, reality has been reconstructed in a seamless way.
And that, I have to say, is what terrifies me about Putin.
I'm not an expert on politics, I truly don't get involved
in contemporary politics, but when I watched that
Crimea speech that he gave a year ago, I thought
"That's not a tear in the fabric of reality, that's a whole
other world", he has spun a whole other world, in which
there's no longer a real distinction between truth and lies.
I thought Peter Pomerantsev's book was brilliant,
the one that just came out,
Nothing is True and Everything is Possible.
It's very chatty, it's very anecdotal,
it's full of lots of sex.
But it's philosophically really serious,
and is has to do with a certain kind of post-modern
rupture of any kind of faith, that there's some kind of
anthological solidity to truth.
And I think that's where the legacy, the philosophical
legacy of the dissidents really is important.
Because even at these moments of propaganda
and feeling like you were living in a regime of lies,
one of the things that the dissidents insisted on
was that even if there's all this epistemological confusion
the regime saying one thing and they're lying about this
and lying about that, and who knows what really happened
because it's very hard to figure it out,
because everyone's in bed with this web of lies.
There was a belief that if we didn't know the truth
at any given moment, we believed
there was such a thing as truth,
and that it had some kind of solidity, and that it could
be distinguished from lies, that we weren't in this
post-modernist free frawl, well maybe this maybe that,
there might be epistemological confusion,
but there is never anthological confusion,
there is a faith in anthological clarity,
that there was such a thing as absolute truth,
and maybe with enough work, going back to Kolakowski,
we could figure out what that absolute truth was.
And I think that's become particularly important
at this moment, and I think Peter Pomerantsev
had this exactly right, what does it mean when you
enter this world in which nobody really knows anymore,
what's real or what's not real, 'cause a completely
different version of reality has been spun, and maybe
people kind of give up on trying to figure it out.
- Getting my exercise.
(soft chuckle)
- Um, hi, I'd like to thank you for a very interesting
talk, my relative's are from Slovakia,
but it's nice to hear about the intellectual community,
they were farmers, running around, trying to escape
and escaping to America.
So, it's been interesting.
I was wondering another institution.
As you were talking I thought, for the first time a pope
came from Poland, was this the institution
of the catholic church trying to enter
the thought processes that were going on at that time,
and are trying to present itself as the bridge?
I mean, there has never been a pope from Poland,
and it seems to have happened right when
all this was going on.
So I was just thinking about this institution,
how did it fit into all what was happening at that time,
as others were looking for the bridge was
the catholic church reaching into
this area by choosing a Polish pope
and having that pope visit this area so often.
- Do you mind if I collect this other question?
Yeah, Okay.
- I just wanted to ask, what should be, in your opinion
the response of intellectuals in the west to this,
'cause it seems very confused and,
no strong reaction that I can see really has a unity.
Thank you.
- Another question?
- Thank you for a terrific talk, thank you.
I was interested in what you were saying in
the way The Power of the Powerless was devoted to Patocka
and that in a way he signed Charter 77
and waited for his own demise, in a sense.
He knew what was coming, and then I think about
what I really like about Power of the Powerless
is not so much, certainly the importance of living
in the truth and how that will the whole edifice
just crumble, of the authoritarian system, but I'm also
interested in the lack of courage of every individual,
the willingness to make the small gesture
of hanging the sign, showing that "Yes, I too comply,
"I don't have the courage", and that reinforces
other people's lack of courage.
I'm wondering, what has been written, or your understanding
of the courage that it must have taken for Patocka
to sign this knowing what would happen to him,
because to me what is also very interesting
about The Power of the Powerless is the question of courage
and where individuals find the courage to live in truth,
or to find the courage to stand up
for what's true and what's right.
- Okay, thank you for those questions.
I know we're running out of time
so I'll try to answer them quickly.
Karol Wojtyla's election as the pope, hugely important.
That was a huge injection,
kind of moral burst of support,
for solidarity, he was the patron saint of solidarity.
Including for people who were never catholic, have never
believed in God, never intended to believe in God.
He represented a very particular
certain kind of universalist cosmopolitan catholicism
that perhaps was not particularly representative
of the catholic church in Poland at all, in some sense.
It was representative of Ti-wa and Jozef Tischner
and some of their friends.
Wojtyla, by the way, was a student of Husserl's student
Roman Ingarden, and he has this very interesting
phenomenalogical education in his book The Acting in Person,
it's a kind of phenomenalogical reading of personhood,
which I would love to get into, but I think
that will take us on another subject.
But yeah, hugely important.
When he makes his first visit back to Poland as the pope
in '79, people come out on a scale that
the regime couldn't possibly control.
There was a sense that he had injected them
with this kind of moral support,
that would urge them on to victory,
it was enormously important.
The response of intellectuals in the last.
That was your question.
Now that's a kind of thing that you ask yourself
every day, what can I do as an intellectual?
And I always feel to some extent helpless.
I mean, I can talk about what I feel like I can do,
personally, which is very limited, I'm not
a political person, I have a very limited understanding
of global finance, for instance, which is very
critical to international relations right now.
I feel myself at moments like this, and I try not to engage
in current issues 'cause I don't trust myself,
and as a historian you're used to having
all the advantages of retrospect.
It's the Owl of Minerva again, right?
You wanna be able to see all your sources
which you can never take in in real time,
it's impossible to do in real time.
But there are certainly moments, and especially
in the past year, or more than a year,
watching what's going on in Ukraine, where I felt this
certain kind of moral responsibility
as a cultural mediator, which I think it's basically
the same thing as I notice that friends of mine
from graduate school who becomes historians of
the Middle East felt during the Arab Spring.
Not that they were political commentators necessarily,
or foreign policy advisors, but the people who are out there
getting beaten up or getting killed, were people who
were real to them and they were people they knew
and they were worlds they knew because
they had spent time there, and therefor you feel
this kind of moral imperative to make these people real,
and I think there's that sense of contiguity.
I mean, these people who were out there in the Maidan
there were only a handful of them I really knew well,
personally, but there were a lot of friends of friends,
and colleagues of colleagues and people I had
run into in conferences or had breakfast with at hotels.
The people that are in your world are real to you
in a different way and so you have,
I did feel like some kind of responsibility to
tell their stories more, because I have a certain audience
in English, and I felt like I understood certain things.
But less about advocacy and more about understanding.
I was at this conference in the University of London
last spring, and it wasn't a conference
on Eastern Europe at all, it was about
historians and novelists, or literary issues
in writing history or something like that,
and there was a small group of us, but not necessarily
specialists in Eastern Europe, just anybody.
And I was having dinner with some of my collogues
that night in London, and a couple of them,
including one who is a North American historian
of post-war Germany, and they said,
"What's going on in Ukraine?"
"wasn't that a revolution of fascists and the Anti-Semites?"
I started saying that,
the far right was there, but look at what just
happened in the elections, the far right in Ukraine
is getting between one and two percent of the voluten.
I'm living in Vienna and the far right in Vienna
is getting about 20% of the votes so
yes, they are there, but let's put that into perspective,
they are a very very marginal part of the population.
And the woman who was the historian of Germany said
"Well, you understand that as a historian of Germany
"I feel a particular moral responsibility
"to be vigilant about fascism.
"When they tell us there are fascists out there
"I feel like we have to take an uncompromising stand".
And then I started to talk about, well there's a bit of
Freudean projection going on, given the recent
European election said "Hello, the far right is done".
But then at a certain point, this was having no affect,
and I said, "For me and my husband those people out there,
"those are our friends and colleagues
"out there getting shot at".
And somehow then that changed the whole conversation.
Like that, the percentages in this election
and that election, and we're just like real objective
material which should have some significance.
Somehow that had no real meaning.
Whereas the fact that we personally have some friends
getting shot at, that seemed to be
of enormous political significance.
We could have crazy friends, I'm sure I have crazy friends
in all different places and have over the years,
but that's not necessarily a fact that has universal
political significance, but somehow
that was what changed the conversation,
that was what made everyone think differently.
Like, "Oh, well you're a real person and here I am
"at a conference with you, and so those are your
"colleagues and maybe those are real people too".
And so I feel this kind of cultural mediator responsibility.
Patocka's courage, this is a big topic.
I think in some sense I'm more critical about him
than lots of real die-hard Patocka scholars are,
and I love Patocka, in a certain way.
Patocka's a Czech born in 1907.
He's studying with Husserl and attending
Heidegger's lectures in Freiburg in 1933.
He's personally very loyal to Husserl,
he tries very hard to help bring him to Prague.
He's one of the people who issues the invitation,
is one of the people who tries
to help smuggle the archive out.
He doesn't do anything particularly heroic in the 1930s
and he understands exactly what's coming on.
He doesn't do anything particularly heroic
during the Second World War, he kinda keeps a low profile.
He doesn't do anything particularly heroic
during the Stalinist period, he also keeps a low profile.
The thing I found actually most shocking,
although other people don't find it shocking,
Patocka was someone who was personally very loyal
to Husserl, philosophically closer to Heidegger,
although you could look at all his work as
a kind of attempt to synthesize both of these currents.
I asked one of his students who directs
the Patocka archive now in Prague, I said, "Did Patocka
"ever talk about Heidegger's engagement with Nazism?"
And this is Ivan Chvatík, and Ivan said, "He did once,
"after that famous Der Spiegel interview
"with Heidegger comes out in 1976".
So Heidegger speaks publicly really once about
his engagement with Nazism, it's an interview he gives
to Der Spiegel in 1966, on the condition that it
not be published until after his death.
He dies 10 years later, it's immediately published
to Der Spiegel, it's smuggled in, Patocka's students
smuggle it in, they give him the interview
and then they tape-record his comments.
And from my point of view, my point of view as an American,
he was scandalously empathetic.
I mean, Patocka's comments were essentially that like,
"Well, today of course we know what Nazism was, but really
"he couldn't have possibly known that then, and did a
"German intellectual in 1933 really have
"any other choice than to try it out."
Moreover, he makes the provocative point that
he suggests that weren't not for the contingency
that Husserl was of Jewish origin, he might well
have made a similar decision in 1933.
Because look at what a fanatical German patriot Husserl was
during the First World War, and in fact he was a fanatical
German patriot during the First World War like a lot of
German Jewish intellectuals at that time.
He says nothing supportive of Nazism,
but it's a very generous reading.
To me it was scandalously generous.
Other when I talked to my Czech and German colleagues
who work on Patocka about that,
one of them said, "Come on, Marci it's always better
"to be me more generous towards one's colleagues
"as opposed to less generous towards them".
The Czech Patocka expert I was talking to
basically took that position, at a certain point I'm like,
"Come on, Hansel, read this line, look at what
"he said here look at what--",
he's like "Okay, maybe that was going a little bit far".
But he's very very generous towards Heidegger, although
he doesn't say anything that's particularly sympathetic
to Nazism or fascism, it's just
a generous reading of Heidegger.
Some people do read his idea of The Solidarity
of the Shaken, which is inspired in part by Junger,
as a kind of fascist ideology that you can
unite even with your enemies.
I don't read it that way at all, personally.
But when he agrees to be the spokesperson of Charter 77
that's kind of the first time he really puts himself
out there, and he is 69 years old at the time,
and he's thrown out of the university in '72,
he hasn't been able to work at the university
for most of his career, so he hasn't been a communist,
he hasn't been a central conformist, but he's
kind of kept a low profile, kind of like Husserl in 1933.
He kinda keeps a low profile and does his own thing,
tries to stay out of the way.
He teaches briefly around '68, thrown out in 1972, and then
holds an underground kind of seminar in his apartment
with some of his students, between '73 and '76,
at which they basically read Being in Time
again and again and again, and they
translate it aloud, from German into Czech.
But he doesn't really put himself out there til '77.
And I think at that point he does understand
that it's going to be a risk, he certainly expects
to be detained, I don't know that he expects to die.
It's not that they killed him.
It's that he was exposed to brutal interrogation
and draining interrogation while he was in fragile health,
and therefor dies, I think of a stroke.
But the intention was not to kill him,
and I don't think he thought the regime
would intentionally kill him, he didn't expect to be shot.
But he expected to be detained,
he understood what it would mean.
And it's a decision he made
in his older age, at the very end.
Whether you read that as better late than never or...
It's a matter of opinion.
- Thank you very much, it was really terrific talk
and I appreciate all the questions today, so thank you.
