Confronting Totalitarian Minds

Jan Patocka on Politics and Dissidence

Aspen Brinton

• Publisher: Karolinum Press, Charles University
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9788024645391
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Jan Pato?ka was a Czech philosopher who not only lived through the turbulent politics of twentieth-century Central Europe, but he shaped his intellectual contributions in response to that tumult. One of the last students of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, he was a philosophical inspiration to Václav Havel and other dissidents who confronted the Soviet regimes before 1989, as well as being actively involved in authoring and enacting Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. He died in 1977 from medical complications resulting from interrogations of the secret police, his political involvement cut short by an untimely death. Confronting Totalitarian Minds examines his legacy along with several contemporary applications of his ideas about dissidence, solidarity, and the human being's existential confrontation with unjust politics. Aspen Briton puts Pato?ka's ideas about dissidence, citizen mobilization, and civic responsibility in conversation with those of notable world historical figures like Mohandas Gandhi, expanding the current possibilities of comparative political theory. In adding a fresh voice to contemporary conversations on transcending injustice, Confronting Totalitarian Minds seeks to educate a wider audience about this philosopher's continued relevance to political dissidents across the world.

Chapter One
Living in Truth:
in Conversation with Václav Havel

On the occasion of Václav Havel’s death in 2011, the idea of ‘living in truth’ was celebrated as one of his main legacies as a playwright, a dissident, and a politician.1 Journalists and commentators eulogized Havel’s thoughts on ‘living in truth’ largely from his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” dedicated to the memory of Jan Patočka and written in light of the harsh government reactions to Charter 77. While the eulogies did not necessarily agree that Havel fully managed to ‘live in truth’ throughout his time as a politician, the notion of ‘living in truth’ nonetheless framed his legacy as a dissident.2 Havel’s use of this idea was also partly inspired by Patočka’s philosophical thinking and the tragedy of his death in 1977. ‘Living in truth’ was later evoked by dissidents around the world quite directly, including (to name only the two most famous) Charter 08 in China and Aung San Suu Kyi as she resisted the military dictatorship in Burma-Myanmar.3 Within Havel’s texts there are many direct and indirect insights about how dissidents and activists might engage the idea of ‘living in truth’ as it relates to political action, and this comparison of Havel’s and Patočka’s ideas about ‘living in truth’ aims to uncover and illuminate these ideas.

The idea that truth is something to be lived in the world—not just something thought, not just something written down, and not just the purview of professional philosophers and scientists—is an area of common ground shared by Patočka and Havel. Yet while Havel read Patočka’s works and the two of them shared philosophical influences,4 by comparing their ideas of ‘living in truth,’ this is not meant to argue that Patočka and Havel fully agreed, or that Havel merely put Patočka’s ideas ‘into practice.’ This would overlook the possibility that given their conversations, there was likely cross-fertilization of ideas in both directions, especially in Patočka’s last essays about Charter 77.5 For Havel, philosophical categories were necessarily made more concrete by his efforts to substantiate ideas like ‘living in truth’ for the broader audience of Eastern European intellectuals, including those without access to the Czech samizdat in which Patočka was writing, and Havel’s style is also more accessible to the general reader than Patočka’s. In reading their two oeuvres together, there is a sense that Havel had an ability to riff off of Patočka (to use a colloquial phrase from jazz he might appreciate).6 When Havel references Patočka directly, he takes the kernel of an idea and ‘runs with it,’ sometimes moving very much in his own direction. If the conceit of this book is that all dissidents should be given some access to Patočka’s ideas in order that they might be able to riff off of those ideas, moving in directions of their own choice and necessity, then how Havel engaged with Patočka and ‘ran with’ notions of ‘living in truth’ is important for opening up the world of Patočka’s thinking for those not immersed in the vocabulary of philosophical phenomenology.

Reading Havel’s and Patočka’s writings together makes it easier to see that under the larger umbrella of ‘living in truth,’ there are multiple possibilities for how forms of ‘truth’ can illuminate types of ‘living,’ and how these modes of living might relate to acting as a dissident. Focusing on four specific dimensions of Havel’s and Patočka’s visions of living in truth, I will explore (1) the inward truth of the self, coupled with the idea that unless you know yourself and the nature of your own soul, you cannot accurately grasp the nature of the world in general; (2) the truth of others, including the idea that you cannot define what is true without the help of others who came before you and who exist around you, and that truth therefore has a moral and ethical component; (3) the political truth, or the truth derived from relationships between people that enables action through a larger understanding of human groups and collectives;7 and (4) truth as the necessary recognition of objectivity’s limits, or the notion that the truth handed to us by science and objectivity might be incomplete, requiring a mode of living that recognizes how certain parts of the world cannot be objectively defined, such as spiritual meaning and subjectivity.

Each of these modes of truth implies a mode of ‘living,’ as well as a particular ‘emplacement,’ or an understanding of what the ‘in’ in ‘living in truth’ identifies as a ‘place’ (see Introduction). If these four types of truth should be sought out by dissidents, then there are also multiple types of ‘places’ where one can live in truth, if ‘place’ is construed as a much wider idea than merely being geographical, and something more like ‘finding one’s place in the world.’ Any dissident could potentially put these modes of ‘living in truth’ into practice in their own world, in their own place, riffing or running off as needed. From another angle, elaborating these four modes of truth can also begin to show how Patočka offered a philosophical way to value dissidence intrinsically, not just instrumentally. Dissidence as something valuable and meaningful in itself, rather than just being valuable for what it can change in concrete politics, is a significant aspect of what a conversation between Patočka’s and Havel’s ideas might help to illuminate. These four modes of truth are each an example of that intrinsic value, each also demonstrating how seeking truth about these modes of living also might require something of a dissident attitude towards established norms. Such truth-seeking, and that attitude, are valuable in and of themselves, over and apart from whatever they might change about the world, politically or otherwise.8 While ‘living in truth’ might not have been so eulogized alongside Havel had he not also led the Velvet Revolution and ‘changed the world’ through the ‘success’ of his dissident movement, the idea of living in truth offers more than just that legacy. The argument here is meant to suggest that each moment of ‘living in truth’ is a kind of revolution, intrinsically valuable in itself, and such moments can happen in both the small and large theaters of political and anti-political life.

The Inward Truth of the Self

For both Havel and Patočka, looking inward to find the truth of oneself is entirely necessary to begin the process of living in truth, but it is not sufficient to complete the process. Looking inward is the beginning, but it must be for the sake of eventually looking outward toward truths about the world in general, including the importance of history and the politics of the day. Finding the inward truth of the self is a variant of the question of how to come to know oneself, an inquiry that has been at the center of Western philosophical discussions since at least as early as the ancient Greeks.9 The inscription at the oracle of Delphi, “know thyself,” became a question at the center of Plato’s philosophy, and was therefore inherited by every philosopher who was heir to Plato and the Greek tradition. Patočka sees himself as part of this inheritance, and the task of ‘knowing thyself’ and ‘caring for the soul’ both accompany his reading of Plato, marking for him the beginning of the European philosophical tradition.10 The suggestion that looking inward to find truths about the world as they might already exist in the structure of the individual soul is therefore an important part of Patočka’s Platonic project, but as with each inheritor of the Greek tradition, this process of inward examination has local and temporal variation.

Patočka’s ideas about the inward truth of the self are partially captured within his vision of ‘caring for the soul.’ This idea is at the center of his philosophical inquiry and also relates to his political action (see Introduction). While more will be elaborated in Chapter Two about the political implications of ‘caring for the soul,’ it is related to ‘living in truth’ in part because it contains a clear mode of self-examination, or in his own words, caring for the soul “manifests itself in three ways: in one way as the complete plan of existence, in another as the plan of a new political life, and in yet another as the clarification of what the soul is in itself.”11 When one asks the right sort of philosophical questions about oneself, therefore, caring for one’s own soul can clarify something fundamental about our internal nature, our relation to the world, and our plan for political life. “The care of the soul,” according to Patočka, “is something that transforms us internally, that at once makes us from instinctive and traditional beings, beings who look at what is normal in society and spiritually nourish themselves with this, into beings who entirely reverse this course, who are constantly examining.”12 The linkage between thinking and action in this formulation is usefully suggestive: when we challenge the received traditions and what is ‘normal,’ not only does the way we ‘spiritually nourish’ ourselves change, but what we do and how we act changes: we reverse our course (our direction of motion) and do something differently, examining and questioning everything.13

‘Living in truth’ and the ability to care for the soul are therefore closely connected and interdependent ideas for Patočka: “What… makes humans just and truthful is their care for their soul… Care for the soul means that truth is something not given once and for all, nor merely a matter of observing and acknowledging the observed, but rather a lifelong inquiry, self-controlling, self-unifying intellectual and vital practice.”14 Deploying the idea of caring for the soul is thus an example of truth being a place beyond the horizon that is ‘not given once and for all;’ truth—and living within it—is a lifelong process and practice of both self-examination and worldly engagement. When Patočka defines what it means to think, ‘cognizing,’ he argues that that too begins with a forever-ongoing practice of trying to understand our own essence and our own character: “undoubtedly we cognize methodically and purposefully… it is not enough to open one’s eyes, it is directed activity. And such directed activity has to naturally have its goal, which is obviously connected with our own character, with our soul, with what we are in our own essence.”15

To point the Socratic method inward to our own souls, and to find our characters and essences, is for Patočka one way to care for our souls, but it is also a way to begin thinking anew about forms of community, politics, and relations with others:

Socrates did not help himself, but he helps others. In what way can a philosopher who is in such dire straits help others?...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One — Living in Truth: in Conversation with Václav Havel
• Chapter Two — Care of the Soul: in Conversation with Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• Chapter Three — Confrontation as Polemos: in Conversation with Mahatma Gandhi
• Chapter Four — Solidarity of the Shaken: in Conversation with Atomic Activism
• Chapter Five — Shipwrecked Existence: in Conversation with Environmental Activism
• Epilogue: Political Distress and Underground Books
• Bibliography
• Index