In an extraordinary address at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem made soon after the Velvet Revolution, the first elected post Communist President of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, declared his profound affinity with Franz Kafka.
“I want to take this opportunity to confess my long and intimate affinity with one of the great sons of the Jewish people, the Prague writer Franz Kafka. I’m not an expert on Kafka, and I’m not eager to read the secondary literature on him. I can’t even say that I’ve read everything Kafka has written. I do, however, have a rather special reason for my indifference to Kafka studies: I sometimes feel that I’m the only one who really understands Kafka, and that no one else has any business trying to make his work more accessible to me. And my somewhat desultory attitude to studying his works comes from my vague feeling that I don’t need to read and reread everything Kafka has written because I already know what’s there. I’m even secretly persuaded that if Kafka did not exist, and if I were a better writer than I am, I could have written his works myself.”
In that speech (and in many others afterward) this legendary dissident who, as much as any other individual, brought down the Soviet Union and Communism in his own country through rare courage in speaking truth to power and risking the severest of consequences, shocked his audience by expressing deep existential doubts about himself, in terms that clearly resonate with Kafka.
"I am the kind of person who would not be in the least surprised if, in the very middle of my Presidency, I were to be summoned and led off to stand trial before some shadowy tribunal, or taken straight to a quarry to break rocks… Nor would I be surprised if I were to suddenly hear the reveille and wake up in my prison cell, and then, with great bemusement, proceed to tell my fellow-prisoners everything that had happened to me in the past six months. The lower I am, the more proper my place seems; and the higher I am the stronger my suspicion is that there has been some mistake."
Virtually all of Havel’s literary output –his plays, his political tracts, his letters from prison and his memoirs – have at their core a theme of the alienation of the individual from his fellow man and from his environment. He writes about his ostracism as a chubby scion of wealthy family that set him apart from the other children at school and then his pariah status as a teenage son of a bourgeois family under Communism. The heroes of his plays (at least those few I’ve read) are somewhat confused by, and disconnected from, the world around them, but they achieve a penetrating insight into its absurd dimensions. His iconic Greengrocer, the subject of his most influential political essay, is a frightened man who places a sign in his shop window with the slogan “workers of the world unite!”, that neither he, nor anybody, remotely believes to be true, in order effectuate a hollow and false conformity – to a lie that is the underpinning of the entire, monstrous and oppressive Communist order.
“I want to take this opportunity to confess my long and intimate affinity with one of the great sons of the Jewish people, the Prague writer Franz Kafka. I’m not an expert on Kafka, and I’m not eager to read the secondary literature on him. I can’t even say that I’ve read everything Kafka has written. I do, however, have a rather special reason for my indifference to Kafka studies: I sometimes feel that I’m the only one who really understands Kafka, and that no one else has any business trying to make his work more accessible to me. And my somewhat desultory attitude to studying his works comes from my vague feeling that I don’t need to read and reread everything Kafka has written because I already know what’s there. I’m even secretly persuaded that if Kafka did not exist, and if I were a better writer than I am, I could have written his works myself.”
In that speech (and in many others afterward) this legendary dissident who, as much as any other individual, brought down the Soviet Union and Communism in his own country through rare courage in speaking truth to power and risking the severest of consequences, shocked his audience by expressing deep existential doubts about himself, in terms that clearly resonate with Kafka.
"I am the kind of person who would not be in the least surprised if, in the very middle of my Presidency, I were to be summoned and led off to stand trial before some shadowy tribunal, or taken straight to a quarry to break rocks… Nor would I be surprised if I were to suddenly hear the reveille and wake up in my prison cell, and then, with great bemusement, proceed to tell my fellow-prisoners everything that had happened to me in the past six months. The lower I am, the more proper my place seems; and the higher I am the stronger my suspicion is that there has been some mistake."
Virtually all of Havel’s literary output –his plays, his political tracts, his letters from prison and his memoirs – have at their core a theme of the alienation of the individual from his fellow man and from his environment. He writes about his ostracism as a chubby scion of wealthy family that set him apart from the other children at school and then his pariah status as a teenage son of a bourgeois family under Communism. The heroes of his plays (at least those few I’ve read) are somewhat confused by, and disconnected from, the world around them, but they achieve a penetrating insight into its absurd dimensions. His iconic Greengrocer, the subject of his most influential political essay, is a frightened man who places a sign in his shop window with the slogan “workers of the world unite!”, that neither he, nor anybody, remotely believes to be true, in order effectuate a hollow and false conformity – to a lie that is the underpinning of the entire, monstrous and oppressive Communist order.
Havel was exquisitely sensitive to the pseudo- legitimacy Communism manufactured from slogans and enforced modes of discourse congruent to a falsified reality, which he recognized to be its soft underbelly, and he ultimately undermined the system with a relentless deployment of language and emotion rooted in reality and moral truth. He diagnosed that, in order to survive, communism had to enforce a universal conformity to its lies, even and especially its trivial and pedestrian distortions like the Greengrocer's sign - what Havel called its 'panorama' - and any dissent threatened to bring down the charade by revealng to everyone, together and at once, that they had acquiesced in thier debasement before an Emperor who has no clothes; to a system that served no human purpose; that no one ever believed in. He understood he was only a catalyst and it was the receptiveness of other people to the undeniably of truth that made the revolution. This was "the power of the powerless".
Havel was an agnostic, but he was no enemy of religion. He attributes the descent into totalitarianism in 20th century Europe to the decline in traditional religion and the belief in a transcendent God to whom all men are subservient and responsible, without its replacement by a new belief in something transcendent to which man stands beneath or is integrally related. He traces this downward moral trajectory to the success of the modern scientific outlook, with its faith that all of reality can be explained by, and subsumed under, impersonal universal laws which have no place for morality, spirituality or human responsibility.
A world devoid of the concept of responsibility – and guilt – and in which there are no limits to what man can do to his fellow men and to his environment, is a dystopia and the very opposite of a free and humane order. That is the central crisis of our civilization. Yet Havel is firm in his conviction that democracy is the only political arrangement in which responsibility can flourish.
“The present crisis of authority is only one of a thousand consequences of the general crisis of spirituality in the world at present. Humankind, having lots its respect for a higher authority, has inevitably lost respect for earthly authority as well. Consequently, people also lose respect for their fellow humans and eventually even for themselves. This loss of a transcendent perspective, to which everything on this Earth relates, inevitably leads to a collapse of earthly value systems as well. Humanity has lost what I once privately described as the absolute horizon; and as a result, everything in life has become relative. All sense of responsibility disintegrates, including responsibility for the human community and its authorities. This is a philosophical, not a political problem. However, even a decaying or diminishing democratic authority is a thousand times better than the thoroughly artificial authority of a dictator imposed through violence or brainwashing.
Democracy is an open system, and thus it is capable of improvement. Among other things, freedom provides room for responsibility. If that room is not sufficiently used, the fault does not lie with democracy, but it does present democracy today with a challenge. Dictatorship leaves no room for responsibility, and thus it can generate no genuine authority. Instead, it fills all the available space with the pseudo-authority of a dictator.
Potential dictators are well aware of the crisis of authority in democracy. The less that atheistic people today heed the challenge that democracy presents, the less they succeed in filling the room it offers by taking genuine and unquestioned responsibility, the faster a dictator, posing as the bearer of universal responsibility, will proceed to occupy that room until finally he will occupy it entirely. Hitler, Lenin, and Mao were typical examples of this species. Filling all the available room with a completely false authority, they closed it off, destroyed it, and eventually destroyed democracy itself. We all know where this leads: to the tombs of the dead, the tortured, and the humiliated. In a word, while democracy paves the way for the creation of real authority, an authoritarian regime blocks that path with a terrible barrier, with the caricature of authority.
The chances for a successful existential revolution -- as I once metaphorically described the awakening of a deeper human responsibility -- are far better under freedom and democracy than under a dictatorship, where the only room offered to anyone who wishes to take responsibility is a prison cell.”
Because “communism was the perverse extreme” of this modern world-view, Havel sees life under communism as “a kind of warning to the West, revealing to it its own latent tendencies”. But the West shows “unwillingness to hear the warning voices coming from our part of the world.” So, it misses the real significance of “the end of communism,” which is “a signal that the era of arrogant, absolutist reason is drawing to a close.”
And so Havel deduces there can be no social order with meaningful or lasting liberty or equality without an acknowledgement of a transcendent and moral “Creator”.
The challenge of today, upon which the continued existence of the human race may well depend, is to develop a sense of spirituality in an increasingly integrated multicultural world. How can the inhabitants of our increasingly integrated planet live decently? This interdependence includes, increasingly, elements of the natural environment on which our survival depends and which can be threatened by our activities. Havel looks for inspiration to antiquity.
The religions of antiquity proclaim in common what modern humanity has lost: “The certainty that the Universe, nature, existence, and our lives are the work of creation guided by a definite intention, that it has a definite meaning and follows a definite purpose.” Despite our superior information about the universe, our ancestors “knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us.” They knew that “people should revere God as a phenomenon that transcends them.” They knew that “true goodness, true responsibility, true justice, a true sense of things–all these grow from roots that go much deeper than the world of our transitory earthly schemes. This is a message that speaks to us from the very heart of human religiosity.”
“To this day, the point of departure has been present in all our archetypal notions and in our long-lost knowledge, despite the obvious estrangement from these values that modern civilization has brought with it. Yet, even as our respect for the mysteries of the world dwindles, we can see for ourselves again and again that such a lack of respect leads to ruin. All this clearly suggests where we should look for what united us: in an awareness of the transcendent.”
Havel could not work out how to effectuate this transformation because, I think, he embodied the essential contradiction. He was a product of Western civilization and could not bring himself to believe in any ancient religion-he was too alienated and too modern for that. This was a man who counted Frank Zappa and the Rolling Stones among his first invited guests to the Prague Castle after becoming President. But he grasped the crux of the problem.
“Dostoevsky wrote that if there were no God everything would be permitted. To put it simply, it seems to me that our present civilization, having lost the awareness that the world has a spirit, believes that anything is permitted. The only spirit that we recognize is our own.
However different the paths followed by different civilizations, we can find the same basic message at the core of most religions and cultures throughout history: people should revere God as a phenomenon that transcends them; they should revere one another; and they should not harm their fellow humans.
To my mind, reflecting on this message is the only way out of the crisis the world finds itself in today”.
Havel lived with massive guilt and doubt. He doubted because so often he just didn’t “get it” about what everyone around him seemed to know or to believe and like Kafka, his questioning led him to discern and dissect the sources of hypocrisy and false convention that made it so difficult for a person in search of truth to make sense of the world around him. He discovered, like Kafka, that his society was a system designed to restrict and degrade human relations to lies; an institutionalized system of systematic lying. It must have been at least in part because of his feelings of alienation – of beginning life as an ‘outsider’ –that he was able to penetrate to the rotten stinking core of the debased society Communism had created and required to perpetuate itself.
"All that I encounter, reveals to me, first and foremost, its absurd dimensions. As if I were pursuing a group of strong and confident men, which I am unable to reach or overtake. I think I am an annoying person, worthy only of mockery…
there is a feeling of deep guilt. As if my very existence were a sin. Furthermore, I sense a feeling of non-belonging - concerning myself and all that which has developed around me. A feeling of deep claustrophobia and the constant need to explain and defend myself. In this, there is a search and aspiration for a higher order”
But unlike his hero Kafka, Havel proceeded to the Public Square –what little still remained of it – and did battle with the Castle. At first in the theatre, where he mastered the craft of orchestrating effects that elicited from a community of actors and audience a shared spontaneous outpouring of true emotion that helped affirm– if only for the moment – that a common bond still existed between them; And then in the political realm, where he wrote and spoke out against the government’s violation of basic rules of human decency – and earned himself years in prison; And finally to Wenceslas Square in Prague where he played midwife to a new birth of freedom in Central Europe.
“A person, whose idealism has brought him to lead his country. I admit, that from the outside, I appear the complete opposite of Joseph K. and other characters, even Franz Kafka. Nonetheless, I will not retract what I said previously. I think that the feeling of non-belonging is an intelligent feeling, and it is the underlying factor which motivates my efforts. Moreover, [I think] that it is my desperate search for a higher order which has dragged me into unlikely adventures. I would even go so far as to say, that whenever I have achieved something good, my actions were probably the result of the need to overcome the metaphysical feeling of guilt. It appears as if I create, organize or fight, only to defend my dubious right to exist.”
Havel understood that speaking truth to power could undermine a system, no matter how powerful, that was built on lies. He spoke the truth about everything, including himself. He had the eloquence, the opportunity and the courage to do it.
And the evil system collapsed.
He was the leading European of his generation.
Havel was an agnostic, but he was no enemy of religion. He attributes the descent into totalitarianism in 20th century Europe to the decline in traditional religion and the belief in a transcendent God to whom all men are subservient and responsible, without its replacement by a new belief in something transcendent to which man stands beneath or is integrally related. He traces this downward moral trajectory to the success of the modern scientific outlook, with its faith that all of reality can be explained by, and subsumed under, impersonal universal laws which have no place for morality, spirituality or human responsibility.
A world devoid of the concept of responsibility – and guilt – and in which there are no limits to what man can do to his fellow men and to his environment, is a dystopia and the very opposite of a free and humane order. That is the central crisis of our civilization. Yet Havel is firm in his conviction that democracy is the only political arrangement in which responsibility can flourish.
“The present crisis of authority is only one of a thousand consequences of the general crisis of spirituality in the world at present. Humankind, having lots its respect for a higher authority, has inevitably lost respect for earthly authority as well. Consequently, people also lose respect for their fellow humans and eventually even for themselves. This loss of a transcendent perspective, to which everything on this Earth relates, inevitably leads to a collapse of earthly value systems as well. Humanity has lost what I once privately described as the absolute horizon; and as a result, everything in life has become relative. All sense of responsibility disintegrates, including responsibility for the human community and its authorities. This is a philosophical, not a political problem. However, even a decaying or diminishing democratic authority is a thousand times better than the thoroughly artificial authority of a dictator imposed through violence or brainwashing.
Democracy is an open system, and thus it is capable of improvement. Among other things, freedom provides room for responsibility. If that room is not sufficiently used, the fault does not lie with democracy, but it does present democracy today with a challenge. Dictatorship leaves no room for responsibility, and thus it can generate no genuine authority. Instead, it fills all the available space with the pseudo-authority of a dictator.
Potential dictators are well aware of the crisis of authority in democracy. The less that atheistic people today heed the challenge that democracy presents, the less they succeed in filling the room it offers by taking genuine and unquestioned responsibility, the faster a dictator, posing as the bearer of universal responsibility, will proceed to occupy that room until finally he will occupy it entirely. Hitler, Lenin, and Mao were typical examples of this species. Filling all the available room with a completely false authority, they closed it off, destroyed it, and eventually destroyed democracy itself. We all know where this leads: to the tombs of the dead, the tortured, and the humiliated. In a word, while democracy paves the way for the creation of real authority, an authoritarian regime blocks that path with a terrible barrier, with the caricature of authority.
The chances for a successful existential revolution -- as I once metaphorically described the awakening of a deeper human responsibility -- are far better under freedom and democracy than under a dictatorship, where the only room offered to anyone who wishes to take responsibility is a prison cell.”
Because “communism was the perverse extreme” of this modern world-view, Havel sees life under communism as “a kind of warning to the West, revealing to it its own latent tendencies”. But the West shows “unwillingness to hear the warning voices coming from our part of the world.” So, it misses the real significance of “the end of communism,” which is “a signal that the era of arrogant, absolutist reason is drawing to a close.”
And so Havel deduces there can be no social order with meaningful or lasting liberty or equality without an acknowledgement of a transcendent and moral “Creator”.
The challenge of today, upon which the continued existence of the human race may well depend, is to develop a sense of spirituality in an increasingly integrated multicultural world. How can the inhabitants of our increasingly integrated planet live decently? This interdependence includes, increasingly, elements of the natural environment on which our survival depends and which can be threatened by our activities. Havel looks for inspiration to antiquity.
The religions of antiquity proclaim in common what modern humanity has lost: “The certainty that the Universe, nature, existence, and our lives are the work of creation guided by a definite intention, that it has a definite meaning and follows a definite purpose.” Despite our superior information about the universe, our ancestors “knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us.” They knew that “people should revere God as a phenomenon that transcends them.” They knew that “true goodness, true responsibility, true justice, a true sense of things–all these grow from roots that go much deeper than the world of our transitory earthly schemes. This is a message that speaks to us from the very heart of human religiosity.”
“To this day, the point of departure has been present in all our archetypal notions and in our long-lost knowledge, despite the obvious estrangement from these values that modern civilization has brought with it. Yet, even as our respect for the mysteries of the world dwindles, we can see for ourselves again and again that such a lack of respect leads to ruin. All this clearly suggests where we should look for what united us: in an awareness of the transcendent.”
Havel could not work out how to effectuate this transformation because, I think, he embodied the essential contradiction. He was a product of Western civilization and could not bring himself to believe in any ancient religion-he was too alienated and too modern for that. This was a man who counted Frank Zappa and the Rolling Stones among his first invited guests to the Prague Castle after becoming President. But he grasped the crux of the problem.
“Dostoevsky wrote that if there were no God everything would be permitted. To put it simply, it seems to me that our present civilization, having lost the awareness that the world has a spirit, believes that anything is permitted. The only spirit that we recognize is our own.
However different the paths followed by different civilizations, we can find the same basic message at the core of most religions and cultures throughout history: people should revere God as a phenomenon that transcends them; they should revere one another; and they should not harm their fellow humans.
To my mind, reflecting on this message is the only way out of the crisis the world finds itself in today”.
Havel lived with massive guilt and doubt. He doubted because so often he just didn’t “get it” about what everyone around him seemed to know or to believe and like Kafka, his questioning led him to discern and dissect the sources of hypocrisy and false convention that made it so difficult for a person in search of truth to make sense of the world around him. He discovered, like Kafka, that his society was a system designed to restrict and degrade human relations to lies; an institutionalized system of systematic lying. It must have been at least in part because of his feelings of alienation – of beginning life as an ‘outsider’ –that he was able to penetrate to the rotten stinking core of the debased society Communism had created and required to perpetuate itself.
"All that I encounter, reveals to me, first and foremost, its absurd dimensions. As if I were pursuing a group of strong and confident men, which I am unable to reach or overtake. I think I am an annoying person, worthy only of mockery…
there is a feeling of deep guilt. As if my very existence were a sin. Furthermore, I sense a feeling of non-belonging - concerning myself and all that which has developed around me. A feeling of deep claustrophobia and the constant need to explain and defend myself. In this, there is a search and aspiration for a higher order”
But unlike his hero Kafka, Havel proceeded to the Public Square –what little still remained of it – and did battle with the Castle. At first in the theatre, where he mastered the craft of orchestrating effects that elicited from a community of actors and audience a shared spontaneous outpouring of true emotion that helped affirm– if only for the moment – that a common bond still existed between them; And then in the political realm, where he wrote and spoke out against the government’s violation of basic rules of human decency – and earned himself years in prison; And finally to Wenceslas Square in Prague where he played midwife to a new birth of freedom in Central Europe.
“A person, whose idealism has brought him to lead his country. I admit, that from the outside, I appear the complete opposite of Joseph K. and other characters, even Franz Kafka. Nonetheless, I will not retract what I said previously. I think that the feeling of non-belonging is an intelligent feeling, and it is the underlying factor which motivates my efforts. Moreover, [I think] that it is my desperate search for a higher order which has dragged me into unlikely adventures. I would even go so far as to say, that whenever I have achieved something good, my actions were probably the result of the need to overcome the metaphysical feeling of guilt. It appears as if I create, organize or fight, only to defend my dubious right to exist.”
Havel understood that speaking truth to power could undermine a system, no matter how powerful, that was built on lies. He spoke the truth about everything, including himself. He had the eloquence, the opportunity and the courage to do it.
And the evil system collapsed.
He was the leading European of his generation.
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vaclav havel was an amazing person
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