Opinion Havel in eternity
The philosopher-king of Prague defies easy classification
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Genuinely great figures have a paradoxical relationship with history. We dont quite know what to do with them. Vaclav Havel was the courageous personification of resistance to totalitarianism. But even as the tributes pour in,his ideas largely remain unhoused,often inconvenient. Coming to terms with Havel is difficult for two reasons. The first is biographical. He was a writer and dissident. His life was a reminder that successful political movements draw on the power and balance of exceptional individuals to give them a moral centre. But he also became president of the Czech Republic. He remained a figure of enormous moral authority. In our age,the complication of power takes some sheen off any thought. In his own Czech Republic,there was more than a hint of impatience with what some saw as his moralising. His own great remark,there is always something suspicious about an intellectual on the winning side,came to cast a shadow on him.
The second reason for his remaining unhoused is conceptual. He refused to classify himself as either on the Left or the Right,and always stood independent of them. More importantly,his work was not just a rebuke of a totalitarian system. It is also a standing admonition to citizens of capitalist democracy. His essay The Power of the Powerless was jolting,not simply because it dissected the lie of totalitarianism. Its enduring power came from a feature all great writing possesses: it spoke to a specific political moment,but with an eye to eternity. Letters to Olga had deep philosophical ambitions,not least because one way of beating the censor was talking in philosophical code. While he was a liberator,there is not a trace of triumphalism in his work. In his plays,the one theme that recurs over and over is his own temptation. Anyone minimally self-aware of their own temptations will recognise how easy it is to give into a subtle voluntary servitude.
His remarkable 1990 address to a joint session of the US Congress almost reads like a manifesto for our times. The central challenge he contends remains,We still do not know how to put morality ahead of science,politics or economics. His lifelong struggle was not just against totalitarianism. It was against easy instrumentalism,the root of all our denials of humanity,freedom and plurality. In a resonant phrase,he describes states transforming people into statistical choruses for deployment in this or that cause. That instrumentalisation was not just the preserve of communist societies. Elsewhere he put it,People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies. But this static complex of rigid,conceptually sloppy and politically pragmatic mass political parties run by professional apparatuses and releasing the citizen from all forms of concrete and personal responsibility; and those complex focuses of capital accumulation engaged in secret manipulations and expansion; the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption,production,advertising,commerce,consumer culture,and all that flood of information: all of it,so often analysed and described,can only with great difficulty be imagined as the source of humanitys rediscovery of itself.
This worry about instrumentalism is paradoxically what inoculated him against Marxism. In what must surely be the densest philosophical epigram delivered to politicians anywhere,he told Congress that the only certainty his dissident experience taught him was,Consciousness precedes being,not the other way round,as Marxists claim. The idea that human beings could be reduced to impersonal forces,defined by their social relations,was anathema to any idea of humanity. To say that being determines consciousness is to deny the possibility of individuality. The hallmark of genuine dissidence is not just that it resists power; it also resists the idea that history can define us. A genuine dissident is always,in this sense,alone.
What worried Havel about the instrumentalisation of humanity was that it diminished our courage. Power and Powerlessness was dedicated to the memory of Jan Patocka,the Czech Platonist,who died as a result of his interrogation by the authorities. Patocka was perhaps a reminder of just how fortuitous survival can be under a totalitarian system. But both Havel and Patocka shared a central concern with the idea of political courage. In a train of thought almost reminiscent of Montesquieu,who famously said that great security can also breed great timidity,Havel traced a lack of political courage to a willingness to instrumentalise our own life. We readily accept fetters on freedom,precisely because we are willing to trade it for security or material well-being. Every regime keeps us in our place by working on this possibility.
But Havel never looked for redemption,a world where all contradictions had been reconciled. He is the great defender of plurality and heterogeneity. He resists the two great lies that trap us: the idea that we are only victims of larger forces and have no responsibility,and the idea that our individuality can be traded for something else. This is fundamentally not in the quest of an abstract idea of justice,but plain human decency. Human beings can discover themselves,and they can always become more than what they are.
Havels conception of responsibility is also allied with two large ideas. The first is certain humility: creation is not something we should pretend to exercise power over. But the second source of our self-forgetfulness is our engrossment in the here-and-now. There can be no genuine conception of responsibility that is not,in some sense,tied to the idea that everything we do leaves a trace on the universe. Responsibility is grounded,not in the thought that you can simply pass muster with the here-and-now. Genuine responsibility rests on the silent assumption that we are being observed from above,and that up there everything is visible,nothing is forgotten,and therefore earthly power has no power to wipe away the pangs brought on by earthly failure.
Havels gift was that he managed to combine transcendence with an ordinary creatureliness,without a trace of the misanthropy that characterises all those who invoke higher responsibility. There is only one way to strive for decency,responsibility,sincerity,civility and tolerance; and that is decently,responsibly,sincerely,civilly and tolerantly. Like all great figures,Havel kept one eye on eternity. That is why he elevates us; but we also struggle to figure out what to do with him.
The writer is president,Centre for Policy Research,Delhi
express@expressindia.com
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