LAS PROPIEDADES

With the election of Jimmy Carter as the thirty-ninth President of the United States many years later, the philosophical position that Malik had been long advocating finally seemed to resonate in Washington.48 _Human

rights, and not just modernization or development, were made a political priority at long last. But it would be wrong to suggest that Heidegger played much of a role in this context. When it came to matters of concrete policy, Malik’s brand of Heideggerian human rights had only limited influence. It was in the East, behind the Iron Curtain, where the Heideggerian strain of human rights thinking really flourished during the 1970s. Czech dissidence proved that, far from being the gift of the United States to the rest of the world, the concept of human rights—whether Heidegger-inspired or not—was mobilized by local communities, pursuing their own concrete and particular interests. It was used, in other words, to stand against both Soviet communism and American liberal democracy.

As historian Aviezer Tucker has shown, Heidegger was a key source of inspiration for two of the most prominent figures in Czech dissidence: philosopher Jan Pato ka and man of letters—and later president—Václav

46 _{Ibid., 152 and 156.}

47 _{John Wild, The Challenge of Existentialism (Bloomington: Indiana University}

Press, 1955).

48 _{On the ambiguities of the Carter administration’s record on human rights, see,}

most recently Iatai Nartzizenfield Sneh’s The Future Almost Arrived: How Jimmy

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Havel.49 _{Pato ka, who had studied with Heidegger and Husserl in Freiburg}

around the same time that Malik, provided the philosophical foundation for the oppositional Charter 77 movement. His writings addressed truth, authenticity and existence, and became landmarks in the dissident critique of totalitarian rule, which was no doubt why he was imprisoned and interrogated by communist authorities, an ordeal that lead to his premature death on March 13, 1977.

The Charter 77 movement inaugurated Havel’s career as a dissident. He was perhaps an unlikely anti-totalitarian figurehead, with thicker ties to music and the arts than to anything overtly political.50 _{But his}

philosophical bent, evident in his writings, set him apart. Havel’s most famous essay “The Power of the Powerless,” which was dedicated “to the memory of Jan Pato ka,” was written and distributed underground in 1978.51 _{In this essay Havel examined not only the day-to-day workings of}

communist rule in Czechoslovakia but the possibilities of resistance to it as well. By his lights, communist society was, as Pato ka had suggested for some time, inauthentic. It promulgated the very abstractions and evasions that Heidegger—and, like him, Malik—had warned against. What was needed was, in Havel’s words, “an existential solution,” one that took “individuals back to the solid ground of their own identity.”52

This was the only path back to “authentic existence,” to what he calls throughout the essay, in mantra-like, prophetic fashion, “living in truth.”53

Knowing the truth was not enough; one also had to live the truth as well. For Havel, again like Malik before him, human rights were not abstract political or legal concepts, but concrete manifestations of the individual existence.

In his dissertation, Malik wrote of Heidegger’s attempt, in Sein und

Zeit, “to blow away the concealing mists of abstraction, and to just let the

49 _{“Though the philosophies of Pato ka and Havel incorporated distinctly}

Heideggerian themes, their dissident practice in support of human rights is radically different from Heidegger’s practice.” Aviezer Tucker, The Philosophy

and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Pato ka to Havel (Pittsburgh: University of

Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 12.

50 _{Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin,}

2005), 568 ff.

51 _{Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Open Letters: Selected}

Writings, 1965-1990, ed. Paul Wilson (New York: Vintage, 1992), 125-214.

52 _{Ibid., 152.} 53 _{Ibid., 148.}

Provincializing Human Rights? 81

honest truth reveal itself in its overpowering clarity.”54 _{A similar aim}

permeates Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless,” wherein one finds a yearning for the simplicity of individual autonomy, unencumbered by state control or by ideological jargon. In the writings of both Havel and Malik, the simple truth of philosophy is not a grand system, but a humble and authentic existence. Havel calls it “living in truth;” Malik describes it as “you and I living, interacting with our world, enjoying our life, facing it.”55 _{For both, the achievements of Western rationalism, of science and}

industry, are dubious at best, especially insofar as they further alienate the human person from him or herself. For Malik, the scientist does not study human persons, but merely “‘living tissue.’”56 _{For Havel, modern,}

technological society, whether communist or capitalist his equivalence of the two reveals a certain Heideggerian tendency towards world- historical exaggeration reduced individuals to “little more than tiny cogs in an enormous mechanism.”57

Havel’s Heideggerian critique of Western science and technology is most apparent in his essay “Politics and Conscience,” which Havel wrote in 1984, after having been in and out of prison since 1977 as a result of his dissident activities. In the text he denounces Western science, Western pollution of the environment, and, most of all Western politics, a category that for him subsumed both American liberal democracy and Soviet communism. The blame for these various phenomena, which eviscerated all local cultural and historical ties, is placed squarely upon the tradition of Western “rationalism.”58 _{Far from representing a targeted critique of}

totalitarian rule, “Politics and Conscience” was a wide-ranging indictment of all forms of politics in the modern, industrialized world, especially as they reflect the growth and ever-increasing danger of “impersonal power.”59 _{Havel went to great lengths to remind his readers that this}

looming, bureaucratic, totalitarian threat to human rights originated within—not outside of—the West. For him, there was no East/West divide. “It was precisely Europe, and the European West,” he argued,

that provided and frequently forced on the world all that today has become the basis of such power: natural science, rationalism, scientism, the industrial

54 _{Ibid., 274.}

55 _{Malik, “The Metaphysics of Time,” 274.} 56 _{Ibid., 323.}

57 _{Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” 186.}

58 _{Havel, “Politics and Conscience,” in Havel, Open Letters, 260.} 59 _{Ibid., 263.}

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revolution, and also revolution as such, as a fanatical abstraction, through the displacement of the natural world to the bathroom down to the cult of consumption, the atomic bomb, and Marxism.60

Even if “democratic Western Europe” could not recognize any of itself in the trappings of Soviet totalitarianism, it was undeniable for Havel that Soviet communism was but an “ambiguous export” of Europe itself.61

For Malik, communism threatened to throw the Western tradition off course. For Havel, however, the problem went deeper than this. Havel thought that “totalitarian regimes” were a grave danger not because they opposed the West, but because they embodied it: they were “the avant- garde of a global crisis of this civilization, first European, then Euro- American, and ultimately global.”62 _{Soviet rule was merely the symptom}

of a much more profound—and far more widespread—peril, namely the detrimental global dissemination of Western rationalism. “No evil has ever been eliminated by suppressing its symptoms,” Havel declared. “We need to address the cause itself.”63

In language reminiscent of Malik’s own attacks on the materialism of the modern world, Havel brought “Politics and Conscience” to a close by juxtaposing the “dehumanizing” attempts “to produce better economic functioning” and the far more difficult, but consequently far more necessary, tasks of forging “a new understanding of human rights.”64

While the former were, at bottom, merely “tricks and machinations” of impersonal state bureaucracies, the latter were forays into the realms of “love, friendship, solidarity, sympathy, and tolerance”—all things that, taken together, formed the “genuine starting point of meaningful human community.”65 _{Havel’s politics, which he carefully designated}

“antipolitical politics,” represented a “politics of man, not the apparatus.” His politics grew “from the heart, not from a thesis.”66

At the end of the day, Havel’s “antipolitical politics” sought to foster what Pato ka had called—in reference to Charter 77—a “solidarity of the

Provincializing Human Rights? 83

shaken.”67 _{It sought to pit solidaristic humanity against impersonal}

inhumanity; individual human beings against abstract legal, political, and/or economic entities. It was a politics from below, rooted in the seemingly backward-looking and irrational idea of “empathy.”68 Although coined in opposition to Soviet totalitarianism, we might find that his assessment applies equally well to the reign of capitalist multinational corporations in the current era of globalization. In both instances, the missing element is, first and foremost, the human person—and more specifically, the suffering of the human person.

It is hard not to hear echoes of Malik’s own pleas for recognizing the importance of “friendship and understanding and truth and love” in the impassioned paragraphs of Havel’s “Politics and Conscience.” But it is important to remember that, despite their affinities, Havel’s and Malik’s contributions to the discourse of human rights do indeed differ, and sometimes quite significantly. In the name of establishing an authentically philosophical conception of human rights, Charles Malik was more than willing, as we have seen, to subject the West to criticism. But he never entertained the idea that the Western tradition was itself to blame. For him, the descent into the soulless materialism that dominated the exclusively economic-centered paradigm of development and modernization was but a wrong turn for what was otherwise the noble and longstanding journey of the Western idea of the human person, which had traveled from the ancient Greek city-states to the hallways of the United Nations. For Havel, however, it was the Western tradition itself that led to environmental degradation, impersonal bureaucratization, and, worst of all, the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Malik and Havel also developed rather different conceptions of the human person. For the former, the unique dignity of the individual was to be found in his or her soul. This religiously inflected understanding of the person was congenial to a conception of human rights that was timeless and transcendental, beyond and antecedent to any notion of rights in positive law. For the latter, human rights, though they may reflect certain religious tendencies, are more immediately reflective of the relational

67 _{Ibid., 271.}

68 _{Ibid., 256: “The phenomenon of empathy, after all, belongs with that abolished}

realm of personal prejudice which had to yield to science, objectivity, historical necessity, technology, system, and the apparat—and those who, being impersonal, cannot worry. They are abstract and anonymous, ever utilitarian, and thus ever a

Chapter Two 84

contexts of the local cultural community, and more widely, the natural environment itself. Malik anchored his notion of human rights in the authority of a transcendent God, whereas Havel attempted to connect the abstract, impersonal individuals of the modern world to their increasingly threatened local communities and regional environments.

In different ways, Heidegger helped Malik and Havel to rescue the human person from the mounting threats of the modern world. But in order to appropriate Heidegger, they had to humanize him. They had to import an ethical worldview into the work of a philosopher who, famously, never wrote an ethics, and who, furthermore, did everything he could to distance himself from philosophical humanism. Malik and Havel thus isolated and adopted aspects of Heidegger’s thought that Heidegger himself had put to other uses; preserved, as if in amber, these conceptualizations were holdovers from another Heidegger, maybe even from one who never existed. Malik’s talk of the importance of Existenz and Havel’s talk of an ethically-motivated “existential revolution,” were echoes of an imaginary Heidegger, not the real-life Heidegger would go on to declare that he was neither an existentialist nor a moralistic humanist.69

Heidegger may have been, as he was for Malik and Havel, a guiding inspiration for prophetic or existential authenticity. But he was also a trenchant critic, as both of them realized, of Western rationalism. It was no coincidence that Malik concluded Man and the Struggle for Peace with a chapter entitled “The Need for a Western Revolution.”70 _{In pointing out}

the limitations of the West, Malik—and later Havel—was undertaking, perhaps unwittingly, the painstaking process of dismantling the epistemic hubris at work in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Though philosophers from around the world weighed in during the initial human rights debates, evidence of which can be found in the 1949 UNESCO symposium devoted to the topic, it was all but taken for granted that human rights, insofar as they were sanctioned and upheld by the United

69 _{Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” 207 and 209. On Heidegger and}

existentialism and anti-humanism, see of course his “Letter on Humanism,” in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell (New York, Harper & Row, 1977), 213-266. For more on the context of Heidegger’s famous essay, see Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between

Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001),

97-128.

Provincializing Human Rights? 85

Nations, were the purview of the developed, Western world.71 _{And yet, as}

Malik and Havel demonstrated, though the West may have been the home to great intellectual and spiritual resources, it was also the source of many dangers as well. This was something that the peoples of the rest of the globe already knew.