Havel
Václav Havel1936–2011
What Havel argues and who answers him, as Marci Shore presents it in her Yale lectures European Intellectual History since Nietzsche: 10 claims, and 7 places where another thinker builds on him or breaks with him. Each claim is our paraphrase and links to the minute of the lecture it comes from.
In the post-totalitarian system, this line runs de facto through each person, for everyone in his or her own way is both a victim and a supporter of the system.
Václav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless". The epigraph Shore gives lecture 23.
The core ideas
The 5 claims the lectures spend most time on.
Imagine every greengrocer taking his sign down one day: Havel calls that the start of a revolution, which shows the greengrocer was never really powerless.
Put simply Havel: imagine every greengrocer one day taking down the communist slogan in his shop window. That would start a revolution, which shows the greengrocer was never really powerless.
In the text In "The Power of the Powerless" (1978), section VII, Havel imagines a single greengrocer: "one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans", and he is punished for it.
The line dividing victims from oppressors runs through every individual: each person, in a fashion of their own, is at once the system's victim and its supporter.
Put simply Havel: the line between victims and oppressors runs through each person. Everyone, in their own way, both suffers under the system and helps hold it up.
If living a lie is what holds the system up, then living in truth is, unsurprisingly, the fundamental threat to it.
Put simply Havel: if the system rests on everyone living a lie, then "living in truth", refusing to pretend, is naturally the greatest threat to it.
Shore reads Kołakowski and Patočka as holding that robust subjectivity grounds truth instead of relativizing it, linked through responsibility; subjectivity becomes a key word for Havel.
Put simply Shore reads Kołakowski and Patočka as saying that a robust personal standpoint ("subjectivity") grounds truth rather than making it merely relative. Responsibility connects truth and subjectivity, and the word becomes key for Havel.
Havel's truth, like the dissidents', exceeds factual accuracy: it is what rescues a person, grounding the self, liberating, giving life meaning, worth living and dying for.
Put simply Havel's "truth," like that of other dissidents, means more than getting the facts right. It is what saves a person: it anchors the self, sets one free and gives life meaning, worth living and dying for.
Who Havel answers, and who answers him
Each entry joins one of his claims to another thinker’s. The handwriting names the link; the line beside it says which kind. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
Havel and Shore
HavelImagine every greengrocer taking his sign down one day: Havel calls that the start of a revolution, which shows the greengrocer was never really powerless. L23 · 41:58
ShoreThe greengrocer lies twice. Feigning belief in communism is the shallow lie; the deeper one, Sartrean bad faith, is telling himself he is powerless when greengrocers keep the game going. L23 · 43:38
Shore reads the greengrocer's self-deception about his own powerlessness as Sartrean bad faith.
Havel and Jan Patočka 1907–1977
PatočkaThe search for truth has value in itself even when truth cannot easily be grasped, and so the search must go on. L23 · 48:24
HavelOn Shore's reconstruction, Havel insists truth is real, not a language game; one reason is that lies are plainly real, and their reality in some sense proves truth's. L23 · 48:01
Shore says Havel learns from Patočka that seeking truth matters even when truth is elusive.
Havel and Václav Benda 1946–1999
HavelIf living a lie is what holds the system up, then living in truth is, unsurprisingly, the fundamental threat to it. L23 · 42:59
BendaThe parallel polis, an idea Benda voiced most famously, is a second society built by self-organization: institutions of one's own in which people speak and live in truth. L23 · 44:31
The parallel polis gives living in truth a collective, institutional form.
Havel and Karl Marx 1818–1883
MarxFor Marx, your place in the socioeconomic structure, the base, determines your thinking; consciousness, culture and art, the superstructure, derive from it. L5 · 46:02
HavelAddressing the US Congress in 1990, Havel inverted Marx: "consciousness precedes being," meaning that individual responsibility comes first and transcends any socioeconomic conditions. L23 · 50:05
Consciousness comes before being: responsibility is not set by socioeconomic conditions
Havel and Michel Foucault 1926–1984
FoucaultDescartes's cogito, Husserl's transcendental ego, Heidegger's Dasein, Sartre's radical freedom: each keeps an indubitable self at the center, and Foucault's early work revolts against that sovereign subject. L21 · 8:47
HavelShore reads Kołakowski and Patočka as holding that robust subjectivity grounds truth instead of relativizing it, linked through responsibility; subjectivity becomes a key word for Havel. L23 · 48:59
Restores a robust, responsible subject as the ground of truthOur inference
Havel and Hannah Arendt 1906–1975
ArendtTotalitarian rule shapes its subjects to serve equally well as executioners or victims, so the line dividing persecutor from persecuted never holds still: under Stalin, any denouncer could be denounced. L15 · 41:03
HavelThe line dividing victims from oppressors runs through every individual: each person, in a fashion of their own, is at once the system's victim and its supporter. L23 · 42:15
Havel moves Arendt's blurred victim-executioner line inside each person, turning it into shared responsibility.Our inference
Havel and Leszek Kołakowski 1927–2009
KołakowskiNo one escapes responsibility by pleading that their own actions were merely one fragment of history's larger course; Kołakowski refuses that excuse. L18 · 28:00
HavelHavel's greengrocer is not powerless, which makes him answerable and so guilty: it is people like him whose compliance keeps the game going. L23 · 42:07
Havel extends Kołakowski's universal responsibility to complicity: everyone sustaining the system shares its guilt.Our inference
All 10 claims, lecture by lecture
In the order they come up. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
Lecture 23Antipolitics and the Philosophy of Dissent
For the Charter 77 circle, political opposition meant sharing in politics and dirtying one's hands; the only clean space lay outside politics, in a moral force grounded in human rights.
Put simply Havel's Charter 77 circle: joining a political opposition meant entering politics and dirtying your hands. The only clean ground lay outside politics, in a moral force based on human rights.
Imagine every greengrocer taking his sign down one day: Havel calls that the start of a revolution, which shows the greengrocer was never really powerless.
Put simply Havel: imagine every greengrocer one day taking down the communist slogan in his shop window. That would start a revolution, which shows the greengrocer was never really powerless.
In the text In "The Power of the Powerless" (1978), section VII, Havel imagines a single greengrocer: "one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans", and he is punished for it.
The line dividing victims from oppressors runs through every individual: each person, in a fashion of their own, is at once the system's victim and its supporter.
Put simply Havel: the line between victims and oppressors runs through each person. Everyone, in their own way, both suffers under the system and helps hold it up.
If living a lie is what holds the system up, then living in truth is, unsurprisingly, the fundamental threat to it.
Put simply Havel: if the system rests on everyone living a lie, then "living in truth", refusing to pretend, is naturally the greatest threat to it.
In Audience, Vaněk will not, on principle, ghost-write the brewmaster's weekly police reports on himself; the brewmaster, who sheltered him, protests that Vaněk keeps clean while he gets smeared.
Put simply In Havel's play Audience, the dissident Vaněk refuses on principle to write the brewmaster's weekly police reports about himself. The brewmaster, who took him in, protests that Vaněk stays clean while he gets dirtied.
On Shore's reconstruction, Havel insists truth is real, not a language game; one reason is that lies are plainly real, and their reality in some sense proves truth's.
Put simply Shore's reading of Havel: truth is real, not just a game played with words. One reason: lies are plainly real, and that in some sense proves truth is real too.
Shore reads Kołakowski and Patočka as holding that robust subjectivity grounds truth instead of relativizing it, linked through responsibility; subjectivity becomes a key word for Havel.
Put simply Shore reads Kołakowski and Patočka as saying that a robust personal standpoint ("subjectivity") grounds truth rather than making it merely relative. Responsibility connects truth and subjectivity, and the word becomes key for Havel.
Addressing the US Congress in 1990, Havel inverted Marx: "consciousness precedes being," meaning that individual responsibility comes first and transcends any socioeconomic conditions.
Put simply Havel to the US Congress in 1990, reversing Marx: "consciousness precedes being." Individual responsibility comes first, he meant, and stands above any economic or social conditions.
Havel's greengrocer is not powerless, which makes him answerable and so guilty: it is people like him whose compliance keeps the game going.
Put simply Havel: the greengrocer, an ordinary shopkeeper who displays a communist slogan he does not believe, is not powerless. That makes him responsible, and so guilty, because people like him keep the system going.
In the text In "The Power of the Powerless" (1978), section VI, Havel writes that "Position in the power hierarchy determines the degree of responsibility and guilt", and that rulers and ruled are both unfree.
Lecture 25From Modernity to Post-Modernity
Havel's truth, like the dissidents', exceeds factual accuracy: it is what rescues a person, grounding the self, liberating, giving life meaning, worth living and dying for.
Put simply Havel's "truth," like that of other dissidents, means more than getting the facts right. It is what saves a person: it anchors the self, sets one free and gives life meaning, worth living and dying for.
The questions Havel is part of
A throughline follows one question across the whole course. These are the ones his claims sit on.
Works and dates
As they come up in the lectures.
Audience Audience
Ivan Jirous button-holes Havel on his way to a party and plays him Plastic People tapes; Havel's epiphany.
Plastic People band members and Jirous arrested; Havel and others send an open letter to Heinrich Böll (Paul Wilson is expelled the following year, 1977).
Charter 77 Charta 77
Charter 77 released January 1 with 242 original signatories; Patočka, Havel and one colleague as first spokespeople.
The Power of the Powerless Moc bezmocných
Havel's essay, dedicated to Patočka, smuggled to Michnik in Warsaw for his samizdat journal.
Havel, Michnik and Kuroń climb Sněžka on the Czechoslovak-Polish border to coordinate resistance.
Havel, last released from prison in May 1989, is brought to the castle as first post-communist president of Czechoslovakia.
Havel tells a joint session of the US Congress that consciousness precedes being.
Terms
The ideas his claims turn on, as the lectures gloss them.
Anti-politics. Challenging power through moral force outside politics, avoiding a rival political program so as to stay uncompromised by political maneuvering.
Human-rights discourse. The universal vocabulary of rights, made available by the Helsinki Accords, that became Eastern Europe's language of opposition once Marxist language had lost credibility.
The greengrocer. Havel's ordinary shopkeeper who displays a slogan nobody believes; his routine compliance shows how everyday conformity keeps a regime running.
Complicity of the population. Havel's claim that ordinary people sustain a lying regime by going along, and so share responsibility for it while also suffering under it.
Responsibility. The burden that comes with radical freedom: one owns one's choices, and in choosing acts as a model for humanity.
Living in truth. Havel's stance of refusing the regime's pretenses and acting on what one actually knows, accepting the personal cost; the counter to living a lie.
Post-totalitarianism. Havel's name for the late Soviet-bloc order held together by everyone's ritual compliance rather than by belief or open terror.