On Human Rights

Abstract

“It is certainly no accident that precisely here, in this region of continual threats to, and continual defence of one's own identity — whether personal, cultural or national identity — there is such a long tradition of the idea of truth, a truth for which one must pay, the truth as a moral value. One constantly runs up against this tradition, from Cyril and Methodius to Hus and Masaryk, Stefanik and Patocka”. This citation from a lecture entitled “Morality and Politics” provides a brief sketch of the background to the thought of the current Czech president, Vaclav Havel. Though lacking any academic training in philosophy, Havel was strongly influenced by the ideas of the philosophy professor from Prague, and founder of Charta 77, Jan Patocka. Inspired by some of Patocka's last writings, in 1978 Havel wrote an essay on Charta 77 which was dedicated to Patocka. The title of this essay was taken from one of Patocka's central statements: Attempt to Live in the Truth. Patocka's influence is also clearly evident in `Letters to Olga', in his speeches as president and in his thinking on Europe. Havel's thought, via the thought of Patocka, must be situated within a dual tradition. On the one hand it is rooted in Czech history. Patocka had already in his early writings thematized the ideas of Thomas Masaryk. The work of Masaryk, who became the first president of the new Czech republic after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, is characterized by an awareness of the crisis of (European) rationality, like in the later Husserl. On the other hand Havel's thought, again by way of Patocka, is rooted in a phenomenology that is primarily oriented toward Germany. Patocka is often regarded as the interpreter par excellence of the dialogue between Husserl and Heidegger. Yet despite this obvious indebtedness to a dual tradition, Havel's thought bears its own, unique stamp. Contrary to Husserl's phenomenology, he stresses the irreducible autonomy of a prior reality which is the ground out of which human subjectivity arises and about which it reflects. Havel is quite sensitive to the autonomous character of a transcendent truth of being. And contrary to Heidegger's phenomenology, Havel's attempt to `live in the truth' is always prompted by an awareness of the intellectual and ethical responsibility to reality, a `horizon' that surpasses us and thereby constantly challenges and criticizes any time-bound, epochal truth claims. It is particularly the emphasis on the ethical significance of the `absolute horizon' that distinguishes Havel from someone like Heidegger, as can be seen in this quotation about the meaning of responsibility: “it is a responsibility, a `higher responsibility', that consists exclusively of itself because it is metaphysically anchored: it is produced by the conscious or subconscious certainty that nothing ends with our death because everything is registered and judged for eternity somewhere `above', somewhere in what I once called `the memory of being', in that inscrutable order of the cosmos, nature and life that believers call `God' and to whose judgement everything is subject. A genuine conscience and a genuine feeling of responsibility can ultimately be explained only as an expression of the tacit assumption that we are watched `from above', that `above' everything is seen, that nothing is forgotten there, and that it is not within the power of earthly time to banish from our souls the accusation of earthly failure: our soul suspects that it is not the only one with some