At the Existentialist Café (45 page)

One of the few reviewers to show a certain sympathy to Wilson after the
Outsider
blow-up was Iris Murdoch, who considered him an ass yet wrote in the
Manchester Guardian
that she preferred Wilson’s
‘rashness’ to the pedantic ‘dryness’ of more established philosophers. She too had a tendency to write in a generous spillage of words and ideas. In 1961, she wrote a kind of manifesto, ‘Against Dryness’, in which she urged writers to abandon the ‘
small myths, toys, crystals’ of beautiful writing that had been fashionable, and to return to the real writer’s task, which is to explore how we can be free and behave well in a complicated world, amid the rich ‘density’ of life.

Even when existentialists reached too far, wrote too much, revised too little, made grandiose claims, or otherwise disgraced themselves, it must be said that they remained in touch with the density of life, and that they asked the important questions. Give me that any day, and keep the tasteful miniatures for the mantelpiece.

By the 1960s, university teachers were aware of a change. The Heideggerian J. Glenn Gray, who taught philosophy at Colorado College, wrote an essay for
Harper’s Magazine
in May 1965 called ‘
Salvation on the Campus: why existentialism is capturing the students’. He had noticed that recent students seemed more fascinated
than ever by any philosopher who represented rebellion and authenticity, such as Socrates, who died for his intellectual freedom. They loved the existentialists, and especially Sartre’s idea of bad faith. ‘I’m sick of my own pretending,’ exclaimed a student one day. The best of them were also the most likely to drop out; they would vanish in search of a more meaningful path. It worried Gray, especially when one bright young man refused all help in applying to graduate school and simply wandered off, to be last heard of drifting around the country living by casual labour.

Gray had no problem understanding the urge for freedom and for something ‘real’: it was he who had predicted, in the Italian village during the war, that old philosophies would offer little to the post-war world and that everything must be reinvented. Yet, when people acted on this idea almost a generation later, his impulse to celebrate was overwhelmed by concern for their future.

Gray was one of the first to note how a popularised brand of existentialism fed into the growing counterculture. It added its terminology and transformative energy to the great social change that ensued in coming years, with the rise of student radicals, travelling hippies, the draft refusers of the Vietnam War, and all those who threw themselves into mind-expanding drugs and a free-for-all spirit of sexual experimentation. A vast and hopeful idealism pervaded these lifestyles: these people were not ‘dry’, Iris Murdoch might have said. Whether they slipped volumes of Camus, Beauvoir or Sartre into their pockets or not, they adopted the double Sartrean commitment: to personal freedom, and to political activism. When the student protesters occupying the Sorbonne in May 1968 cheered Sartre (alongside a few cheeky catcalls, admittedly), this was what they were acknowledging.

The student demonstrations, strikes, occupations, love-ins and be-ins of the 1960s constitute an extended historical moment to which one might point and say that existentialism had done its job. Liberation had arrived; existentialism could retire. Indeed, new philosophers were already on the scene, reacting against existentialism’s personalised style of thought. New novelists turned against its literary aesthetic too: Alain
Robbe-Grillet, in his 1964 manifesto
Pour un nouveau roman
(
For a New Novel
), dismissed Sartre and Camus as having too much of the ‘human’ in them. In 1966 Michel Foucault predicted that ‘man’, being a relatively recent invention, might soon be ‘
erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ — an image that recalls Lévi-Strauss’ call for studies that would ‘dissolve man’. Later, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the postmodernist Jean Baudrillard dismissed Sartrean philosophy as a historical curiosity, like the classic 1950s films whose old-fashioned psychological dramas and clear characterisation ‘
express marvellously well the — already banal — post-Romantic death throes of subjectivity’. No one needs this kind of ‘existential garb’ any more, Baudrillard wrote. ‘Who cares about freedom, bad faith, and authenticity today?’

Ah, but there
were
people who cared about these things, and they were found above all in the places where freedom and authenticity were under threat. One such place was Czechoslovakia in and after 1968. While Parisian students were treating Sartre as a venerable relic, young Czechs and Slovaks were reading him as though his works had just peeled off the press. This was during the ‘Prague Spring’, a period when Alexander Dub
ek’s government tried to move towards a more liberal and open version of Communism. Just as in Hungary twelve years earlier, Soviet tanks and troops put a stop to the experiment. It was this act that led Sartre and Beauvoir definitively to reject the Soviet model — only to praise people like Mao Tse-tung and Pol Pot instead.

Even after the tanks rolled in, two of Sartre’s most provocative
plays continued into production in Prague:
Dirty Hands
and
The Flies
, both of which were anti-authoritarian. The Prague
Flies
was the latest startling reinvention of Sartre’s parable of freedom and activism. Having begun as a story of wartime France in 1943, and found a new audience in Germany in 1948, it now seemed all too relevant to the citizens of post-invasion Czechoslovakia.

‘Is he passé?’ asked the Czech novelist Milan Kundera of Sartre in 1968. ‘I have heard it said in France.’ Here in Prague, he went on, Sartre had far more to offer than writers such as Robbe-Grillet,
with his view of literature and thought as mere games. Another dissident, the playwright Václav Havel, observed that writers’
words still had weight and value in Czechoslovakia: they were measured in people’s lives, whereas in the West they had no substance, being too easy. Philip Roth also observed, after a later visit to Prague, that in the West ‘
everything goes and nothing matters’, while in Czechoslovakia ‘nothing goes and everything matters’. Sartrean existentialism was precisely a philosophy of
mattering
: he called on his readers to take decisions as though the whole future of humanity depended upon what they did.

It was not just Sartrean existentialism that had this moral weight; for some Czechs and Slovaks it was phenomenology. The Czech phenomenological tradition went back to the country’s first modern president, Tomáš Masaryk, student of Brentano and protector of his archive. Husserl himself came from Moravia, and several of his colleagues had connections with the Czech lands. By the 1960s and 1970s, the high profile of phenomenology in Czechoslovakia was owed mostly to one of those Husserlians:
Jan Patočka.

Like many others, Patočka had been swept away by his first discovery of Husserl’s philosophy after hearing the great man speak in Paris in 1929. He arranged to transfer to Freiburg in 1933 — just as Sartre was going to Berlin — and became one of Husserl’s circle of favourites, as well as studying with Heidegger. Husserl even gave Patočka a desktop lectern that Masaryk had originally given to him, which, as Patočka wrote, made him feel anointed as
heir to a tradition. He returned to Prague and did his best to make the university a centre of phenomenological research.

When the Communist Party took over in 1948, Patočka was increasingly harassed by the authorities because his philosophy ran counter to Marxist theory. In 1972, he was forced out of active teaching at the university, and began holding private seminars at his home instead, working through texts in minute detail. His students got used to spending a
whole evening on a few lines of
Being and Time
. He also gave lessons in Prague theatres to actors and writers — Václav Havel among them. Havel recalled how Patočka would bring texts alive
for the group and encourage them to seek ‘the meaning of things’ and illumination ‘of one’s self, of one’s situation in the world’. He spoke of his own idea of the
‘solidarity of the shaken’, a bond which united everyone whose life had been jolted out of unthinking ‘everydayness’ by some historical upheaval. Such a bond could become a basis for rebellious action. Patočka’s phenomenology was dangerously political.

In fact, one could say that Patočka was only revealing the subversive tendency that had always lurked in phenomenology. Husserl’s call to return to the ‘things themselves’ was a call to ignore ideologies such as Marxism. It was a summons to critical self-reliance, with all dogmas set aside in the
epoché
. One can even trace this anti-dogmatic spirit back to the young Franz Brentano, who refused to accept the infallibility of the Pope and was punished by losing his teaching post. Patočka refused to accept the infallibility of the Communist Party for very similar reasons. Brentano had passed the spirit of sceptical refusal to Husserl; Husserl had passed it to Patočka, and Patočka now passed it to Havel and many others.

(Illustrations Credit 12.5)

More directly,
Patočka became an activist himself. In 1976, aged nearly seventy and in fragile health, he joined Havel and others in signing the famous declaration of political opposition known as
Charter 77. It could almost have been called the
Philosophers’ Charter: of its main representatives during the next thirteen years, almost a third (twelve out of thirty-eight) were either philosophers or former students of philosophy, many of them having studied with
Patočka.

The Czech state immediately set about persecuting the charter’s signatories. They brought Patočka in for questioning in Ruzynĕ Prison on a
regular basis between January and March 1977. His interrogations were more gruelling than violent, but they would last all day, deliberately exhausting him and making no concessions to his frailties. Havel saw him once in the prisoners’ waiting room where they were left to sit before interrogations — a ritual designed to heighten anxiety. Seeming quite unconcerned, Patočka talked to him about philosophy.

That same day, after interrogation, Havel was incarcerated. Patočka was freed, only to be called back again and again through subsequent months. Towards the end of this period, he wrote a ‘Political Testament’ in which he said, ‘
What is needed is for people to behave at all times with dignity, not to allow themselves to be frightened and intimidated, and to speak the truth.’ It sounds so simple: again, that call to speak of things as they are, unadorned.

One day early in March, Patočka was subjected to a particularly long interrogation, lasting eleven hours. He had recently angered the regime again by contacting the visiting Dutch foreign minister, Max van der Stoel, to seek his support for Charter 77. The day after this, Patočka collapsed. He was taken to hospital, where he died on 13 March 1977.

The funeral, at the Břevnov cemetery in Prague, was attended by thousands of people. The authorities did not prevent its taking place, but they disrupted the event in every way possible. Ivan Klíma, who was present, recalled how they sent motorcyclists to rev their engines around a nearby track and helicopters to hover overhead, so the speeches at the graveside could not be heard. Police officers in
attendance turned their backs to the grave. Others ostentatiously photographed faces in the crowd.

The funeral was followed by another of those swashbuckling archive-smuggling operations that feature in the history of phenomenology. A group of former
Patočka students and colleagues, led by Klaus Nellen and Ivan Chvatík together with the Polish philosopher Krzysztof Michałski, arranged for Western scholars and diplomats to sneak copies of his papers out of the country in relays, taking some each time they travelled to and from Prague. Bit by bit, the duplicate archive was reassembled in Vienna’s Institute for the Human Sciences, while the originals were hidden in Prague. Patočka’s memory is still preserved today by institutes in both cities. One scholar associated with the Viennese institution, Paul Ricœur, summed up his legacy thus: ‘
The relentless persecution of this man proves that, in the event of a people’s extreme abjection, philosophical pleading for subjectivity is becoming the citizen’s only recourse against the tyrant.’