On April 5 and 6, 2018, Dr. Marci Shore, professor of history at Yale University, brought to New Haven the leading intellectuals and intellectual historians from the United States and Europe in order to discuss the most pertinent issues of the present day within the framework of the dialogical workshop titled “Understanding Totalitarianism in a Postmodern World: Lessons from Central European Philosophy.”
In her introductory remarks Professor Shore shared with us that in some way this conference is related to the two workshops that she had organized last year in Vienna, during which some of the questions that have come on the table in various debates and discussions were whether “what we are seeing now in the twenty-first century and what we are seeing in Putin’s Russia is a return of totalitarianism as we had understood it from its twentieth century manifestations? or whether there is something fundamentally new and postmodern about what is happening now? Whether this idea of post-truth is not some kind of new variation of what happened to Soviet ideology, but is in some way historically, philosophically, ideologically a fundamentally different phenomenon.”
She mentioned Peter Pomerantsev and Masha Gessen, who discuss these issues in their books — Nothing is True and Everything is Possible and The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia respectively. In Gessen’s opinion, says Professor Shore, what we witness is, indeed, a totalitarianism; and in Pomerantsev’s view what we need is a new conceptualization. Professor Shore then took Pomerantsev’s argument and put it into a content of philosophy terms saying that Pomerantsev describes Putin’s Russia, which is characterized not only by epistemological uncertainty, but also by ontological uncertainty. “It is not that somebody is just lying and everybody knows they are lying and that nobody really knows the truth, although everybody knows they are being lied to; what he is actually describing is a moment when everybody is giving up on truth as such.” Thus, Professor Shore was interested in this moment when epistemological uncertainty becomes ontological uncertainty.
Moreover, Professor Shore shared that she kept returning to the famous phrase from The Captive Mind where Czeslaw Milosz wrote that Europeans cannot take Americans seriously because they have not yet learned that the habit of civilization is fragile. In this moment of fragility Professor Shore wanted to take occasion to get people in the room in real time to engage with people dialogically, because according to her,“looking people in the eye and thinking aloud in real time is different from exchanging papers on the internet.” Her idea was to look at how Central European philosophy responded in the twentieth century to the experience of totalitarianism, and to look at the connection between the epistemological and the ethical — whether this intervention that Polish philosopher and historian Leszek Kołakowski makes when saying that epistemological questions are already ethical question is valid; and whether there is anything that we can do with this. She also wanted to look at the extent to which people in Eastern Europe extricated themselves from a Hegelian Marxist understanding of history with a notion of increasing embeddedness — embeddedness in a way that did not disperse responsibility, but that returned responsibility to us. “With these general questions on the table, I hope we can all think together in real time,” expressed Professor Shore.
The participants of the conference — Omri Boehm, Aspen Brinton, Krzysztof Czyżewski, James Dodd, Irena Grudzińska-Gross, Michael Gubser, Ludger Hagedorn, Ivan Landa, Elżbieta Matynia, Marci Shore, Vladimir Tismaneanu — engaged into the discussions, the titles of which read as follows: East/West, Left/Right, totality/infinity: is solidarity possible? “Living in truth” in postmodern times, or, what is the (non-)ideology of post-truth? “The habit of civilization is fragile,” or why we still need Kant; “Misknowing,” or, truth, half-truth, and the meaning of hope; The totalitarian temptation, or the existential thinness of rationality; and Что делать? Кто/что виноват?, or the meaning of 1968, then and now.
Mike Gubser, professor of history in James Madison University, and Aspen Brinton, professor of philosophy and international studies at Boston College opened the workshop with the session titled East/West, Left/Right, totality/infinity: is solidarity possible? Dr. Gubser noted that today we live in a moment of heightened polarization, the origins of which are many (from political, to economic, to cultural). In fact, he pointed out that our present time is “a moment of lack of solidarity.”
Dr. Gubser emphasized the need to define and understand solidarity as it was experienced and presented in the 1970s and 80s in Central Europe. He pointed out that perhaps a more important question is whether the models of the 1970s-80s are somehow relevant today. He found striking the difference between the Polish experience of solidarity and that of solidarity embodied in a Czech philosopher, Jan Patočka’s Solidarity of the Shaken. In Poland, Dr. Gubser says, the experience is one of the mass movement where there is bridging of differences despite of all the existing internal antagonisms. Polish solidarity was union across differences. And this is classically embodied in the movement where the workers and the intelligentsia get together around 1975-76. This symbolic partnership forms a core of what becomes a very broad movement; one that is associated with the classic late twentieth century definition of solidarity. In his opinion, the Czech dissident movement was represented by a much smaller group. Even Patočka’s Solidarity of the Shaken feels to him as something very different — as “an outpost of the people, who were determined to push for transcendence and freedom against all odds.” And the question he posed for further discussion is whether either of these two models are relevant today.
Aspen Brinton, whose work focuses on Eastern European dissidents, characterized the time that came after the U.S. Presidential election of 2016 as a time of political distress, noting that there is a renewed interest on the part of the students in the legacy of Václav Havel and Adam Michnik and their ethics in international politics. As she describes, there was something in Patočka’s work that led her to think about the fragility aspect of what the shakiness is. During her research on the dissidents across the world, she could see references to fragility as going from the individual to the universal. And even the human rights discourse of the dissident movement seem to her to be something like this. Since the conference was organized in an inclusive dialogical form, after a brief presentation, Dr. Gubser and Dr. Brinton were joined by the other attendees and the conversation touched upon the origins of the concept of solidarity (which finds its roots around the time of the French Revolution as a legal category and from that time on goes through phases and variations in different parts of the world) and its anthropological aspects, as well as on empathy and usefulness and dangers of making historical analogies.
The second session — “Living in truth” in postmodern times, or, what is the (non-)ideology of post-truth? — was led by Ludger Hagedorn, Head of IWM’s Patočka Archive and Program and Ivan Landa, researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences. In offering his remarks Dr. Hagedorn based his talk on Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Dr. Hagedorn believes that this is one and only work from the ‘68 generation that will continue to have meaning for the future. He noted that Havel himself had said of this work that it is “a warning, a challenge, a danger, or a lesson” and not only for the communist system. As such, Dr. Hagedorn posed a question and offered his opinion on whether there still is something to learn from this particular essay. Dr. Hagedorn looked at the article written by Pankaj Mishra titled “Václav Havel’s Lessons on How to Create a ‘Parallel Polis’,” in which the author argues that it be necessary to turn to Havel for lessons for it is Havel, who analyzed totalitarianism and offered ways to resist it. Dr. Hagedorn pointed out that Havel’s work strikingly contrasts with that of Mishra’s because while Mishra agitates for societal change, strike and disobedience, the nature of Havel’s thought is apolitical. Indeed, Dr. Hagedorn believes that this plea for action in society is a proof of the fact that one does not believe in the power of the truth in the old-fashioned Havelian sense. Moreover, Dr. Hagedorn strongly believes in the validity of Havel’s argument — that systemic change is superficial and the only thing that will work is the change on a personal level; this is how Dr. Hagedorn answers his own question about what can be learned today from Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless.”
Ivan Landa, in turn, spoke about the four concepts and sets of problems that he believes are crucial for the discussion of truth: the theme of understanding within the phenomenological tradition; the problem of history and the meaning of being in possession of historical consciousness; the problem of truth and understanding of truth; and the question of a philosophical problem. In emphasizing the importance of understanding and not taking for granted the idea of understanding, he referred to Hannah Arendt’s essay “Understanding and Politics,” in which she makes a distinction between understanding and knowledge. In it, Arendt said that while a lot of people say that in order to combat totalitarianism, we need to understand it, she argued that this was not the case here. All one needs is to know the threat posed by totalitarianism to combat it.
On the following day the participants reconvened for three more sessions to discuss the legacy of the Central and East European philosophy of the twentieth century. Omri Boehm, Associate Professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research and Asaf Angermann, lecturer in the department of philosophy at Yale University, presented on the topic of “The habit of civilization is fragile,” or why we still need Kant. In offering his remarks, Dr. Angermann spoke about the state of liberal democracy and the capacity for rational public deliberation and the liberal politics. According to Dr. Angermann, Kołakowski’s “Why do We need Kant” is useful “because it articulates that there is a price we pay by giving up on the truth.” Kołakowski’s answer to the question inbuilt in the title is that we need Kant because he articulates and defends the moral metaphysical category of the “abstract human being as opposed to the empirical, historical and material category of the concrete human being ideology,” said Dr. Angermann. Kolakowski human rights are valued only when everyone’s equal participation is ensured;in other words, on the basis of abstract human being. The concrete human being, on the other hand, is concrete only in the sense that he is determined not by human nature, but by a more specific category. “From this point of view, it does not matter how we choose this more specific category,” says Dr. Angermann, “it may be a race, a class, or a nation. In any case, the ideological intention, on which the jargon of the concrete human being is based, is to weaken or even to invalidate the general principle of human rights and to permit some sections of humanity to deem others as natural objects. And this creates prerequisite for legitimizing slavery and genocide; though, of course not necessarily encouraging them.”
Dr. Boehm, in turn, continued with the question in discussion and his idea was to connect the questions of totalitarianism with Frankfurt school, invoking Gillian Rose, who wrote her dissertation on Adorno under the supervision of Kołakowski. What Dr. Boehm found interesting is the alternative that Adorno presented to Kant. He pointed out that what contributed to his interest in this topic is a few papers published in 2016 that suggested to revisit the study of the authoritarian personality that the Frankfurt school — and in particular Adorno — conducted. After the 2016 presidential election numerous studies have been conducted examining the personality with tendency towards authoritarianism and totalitarianism. “In the unpublished remarks of Adorno’s study,” notes Dr. Boehm, “he criticizes the focus that he introduces in the text under subjective dimension of the authoritarian personality and emphasizes the need to address the objective, historical, social, ideological, and cultural ones.” Dr. Boehm emphasized an interesting fact — namely that the author of the study was examining the foundations of German totalitarianism by studying the totalitarian potential in the United States. By examining the fascist potential in American society, says Dr. Boehm, the German researchers “assessed the personal dimensions of their own immigration to the U.S.; whether the American democracy can avoid the European problems. In other words, whether it is a good place to live for them.” Having posed and examined these questions, says Dr. Boehm, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer decided to go back to Germany in 1949; which, in fact, does not mean that they had underestimated the totalitarian potential in the post-war Germany. But still, he notes, ten years later, in 1959, Adorno claimed that national socialism lives on and the German fascism lives a ghostly life, under the surface of seemingly normal reality.
At the same time, in seeking to find out why humanity keeps sinking into a new kind of barbarism instead of entering a truly human states, Adorno and Horkheimer composed Dialectic of Enlightenment. And the answer was about the dialectic character of the enlightenment. One of the radical aspects of their argument was that the fascist, authoritarian, totalitarian potential is not the opposite of rational, enlightened humanity and not the opposite of liberalism, but is intrinsically entangled in it. Despite the fact that neither Adorno, nor Horkheimer were anti-enlightenment thinkers, their book’s thesis, indeed states that “enlightenment is totalitarian.” The reasoning behind such statement was to liberate enlightenment from itself and its entanglement with irrationality of totalitarianism, with unquestioned authorities, and the politics of exclusion. The enlightenment, according to them, is the project of universal rationality. They identified “‘the development toward total integration’ both in the socio-political and epistemological sense.” They further argued that enlightenment reverts back to myth. But for Dr. Boehm’s argument, it is important to remain with the dialectical characterization of enlightenment rationality. Further, Dr. Boehm emphasized that Adorno, who had taken part in the education of a new generation of autonomous Germans, had emphasized two fronts: education and media (despite the fact that in his Dialectic of Enlightenment he was extremely critical of the mass media). So, to Dr. Boehm, the question remains “whether critical education cans till motivate human beings to think critically, autonomously, to challenge authorities, and question of totality, both epistemological and political.” Dr. Boehm answers his own question in the positive. “I think it can; the question is whether totalitarianism can be fought on the individual level.” And for Adorno, the answer was that there is no magic solution; but it is all about continuing hard labor of educating young people. These questions opened up a vivid discussion among the participants and attendees of the workshop.
Vladimir Tismaneanu, a Romanian and American political scientist, political analyst, sociologist, and professor at the University of Maryland and Marci Shore, a European cultural and intellectual historian presented their ideas within a framework of the session titled The totalitarian temptation, or the existential thinness of rationality. A scholar of Stalinism and the Romanian communist regime, Dr. Tismaneanu spoke about how the 1930s generation became possessed by the devil and how the devil is mobilized; in other words, as he phrased it, “how the devil contaminated and enslaved some of the most brilliant minds of the East-Central Europe.” Keeping in mind the topic of the discussion — ‘What does Eastern Europe Teach Us About Totalitarianism?’ — he noted that while Patočka “tells us a lot about how to oppose totalitarianism and Havel tells us about how to act against totalitarianism, the Romanian lesson is about how one becomes totalitarian.” And that is, according to Dr. Tismaneanu, because there exist moments of certain conversions; such as the conversion of the current Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán. Dr. Tismaneanu looked at what happened that made people like Orbán embrace “this apocalyptic version of the great capitalist civilization.” One of the things, Dr. Tismaneanu says, that took him years to understand is the fact that fascists were not counter-revolutionaries. Referencing a Rumanian-born essayist and aphorist Emil Cioran’s, Dr. Tismaneanu analyzed the reasons for such conversions. In his History and Utopia, says Dr. Tismaneanu, Cioran writes of the utopian thinking and discusses the hatred for democracy and democracyphobia. While Cioran writes about the fascism, Dr. Tismaneanu says, his ideas can apply to communism as well. Today, Dr. Tismaneanu says, “we are experiencing an age of anxiety… due to the collapse of a certain type of axiological certainties.” In an attempt to answer the question of what can be done to fix it, Dr. Tismaneanu, admitting to be unabashedly Aredtian, proposed that we go back to Arendt and — since we are dealing with rejectionism — “revisit what Arendt called ‘the revolutionary tradition and its lost treasure.’”
Marci Shore continued the conversation, mentioning Hannah Arendt’s idea that “‘understanding only comes afterwards.’” “It’s only when everything is all over,” says Dr. Shore still quoting Arendt, “that you can see how the consequences of actions have played out. Meaning is retrospective. That’s why the actor is never the author of his own life story; and it is only a historian looking back who has a chance to see what it’s all about.” She noted that historians ask themselves a question of whether any of the tools they have developed in an attempt to understand the past can be used for understanding what’s happening in the present or whether it is hopeless to try to understand what’s happening now because understanding always comes later. This being said, Dr. Shore admitted that she is still hopeful that there is something that can be understood now. Picking up on the idea of the dialectic and fragility of the enlightenment and its rationality that had been touched upon throughout the workshop, Dr. Shore brought up “another critique of enlightenment that also tries to draw a line from enlightenment to totalitarianism” — which is a critique that was made in 1935 by a German philosopher, the principal founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. The essence of his critique was that enlightenment rationality was too existentially thin; that it failed to ground the object in the subject. Husserl declared, according to Dr. Shore that “in our positive preoccupation with knowledge and understanding as the collection of facts, we have come up with the reason that is too superficial. And to Husserl, it was precisely because it was too superficial that it left itself vulnerable to the voices of unreason, that are leading us to barbarism.” Dr. Shore believes that this particular critique of enlightenment “speaks to the fragility of liberalism and therefore the space opened to counter liberalism.” Furthermore, referencing the ideas that had been brought up when having discussed Havel’s The Power of the Powerless on the first day of the workshop, she spoke about subjectivity and alienation. Quoting a line from Havel’s essay — “individuals can be alienated from themselves because there is something in them to alienate” — Dr. Shore brought up for further exploration the idea of alienation, which, according to her, is closely connected to the search for purity and purification.
In an attempt to analyze what can be learned from the past, the panelists of the final session of the workshop — Что делать? Кто/что виноват?, or the meaning of 1968, then and now — looked at what is happening fifty years after the famous 1968 moment. The session was led by Elżbieta Matynia, professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research, Irena Grudzińska-Gross, a research scholar at Princeton University and professor at the Institute of Slavic Studies, and Krzysztof Czyżewski, sociologist, social activist, theater producer, and one of the initiators of the “Borderland” Foundation in Poland.
Dr. Grudzińska-Gross, who was a student of Kołakowski and played a key role in 1968, spoke about her experience as one of the leaders of the Polish student protest movement in March of that year. Speaking of her engagement in the movement, she spoke of how conscious they were about what was going on in Czechoslovakia at the time. This inspired them to move more forcefully than they were otherwise. She also mentioned that now fifty years later a debate transpired in Poland about what really had happened, what were the results, and who was to blame in the outcomes. Some of the big questions, according to Dr. Grudzińska-Gross, were whether March of 1968 was part of Polish history of fight against communism, whether it is part of Jewish history as well as who exactly organized the movement. Pointing out that the majority of the arrested people (the number of which was 28,000) were workers, between 17-25 years old, she said that it is clear to her that this had been an eruption of protest by a generation.
She also spoke about the fact that at the fiftieth anniversary of the March ‘68 celebration there arose a question of the Jewish participation in the protest — “this topic had not been mentioned during the previous celebrations,” says Dr. Grudzińska-Gross. Noting that while the majority of those who rebelled were non-Jews, she pointed out that this Jewish element is important because it gave reason to say that the protest was instigated by Zionists. Mentioning that this shift in the conversation is significant in light of the “eruption of anti-Semitic propaganda” in Poland in January 2018, Dr. Grudzińska-Gross offered this as a subject for further discussion. She believes that these rebellions that, as a matter of fact, transpired all over the world at the time, were a sign of hope. While their generation was not interested in capitalism as such, they believed that their system was reformable and thus what they protested against the rigidity of the system. The other things that Dr. Grudzińska-Gross’s generation was rebelling against were “the fear that we had had in our families and our society — that is, the fear of their parents — and obfuscation of history,” which robbed them of the tools to understand themselves and thus rendered them ignorant of their immediate past. Another important thing she spoke about is the difference between the Eastern and Western European movements and their attitude towards violence and towards democracy. Although not criticizing the Western Europe’s movements, Dr. Grudzińska-Gross noted that while the Western Europeans were infatuated with violence, “we were aiming at enlarging of freedom.” She admitted that, sadly, 1968 was a declaration of the fact that the regime was not reformable.
Elżbieta Matynia mentioned that unlike Dr. Grudzińska-Gross, she had not participated in March 1968 events. However, she noted that she and her friends “did know that the beginning of that protest was really about the freedom of speech.” She recalled that when she went to Warsaw, the old professors were gone for they were no longer allowed to teach, students were arrested, and the universities were staffed with new faculty. Thus, Dr. Matynia’s generation could not know what exactly happened in 1968. But the generation of ‘68, according to her, “created a spirit of freedom.” And as Dr. Matynia and other students came to the deserted and silenced universities, they were overtaken by the desire to learn the truth about what had happened. And very soon, despite the attempt of the state to suppress the freedom of speech and information, “within a year and a half, I had the entire library of classics of ‘discounted’ philosophy,” among which were the books by Kołakowski. Dr. Matynia recalled with fascination that all these books had the word ‘freedom’ in the title. As they could not discuss things openly in everyday life, new settings emerged, which created space for discussing everything that interested their minds and hearts — “that was the legacy of March 1968.”
Emphasizing a transformatory importance of speech and words and the fact that words can really act, she mentioned that one of these ‘discounted’ philosophers was Adam Michnik. “It was Adam, who introduced to daily language in the 1970s the idea of subjectivity,” said Dr. Matynia. And the most fantastic thing to her is the fact that the word began to function; and now, she says, “workers were declaring ‘don’t take my subjectivity away from me!’” And it was also Michnik, who had an idea that the people needed to have their own press as well as invent words to say things differently, not only because of the opaque words of indoctrination used by the state, but in order to bring fresh ideas to the society. Turning directly to the question of guilt (кто виноват?/who is to blame?) now that “we are going again through this process of social silence,” Dr. Matynia’s answer was “we are guilty. We are implicated in this crime of silence. We neglected both speaking and listening to each other.”
Krzysztof Czyzewski acknowledged a universal global challenge of solidarity, independently of the historical content and geographical location. He mentioned that the slogan of the 1980s, announced that there is no freedom without solidarity. “But we read this slogan in a wrong way,” he admits; “we interpreted it as ‘we need you to gain independence’ or as ‘come to us because we need you;’ but when freedom happened, solidarity was gone. And that’s our experience today.” He mentioned that they always were building solidarity to gain freedom; which is something different from being in solidarity in a democratic, more or less free country. Dr. Czyzewski believes that solidarity goes together with freedom. “When I came to art, I thought of it as freedom,” he said, “[but] I no longer view art as a way of asserting one’s individual freedom, I think of culture as a connecting tissue with the others — about art as a solidarity gesture.” Dr. Czyzewski maintained that in the past, “we made mistakes when we did not find a way to communicate with local communities.” We charge the politicians with monopolizing the fears and weaknesses of the people; but they do it in the context that somebody else did not take care of these weaknesses. He believes that there was an omission, neglect of the organic work with people on the ground, which comes from the generation of ‘68 and their fear of touching the dark side of life. “And I think we need to make revolution in those terms,” he said, “This is exactly the crucial point; that we should find a way to create culture in a broader term; of communication, co-existence, and co-dialoguing with the people.”
Speaking of his experience with The Borderland foundation, Dr. Czyzewski pointed out that his and his colleagues’ intuition was that in order to build good living one should go to the people. “Not because of your philanthropic attitude, not because you want to sacrifice something from your life ambitions; but because you believe that only by doing that, only by working with people and creating a common ground will you achieve your dreams, your ambitions.” This is how he understands the culture of solidarity: “that everything we believe in, everything we dream about, we put together in the context with local communities around us.” This was Dr. Czyzewski’s answer to the chto delat?/what is to be done? question.
Written by Kamila Orlova, a graduate student of the European & Russian Studies Masters program