Between Philosophy & Politics: Reflections on the Three Cities of Martin Palouš

Once Upon a time of Transition: Fourteen Exercises in Political Thought. Martin Palouš. Washington-London: Academica Press, 2021.

Martin Palouš’s Once Upon a Time of Transition: Fourteen Exercises in Political Thought is an extended meditation on the “miraculous year 1989” (382) that saw the overthrowing of the decrepit post-totalitarian communist regime of Gustáv Husák and the restoration of democracy in his native Czechoslovakia. Palouš uses the manifold of the event to reflect not only on the revolution, but also on himself as a reflecting being, and the process of reflection itself; not only on politics but also on history & philosophy classical and modern; and not only on the Czech situation then and now, but also on our situation in the West and on the post-European age in which we have now entered. This manifold jumps out immediately to the reader perusing the Table of Contents which moves from 1989 to the problems of totalitarianism & authoritarianism; philosophy, politics, & law; God, humankind & human rights; philosophers like Voegelin & Patočka; and thinkers, intellectuals, playwrights, and politicians like Masaryk, Beneš, Benda, & Havel. These disparate threads are tightly woven together in a single reflective journey with fourteen stations not only due to the singularity of the event but also on account of Palouš’s existential understanding of reflection as lived experience. If the stations form the topics, the journey is the movement propelled by Palouš’s method of going back to the originary experiences and the road on which this journey plays itself out is “the uncertain territory between philosophy and politics” (1).

Like much of the literature penned by the intellectuals of ’89, this is engagé literature of the sort that has had at times a venerable, often sordid, tradition in twentieth century Europe. But unlike the main line of this tradition that runs somewhere through Émile Zola, Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, all the way to any number of intellectual-performers espousing any number of positive causes today, Palouš’s contribution belongs to a more submerged current that springs up to the surface of our intellectual landscape only here and there – for example, in Eric Voegelin, Albert Camus, or the literature that emerged out of the Nazi concentration camps and the communist Gulag. Always refreshing, this line is not always easy to identify due to its peculiar dedication to “recapture │…] reality” (86) rather than espousing a cause – “it will not offer positive programs,” Palouš quotes Patočka approvingly, “but will speak, like Socrates’ daimonion, in warnings and prohibitions” (351). This book then is part of a personal, consistent, and comprehensive effort by its author to resist the deformations of reality that tend to accompany the engaged life.

I hasten to add that the specification of the deformation as intrinsic to the engaged life is mine and not the author’s.[1] But I think I make it on good grounds for it seems to me that Palouš’s Czech story is a tale of not one, not even two, but three parallel cities that cohabit the single human reality that we all inhabit. And, as such, existence in and for a single city as if it made up the whole of human reality may appear warped from the perspective of this ultimately mysterious three-part whole.

The first is the political city. Populated by citizens and driven by the question “what should we do?” it is this city that we all have direct experience of and whose existence is affirmed by many contemporaries as the only human city. The second is the philosophical city. Populated by philosophers, driven by the question “What is?” it exists wherever a philosopher raises the question of being. These two originary cities represent two essentially distinct expressions of what Hannah Arendt called the human condition of plurality: the first city exhibits the outer, visible plurality of action while the second manifests the inner, invisible, but no less real “two-in-one”[2] plurality of thinking (41). True, the very existence of the philosophical city has been put under radical doubt since sometime in the nineteenth century but, as Palouš also shows, it continues to be there for those who care to look,[3] grounded as it is in the contemplative question-asking experiences of the bios theoretikos.

Both cities, it seems to me, exhibit a positive ontology; to each belongs a nature, a vision of order, and a remarkable historical continuity. The history of the West may be meaningfully read as the history of the first or the second city; both have been tasked, each in its own way, to “care for the soul.”[4] Palouš’s, however, speaks of another third city – the Czechoslovak Charter 77 famously christened by Václav Benda as a “parallel polis”: initial population: 242 souls; lifespan: 13 years. For this third city we have no unambiguous name – with Hannah Arendt, however, we may call it Bohemia.[5] Coincidentally, it emerged unambiguously in the nineteenth century as the philosophical city ran afoul of history. Populated by intellectuals – those jacks of the public trade – it partakes uneasily of both. Like the political city, it is continuously preoccupied with the always particular question “what should we do?” and it responds to the same contingent dynamics of becoming, progress and degeneration, scarcity and comfort, and power and fairness. Like the philosophical city, it speaks in the general and universal language of moral foundations, theorems, and concepts. But if the two originary cities respond to two clearly different modes of being, Bohemia’s ontological status is far more unstable: by asking the perennially political question “what should we do?” in light of the perennially philosophical question of justice, it seems to emerge unsteadily out of the deformations intrinsic to the first two. Hence, its actual existence has also been rather fleeting, accidental, or discontinuous. And, every time it has come to be, this “parallel polis” has hastened the movement of the political city either towards catastrophe as was often the case with the revolutionary artists and writers of Arendt’s Bohemia, or towards redemption as was the case with Palouš’s Charter 77.

Since Western thought has mostly spoken of either one or two cities, it is worth asking whether we are justified to speak of a third city at all, or are we dealing here with the mere contingencies of Central European history and the short twentieth century? Palouš’s book, I think, provides the outlines of an argument for answering the question in the affirmative even though historically the third city is a seemingly contingent creation of what Pierre Manent calls “the strange interpenetration between intellectual and political history”[6] in modernity. If human reality for all persons is generated by the tension between finiteness and historicity on one hand and eternity and transcendence on the other (114), and the two cities are liable to inherent deformations – the political city in the dreary finiteness of realpolitik and the philosophical city in the infiniteness of propositional, systematic metaphysics – a third city will be needed to re-establish human reality; a sort of clearing house for the metaxy in the space that opens up between the deformed borders of the two originary cities. If we accept that these deformations are inherent to politics and philosophy, we must count on the presence of this third city on the humus that results from the poor health of the two.

The Manifesto of Charter 77 resembles uncannily the US Declaration of Independence (or the American Charter 76). In its form, like the Declaration, the Charter has three parts that answer to three inter-related questions:

• What is justice?
• How has this sense of justice been offended?
• What will the covenanters do about it?

Like the Declaration, then, it opens with the rights that are owed to the person as a human being and which all political cities are obliged to respect, it continues with a list of public grievances known to all citizens of Czechoslovakia against the communist government in a manner that recalls the abuses of George III, and concludes with the covenant that will oppose them (“…springs from a background of friendship and solidarity…[with] no rules, permanent bodies or formal friendship….”, 290). In substance, like the Declaration it establishes a “super-constitutional power” (299) reminiscent of the super-naturalness of the Christian God in relation to which all finite government is necessarily defective by recognizing that its message cannot be flattened out in a mundane party program: “Charter 77 does not aim, then, to set out its own platform of political or social reform or change” (290). It thus opens up the realm of the necessarily mundane beyond itself and creates the pre-conditions for justice by restoring the fullness of human reality: “the realm of the divine and the realm of the human, in any open society, belong essentially together” (113; cf. 300). It is in this most decisive sense that Charter 77 plays its role not merely as an act of resistance but as a redemptive act.

According to Patočka, the language proper to this third in-between city is the negative philosophical speech of ‘warnings and prohibitions’ as opposed to the positive speech appropriate to the political city although its ends are undeniably political. But its first order of business is the restoration of reality which, for Patočka, meant philosophy made political. Jan Patočka founded the third city when he took the “decision”[7] to cross the boundary and risk heresy. Patočka’s “Socratic action” (143) functions on both modes of being: it reopens the political question of the common good so that the political city does not waste away into the mere opportunism of power (145) while it seeks “the outline of a city, where the philosopher can live”[8] so that the philosophical city does not self-isolate away into sectarian madness.[9] Patočka’s decision, like Socrates’s, represents not the abandonment but the culmination of his philosophy which in its highest point changes form like a chrysalis into something that seems something else entirely. The humus of Bohemia is the soil where the encounter between citizen and philosopher gives birth to political philosophy.

With the luminous example of Patočka, Palouš intends to show “how the vita contemplativa can eventually inform and shape the vita activa.” Underlying the carefully drawn distinctions between the two modes is the dream of a transparent harmony between the three cities. But this dream risks self-subversion. After all, the permeation of the three-in-one must happen on the grounds of the political city. Surely, we can think of fruitful moments when that happens; arguably one such was the American founding which through the Declaration of Independence signaled the harmony of common sense (politics) with revelation (religion) and reason (philosophy) around a single best political order; a moment replicated by the harmony between Christians, philosophers, playwrights and others around Charter 77. But, while they brought about much that was new at the political level, viewed ontologically these were restorative efforts that aimed to recover what was already there in Anglo-American traditions of common law and self-government and Czech political, philosophical, and intellectual traditions (see especially Exercise # 11) as well as present at the time elsewhere, in England and Western Europe respectively.

Palouš’s dream of ultimate harmony is cautiously expressed: in Exercise # 6 he speaks of “the Socratic culture of dialogue and never-ending search for the public good to give voice to the middle class, respecting and praising gentlemanly behavior, tolerating conflicting opinions…” (135). “Is it not the case, even today,” he asks a few pages later, “that the cause of human rights can be served well only in an environment of quiet generosity, gentlemanly behavior and balanced judgment….?” (138) The political answer is: not necessarily. In human rights, as in all political things, there is a time for zealotry – such as the Christian zealotry against slavery, or the Churchillian zealotry in duplicitous alliance with Stalin’s terroristic regime against Hitlerite Germany. The question “What should we do?” is singularly disdainful of theoretical answers.

This is a distinctly modern dream, more at home in strands of contemporary liberal and deliberative democratic thought than in classical political philosophy. Fueled by Patočka’s “decision,” it is the dream that the person will be at once a citizen, an intellectual, and a philosopher. But, if we do agree with Palouš and others[10] as I think we should, that Patočka’s civic involvement was founded in his Socratic philosophical project, the “decision” acquires theoretical foundation and is not merely one more instance of prideful decisionism. The theoretical nature of the decision explain why it was not Patočka but Benda that was able to grasp the political meaning of Charter 77 (Exercise # 3). If I am not mistaken, it may make sense for the individual: the philosopher that seeks to bring philosophy “down from the heavens” or the citizen that refuses to succumb to the “authority or charm”[11] of the self-interpretations of the political. But for the city it signals the folding of the third and second into the first city and thus the final inability “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” (Hamlet in Palouš, 285).

Notes

[1] Palouš mentions the deformations caused by totalitarianism and, one may deduce, “post-modern nihilism so fashionable these days” (2).

[2] Hannah Arendt, “Thinking,” The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1978), 179-195.

[3] For an excellent example from communist Eastern Europe of the continuation of the philosophical city in a single person, see Alexandru Dragomir, The World We Live In, trans., James Christian Brown, eds., Gabriel Liiceanu & Catalin Partenie (Springer, 2017).

[4] Just as Plato tasked politics with “care for the soul” (Laws, 650b) through the mouth of the Athenian Stranger, Patočka tasked philosophy with the same (247).

[5] Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 259.

[6] Pierre Manent, Modern Liberty and Its Discontents, ed., and trans., Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Seaton (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998), 36.

[7] Eda Kriseová, Václav Havel, trans., Caleb Crain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 108.

[8] Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, trans., Petr Lom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 87.

[9] Alexandre Kojève, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, revised and expanded edition including the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1961), 150-154.

[10] Costica Bradatan, Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 96.

[11] Manent, Modern Liberty, 108.

Print