Welcome everybody to this year's Tarkovsky Memorial Lecture,
which commemorates probably the most distinguished Polish scholar in the 800 year history of this university.
We're delighted this year to have Professor Matthew Shaw of Yale University and the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna.
Marcy Shaw is a really interesting combination of historian of Central and Eastern Europe.
Historian of ideas and a very notable writer.
A combination which I think is very well fitted to commemorating Schakowsky, who who had all those components.
And perhaps her best-known book is caveated Ashes of Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism nineteen eighteen to nineteen sixty eight,
in which, of course, the Chekhov's key figures, notably a very remarkable piece of intellectual and political history.
She's also the author of two books, which is a mixture of sort of history of the present memoir Literary Exploration, The Taste of Ashes,
The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, and most recently, The Ukrainian Night An Intimate History of Revolution.
And she has her current research project is rather vividly entitled Phenomenological Encounters Scenes from Central Europe.
So please join me in welcoming Marty short of this year's teleconference.
You. Oh, that's right.
Oh, well, thank you all for coming, especially since it's Friday night, and there must be more exciting social events going on at Oxford.
Thank you very much for joining us, for inviting me.
Thank you to Hubert Chayefsky, who just successfully defended his dissertation for creating a good reason to come to Oxford if we can all look at.
You know, and and I'd like to think of, of course, the person.
Why are we who for whom we are here and the reason why we are here, who is not here with us, but hopefully will be here in spirit,
which is a critical skill and it's a great honour for me to be giving a lecture in
honour of one of my favourite thinkers and somebody who I never met in person.
Louder. OK, so I'm kind of losing my voice, but I'm going to try to talk a little bit louder.
Someone who I never met in person, but whose writing was with me throughout all the years,
I was learning about Eastern Europe and whose writing continues to be with me and from whom I continue to learn I'm cold.
Husky was a thinker who, as you dutifully wrote about,
was constantly in dialogue with not only his contemporaries and his friends and colleagues and opponents,
but also with the dead and thinkers who were no longer alive, who were very much present in his thoughts.
And I like to think of Kokoschka as somebody with whom I am constantly in dialogue, even though he is not here now.
So I'm going to I'm going to tell a story today and the historian so I'm more of a historian and a storyteller than a philosopher.
But I'm going to try to tell a story or rather a series of intersecting stories about Central European philosophy.
And hopefully, by the time I'm done in forty five minutes or so,
you'll have some sense of why all of these stories are relevant or why we're bothering to talk about them today at all.
Or am I just deluding myself into thinking that this makes any sense?
So because it's the 30th anniversary of 1989 this year, I want to start by going back to 1989 and not to Poland,
but to Prague, to once this last square and to the slogan the truth prevails or the truth will prevail.
And this was not a coincidental or thoughtless slogan when it came up at the time of the so-called Velvet Revolution in 1989, Pravda VTC.
The truth prevails or proved it, sweetie, as the truth will prevail depending on whether you use the perfective or the perfective picked
up on a theme and a motif that had for a very long time been central in Czech philosophy.
And of course, many of you are familiar with Vaclav hovels imperative to live in truth.
But the most important thing is to live in truth. And as it turned out, that I, as a young person who was very captivated by the Velvet Revolution,
by the playwright who was in prison and gets to go live in the beautiful castle and by the slogan The Truth Will Prevail, which seemed very romantic.
It turned out that that truth Pravda was the first word I ever learnt in check and check with the first Slavic language I learnt.
And it's not a coincidence that Pravda was the first word that I learnt in Czech because I
was as a young student who was interested in the political philosophy of the dissidents.
They talked about Pravda as as if it were like a pen,
like something you could kind of hold and keep and put in your pocket is something that had some kind of real, palpable, tangible quality to it.
And in polish, I would I would say no, numbnuts. Almost it had this like it had this tangibility.
And it struck me because that's not the way I ever thought about truth in English.
Now, in fact, I had never heard anyone in English talk about truth.
The way the Czech and Slovak dissidents I was meeting then talked about truth.
This idea that it was something real, it was something solid, something tangible.
And now, 30 years later,
looking back at one of the reasons they were pitching the lecture this way is because we're now kind of at a moment of post-truth.
And I want to return to this question of truth. What makes truth, what it is and how do we get to it?
And why do I think they have something interesting to say about this in east central Europe?
So in order to deal with the problem of truth, this epistemological question question about knowledge,
we have to deal with this problem of the relationship between the self in the world, inner and outer consciousness and being subject and object.
This is what we call the epistemological question How do you get from inner to outer, from consciousness to being?
Um, and in in February 1990,
when he came to the United States to give his first speech as the first post-communist president of post-communist Czechoslovakia,
Vaclav Havel stood before a joint meeting of the American Congress and said consciousness precedes being and not the other way around.
As the Marx's claim now, for anyone who's been following the dialogues within the American Congress.
This was obviously like a level of conversation, probably then and especially now completely unknown to our congressmen,
and I don't think anybody knew what it meant, but it sounded very beautiful anyway.
Oh,
it's doubtful that anybody there remember that passage in German ideology when Marx and Engel talk about the fact that being precedes consciousness?
For Mark's, of course,
being perceived consciousness because consciousness is simply derivative of your objective position in the socio economic structure of things.
And when Hovell said consciousness precedes being, he was making a moral statement about responsibility.
You know, and that our responsibility for how we are thinking about the world and how we are approaching the world.
Cannot simply be written off as mechanically derivative of our objective position with it.
But aside from the fact that this was a comment about responsibility.
I started with this because I want to go back to the problem of consciousness and being which has been a problem,
especially since Nietzsche killed off God.
I know we have Hubert here who I think is is going to try to bring back God, which would be a good thing, perhaps.
But once you don't have God to guarantee the relationship between consciousness and being to guarantee that connexion, you've got a big space to fill.
Hannah Arendt in one of my favourite aunt essays, of which there are many and what is existential philosophy, what is existential philosophy?
She actually blames not Nietzsche, but Conte. She blames Conte for severing that connexion once and for all.
Between being and consciousness that gave man a home in the world and she loves Conte, I think arguably she loves it.
Nevertheless, she sees as Conte's fault that leaves us without a place in the world, without any certainty to hold on to without any kind of bridge.
Because for Conte, of course, like the Dingle and Zeke,
the thing itself was precisely what you couldn't get to being itself is what could never be reached.
And art blames Conte, then, for what she calls a kind of philosophy of melancholy,
the kind of melancholic mood of modern philosophy that alienates man from the world.
Because of this absence of the bridge between consciousness and being and for art, you know,
like in a different way for Marx, like for Kafka, like for Heidegger, alienation was the great problem of modernity.
But this problem of truth, of of how you kind of the problem of the bridge,
of how you get from consciousness to being with arguably how modern philosophy gets started with this epistemological problem.
And I want to put the epistemological problem on our heads because I'm going
to come back in the end to the relationship between epistemology and ethics.
But for now, I want to go back to a friend of mathematics, a friend of too much Master Edmond, who of.
Moshtarak, of course, you know, like like Kabul and like Young, who's for whom he arguably takes it,
you know, was very attached to this idea of the truth prevails.
And he and Hustler all met at this moment in the late 1870s in Leipzig,
when both of them were becoming more and more concerned about the problem of certainty and the problem of reaching epistemological clarity.
And whose role would come to feel more and more?
That he had as he went from his student years to his doctoral student years to his young assistant years to have this feeling of emptiness,
this feeling that this ideal of epistemological clarity and certainty could never be reached.
He wanted to overcome conflict and fatalism.
He couldn't stand this kind of gaping abyss between consciousness, between vigour, between how we think and the thing in itself.
He was obsessed with this phrase that he takes from Descartes and which he calls in German cloud height and height,
clarity and distinctiveness that there has to be a way to solve this problem of the bridge and reach epistemological clarity and distinctiveness.
Know an aunt describes who sort of method for resolving this problem is taking a
kind of detour through the intentionality of consciousness who circles solution,
which I'll sketch out very briefly. I don't personally think it works, or it's much of a solution.
But but he spends his whole life working on it, and he was arguably a much greater genius than I am.
Is that consciousness is not like, like a box? The structure of consciousness is one of intentionality.
Intentionality is not like I intend to do my homework tonight or to go to the movies.
Intentionality is like a magnet with a string. It's kind of reaching out to grab the world.
And who has this idea that we can kind of nudge ourselves from the natural attitude in which we kind of blithely unproblematic,
we go around the world assuming it exist into a kind of higher self reflective state that he calls the phenomenological attitude.
Arrived at by performing the phenomenological reduction,
which means you take that problematic realist idealist question of does the world exist or is it just a projection of my consciousness?
And you put it in brackets? Now the big question is, have you actually ever take away the brackets?
But but for now, we just put it in brackets. You put it in brackets, you put it aside and you concentrate on this exhaustive,
intense description of the object as the intentionality of your consciousness has grabbed it.
And it involves performing an analysis from a first person I that is not exactly the same as the empirical I.
It's kind of an Hegelian out of the eye so that the transcendental ego,
the pure eye is a kind of higher purified state in which everything that is particular empirical, psychic, psychological, physical has been purged.
Now this just articulation of the transcendental ego from the empirical ego seems to me to be insane.
I mean, I think it's something it can be done in theory, but but not in practise.
But he deeply believed it could work and that through this,
the nudging of a higher state and this phenomenological reduction in this analysis performed from the point of view, the transcendental ego.
You could actually reach a epistemological clarity and absolute truth.
And John PyTorch go to I'll talk about in a few minutes, I think describes this much better than who Searle himself does,
whose role, I think was a terrible writer and ironically, for someone who is obsessed with clarity and distinctiveness.
He's basically incapable of writing a single, clear sentence. But the picture, I think, describes it so much more clearly.
And he says that Hoose are all basically OK.
He never reopened to the brackets so that you get to ask the question again of whether the world really exist.
But he tries to sink you to a point where you are so wrapped up in this intensive, exhaustive description of the world,
as it appears to the transcendental ego that you somehow lose the desire to kind of ask that question about whether it really exist.
I mean, Toshka says this objective Corlett remaining after the reduction of coral,
about which it no longer makes sense to ask about its existence or non-existence.
In any case, it seems to me as a historian and a non philosopher, that Khusro basically had this problem that that in Polish,
there's a saying which goes, You can't dance at two weddings at once.
I think it exists in a bunch of other languages, but not English,
whose rule with one with a classic example of somebody who wanted to dance at Two Weddings at once.
He wanted all the depth of subjectivity and all the certainty of objectivity. And he wanted it without giving it anything up.
He had it dancing it to wedding problems. OK.
And then Heidegger comes along, who, of course, was with his real student, and Heidegger is Move,
which I find much easier to understand that whose roles move, you know, whose roles move as a radicalisation of the continent,
which says, OK, if you don't start with the subject and derive the object and you don't start with the object and derive the subject you start with,
the relationship in the beginning is the relationship. The relationship with subject and object in some way perceives the parts.
Intentionality is that bind that cannot be broken.
So you're always in that relationship. We're always connected to the world that way.
The relation precedes the parts, and Heidegger then comes along and says, OK,
this whole question about how can we how can we know that the world exist?
Does it really make any sense? Because who could ask it aside from we ourselves, the kind of beings we are and we are always already in the world?
There's no place outside of the world to which we could step and look at the world
as a subject separate from an object and ask the question of does it exist?
Because we're always already inside? We're embedded. Involved were engaged.
We're concerned. You know, we're we're moving things around.
We're always up to something. There's no there's no Archimedes point.
It's an illusion that there's some Archimedes point from which you could clearly take a subject as articulated from the object,
so that that's the height of Gary and move.
And it also moves away from the transparency of who circles transcendental ego, which is both somehow the deepest,
most important intimate part of us, but also curiously generic universal purged of all personal qualities and absolutely transparent in Heidegger.
Suddenly things start to get hidden. OK, so Heidegger says that we're always already in the world.
There's no outside, there's no escape. There's no Archimedes point.
But most of the time in the world, we're not really living in truth, we're living in authentically.
We've kind of fallen into the world. We're kind of going along with other people and other things.
And above all, we are trying to conceal from ourselves the reality of our existence, which is that we are always already moving towards our own death.
So for Heidegger to live, in truth, you've got to be kind of shaken into what he calls authenticity,
which involves facing the fact that we are always already moving towards our own death with eyes wide open.
Now it's this is extremely unpleasant. It's a state of shakiness that brings us into a state of angst.
Angst is not like fear that takes an object like, I'm afraid of snakes.
You can take with snakes and then it will go away. Almost doesn't have an object.
It's this kind of uneasiness in the face of human finitude.
OK, so this Owen Heimlich height, this uncanny this the fact that we can never get home in the world,
we are always going to feel alienated and we can never feel at home,
not because of this subject object gap, because I think there's really not that much of a gap for Heidegger if there's a gap at all.
But because we're always already moving towards our own death. OK.
So I'm sure you all know the story about Heidegger being who's the all star student who who
Searle recommends as his successor at the University of Freiburg in the late 1920s twenties.
Heidegger gets that position in 1930. The Nazis come to power.
You know, Heidegger joins the Nazi Party. He takes over directorship of the University of Freiburg under his leadership, whose role,
as well as all other professors of non Aryan descent, are expelled from the university and forbidden on this premises.
Now what does Cicero do? Who's the role, it turns out, goes back to his desk and tries harder and harder to clarify the phenomenological reduction,
which is this extremely abstruse philosophical procedure that seems to me can work in theory, but not in practise.
I don't know anyone who's ever purely performed phenomenological reduction.
But I think the most moving testimony of his response are in his letters to his Polish student,
who by the end is a Polish professor, Roman and garden with whom? Who's real sends these letters, saying, I have to.
I just I, I have to clarify, I have to make people see, I have to make people see that yes,
it can be done that yes, there is a path to absolute truth and epistemological clarity.
And if I could just get people to see that, then they would not be attracted to the kind of inner rationalism that has led us to barbarism.
He then comes on the invitation of the unfettered Scot and a few other colleagues to Prague
in nineteen thirty five to give the lectures he can no longer deliver in Nazi Germany.
And there he talks about the fact that enlightenment reason has failed because it's proven to thin,
too superficial that the Enlightenment understood reason and rationality as a leap into the world of objectivity.
It decapitated the thinker, it decapitated the subject and not without a more robust grounding in the subject.
Enlightenment reason is never going to be deep enough to save us.
And that that is precisely the reason why these irrational forces have led us to barbarism.
We need who saw says a deeper reason, a thicker reason.
We need to ground our objectivity and the deepest subjectivity.
And if we could do that, if people could just see that, yes, we can, who through is kind of like the Obama figure,
like, yes, we can get to epistemological clarity and absolute truth.
That would be the thing that would now save us from Nazi isms, Guided later wrote.
He said he absolutely believed that his philosophy would save the world. Now, if you read who Soros philosophy and you know,
you read through the sources on what's happening in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the pathos of this is extraordinary.
You know, who was unable to articulate a single clear sentence is an extremely abstruse procedure.
You know, there's there's all of this heavy philosophical language,
some of which he's kind of invented and reinvented that makes no sense to most people.
And in the meantime, Hitler has taken power. But but he really believes that if you can just see we could get to absolute truth.
People will no longer be attracted to barbarism.
Leftist of the Russian philosopher who did not believe in reason or truth, the same way who Israel did at all,
but who was very close friend of whose rules of rights when whose world dies in nineteen thirty eight.
This very beautiful kind of eulogy to him in which.
DAV writes that for Hoosiers, it was always a kind of Kirkegaard, an either or situation, either.
Yes, we can. We can get to absolute truth and epistemological clarity.
Or it's the madhouse or we resign ourselves to the loony bin.
There's nothing in between. And so it's a kind of pascaline wager in that sense, like, you've got it, you've got to stick yourself on truth.
You have to believe that it can be done because the the alternative is horrific.
And I think it's just I've articulated this much more beautifully than whose real himself ever articulated this.
I mean, it's just all this, just a much more literary writer.
He also translates as a kind of footnote what customer calls evidence in German, which has no real good English translation.
It gets translated into evidence or self evidence or just evidence.
It doesn't make it. It doesn't really make sense in German. It doesn't make people less sense in English.
He translates it into Russian as you witnessed, it actually makes sense in Russian.
This obviousness like obviousness and like scene to the eyes, which is really what a lot of phenomenology was about.
In any case, OK. So that's that phenomenological tradition.
There was another another route to truth that ah, and also addresses in that same essay what is existential philosophy?
And that one led not for who Searle and Heidegger, but through Hegel. And you see that you see that play out.
I think most movingly in the case of Georg Lucas, who is, of course, becomes a Marxist at a certain point, but maybe more profoundly Hegelian.
And you see that story play out especially beautifully in Mary Glocks.
Book on the young Luke IUCh, in which she writes about how that distance between subject and object was not just an intellectual problem for him.
It was a gap that he suffered over. It was a lack of wholeness that was painful.
And what Hagel then provides is less the idea of tele ology, which is, I think, what we often associate Hagel with and more.
The idea of wholeness of totality thus far is just gone for the truth of the whole.
And for Lucas, it was the seduction of wholeness, the seduction of totality.
That's a thing that was special about Marxism was the point of view of the whole that you
couldn't understand one part in isolation from the others in history and class consciousness,
Lucas writes.
It's not the primacy of economic motives and historical explanation that constitutes a decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought.
But the point of view of totality, the all pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts,
the primacy of the category of totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science.
So for a generation and arguably for caucus goers generation,
that truth of of Hegel turned Marxism turned to communism turned Stalinism is in some way realised in confrontation with Nazi ism.
And I think this is especially true in the case of his Czech contemporaries born in the 20s and the Poles always say the betrayal at Yalta.
The Czechs say that betrayal at Munich. And that was when Western democracy sells out Czechoslovakia.
OK. When the Stalinist, you take power.
In Prague. John Kataoka, who was one of whose roles last students, Petrushka went to Freiburg to study with Hu Searle and Heidegger in 1933,
and he was in Freiburg in 1933 as a young Czech student born in 1987 when the Nazis took power.
In nineteen forty eight. Now as a forty one year old professor of philosophy.
The Stalinist take power in Prague.
And interestingly, coach responds exactly the way, exactly the way that Cyril had responded in nineteen thirty three.
In fact, he even has the same desk is when Masaryk left Leipzig in 1877.
He left who through all his idea, it was more like a podium, something like this, like kind of standing desk.
And in the nineteen thirties, shortly before his death, whose role gave master access to the coach of the Stalinist take power in Prague.
In nineteen forty eight for Tortuga Retreats, to his study, to his desk, and he reread some marks and he reread Hegel,
and he makes these notes in his diary, which I found very moving when I read this, and he said but but it was a misunderstanding.
Marx misunderstands the problem of alienation.
In fact, he presents the problem of alienation in such a way that in fact conceals that problem entirely.
He's imagining that alienation. This is what PyTorch, because writing to himself is something like a kind of illness,
something that can be cured through some kind of technical means that it's possible to live without alienation,
that that alienation is middle class loss to middle class nanos, which can't really be translated.
But it's that it's an imperfection in the sense of something not yet having been perfected like an imperfect verb in the Slavic languages.
You know, that alienation is an imperfection that still could yet be perfected, and Petrushka said,
but this is this is a misunderstanding because alienation, the fact that we live in alienation is not a lack of completeness.
It's not an imperfection that can be cured. It's the fact that we are not ourselves.
That man is not himself.
Alienation, but excavates the fact that man is not at home in the world, that that hurt, that wound that Marx wants to heal is irrevocable.
It cannot be healed. Alienation can never be healed.
OK, I'm going to jump ahead now just a little bit to the end of the spell in this period and we'll skip Stalinist terror Friday evening,
you probably don't want too much Stalinist terror. Stalin dies in nineteen fifty three.
Khrushchev gives his famous secret speech in 1956 for the Czech and the Slovak writers, especially more so than the Poles.
It's a shock, and they literally have no other language apart from Stalinist language at that time with which to critique Stalinism.
And initially, when they have to kind of get together and talk after Khrushchev's secret speech,
they say things like, Listen, my generation, we grew up with Stalin's name and my best friends.
They went to their death in the Nazi camps with Stalin's name, on your lip, on their lips.
Well, now you're telling me. Well, no, I'm not going to apologise. I'm not ashamed.
And how they eventually start to step back is through a confrontation of the
phenomenological turned existentialist tradition with the Hegelian Marxist tradition.
And you go back to these questions, where is truth? Is it in the subject or is it in the object?
Is it in consciousness or is it in the world?
We go back to High Tiger's idea about authenticity and alienation and choice, and the idea of taking hold of ourselves and seeing if we can live.
In truth, Heidegger really like this word gives orphan height.
We're kind of thrown into the world our thrown ness for software.
What was really important about give orphan height was that we're thrown into the world and we are abandoned.
We're abandoned by God because God does not exist. Therefore, we carry this unbearable responsibility because in the absence of God,
there is no one else to create values or take responsibility for our choices outside of ourselves.
And supporters move was to say like, Yes, you know, Dostoyevsky was right.
If God is dead, then everything is permitted. Nietzsche was right.
God is dead. The consequences must be interpreted as radically as possible.
If any compensation is to be made for the loss and this confrontation of the Marx's to and tradition with all its historical determinism in totality.
And now this could phenomenological turn existentialist tradition with its concern with the relationship between
being and consciousness and choice is going to lead to a discussion about responsibility and determinism.
And so the big question and this is really where called Kosky becomes one of the most
important voices still is a very young man in Poland is about responsibility and history.
And where is the border between historical determinism and individual agency?
And he will be one of the first and most articulate people in the 1950s to insist that moral
decisions for the individual remain despite any kind of historical determinism we may believe in.
That determinism does not absolve one of individual responsibility and his contemporary Carl Kosik.
We'll go back to trying to work out this relationship between the individual and history and say it's like it's basically like, Heidegger says.
We're always already thrown into the world. We're always already thrown into history, so we're not creating it ex nihilo.
You know, there's something already there that we're interacting with,
but we're also not passive objects that can be somehow disarticulated from history.
We're always already involved. We're involved, and therefore we're responsible because we are part of history.
And he then Kosik in 1967 tells the story of a certain religious reformer, a parable.
This is obviously the 15th century religious reformer young who saw the acoustic doesn't mention his name,
who is advised by a theologian while in prison that when the ecclesiastical council comes to him,
if the ecclesiastical council says you have only one eye.
He is obliged to acknowledge that the council is correct.
And the imprisoned man replied he knew by his own reason that he had two eyes and a denial of reason was a betrayal of conscience.
The loss of a unity of reason and conscious conscience leads then to nihilism.
So he's also he's going back, he's he's going back to who's the rules idea as well of reasoned truth and clarity.
And a denial of that reason is a moral problem. It's not merely in the system, a logical problem.
So what Kozak and Colaco ski share here is this kind of affirmation without abandoning
historical determinism and affirmation both of the reality of historical determinism,
but also responsibility of the individual as part of that movement of history, because we are participants in history.
We're embedded in history. So it's a kind of interactive model, so to speak.
Now, after nineteen sixty eight,
after the anti-Zionist campaign in Poland and then subsequently the Prague Spring that was basically in in Eastern Europe,
the end of Marxism, communism goes on for another couple of decades, as you well know.
But Marxism as a kind of as a vibrant intellectual choice and force, that's the beginning of the end.
The truth of Marxism, of course, depended upon this our comedian perspective prevented.
Provided by the end of history. Available as Hagel's sense, once the owl of Minerva takes flight only with the coming of the dusk,
meaning is only retrospective marks was very forward thinking.
But actually for Hegel, it was less about thinking forwards and more about thinking backwards.
Meaning can only be seen in retrospect. Right, by the way, takes up this Hegelian position, she says.
The author is never that the actor is never the author of his or her own life story.
It's only the historian looking back who can see what it was all about because the consequences
of actions are infinite because of what she calls the boundless ness of human interrelatedness.
So to act is to set something in motion, the consequences of which can never be foreseen and could only even be glimpsed in retrospect,
but never looking forwards, only looking backwards. I want to now turn to two another thinker and a student of both caucuses and Tortugas,
whose Christophe Behal is a much younger generation born in 1948 and in very sadly died too young.
He was a student of Kerlikowske, is at Work State University.
In 1968, after Kerlikowske emigrated from Poland following the events of the anti-Zionist campaign,
a mutual friend of Kerlikowske Izinyon Tortugas sends just off me hellscape to Prague to
unfettered sugar to write his dissertation on Heidegger under the supervision of Yann Petrushka,
which happens largely through correspondence. And Mikulski's question is coming out of of Marxism and coming out of a Galleon ism.
Can there be truth and meaning only in wholeness? Does the understanding of something presuppose finding some kind of unity?
Is it only from the perspective of the whole that we can understand our world?
And when when the Yankees just offered me half ski rights to Yampa, Texaco, who is 40 years older.
Petrushka responds with comments about the special meaning of Heidegger, its philosophy.
For our part of Europe, for our Eastern Europe and what brings the older philosopher and the younger philosopher together at that moment?
And this is now the nineteen seventies is a shared understanding that Heidegger, in the tradition he represents,
could be an antidote to what Louis Walsh calls the Hegelian bite that perhaps the way out of Hegel is precisely through Heidegger.
And for me, Huskey Heidegger became the thinker who provided a point of departure for answering the questions that kept him awake at night.
Yes, there could be meaning without totality, without an Archimedes point outside of history and outside of oneself,
because Heidegger, like Hegel, was a profoundly historical thinker for whom meaning was only possible in time.
Except that in in High Tiger's philosophy,
you didn't look at history from the outside as something already either completed or potentially to be completed, you looked at it from the inside.
We're always already thrown into the world into history, always already bound up in it, open to it.
In some ways, there's no place apart from the world to look at history from a distance and contemplate it because we're in the world.
You know, Heidegger taught us not in the way a bird was in a cage or a cookie was in a jar.
Not in such a way that we could be taken out of it or extricated, not in such a way that we could, in principle, be detached.
Mikulski later writes that life and history do not go on independently of our participation, like a carousel you can jump off or on at will.
And so that there was no point of view from outside of time and outside of history,
from which we could look at our own condition and relative size it because the time in which we were living had its own finality.
We were the co-creators of Meaning in this time.
All of those meanings were fragile and open to change, but they were nonetheless deep and binding and real.
They were the ones had we had in the ones we had to use.
Meaning was possible, but not outside of ourselves and not above ourselves, because everything around us was, in some ways, also our creation.
We were co-creators of Meaning in History and we were therefore responsible.
And Heidegger, for Mahaskey, was the philosopher of freedom and of freedom as responsibility.
And it was understandable, Michalski wrote, that that we long to this burden ourselves of this responsibility.
And this is something I think arguably he takes very largely not just from Petrushka and Heidegger, but also from Kerlikowske.
This we long to this burden ourselves of this responsibility. We long for the world as a garden, something that's orderly, that secure, that stable.
But there was no such world,
and there is no such guarded for lurking in every moment was the possibility of the end of a border of the closing of the world,
as it is in the beginning of something new for which we will always be co responsible.
OK. One of the things that happened while Michalski and PyTorch in the 1970s were having this correspondence about Heidegger is that Miyazaki,
who had a kind of gift for persuading people to do things. Tried to persuade Petrozza to write down his thoughts about the philosophy of history.
Petrushka eventually does this, writing up some lectures he had given an underground seminars and private apartments.
There later, they circulate in some resort as heretical essays in the philosophy of history.
The third one called Does history have a meaning?
Michalski managed to translate into polish and publish in the Catholic journals knock in crackles before that possibility of publication,
which was shut down. And in that essay, does history have a meaning?
But Hosko argues that history begins when meaning is shaken.
Shaken the way that Heidecker feels, we are shaken when we confront the truth of our condition, which is being towards death.
When meaning is shaken, this shaken, this is a problem.
It's the beginning of Problem Wettest City, it's the beginning of asking questions for plateaued prehistory.
It's before we start asking questions. History begins when we start asking questions.
This asking questions is what philosophy is accepting.
Responsibility is about posing the question of meaning, and the shaking is good, Petrushka says,
because it pushes us to seek meaning, which is riskier but ultimately more meaningful.
The shaking is not impoverishing. It's enriching our instability.
The fact that we can never be completely at home, that we have to search.
Doesn't completely alienate us from the world, but should throw us into the world to seek its truth.
Hello, Petrushka distinguishes here between having and seeking the truth, and he says that the thing itself,
the thing that matters, the thing for which we bear responsibility is the seeking.
In some ways, the seeking the search is the thing itself. And Christmas in December 1976,
plateaued had his last kind of underground apartment seminar about high diggers being in time kind of throughout a
large part of the seventies after he was thrown out of the university in the wake of the events of sixty eight,
Petoskey and his students read Heidegger as being in time in PyTorch guest apartment.
They read it out loud in German. They translate outloud into check, they read it again and again and again.
It's like Koch's famous seminar on phenomenology of spirit in Paris.
Keep reading phenomenology of spirit they kept reading big in time on January 1st, 1977,
picture emerges as one of the initial three spokespeople for the Human Rights Petition Charter 77.
Very soon after that, the secret police come for him, as he had known they would.
He's an older man. He's in weak health. He does not survive the interrogations he dies.
In March 1977, the following year, Mikulski's book on Heidegger is published in Poland.
Beginning with their shared conviction of the special meaning of Heidegger for Eastern Europe living in Poland, Maski wrote in the introduction,
he felt as if Heidegger were speaking directly to him like the eyes and certain portraits which seem to be gazing at you wherever you may be.
Heidegger was for me and the husky, wrote the philosopher, who was able to disclose the weight of each step of my life for yours.
That same year, 1978, Vaclav Havel published or didn't publish, I would say, he wrote on the encouragement of Auto Mechanic,
an essay called The Power of the Powerless, which was also published in Samizdat in Polish, dedicated to John PyTorch because memory.
And in that essay, you have your ordinary greengrocer, Communist Czechoslovakia, late 1970s,
who every day goes to his vegetable shop and in the window alongside the carrots and the onions, he puts the sign saying workers of the world unite.
And Hubble says why does he put the sign there? Is it his sincere, spontaneous desire to acquaint passers by with his socialist enthusiasm?
No, Hubble says. Of course not. He doesn't believe the sign the passers by.
Don't believe the sign. Even the regime no longer believes the sign.
Moreover,
the regime knows that the people don't believe and the people know that the regime knows that they know and everybody knows that everybody knows.
But everybody keeps going on pretending.
And Hovel says, Well, what else can the greengrocer do in the greengrocers powerless if he takes down the sign?
If he stashes it at the bottom of the box of tomatoes, you know somebody could inform on him, you know,
he could be questioned, he could be detained, his children could be denied access to education.
So what can he do? And Hovell says, well, the fact that all of these bad things might happen to the green grocer if he takes down his sign suggests
that the painting of the sign in which nobody believes anyway is actually paradoxically very important.
In fact, if one day all the green grocers were to take down their signs, that would be the beginning of a revolution.
Therefore, the green grocer is not so powerless, after all, because he is powerful.
He is therefore responsible and also guilty for the green grocers who allow the game to go on in the first place.
And Humble makes two philosophical points here. One at the ontological reality of truth is proven by contrast with the ontological reality of life.
You know, the fact that you know that something is a lie,
that there's a whole realm of life that is living a lie makes you know that there is something called truth.
By contrast, the other point he's making is that the greengrocers failure to live in truth is a moral failure.
The green grocer is guilty of what Thatcher would call love. Love is the bad faith, meaning self-deception.
The self-deception is not about his faith in communism. The greengrocer knows perfectly well.
He doesn't believe in communism. The bad faith is about his powerlessness.
The greengrocer is deceiving himself into telling himself that he's powerless when in fact he is responsible,
thereby allowing the oppression to go on in the first place.
And I'm going to finish up this discussion by going back to guy who around the same time in the 1970s delivers a series of a few years earlier,
maybe seventy three seventy four. You remember the year delivers a series of lectures on who's the role at Yale University.
I love these lectures.
In some ways it's the clearest exposition of whose role I think we have of, and he addresses very directly who are dancing it to wedding problems.
And he says that whose role he admires, whose role he says that whose role wanted more passionately and dug deeper and tried harder to
get to absolute truth and epistemological certainty than anybody else in modern philosophy.
He dug deeper. He tried harder. He threw his whole being into it.
Nevertheless, he said, who through all fails. He fails because the problem of the bridge is insoluble.
There is no bridge between consciousness and being there's no there's no way to get from inner to outer, from imminence to transcendence.
If you start with eminence, you'll end with imminence. Without God, it can't be done.
If we start with the imminent world, Kerlikowske says, we'll end with the imminent world.
The problem of the bridge is insoluble. There's no logical passage. Nevertheless,
and here is the point that I think is particularly important to understand about
dissident philosophy in Eastern Europe that might be worth remembering today.
Nevertheless, Kerlikowske says the moral imperative even though the problem with the bridge is insoluble.
If you bracket, you bracket the fact that that bridge can never be found and you keep looking.
Because if you give up on truth, you've given up on ethics because epistemological questions are always already ethical questions.
And it is morally impermissible to give up on truth. And the move is very, very close to what Patrick is talking about in that third heretical essay.
The seeking is the thing itself. It's active. And that activity is the activity of somebody who is responsible.
And so we kind of move through this arc, and I'll just say a couple of words in conclusion.
I know you've been sitting for a long time and it's Friday night.
We move through this arc of truth, this subject object conscious and being correspondence to a conversation about truth.
That's about the relationship between consciousness and being, but also about truth and lies and authenticity and authenticity.
It's an interrogation of what it means to be in the world.
That becomes very primordial historical. What comes in the middle is history.
And I want to just say a couple of words in conclusion, perhaps about why this phenomenological essentials tradition takes a very
different path in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia than it does in France,
because coming out of the same continental tradition in France and in some ways responding to totalitarianism.
You have a postmodernism that says there can never be any such thing as a stable truth, as a stable meaning as a stable subject.
In fact,
the mere positing of those things is a risk of a future totalitarianism that in fact the imperative to insist that truth is always self undermining,
always fragile and contingent is what will stave off the absolutist claims that have landed us in totalitarianism in the 20th century.
Derrida had this idea of the Appau you you know the moment of the Enpass where no meaning is possible,
where you have to give up on the ontological reality of truth because that is your defence,
your critical sensibility to to articulate yourself and to resist totalitarianism, to resist the absolutist claims of grand narratives.
And what happened in East Central Europe is a kind of different philosophical move that also rejects grand narratives,
but says that even after you have extricated yourself from Marxism as the last grand narrative and refused to go to any others,
you still can't give up on truth.
The fact that the fact that truth involves subjectivity, that subjectivity can never be purged does not relative vice truth,
but grounds it that a return to the subject is the thing that should ground truth as opposed to make it melt into air.
And this is a very who cirelli it in a way you return to the subject,
but that's with an idea that that's going to allow you to get to absolute truth and epistemological clarity,
as opposed to an idea that going back into the subject relative size is everything until all that is solid melts into air.
The imperative is you need to posit and onto logically real subject and onto logically real truth.
And the idea is that truth and subject are linked to the responsibility. Truth is active.
The moral imperative is to keep seeking, to keep searching.
The fact that it's not some refined object out there to be caught and tossed around doesn't make it less real,
and the seeking becomes the thing itself, but it is morally impermissible to give up.
And that epistemological question and that epistemological faith has to be understood as a moral question.
OK, I'm going to end now and by. Trying to invoke a little bit of both electrical cloak hospitalising, just like me, is the life.
I'm going to end with a passage from an interview that Christopher Michalski gave to tickle me right after his death in 2009.
And I I fear my English translation will not completely capture the beauty of just a sense of humour and polish, but I've tried my best here.
So this is just off telling, just off my housekeeper telling a story about life at Coco Ski.
And he says for many years, the Institute for Some Chopped and Fun mentioned, which I oversee in Vienna,
organise meetings of the outstanding scholars comprising its academic council at the Papal Summer Residence in Castello Gandolfo.
Once in the 1980s, when we were returning to the hotel following one of the meetings, discussions dominated by Paul Record, Emmanuel Levinas Lesniak,
a member of our council from the very beginning,
proposed that the name of the institute be changed to the Institute for the Science of Living Nazism, Derrida ism.
And he fell into a discussion when Christof pulled me on about the future programme of such a reformed institute,
a programme that foresaw the creation of a department of dialectical living,
Nazism, Derrida, ISM, Department of Historical, Levinas ISM, Derrida ISM, etc. to the amazement of the very serious German professors accompanying us,
the discussion concluded in Russia after returning to the hotel,
Colaco Ski wrote in Mediaeval Latin, a proposed papal bull, which, amongst other things,
declared that quote the claim that not all French philosophers should be burned unquote was heretical, poorly formulated and should be condemned.
Later, we gave that bull to the pope for authorisation, but I won't say whether he signed or not.
Thank you.