Can There Be a Central Europe?
Kohák, Erazim
Ten years from now, will there still be a Central Europe? Or will Europe's center, suddenly reemerging as the Soviet tide recedes, find itself submerged once more by a Western tide? The end came...
...Amid the euphoria sweeping the streets of Prague, that question seems rather beside the point...
...Full shop windows seem so much more pressing a need than ecological concerns or social justice...
...Will my compatriots even want to resist it...
...To them, it would be tragic if Central Europe, so recently freed from the imposed histrionics of "real socialism," were just to sink into the mindless consumerism of the Atlantic basin...
...The entire tenor of the Czech SPRING • 1990 . 195 European Revolutions dissent, whose most prominent figures are playwright-philosopher Vaclav Havel and priesttheologian Vaclav Maly, has been on life in truth, the Socratic call echoed by Edmund Husserl and Jan Pato&ca...
...Today, it is too late...
...In Central Europe, however, that conception remained as an option...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...The end came so abruptly: what now...
...For the Czechs, it has a Kantian ring...
...Forty years were enough, thank you...
...How long that will be, however, is open to question, and once domestic support for a separate DDR evaporates, it would be rather unwise to insist on preserving it by external force...
...We are, after all, Westerners...
...Its obverse is the conception of humans as devoid of any role in the cosmos except that of consumers...
...When, early in this century, Romania switched from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet, it was making a cultural statement...
...The daily reality of the Europe we would rejoin is rather different from the Europe as a cultural ideal so dear to dissident essayists through all the years when a triple tier of barbed wire prevented closer inspection...
...But as for many years a New Hampshire man who witnessed America's journey from Eisenhower's "peace and prosperity" through the turmoil of the "me-generation" to the age of Reagan's yuppie affluence, I am all too conscious of the immense momentum of a civilization predicated on an ever-increasing rate of individual consumption...
...6) Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...
...The Czech dissident philosophers committed to life in truth and to the reality of truth, goodness, beauty are very much his heirs...
...Now all but forgotten, he was one of the most acclaimed men of his age: Harvard wanted him for its president, the English Parliament for a mediator between itself and the king, Sweden to reform its school system...
...Yet straws there are...
...Comenius bequeathed to Central Europe a very different vision of reality, as intrinsically value-laden and meaningfully ordered...
...For years in America I had to deal with the question, "When did you come to the West...
...Will my compatriots retain that vision when they are no longer locked in a struggle with oppression but need to deal with the mundane needs of rebuilding their economy, with the Austrian and German example ever reminding them of the shabbiness of their lives and of the glitter of affluence...
...After all, the man who articulated the Czech cultural heritage in the darkest time of the Thirty Years' War, Jan Amos Komensk/Comenius, was a philosopher, and so was Tomag G. Masaryk, the man who restored Czech independence in our century...
...To be sure, both for the sake of European stability and of easing the transition, there is good and sufficient reason for supporting the DDR as a separate entity as long as it retains any domestic viability...
...To be sure, Germany is a special case...
...Because I am a philosopher by trade, it is the philosophical straws I notice...
...Our language is Slavic, yet our history, more than a millennium of it, is Western...
...What, though, of other Central European countries, of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and the Baltic republics...
...The American philosopher Richard Rorty concludes that truth is the shared conviction of a community of speakers, and American popular culture reduces it to a matter of "how you feel about it...
...A Polish-Czechoslovak conference held in Wroclaw last November focused those doubts...
...When, in 1935, the Moravian-born philosopher Edmund Husserl wrote of die Krisis der europdischen Wissenschaften —really the crisis of Western civilization— he located its roots precisely in the Cartesian vision of "objective" reality as meaningless and value-free and of meaning and value as "merely subjective...
...The conceptual matrix of consumerism is precisely the conception of value as a "merely subjective" matter of individual preference and of "objective" reality as devoid of any value or meaning except as an object of consumption...
...It reemerged in Goethe, in Schelling, and, for that matter, in a very different guise, in Masaryk, famous for his statement that "Values, too, are facts...
...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...At most, we can speak of straws in the wind...
...Yet the consumerism that seems to have largely displaced the European cultural ideal west of the erstwhile Iron Curtain is profoundly problematic for men and women who for so long lived for the ideal of life in truth, sacrificing even such consumer ease as communism could offer for its sake...
...Would it, though...
...If augmented by Czechoslovakia, it might provide the protective environment that the old Hapsburg monarchy failed to provide...
...By contrast, in Central Europe, Descartes's great counterpart was Comenius...
...While the Atlantic littoral has grown increasingly secular, regarding the world as random and only conventionally constrained by morality, Central Europeans are flocking to churches, rediscovering the world as morally ordered...
...For France and England, modernity began with Ren6 Descartes and his successors, who presented the West with a vision of "objective" reality as an aggregate of extended objects, devoid of value and meaning, only spatially and causally ordered and obeying only mathematical laws...
...196 • DISSENT European Revolutions The crisis of which Husserl wrote is likewise still with us...
...Yet the phenomenon has much deeper foundations, in the different foundations of modernity in Central Europe and along the Atlantic littoral...
...The very idea of seeking to preserve a distinctive identity seems to have little utilitarian justification or hope of success...
...German Democratic Republic, really has no alternative to "rejoining the West...
...Could that prove to be the beat of the different drummer, the distinctive vision that could keep Central Europe from dissolving into the consumer civilization of the Atlantic basin...
...they're the author's responsibility...
...Hence the overwhelming longing— to live in truth, spontaneously, just to be what we naturally are...
...Truth, beauty, goodness appeared to him not as a "subjective" imposition of an ephemeral mind on a value-free, meaningless, "objective" reality but as the intrinsic structure of that reality itself...
...For the men and women in the dreary normalized streets, imposed histrionic personality disorder would be a better metaphor: the fatiguing effort to sustain a facade devoid of all conviction, of all spontaneity, and much more rigid for it...
...There is literally everything to be done, and all of it at once...
...Perhaps wholly coincidentally, the percentage of positive answers corresponds to the percentage of the employees of the SEP and the Stasi—the Communist party and the secret police— in the total population...
...q To Our Contributors: A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your ms —the mails aren't always reliable...
...Though Germany's small neighbors may be so fond of Germany as to want to have two of them, imposing an artificial division on an unwilling German people would be most likely to lead to a replay of 1870 — and so of 1914 and 1939—in the not too distant future...
...Highly influential French philosophers like Foucault and Derrida argue that human discourse can only refer to other discourse, a text to another text...
...Is there, can there be, a distinctive Central Europe based on anything more than a nostalgia for the old Hapsburg monarchy...
...The thinkers of Central Europe, affirming the reality of truth, are living out an answer to that crisis...
...In the Franco-English West, a rising natural science, operating with the Cartesian conception of reality best suited to its purposes, largely crowded out all vestiges of the Comenian conception of the meaningful, value-laden world...
...Why even try...
...The topic was "Culture Perplexed:Between Communism and Consumerism...
...They struggled and sacrificed for an ideal...
...None of the participants manifested the slightest trace of nostalgia for communism, not even of the "reform," "Euro-," or "human face" variety...
...In ten years, will there be a Central Europe...
...Ever since the Soviet occupation, we have lived a laborious charade...
...We shall live naturally: for a Czech, that so clearly means, "We shall rejoin Europe...
...I could only answer that I was born in the West, in Prague, the city of two Holy Roman Emperors, of a great medieval university, the cradle of the Reformation and the focus of the Renaissance north of the Alps...
...Like the post–World War I occupation of the Rhinelands, it could serve only to focus German resentment...
...What are we, simply, "naturally...
...That unwavering conviction contrasts sharply with the philosophical development of the Atlantic basin in recent decades...
...A sociologist might well explain this phenomenon as an aftereffect of the forty years of communist rule, and that may well be the proximate cause...
...Can Central Europe find a different drummer...
...It will be so tempting to give up the vision of the true, the good, the beautiful, to sink into the ease of consumerism just to the west of us...
...Vaclav Havel writes of moral motivation that "in principle it means that what we do, we do not for so-called 'utilitarian' motives . . . but because we believe it to be good...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...Philosophy, to be sure, may seem simply a Czech peculiarity...
...With its collapse, we shall obviously rejoin Europe...
...In a recent survey conducted in the DDR, 89 percent of the respondents answered in the negative when asked whether a third way between communism and capitalism is possible...
...Europe's safety can surely be better served by integrating a united Germany in a united Europe than by perpetuating its division...
...The cultural boundary between Europe's East and Europe's West has always been quite clear...
...His conception of the valueladen, meaningfully ordered Lebenswelt structured by "transcendental subjectivity" — that is, life's world, rendered meaningful and valueordered by the presence of life, of purposive, internally governed subject beings—was in effect a proposal for a Comenian vision of the cosmos as a solution for the crisis brought on by the Cartesian conception...
...Yet even if the rest of Central Europe does not share the Czech passion for philosophy, the beat of the different drummer is still clearly heard...
...In word and deed, Czech dissidents have demonstrated their deep conviction that there is truth, that there is good and evil—and that the difference is not reducible to cultural preference...
...That, though, described the rulers rather than the ruled...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...But what are we, we Czechs and Slovaks...
...It is based on a very different confidence than a 'utilitarian' one— on a fundamental conviction that the good is always worth doing...
...It is demarcated by orthography...
...Certainly, locked in a struggle with oppression, they fixed their eyes on a distant star, on a moral ideal—and in the Czech context, that does not mean the shabby "return to family values" that haunts American politics...
...As a Czech philosopher, I see the task of articulating and preserving that vision as my calling and as the justification of our distinctive identity...
...Europe's East, demarcated by the Cyrillic alphabet, has a very different cultural heritage, rooted in caesaro-papism, in Orthodox Christianity and czarist autocracy, shaped by the very different struggles at the border of Europe and in the vast expanses of Asia...
...In the twentieth century, "Central Europe" was the slogan of German expansionism...
...When Czech philosophers call for a life in truth, convinced that there is truth and that truth shall prevail, putting their lives on the line, they are marching to a very different drummer...
...Humans, after all, are the most unnatural of all animals, devoid of a secure instinctual basis for their social interaction and their individual lives...
...Muscovy, Krivia, the Ukraine, that was Europe's East, and Central Europe was never a part of it...
...The AustroHungarian cooperation of recent months holds out much promise...
...Yet here the doubts emerge...
...That answer compresses into two words the longing of the weary years when life, constrained by arbitrary rules, became an unceasing, wearying effort, when there was no spontaneity...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...For Czechoslovakia, like the putatively "Eastern" Germany, like Poland, like Hungary, was never an "East European" country...
...Given enough men and women of vision and good will—and there are such—some form of humanized socialism might yet survive as a reality, softening the harshest aspects of capitalism, but, in Czechoslovakia at least, it cannot function as a slogan...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...There are simply no historical, cultural, or ethnic grounds for a separate "East" Germany...
...Milan Kundera to the contrary, the idea is problematic...
...Were such a configuration to prove attractive to Poland and the western portions of Yugoslavia, it might well provide the breathing space within which Central Europe could find a distinctive identity...
...Now everything is to be done, and as to the question, what next, the answer is obvious: "Budem EC We shall live, just live, live at last...
...Here the prevailing drift of philosophical thought is clearly toward a cultural relativism once associated with the sophists and their disillusioned suspicion that "truth" is no more than individual preference or collective consensus...
...The "East bloc" was always a wholly artificial 194 • DISSENT European Revolutions entity...
...I know of only one answer, that of Comenius, Masaryk, Havel—that the good is worth striving for simply because it is good...
...In Czech journals published abroad there are already voices presenting the fashionable cultural relativism as one of the achievements of the advanced West...
...Far more than instinct, it is custom, the precipitate of history, that shapes our spontaneity...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc...
...In the long run— and the longer, the better—the Soviet zone, a.k.a...
...THE EDITORS SPRING • 1990 • 197...
...The DDR, or "German Democratic Republic," was never more than the Soviet zone of Germany under a different name, devoid of any distinctive cultural identity...
...The mind, with all it involves—truth, goodness, beauty—had no place in their scheme: it was relegated to a separate mental entity of dubious reality, as, in much later terminology, "merely subjective...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...Twenty years ago, it might have been a socialism with a human face...
...Here a strong sense of national identity might well buy time, generating transitional configurations that could make the transition less abrupt...
...Here confident answers would be the height of folly...
...But it is worth trying...
...Wherever the Latin alphabet is used, the cultural identity is distinctively Western, shaped by Latin Christianity, by scholasticism, by the Renaissance, by the struggles of the reformation and the counterreformation, by the Enlightenment, by industrialization, and by social democracy...
...It ended too abruptly for a new social texture to have grown gradually within the old...
...No dot matrix submissions, please...
...Those Western commentators who favored psychological rather than political or religious imagery for describing communist practice used to describe it as institutionalized paranoia...
...Moral motivation leads us to do the good as such, for its own sake and in principle...
...I would have given the same answer had I been born in Hungary's Debreczin, where Comenius once taught, or in Latvia's Riga, where Immanuel Kant's works were first printed...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...The Communist rule lasted too long: we can no longer fall back on the status quo ante...
...I do not know...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
